No Future/No Alternative: Punk and the Cynic Sensibility

Abstract

In the following passage from his history of countercultural London, long-standing music writer and cultural critic Barry Miles identified the huge popular significance and impact of punk music on late 1970s British culture:

It is axiomatic that the true character of a culture, the state of its national consciousness, can be glimpsed through a nation’s popular music, television shows and tabloid newspapers. In the post-war period there was never such a division as the one between the punks and the cultural establishment in the late seventies. The punks exposed the barely restrained violence beneath the British stiff upper lip; the repressed rage of the “flog ’em, bring back hanging” old ladies delicately sipping their tea in Bexhill-on-sea and Windsor; the roiling and daily disappointments of the robot-like millions commuting into the City of London each day to make millions for foreign bosses and anonymous shareholders; the blatant hypocrisy of the Fleet Street newspapers, suppressing and distorting facts to suit the political objectives of their millionaire owners; the cynical manipulation of children and the poor by the pony-tailed advertising men of Charlotte Street — one punk band had a song about a champagne party held to celebrate the launch of individual fish-finger packs for pensioners — the steady diet of murder, murder, murder in films and television drama, and, in the seventies, still the puritan admonitions against sex.