Style over Substance: Punk, the Internet, and The Shifting Role of Subculture

The following article is a sample essay written in my (Rathin) freshman year. Expect looser formatting and clearer prose going forward: 

Style over Substance: Punk, the Internet, and The Shifting Role of Subculture

Punk, since its inception, has been viewed as the prototypical subculture movement. In their transgressive style, influential music, and anti-establishment attitude, the punk movement, though proclaimed “dead” by the media and punk themselves, has proved itself to be one of the most distinctive and unabashedly political subcultures. Punk band, the “Sex Pistols” are arguably the most important musical group in defining the style and attitude of the punk movement. To rock critic Greil Marcus, “the Sex Pistols were meant to be a force that would set the world on its ear… and finally unite music and politics” (Marcus). Today, the role that popular music subculture has changed significantly since its heyday. This stark change can be seen in a major demonstration of the Sex Pistols’ attitude dubbed “The Today Incident.” Using Dick Hebdige’s theory of subcultural style, this paper will compare the Pistols’ public persona and the movement surrounding it with modern popular music media and culture. With contemporary accounts of media culture in the internet age this paper will argue that though the internet has increased accessibility to historically transgressive musical subcultures, social media platforms disincentivize transgressive rhetoric of such subcultures, thus disempowering cultural and political movements long-associated with music genres like punk. While there has been much academic coverage of Punk music’s relevance as a subculture, there’s been scant retrospective research on transformation of music subculture, especially within its interaction with social media.

On December 1, 1976, the Sex Pistols, along with an entourage named the Bromley Contingent appeared on the Today show as a last-minute replacement for Queen. Members of the band use constant profanity in the interview, when profanity was prohibited on television at certain parts of the day. Frontman John Lydon and guitarist Steve Jones insult, mock, and try to provoke host Bill Grundy, calling him a “dirty fucker” and a “fucking rotter” as Grundy makes inappropriate comments toward a female member of their entourage and demeans the value of their music. A pivotal point in the interview is when Grundy emphasizes that "Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms have all died," when Lydon interrupts Grundy sarcastically commenting, "They're all heroes of ours," adding "They really turn us on" (“Transcript”).

As a result of this contentious public media appearance, news outlets and concerned viewers of the Today show were quick to comment on the situation with one outlet claiming that the Sex Pistols’ replies to Bill Grundy was “the filthiest language ever used on British Television.” Wind of the exchange soon made it across the pond with the Washington Post commenting, “Punk rockers go in for macabre fashions. They paint their faces in garish colors, wear safety pins through their noses wear skintight leather clothes, including T-shirts with obscene motifs, and decorate themselves in Nazi swastikas and chains” (“Swearing by British Rock Band Enrages Television Viewers”).  The narrative of punk identity within popular media existed in direct opposition toward mainstream sensibilities, where the crass Punks with their “macabre” and “obscene” style threaten mainstream culture. Interestingly, mainstream press additionally had a specific focus on the dress of the Sex Pistols, centering the stylistic divide over the ideological one. Rather than simply highlighting their rudeness toward the host, the mainstream media detail how to visually identify punks by listing their clothing features. This is not to say that the identifiable dress of Punks is a mainstream media construction. Rather, through mainstream media’s disdain of Punk styling, style becomes an important marker for ideological difference.

The Today Incident was the most public clash between punk subculture mainstream, inciting discourse on the political validity of punk from journalists and scholars alike. The idea of punk aesthetics and style signifying ideological opposition, as framed in mainstream media’s reaction to the Sex Pistols’ appearance, is in keeping with Subculture scholar Dick Hebdige’s theory of subcultural style: “Style in subculture is, then, pregnant with significance. Its transformations go ‘against nature’, interrupting the process of ‘normalization’. As such, they are gestures, movements towards a speech which offends the ‘silent majority”, which challenges the principle of unity and cohesion” (Hebdige 18). In Hebdige’s view, style is the ultimate determiner of subcultural identity through its significance in demonstrating its difference toward mainstream culture, style itself is a statement that challenge the “silent majority,” making subversive style an inherent anti-establishment political statement. Within this, a hostile media gives power to the punks by naming and grouping individual’s stylistic “gestures” into a unified oppositional movement, hence validating punk identity as a subculture.

 However, the political statement of style is not simply transgression for transgression’s sake. In Hebdige’s analysis of the punk movement he writes, “The safety pins and bin liners signified a relative material poverty…which in turn was made to stand for the spiritual paucity of everyday life” (Hebdige 115). In this way, style for punks was a signifier of broader economic conditions, separating the angry working class with establishment media figures through their aesthetics. Where many news outlets would portray punks as politically vague and simply exhibiting deviant behavior, their dress signified specific working-class social and economic struggles. We can see specific punk messaging clearer in the decades following the original rise of punk in the 1970s, where other subjugated social groups would adopt new punk offshoot subcultures like the feminist “Riot Grrrl” or the LGBTQ “Queercore” movements, advocating explicitly for their representation within politics and culture. For the Sex Pistols, this class-identification and political messaging was later spelled out by frontman John Lydon, “If we had an aim, it was to force our own, working-class opinions into the mainstream, which was unheard of in pop music at the time” (Verrico). Although Lydon's particiular identification of "working-class opinions" in his band's music warrants some skepticism, it is the explicit political spirit that makes punk stand out within mainstream popular music.

However, Hebidge’s theory of style does not fully explain punk’s politics as style alone did not form the political discourse of the punk movement. Instead, the underground proliferation of punk fanzines, fan-created multimedia works printed in small-circulation, created the social dynamics and political rhetoric and ideologies of the subculture. As described by historian of punk and popular music subculture, Matthew Worley, “Thatcher’s image repeated across fanzine pages. Torn from newspapers and inserted into artworks, she decorated political rants that railed against Conservative policies en route to denouncing ‘the system’” (Worley 189). Though usually quite vulgar, fanzines offered real working-class perspectives and vitriol towards government policy, representing a minority culture that was not given a voice through mainstream media. Additionally, by being distributed locally, these fanzines could cover local issues and distribute messaging, creating a politically significant presence of punk within the community.

Although fanzines were united in their mission to dismantle oppressive structures, zines also had a nuanced political discourse which gave a voice to minorities within this minority culture. This discourse can be seen through the commentary of a female fanzine writer of color, Kristy Chan, during the 1990s Riot Grrrl movement: “This one guy in particular I know does a really crappy zine & I wrote to him and told him his zine is exclusionary to women, queers & people of colour” (Fatila). The medium of the punk fanzine allowed Kristy Chan to have a voice and the ability to call out other zines, dismantling the misogynistic social structures that pervade even punk spaces. This inclusion of minorities and diverse perspectives within fanzine culture not only fostered a significant political culture but also a highly progressive and nuanced political discourse within the culture.

Even with much minority representation and ideological variability, punk identification was well-guarded through gatekeeping, this kept the fans of the music and the political movement of punk the same, excluding passive listeners who did not care for its ideology. Mainly the punk dress was heavily guarded, portraying those who co-opted the style without the culture as “posers” as opposed to those who were really punk, creating a tight-knit core-audience that shared political dialogues, music taste, and ways of expression. (Worley 76)

In contemporary culture, the amount of media coverage that the Sex Pistols had from their behavior on the Today show is almost unthinkable. Many factors contribute to this: firstly, swearing on live television is no longer much of a social taboo, punk style is less controversial,  and music promotion is done mostly through social media (Deloitte). The internet age has created a new dynamic that has completely changed subculture’s influence on the general popular culture. Current research supports the idea that internet and social media has aided the growth and influence of subculture greatly, with increased subcultural accessibility due to social media being able to target a global net of people without the reliance of mass media sources like television or radio, and increased acceptance of styles that were once thought to be deviant as a result of online visibility (Leary et al.; Debies-Carl).

Although acceptance of different aesthetics and behavior is usually viewed positively, the implications for the subculture, with mainstream acceptance through social media platforms, the style of subcultures are at risk of being commodified and co-opted. Where fanzines, the primary method of communication within a subculture, would create an ideological barrier to entry to the movement, modern social platforms like Twitter desensitize the “gatekeeping” of information emphasizing virality. Moreover, social media does away with the geo-restrictions of media proliferation, which decrease political will toward local protest movements because of the lack of geographical proximity within the movement (Xu and Guo). The change from underground print media to online platforms have increased the reliance on for-profit sources like Facebook or TikTok for subcultural resistance, which may offer greater accessibility of punk, but can in turn “normalize” punk culture and dull political resistance by commodifying punk style. A prominent example of this commodification can be seen in the way that businesses use the anarchist “A” symbol to sell products, co-opting the style thereby making subcultural symbols “empty signifiers,” divorced from its original social context transforming into a tool of mainstream capitalist culture (Debies-Carl).

 The transition from subculture to the mainstream is an inevitable part of a subculture’s transformation, but this process does not eliminate the subculture. Hebdige illustrates this process: “Eventually, the mods, the punks, the glitter rockers can be incorporated, brought back into line, located on the preferred ‘map of problematic social reality’… the fractured order is repaired and the subculture incorporated as a diverting spectacle within the dominant mythology” (Hebdige 94). What Hebdige does not include here is the extent by which subculture is incorporated in the mainstream and how this is done. Hebdige addresses how the life cycle of a subculture will end up with punk identity being systematically codified, thereby bringing the movement “back into line.” However, this view relies on a binary outlook on the status of a subculture. Though weakened, a subculture still exists even when its style is commodified, current subcultural theory does not answer what happens to a subculture when it becomes a “diverting spectacle” in the modern era. Even when the unique signifiers of style in a subculture such as fashion, music, or slang are absorbed and commercialized in the mainstream, the core identity and community within the subculture to do not entirely disappear. Rather, the influence and distinctiveness of a subculture may diminish as its unique aspects are diluted by mass consumption.

The transformation of subculture due to online visibility and commodification leads to the phenomenon of online “subcultural dilettantism” where listeners have a passing interest culture but do not possess a deep understanding of it (Whelan). We can understand this phenomenon through the modern example of the commodification of Whitby Goth Weekend, once a niche music festival that—as a result of mainstream attention from the internet—became a worldwide tourist attraction. Researchers Karl and Beverly Spracklen detail the Goth reaction to this overnight popularity: “As one suggested ‘If anybody can be a Goth by buying the uniform it does stop being something else’, that something else being the political, communicative edge the scene developed in the early 1980s” (Spracklen and Spracklen). The Goth interviewee illustrates this critical divide between style and rhetoric. Though the style has been co-opted, subcultural dilettantes are not Goth because they lack what makes them “something else,” but as Whitby Goth Weekend loses its subcultural heritage through tourism this “something else” loses significance, making the dilettantes indistinguishable from the real members of the subculture.

The way that popular music expresses itself politically different today: an artist’s style is highly fluid and referential, not directly indicative of political ideology or individual subcultural identity. For example, Miley Cyrus’s style 2 years after Cyrus’s psychedelic-inspired liquid glitter photoshoots for her album Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, she returned to a conservative country aesthetic to reach out to Trump-supporters after Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for president because “I don’t think those people are going to listen to me when I’m sitting there in nipple pasties” (Blistein).  This is not a fault to the long-held practice of stylistic “eras” in popular music but rather a case study in the way the appropriation of different styles is normalized in modern culture, a departure from the Sex Pistols’ aesthetic ties to the movement and subculture surrounding them. Miley Cyrus’s politics are not within her stylistic identity as an artist but her referential stylistic gestures to different subcultures.

This shift to commodification of style in popular culture does not mean political significance in popular music is impossible. A notable outlier in the internet age is rapper M.I.A., who, despite being accused by the press of being a “terrorist sympathizer” (Hirschberg) gained mainstream success with her politically charged alternative hip-hop music. Instead of appropriating specific subcultural aesthetics for political messaging, M.I.A. through her insistence on explicit political references to her complex political status as the daughter of the infamous Sri Lankan revolutionary, Arul Pragasam, made her music and identity inseparable from the political ideology that underlies them. In addition, to resist subcultural dilettantism, M.I.A. purposely made her music inaccessible after gaining mainstream attention by naming her third album “/\/\ /\ Y /\” a name hard to find on search engines, limiting her reach to “the most enthusiastic” fans (Rowe). Effectively, M.I.A used the internet to gatekeep rather than its usual result of commodifying; however, this outcome is highly unique and a result of M.I.A’s inventive process of tempering her fame, going against the common incentive to increase one’s fame.

You may wonder: why does the present commodification of subculture matter? After all, the accessibility of subcultural style makes individuals able to express themselves in more ways; however, subcultures are born out of a shared struggle from the dominant culture preventing the agency of the marginalized. Transgressive styling, especially for punks, gave a voice to angry, middle-class, youth in opposition to the repressive government that paid them no heed. Recognizing and protecting the political identity of subcultures can ensure that the status quo will continue progress to accommodate the ignored parts of society.

 

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