Ian Curtis

Tim Richardson’s work considers some of the influences and material interventions – books, records, rooms, paint - that supported Ian Curtis’s breakthrough contributions to post-punk music as well as the cassette tapes that allowed high school kids in West Texas to find and love him afterward. Tim suggests that these material affordances are personal encounters that continue to register emotionally.

The Art of Slouching: Posture in Punk

In this chapter, the author argues that the way performers of punk music inhabit the stage, through hunched postures, gains significance when set against the backdrop of a longer history framing the meaning of posture. Punk postures often represent pain as both kinesthetic and visceral. As discourses about posture move away from questions about morality and class, attached to the upright postures of “proper” citizens, and toward scientific claims about alignment and health concerns, novel performance practices ensue, infused with new musical meanings. The author suggests that theatrical punk performers who display different body organizations demonstrate not only the pain of being asked to “align” and “fix” their bodies to fit in, but also alternative meanings of success in society that are not built on able-bodied discourses but often nevertheless attuned to the desire for power.

Samira Kentrić’s Graphic Novel “Balkanalia: Growing up in the Age of Transition” and His Hybrid Poetics

The article analyzes the autobiographical graphic novel of the Slovenian artist, illustrator and performer Samira Kentrić (b. 1976) “Balkanalia: growing up in the age of transition” (2015), in particular the hybrid nature of the genre of this work and its poetics. In this example, the genre incorporates elements of autobiographical comics strip, comics book about the war (in Bosnia), family album, graphic poetry, political illustration, philosophical parable, etc. Visual and textual narratives are designed to reflect the transculturality, the hybridity of the space of the former Yugoslavia, the territory between Bosnia and Slovenia, the two homelands of the protagonist, which became separate states during her growing up. The aesthetic layers are including images of classical artistic heritage, surrealism, popular, ethnic culture, as well as subcultural references (rock and punk music, graffiti), which the artist transforms into a unique fusion through postmodern techniques of irony and deconstruction.

Collaborating across new media and gender

Gender transitioning, with a punk music setting was always going to be controversial. Especially in this internationally ‘first’ YA novel with a trans co-author Ryan who had transitioned from female to male (ftm). However we did not expect the speed of social media which made ‘f2m: the boy within’ a fascinating case study in online collaboration techniques. These included Skype plotting, webchats, guest blogs, book trailer and Twitter, by the co-writers in different countries, and the YA readers and reviewers. Authors are not solo creators. Professionally, they may work at home, but are linked internationally, by new social media.

Whose Rebellion was Punk in the 1990s?

While punk in the United States is often associated with white, male, suburban youth, the 1990s witnessed a dramatic increase in the vocal participation of women and Latinos in US punk bands. The all-Latino, Spanish-language band Los Crudos built a punk scene in the Chicago majority-Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen and went on to captivate the punk scene in the United States and internationally with their ferocious hardcore punk music and unapologetic assertion of Latino identity. The all-women band Spitboy as well as bands with women vocalists such as Anti-Product challenged patriarchy inside and outside the punk scene and fused the anger and energy of punk music with their own experiences of oppression and empowerment. The increasing and assertive participation of Latinos, women, and LGBTQ people in US punk generated responses ranging from supportive to hostile and sparked debate over the ideals and realties of punk values of unity and equality.

The Dystopian Sublime of Extreme Hardcore Punk

With roots in the 1980s and becoming a coherent trend in the 1990s, extreme hardcore punk pushed the intensity of punk music beyond previous levels with beats over 800 BPM, screamed or growled vocals, and guitar riffs built from dissonant and nondiatonic pitch material. Its lyrics often provided dystopian warnings of environmental catastrophe and humanity’s downfall due to globalized capitalism. Analysis and reception history of the music of bands such as Dropdead, His Hero Is Gone, Hellnation, and Capitalist Casualties identify the musical techniques and sublime effects of the extreme hardcore punk subgenre, also referred to as grindcore and power violence.

Punk’s Popularity Anxieties and the Introspective Aggression of So-Cal Punk

With the rise of the alternative music industry and the mainstream success of a few punk bands in the 1990s, the underground punk scene engaged in a vituperative debate over staying DIY versus “selling out.” Amid this debate, those promoting a discourse of DIY purity insisted on excising commercially successful bands from the punk scene, while others embraced the diversity of punk music or questioned the importance of DIY purity. One style that found some commercial success, So-Cal punk, combined 1980s hardcore punk with melodic vocals, intricate palm-muted guitar rhythms, octave-chord lead guitar parts, and more polished recordings and spoke to the postmodern existential dilemmas of disaffected suburban youth. The music of NOFX’s The Decline exemplifies So-Cal punk style and offers a critique of the decline of American society.

Putting the ‘punk’ back into pop-punk: Analysing presentations of deviance in pop-punk music videos

Writing on pop-punk, the melodic branch of punk that rose to fame in the mid-tolate-1990s, usually centres on the pop aspect of the genre: its popularity, polished sound and commercialization. Defining punk as a culture of deviance, this article in contrast examines the punk aspect of pop-punk by analysing the ways deviance is presented in the music videos ‘All the Small Things’ by blink-182, ‘In Too Deep’ by Sum 41, and ‘Original Prankster’ by the Offspring, all released at the turn of the millennium. Understanding music videos as media advertising a song, an album and an artist and analysing the interplay of visuals, music and lyrics therein, we argue that blink-182 and Sum 41 present themselves as deviant by staging a notion of authenticity, ridiculing mainstream pop and appropriating the ‘prankster’ stereotype, while the Offspring take a more nuanced stance on the matter of pranking. Concluding, we attribute this difference to the generational gap between the bands and briefly identify the different waves of pop-punk.