Touch Me I’m Rich: From Grunge to Alternative Nation

The grunge scene originally developed in Seattle as an amalgam of the sounds and styles of punk and metal during the late 1980s. Like the initial punk subculture of the 1970s, grunge spoke to alienated young people growing up in a time of economic dislocation and social discord. But in the early 1990s, grunge suddenly catapulted to the top of the charts and made an enormous impact on mainstream music, fashion, and culture through the success of bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The appropriation of grunge by commercial popular culture can only be understood as part of a larger transformation within late capitalism that facilitated the commodification of a wide range of formerly “alternative” or “underground” subcultures. Various commercial forces sought to capitalize on the perceived authenticity of grunge in a moment that demanded innovative methods of stealth marketing to “Generation X.” However, this threatened the enduring oppositions between art and commerce and alternative and mainstream that define “subcultural capital,” and was met with a backlash from young people. This chapter examines the rise and fall of grunge within the context of these larger dynamics of late capitalism.

Danger, Anger, and Noise: The Women Punks of the Late 1970s and Their Music

This chapter will give an overview of the dangerous environment for young women in the British punk subculture in the late 1970s, followed by a discussion of the feelings of anger this sense of danger prompted in them, contributed to by a feeling of lack of control over those who appeared to have invincible power over their lives. Finally, the ways in which this anger translated into the punk songs they played will be discussed. Using contemporary music press and radical press reviews and features, extracts from published diaries of the time, and the author’s own interviews with women active in punk bands, the chapter highlights and explores the unexpectedness and originality of the noise that these women made, and its reception by male journalists at the time.

‘There’s nothing I can do’: Bad faith and the narrative maintenance of ethical identifications

It has often been emphasized in narrative sociology that individuals strive to present themselves in a good, ethical light and that they attempt to make themselves the protagonists of their own stories. However, less work has been done on what happens when individuals are confronted with a necessary contradiction in their narrative that conflicts with their subjective ethical positioning. In this article, I use evidence from my qualitative research into the anarcho-punk subculture in Philadelphia (2016) to show that in such a situation, the narrator may use what Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘bad faith’, the denial of personal responsibility or choice, to protect their ethical identification through narrative.

Od subkultury do kultury DIY. Miejskie ewolucje kultury punk

The aim of this article is to show evolution of punk subculture in the context of a city. The author presents his ethnographical research on punk subculture. Punk is depicted as a two-figure movement. First figure works as a historical reconstruction of early punk contestation character. Second, based on late political engagement, creates a figure of alternative culture in a city. The author describes forms of engagement in movement and reconstructs the line of punk city network.

Punk Subculture and the Queer Critique of Community on 1980s Cable TV: The Case of New Wave Theatre

If histories of television recognize it all, the relationship between punk subculture and the mass cultural medium of television is often rendered as a story of misreprentation, conflict, or mutual avoidance. Such studies overlook a rich history of punks throughout North America who produced numerous programs for cable television, especially the non-commercial forum of public access, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Conceiving of TV as a kind of social technology, some punks actively and critically engaged in producing subculture both on and through the medium. This article looks at the case of New Wave Theatre (Theta/KSCI 1979–1983), a Los Angeles–based cable program that featured punk and new-wave bands, performance art, and interviews. It argues that through distinctive performance tactics and production practices, New Wave Theatre developed a form of “subcultural television” rooted in queer “antisociality.”