This book tells the story of punk rock as a global movement that spanned the boundaries of the Cold War world, focusing on examples in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe, the United States, the United Kingdom, and their connections with the Third World. Drawing on archival documents, ’zines, mainstream publications, and other sources, it closely examines the appeal of punk to its practitioners and the reactions of each society to the rise of punk. It argues that punk grew out of and contributed to the global transition from the late Cold War era to the era of neoliberal/neoconservative globalization. Punk arose among individuals and scenes communicating across the Iron Curtain at a moment characterized by transnational crisis, globalization, postmodernism, and an aesthetic/cultural turn in sociopolitics. Through the culture wars it helped provoke in the First World and Second World alike, punk contributed to a global realignment from the sociopolitically, ideologically oriented world of the Cold War to the subsequent era, oriented primarily around culture and identity. Through the example of punk, it challenges the resistance-centric framework of Cold War era cultural studies, presenting an alternative model for how culture is intertwined with politics that accounts for its significance as a major sociopolitical force.
American Counterculture Ideals Expressed through the Music of the 1960s