Abstract
Since its emergence in the 1970s, punk rock as a musical genre, fashion, ideology, and consumer product has been predicated on the rejection of the 1960s. Punk songs abandoned the psychedelic soundscapes of 1960s bands such as Pink Floyd or the earnest activism of folk artists such as Joan Baez and instead sought to return rock’n’roll to a stripped-down roots-rock sound. Fabrics like cotton or denim associated with hippies were discarded by punks who instead donned plastics, faux furs, and leather to represent, aesthetically, the artificial nature of modern life. While hippies in London or Haight-Ashbury experimented with downers such as marijuana and hashish, punks popped uppers to prepare themselves for nights of wild abandon and frenetic activity. Punks replaced 1960s’ slogans such as ‘Peace & Love’ with ‘Hate & War’ as a more realistic vision of the world. Political issues that obsessed Sixties activists, such as concern over the environment, were summarily dismissed as romantic nonsense by punks: Mick Jones, guitarist for the Clash, famously remarked, “I hate the country. The minute I see cows I feel sick.”1 Indeed, there is perhaps no better encapsulation of punk rock’s hostility to the 1960s than the chorus to The Clash’s “1977,” the B-side to their first single White Riot (1977): “No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones / in 1977.”
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Notes
Marcus Gray, Last Gang in Town: The Story and Myth of the Clash (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1996), 174.
Even the titles of books on punk celebrate the rupturousness of the genre. See Curry Malott and Milagros Peña, Punk Rockers’ Revolution: A Pedagogy of Race, Class, and Gender (New York: Peter Lang, 2004);
Adrian Boot and Chris Salewicz, Punk: The Illustrated History of a Music Revolution (New York: Penguin Studio, 1997);
Tricia Henry, Break All Rules! Punk Rock and the Making of a Style (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989).
According to George McKay, “One of the things hippy and punk had in common—at least in terms of my constructions of them—was an oppositional impulse, an idealism or rhetoric of idealism. For both, politics and culture were, or could be, or should be, the same thing.” See George McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 5.
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Craig O’Hara, The Philosophy of Punk: More than Noise! 2nd ed. (London: AK Press, 1999).
Clinton Heylin argues that rock journalists such as Bangs invented punk avant-la-lettre in their call for a “new” rock n’ roll in the late 1960s and early 1970s. See Clinton Heylin, Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge (London: Viking, 2007), 2–8.
See Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes, PA: Open University Press, 1985), 59–63.
The classic statement—though he does not use the term postmodernism—is Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Routledge, 1979).
There is an enormous literature on UK punk. But for excellent introductions, see Heylin, Babylon’s Burning; John Robb, Punk Rock: An Oral History (London: Ebury Press, 2006);
and Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, rev. ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).
For an overview of the West German punk, see Hollow Skai, Alles nur geträumt: Fluch und Segen der Neuen Deutschen Welle (Innsbruck: Hannibal, 2009);
and Jürgen Teipel, Verschwende Deine Jugend: Ein Doku-Roman über den deutschen Punk und New Wave (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).
While there are countless how-to guides, there are no comprehensive histories of the DIY movement. On punk DIY, see Teal Triggs, Fanzines: The DIY Revolution (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2010);
Alan O’Connor, Punk Record Labels and the Struggle for Autonomy: The Emergence of DIY (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008);
Amy Spencer, DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2005);
and George McKay, ed. DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain (London and New York: Verso, 1998).
On alternative culture in West Germany, see Sven Reichardt and Detlef Siegfried, eds., Das Alternative Milieu. Antibürgerlicher Lebensstil und linke Politik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Europa 1968–1983 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010).
Günter Franzen and Boris Penth, Last Exit. Punk: Leben im toten Herz der Städte (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), 210;
and Jürgen Stark und Michael Kurzawa, Der große Schwindel? Punk—New Wave—neue Welle (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Freie Gesellschaft, 1981), 193.
Clinton Heylin argues that this is one of the key differences between American and British punk. Clinton Heylin, From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock, updated ed. (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005).
For a brief overview, see Nick Thomas, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003).
In West Germany, the student movement had splintered into numerous Maoist- and Communist-inspired factions, which—by the mid-1970s—had little relevance to anyone but themselves in their constant internecine feuding. See Gerd Koenen, Das Das rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution, 1967–1977 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2001);
and Andrei S. Markovits and Philip S. Gorski, The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993).
On the emergence of serious rock journalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Ulf Lindberg et al., Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers, and Cool-Headed Cruisers (New York: Peter Lang, 2005).
See Tim Klütz, “POP TALK—Wie Pop in Sounds und SPEX zur Sprach kam,” in Pop am Rhein, ed. Uwe Husslein (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008), 161–189.
Skai, Alles nur geträumt, 9; and Teipel, Verschwende, 141. Thomas Groetz correctly points out that Jürgen Kramer used the term ‘Neue Welle’ for the third edition of his fanzine Einige Millionen in August 1978. See Thomas Groetz, Kunst=Musik: Punk und New Wave in der Nachbarschaft von Joseph Beuys (Berlin: Martin Schmitz Verlag, 2002), 24.
See also Frank A. Schneider, Als die Welt noch unterging: Von Punk zu NDW (Mainz: Ventil Verlag, 2007), 12;
and Barbara Hornberger, Geschichte wird gemacht. Die Neue Deutsche Welle. Eine Epoche deutscher Popmusik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011).
Teipel, Verschwende, 210; Michele Avantario, “1977–1987: Von Krawall bis Totenschiff. Punk, New Wave und Hardcore,” in Läden, Schuppen, Kaschemmen: Eine Hamburger Popkulturgeschichte, ed., Christoph Twickel (Hamburg: Edition Nautilus, 2003), 53–54.
Roberto Ohrt, “Punkmemory,” in Zurück zum Beton: Die Anfänge von Punk und New Wave in Deutschland 1977-‘82, eds., Ulrike Groos, Peter Groschlüter, and Jürgen Teipel (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2002), 154.
Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
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Hayton, J. (2014). “The Revolution Is Over—and We Have Won!”: Alfred Hilsberg, West German Punk, and the Sixties. In: Brown, T.S., Lison, A. (eds) The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375230_9
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