For punk rockers, music and art have often been used as tools for resisting and accommodating the interests of society's dominant classes. During the late 1970s, a predominantly white, male working/middle-class counterculture began to develop what is now known as punk rock. This book shows how punk rock serves to both subvert and accommodate the interest of late-capitalist American society by looking at the trends in the ideas, values, and beliefs transmitted through punk lyrical messages, specifically through the content of three punk record labels and how they have evolved over time. The impact of punk will continue because it is a product of the changing face of alternative cultural spaces - spaces that impact and are impacted by increasingly hostile and exploitive relationships between and within oppressor and oppressed groups.

In March 1977, John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon of the punk band the Sex Pistols looked over the Berlin wall onto the grey, militarized landscape of East Berlin, which reminded him of home in London. Lydon went up to the wall and extended his middle finger. He didn't know it at the time, but the Sex Pistols' reputation had preceded his gesture, as young people in the "Second World" busily appropriated news reports on degenerate Western culture as punk instruction manuals. Soon after, burgeoning Polish punk impresario Henryk Gajewski brought the London punk band the Raincoats to perform at his art gallery and student club-the epicenter for Warsaw's nascent punk scene. When the Raincoats returned to England, they found London erupting at the Rock Against Racism concert, which brought together 100,000 "First World" UK punks and "Third World" Caribbean immigrants who contributed their cultures of reggae and Rastafarianism. Punk had formed networks reaching across all three of the Cold War's "worlds". The first global narrative of punk, Punk Crisis examines how transnational punk movements challenged the global order of the Cold War, blurring the boundaries between East and West, North and South, communism and capitalism through performances of creative dissent. As author Raymond A. Patton argues, punk eroded the boundaries and political categories that defined the Cold War Era, replacing them with a new framework based on identity as conservative or progressive. Through this paradigm shift, punk unwittingly ushered in a new era of global neoliberalism.

In Punk and Revolution Shane Greene radically uproots punk from its iconic place in First World urban culture, Anglo popular music, and the Euro-American avant-garde, situating it instead as a crucial element in Peru's culture of subversive militancy and political violence. Inspired by José Carlos Mariátegui's Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, Greene explores punk's political aspirations and subcultural possibilities while complicating the dominant narratives of the war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian state. In these seven essays, Greene experiments with style and content, bends the ethnographic genre, and juxtaposes the textual and visual. He theorizes punk in Lima as a mode of aesthetic and material underproduction, rants at canonical cultural studies for its failure to acknowledge punk's potential for generating revolutionary politics, and uncovers the intersections of gender, ethnicity, class, and authenticity in the Lima punk scene. Following the theoretical interventions of Debord, Benjamin, and Bakhtin, Greene fundamentally redefines how we might think about the creative contours of punk subculture and the politics of anarchist praxis.

Examining the multigenerational impact of punk rock music, this international survey of the political-punk straight edge movement - which has persisted as a drug-free, hardcore subculture for more than 25 years - traces its history from 1980s Washington, DC, to today. Asserting that drugs are not necessarily rebellious and that not all rebels do...

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Rolling Stone * BookPage * Amazon * Rough Trade Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence “[A] riveting and inspiring history of punk’s hard-fought struggle in East Germany.” —The New York Times Book Review “A thrilling and essential social history that details the rebellious youth movement that helped change the world.” —Rolling Stone “Original and inspiring . . . Mr. Mohr has writ­ten an im­por­tant work of Cold War cul­tural his­tory.” —The Wall Street Journal “Wildly entertaining . . . A thrilling tale . . . A joy in the way it brings back punk’s fury and high stakes.”—Vogue It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin, and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a life-changing discovery. The buzz-saw guitars, the messed-up clothing and hair, the rejection of society and the DIY approach to building a new one: in their gray surroundings, where everyone’s future was preordained by some communist apparatchik, punk represented a revolutionary philosophy—quite literally, as it turned out. But as these young kids tried to form bands and became more visible, security forces—including the dreaded secret police, the Stasi—targeted them. They were spied on by friends and even members of their own families; they were expelled from schools and fired from jobs; they were beaten by police and imprisoned. Instead of conforming, the punks fought back, playing an indispensable role in the underground movements that helped bring down the Berlin Wall. This secret history of East German punk rock is not just about the music; it is a story of extraordinary bravery in the face of one of the most oppressive regimes in history. Rollicking, cinematic, deeply researched, highly readable, and thrillingly topical, Burning Down the Haus brings to life the young men and women who successfully fought authoritarianism three chords at a time—and is a fiery testament to the irrepressible spirit of revolution.

Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution: An Oral History is the very first comprehensive overview of the movement that defied both the music underground and the LGBT mainstream community—queercore. Through exclusive interviews with protagonists like Bruce LaBruce, G.B. Jones, Jayne County, Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, film director and author John Waters, Lynn Breedlove of Tribe 8, Jon Ginoli of Pansy Division, and many more, alongside a treasure trove of never-before-seen photographs and reprinted zines from the time, Queercore traces the history of a scene originally “fabricated” in the bedrooms and coffee shops of Toronto and San Francisco by a few young, queer punks to its emergence as a relevant and real revolution. Queercore gets a down-to-details firsthand account of the movement explored through the people that lived it—from punk’s early queer elements, to the moments Toronto kids decided they needed to create a scene that didn’t exist, to the infiltration of the mainstream by Pansy Division, and the emergence of riot grrrl as a sister movement—as well as the clothes, zines, art, film, and music that made this movement an exciting in-your-face middle finger to complacent gay and straight society. Queercore will stand as both a testament to radically gay politics and culture and an important reference for those who wish to better understand this explosive movement.

Recreating the complete story of the punk phenomenon — including where it came from and what it turned into — Punk is a massive and visually stunning record of five years that changed the world: from 1975 to 1979. Collecting the testimony of more than 260 artists, record producers, designers, and journalists — including John Cale, Debbie Harry, Joe Strummer, Maureen Tucker, Gerard Malanga, Lou Reed, Johnny Rotten, Danny Fields, Legs McNeil, Bob Gruen, David Byrne, Iggy Pop, Tommy Ramone, William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, Cherry Vanilla, and Malcolm McLaren, former manager and ringleader of the Sex Pistols — Punk brings to life the profound effect punk music had on global popular culture in the words of those who created it. With reverberations in style, fashion, attitude and philosophy, the birth of punk music released the greatest shockwaves in the popular culture since The Beatles. Punk tells the story through the words of the people who were closely tied to the mania and through hundreds of contemporaneous color and black-and-white photographs.