The roots of punk music go deep half a century into the past, but threads of that in your face Sonic experience continue to evolve. Punk is part of today's culture, fashion, literature, comedy, education and, of course, politics. And there's no one better to talk with Kansas reflector about influences of punk music on society than Ian LSL, lecturer at the University of Kansas, and the author of a book, punk beyond the music, tracing mutations and manifestations of the punk virus. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you very much. Tim,
it's great to have you here.
Great to be here. Yeah, it's
a good topic. So Ian, begin with, let's, let's just note what you are striving to accomplish by writing this book
at the personal level, this very much, is a kind of life memoir of sorts for me, even though it isn't a personalized book, it's it was that was what changed my life. It politicized me, I say it in many ways, established values that I maintain to this day. And that was when I was about 14 and first discovered punk rock growing up just outside London at the time. So it's been such a life defining aspect for me, and I think at the time, we all thought it would be a five minute wonder, that it would come and go, like all other pop trends of that era seemed to but what became apparent was that it didn't stay the same, but it kept mutating, and it kept manifesting in different things. Similarly, I think most of us that time perhaps saw it as just a musical phenomenon, or perhaps we saw it orienting into other art forms, but nowhere near as much as what now I look back on and see that punk has basically manifested across all arts as well as into different lifestyle aspects. I see things about punk parenting. I see things about punk gardening. I see punk education theories, I see punk essentially operating not just as a musical subculture, but as an actual cultural epoch in our history that has influenced everything in our lives. And therefore, I see punk not as just a musical phenomenon, but as a culture, and I think I'm the first person to come to that conclusion, but I felt it was about time somebody gave credit to that and started charting and tracing some of it, these manifestations and mutations, and I hope that they're not just random guesses. So I do try and trace these things in relation to where they come from and what punk traits are at play.
And you've started to explain this, but, but how did you exactly become a lecturer in English at the University of Kansas? You obviously came across the ocean. And,
yeah, like most Brits who are interested in music, I wanted to follow and trace the history of music. And of course, Britain has its own fantastic traditions of that. But ultimately you start discovering as you go back further. And I got interested in 50s music and before and wanted to trace that, and came to America to, I guess, be closer to the roots, and start investigating that further. And when I went to grad school, and that was in the mid, mid to late 1980s when I first came over to America, I was on a program that in a university, Bowling Green, State University in Ohio, that actually had the first popular culture department in the country and had a major pop music library. So it was I didn't even know this before I came, but when I was there, I discovered this, and it was like I was kid in a candy sauce for me. And because I was studying American Studies, and then later did a PhD in American culture studies, I was able to orient my studies towards my areas of interest, which were in music, and particularly punk. And then when it came time for me to do my PhD dissertation, I decided to follow my bliss, as they say, and investigate punk further, and wrote my PhD dissertation on the dissemination of the punk esthetic across American culture in the 1980s And that became the kind of early draft, we might say what I picked up on recently during the covid pandemic, where I started looking back and thinking about that and realizing that what I'd done back in the 80s had been continuing thereafter, but in much broad. Were cultural manifestations than I had possibly could have imagined at that time. And so I expanded the idea and started tracing and investigating what is this thing called punk that keeps showing up everywhere and keeps manifesting in different ways. The same traits are apparent, and I in the book, narrow those traits down to five main ones to try and get a foundational idea of what punk is. The first one is the idea of assuming a position of the outsider. It's political, and we can get into that later. What I mean by that. It's built around notable symbols that keep reoccurring. It has a passion for DIY. Do it yourself. And there is a fifth one. I can't remember what it is, but I'm sure it's important attitude. That's what it was. Attitude. I
thought you were just going to withhold that from us and make people buy the book
I should have done. All right,
so that's good, and we will get into some of these particularly characteristics in a second, not to be too academic, but I was hoping you could help with some definitions. And there you kind of categorize the evolution of punk through pre punk and post punk. Can we just and maybe offer a little bit of a snippet of culture to illustrate what you mean by each of those four categories. Yeah,
this approach to my topic is very much rooted in my determination that punk is not a product of a time period or even a product of any singular thing. It's indefinable in some ways, and that's why one has to be very open as well as have a tracing process that recognizes that punk didn't just land out of the sky. It is rooted in certain artistic traditions and cultural traditions, and has subsequently manifested in others. So my tracing process goes backwards, goes forwards, and it starts ultimately by recognizing that punk came from certain artistic roots. Many of those come from the fine arts, if one looks back particularly to certainly avant garde movements of the early 20th century, dada, Italian futurism, surrealism, and go through things like pop art,
Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol and
others, what you see is traits that you will think, Hmm, punks really seem to pick up on a lot of those ideas, this kind of anti establishment, this kind of negation idea that people like the futurists or the Dadaists were doing, this irreverence, this attitude, this politics, these are things that came out of the art movement, and it's notable, particularly in the British tradition, but to a certain degree in the American punk traditions too. If you actually go through a lot of the original punk groups from Britain, as well as the managers that were surrounding them, most of them went to art school. Art School is a huge tradition in British pop and rock music, and this is where a lot of their esthetics were learned, like Malcolm McLaren, who managed the Sex Pistols, but also had the clothes shop with Vivienne Westwood, that kind of promoted the style of the puzzle culture. He was an old 60s art school boy, and he got these ideas from studying the situationalists who were a rebel French group in the late 1960s a revolutionary group. So when you look at things like the covers of sex, pistols, singles and albums, what that those designs are, they're actually coming from kind of variations on what the situationists were doing in the late 1960s and their designer was a guy called Jamie Reed who similarly went to art school. Yeah, he actually went to art school with Malcolm McLaren. So there's the kind of untold story of this so called Street Movement is actually a rather intellectual tradition as well as a street tradition. Wasn't
aware of that. So you have pre punk, which we can say before the 70s, or into the 70s, and we have proto punk. What is that for
pre punk? Those forces that came Could, could be well before punk, as I say, going back to the early part of the century. And then I have a term called proto punk. These are the things that are happening just before what we call punk comes around. These are the Forerunners that. Are making gestures. Sometimes. There's there's films coming out of New York. It's called the new wave of film, in fact, that's coming out of New York, New York in the early 70s. Or there are groups like the New York Dolls in the early 1970s or groups like Iggy Pop and the Stooges from this period. These are what I call proto punk. It comes out of glam rock in Britain, pub rock. These are kind of like things that are sending out tentacles that the punks are going to use themselves.
Could you include Monty Python in that, yes, it's
across the arts, because it's not just happening through music. As I say, this is a cultural phenomenon. It's coming through irreverent comedy in the early 70s, even in America, you start getting some of these irreverent comedians like George Carlin, who are actually changing their own identity. George Carlin started out as what we might call a kind of hippie comedian, but when you start seeing what he's doing by the mid 70s, that attitude is starting to harden. And I think this is where politics starts to come into play, particularly in America. The importance of Watergate, post Vietnam, there's a certain kind of malaise that is hardening the esthetic, such that those old hippie flowers in your hair idealism is starting to be seen through a cynical lens and through a harder, more aggressive response that groups like The Ramones are going to represent in that kind of harder, primitive sound that we hadn't heard before, almost a parody of hardness, almost a parody of aggression. So that kind of outsider attitude is starting to be reflected in the music, but it's also, as you say, reflected in in humor is starting to be reflected in some of the writing. We mentioned people like William Burroughs, who was of the hippie era, but he's notably different from a lot of the hippiest writers. There's a cynicism, there's a darkness, there's a bleakness that people like he Charles Bukowski, Hunter, Thompson, they're writing in a way that is showing us that that kind of hippie idealism is turning to a cynicism that's going to soon manifest itself in punk that close quarters punk expressions not called punk at the Time. That's why I call them proto punk. It's like, okay, it's not fully formed or even called pump yet, but it's very close. And it's all happening around the early 1970s mid 1970s and it's pollinating around in the US and Britain. We get
to primary punk. And I may say, who thought of the term punk, by the way. Do we know? Well,
the roots of the term itself have many different notations in rock journalism. It was used for certain groups, Garage Band groups, in the early 1970s by some American rock journalists. Shakespeare actually is often credited with using the term. That's excellent. So
I was pretty sure when we started this, we wouldn't be talking about Shakespeare, but I love that. So primary punk, later 70s, you're talking about maybe the clash sex business,
yeah. Primary punk, to me, is where you get the kind of codification of those proto punk forces coming into a kind of focus, and this is where the term starts to be used. And to give them credit, it came out of a fanzine out of New York called punk. That's where the term came from. That was a couple of guys who were covering the scene that was going on in music at this bar called CBGBs in the in the Bowery in New York, and that's where you get all those early bands that became known as punk, talking head Blondie Richard hell and the voidoids, the Ramones, The dead boys. These are all playing the same small, dingy club, and even though their music is not the same. You know, Bundy doesn't sound like the dead boys, but they're all starting to be seen as a certain coalition of attitude, of irreverence, of kind of stylistic opposition, kind of wanting to perceive themselves in opposition to the pop music that's happening in mainstream America now. A lot of that did influence Britain, because the Ramones toured Britain in mid in July in 1976 and a lot of the people that went to that show immediately went home afterwards. You know, broke. Up their bands and said, The Ramones, they're the thing. And who was there? Members of the clash, members of the Sex Pistols, members of the Damned. So you get that kind of influence coming over from the Ramones. But it's not just from them. It's also coming from things that are happening in the British scene, the politics of rock and the politics
the politics of alienation.
Yes, exactly. So there's a there's maybe
it was a fertile terrain for the Ramones to come along and show a different way. And then it's totally the people in the advanced in the UK really picked it up and carried it forward.
Youth unemployment was a big issue in Britain in the mid 70s, so a lot of kids with times when they use if you listen to a lot of early punk songs, you hear the word boredom used, yeah, there's a sense that this is a lost generation, and they're expressing themselves in this way. And a lot of those early punk songs that come out of what I call primary punk. So I guess when you trace it historically, I go from pre punk to proto punk to primary punk, and then afterwards you had this splinter into different manifestations of what we might call post punk. Now post punk itself is a kind of sub genre of a style, a kind of intellectualization of punk that's sometimes called post punk, but there are so many other splinters that came out of it, such that in 1979 for example, just three years after what sometimes called the Big Bang year 1976 the kind of the when those primary punk bands exploded. What do you have in 1979 we have the birth of the goth subculture. You have the development of the industrial subculture. You have the development of new wave. You have a doubling down on punk, with street punk and Oi. You have the birth of hardcore out of Los Angeles. So you have this fascinating explosion of many different directions. And that's because Punk has never stood still. It's always mutated. It's always manifested. So even though you look at goth and you think it has traits or elements that aren't necessarily like the Ramones or like the clash, they are taking that foundation and they're exploring new territory.
So let's you know the Kansas reflector is dedicated covering politics and government of Kansas. So we should shine even brighter light from this punk movement on how it's infiltrated politics. You know, you think back to the Sex Pistols. They had this famous tune, God saved the Queen, and it was irreverent, and it got banned on radio, and the more you banned it, the more people probably wanted to listen to it. So through music, how has punk infiltrated the political environment?
I don't think punk infiltrated politics. I think punk always was political, and I think that's why it has been so influential and has had such a legacy and has had such longevity. Is the fascinating element of punk, is that punk politicized an entire generation. To me, that generation is now a generation that many of which are coming, coming to power, because what pump did was in not dissimilar way to some of the counterculture music of the late 60s. Would it pump do? It forced you to question authority. It forced you to question establishments. It forced you to question everything. Because that's what it was. It was oppositional in nature. It saw itself as antagonistic. It was an argumentative esthetic. And therefore it educated us, people like myself when we were growing up, to not be passive, to not be accepting of the status quo, to always question everything. And we see that manifesting now in days. And I do a chapter in my book on education, which investigates how many pump rockers are now, community college teachers, university professors. It's going into politics right now. I was just mentioning to you earlier that the last couple of nights at the DNC, we've got Doug emhoff, who is an old clash fan? We've got Tim waltz, who is an old fan of the replacements and Husker do in 1981 now people say, Well, so what? When you're a kid and you grow up with that kind of music, it frames the way you see the world. It politicizes you. It forces you to be a kind of person that is not just, as I say, passive, someone who is a questioning person, and they're the kind of people that go into politics, and they're the kind of people that become political in nature. Now the irony of this, of course, is that you ask your average punk about. This, and they'll say, oh, no, punk isn't political. That's why I always say when this is not it's not necessarily that punk is party political. It is political with a small p. It is, by definition, a political esthetic, and I would argue the most political genre in the history of music, because that's what it is. In essence, is political, but it's also anti establishment. So it doesn't want to be aligned with the Labor Party in Britain sometimes, or it doesn't want to be aligned with the Democratic Party over here. So it also wants to see itself as a kind of separate politics now, as I say, it has gone into the establishment, and it's the same thing in Britain. A lot of politicians in Britain right now quite open about their love of punk music growing up because they were politicized by it. But most punks are political, even though they're not necessarily, you know, card carrying socialists or whatever, and you can see that reflected in different manifestations. Anarchy being one, perhaps the longest and most enduring tradition of punk politics started as a
joke, and I've always kind of viewed as a joke when you say anarchy, and you have songs about this subject, and they're they're around. I just thought, Well, yeah, anarchy, that's a nice song line, but actually it's pretty terrible.
Yeah? Well, it was the first sexist single Anarchy in the UK, and that's how most of us, when we were growing up, even first heard the term, like, What the hell is this anarchy thing. And for a lot of people, that was an interesting journey that they went on thereafter, because suddenly they're thinking, Well, I mean, Johnny Rotten didn't care about anarchy as a political philosophy. He was using it as an inflammatory term for disruption and disorder. But what happened was a lot of us started saying, Oh, what is this anarchy thing? And then they started discovering that there were people that were taking it seriously, the most important group of which was a group called crass. Now, crass were a card carrying anarchist group lived an anarchist lifestyle, and their influence on things like DIY, creating their own artwork, their own
in artwork, but in music, DIY, you're referring to people that record market sell their own stuff because
they don't want institutional control. So that is the true roots of anarchy, the idea of not being under the control of any corporate entity not being working for a record company. Well, that is a tradition that runs through culture to this day. Anarchist bookstores, anarchists working at homeless shelters, the Wall Street protests of the early 2000 look at the makeup of those protesters, 1000s of punk rockers who come through that anarchist tradition. This is one of the most enduring aspects of the punk tradition. Excellent.
I want to touch upon an incident which I was not aware of until reading part of your book, I believe, in the mid 70s. Eric Clapton famously to people in Europe, apparently, he said, he said, England was becoming overcrowded, and we need to vote conservative before England becomes a black colony. Totally reprehensible statement. But what it did was, I guess a bunch of punkers kind of got this idea in response of rock against racism, yeah. And can you describe the movement and really, kind of how that grew and evolved into a powerful force?
Yeah. First of all, it's worth noting that the founders of rock against racism were not found rock. Oh, I
see. Okay. Good clarification. What
happened was, in the mid 70s, was the rise of a far right group. I call them the kind of Trump of that era, of the kind of Trumpism of that era, and it revolved largely around an organization or group called the National Front who were a kind of far extremist far right organization, and their tactics of recruitment were very much, you know, get them while they're young, so they're doing a lot to try and infiltrate the youth culture and the popular music culture of the time to get these young, vulnerable kids before they kind of have their ideas formed and do what is being done now and Trumpism, and that is, blame immigrants, blame people of color, divide and some of this filtered into. We might say the softer version of that, which was Thatcherism that came at the end of the 70s. But the National Front were very influential, and their voice represented before that by a key political figure called Enoch Powell, who was the kind of quintessential racist of the late 60s, early 70s in British politics, and he was very influential, even on people like Eric Clapton, and you started to see this, these flirtations with fascism. Sometimes they were esthetic. We might say people like David Bowie were flirting with these things. But Eric Clapton, he claims he was drunk at this show, but basically was voicing a lot of the things that were going on in Far Right politics in Britain at that time. And this guy got was so outraged, he wrote a letter to one of the British music papers saying, you know, we can't let this happen. We can't let our young people be colonized by this Neo Nazism that's taking place and is growing across our land, and they're stealing our youth. And so they set up a kind of counter force by saying, we need to form an organization, and that's where rook against racism was formed. Now the reason why it's associated with punk is because what they wanted to do, as I say, was fight for working class youth that were almost became pawns in a political game in Britain that the far right were trying to colonize and accommodate into their own ranks. So they said, well, let's form rock against racism, and we'll put on concerts, and we will kind of fight against them in that way and attract them to a more left wing or socialist cause, or at least liberal cause. Now, what was the music at the time that represented these kind of ideas of sticking up for the underdog, marginalized culture. It was punk and it was reggae. And so if you see where that what the lineup of these rock against racism gigs were. I went to many myself back in the day. They were interesting, even though punk was a very white working class music form, to a degree, it had a very strong racial component, because of rock against racism, and it made, in some ways, oriented the politics of punk towards being very open to you're
bringing The biggest fans of reggae, which would be black, largely and and punk, which is largely white, not exclusively, of course, but you're bringing them together in the same arena, on the same pitch.
And most of those early punks in Britain, that's all they listened to. Was reggae music. They were big reggae fans because reggae was the outsider music before punk came along. So you had people like Johnny Rotten or Paul Simon, and from the clash or listened to was reggae music they have they aligned themselves with the outsiders, with the excluded, with the ostracized, with the discriminated against. That caught on to a degree that after rock Against Rape, you get rock against sexism. And so you start to see that it goes down new paths, and then later on, you get queer core. So now this invitation to the outsider, to the marginalized, to the discriminated against over time, mutates and manifests into political representations that represent people who are discriminated on the basis of race, class, gender, sexuality. And this goes into the 90s with Riot girl. It goes into the 90s with queercore. So explain riot girl. Riot girl comes out in my mind of what I call post punk as a genre, because one of the things that happened after punk primary well called primary Punk in the late 70s, you had a kind of might call it, almost a college version of punk, an intellectualization, where they're taking the ideas of punk, and now they're starting to create This DIY independent framework. They're being very influenced by a lot of the ideas they're learning in college, which tended at that time, when I was a kid growing up, came out of left wing Marxist traditions and French theorists and the like, and bands like The Gang of Four, who I know you went to see, but also female or female groups like the au pairs or or bands like The raincoats. These are bands that come out of the post punk tradition, and they're, they're they're revolutionizing punk because they're taking that spirit of punk, and now they're saying, well, we don't all have to continually play like the Ramones for the rest of our lives. So let's reinvent our own version. And now they start singing in ways you've never heard women sing before. If you listen to the voices of some of those people, listen to the slits, or listen to listen to, you know even Susie sue a forerunner of that. And then later you listen to the riot girls with Kathleen Hannah in Bikini Kill and others, there's suddenly a new female voice that is empowered, that is completely uncontainable. We might say it's a very raw voice and Riot girl very much. Was a consolidation of the work that those post punk feminists had put in in the late 1970s there's a group called the au pairs in the late 70s who were very important for this, because they were very ideological in the same way that Riot girl was, and they had kind of a deconstructive attitude to the music they liked. The Gang of Four wanted to reinvent punk around ideological grounds. Gang of Four were very influenced by Marxism. The au pairs were very influenced by feminist ideas at the time. These were picked up by again, college kids in the late 80s, early 90s, some of which crossed over with grunge. So it came out of the two Washingtons, actually Washington DC and Washington State on the west coast, where these young women who are college started creating their own zines, fanzines. We called them fanzines originally, but by then they started to be called zines. And these zines are very political. Explain what a zine is? Well, a zine is essentially an amateur DIY magazine for constituencies that have no voice so mainstream. The reason why zines really started with punk rock was because the music papers wouldn't cover punk rock, or the mainstream media wouldn't cover punk rock, or when they did, they just stereotyped it or dismissed it or or misread it. So a lot of the kids who were part of punk rock said, screw that. Let's do our own media. And so they said, let's, let's make our own zines. All you need is a few sheets of paper and a stapler, and Riot girl was like that for women's voices in the in the 90s, and it created a scene that, again, pollinates into weird phenomenon where you think, what have the Spice Girls got to do with this? Well, the Spice Girls are actually using the same cliches the girl power stuff, because they're learning it from the riot girls a few years earlier. So you start to see that punk is mutating and manifesting in mainstream culture as well as in the margins. And it's for was originally done for the margins.
That's an excellent connection. I wonder we do before we have to run off. If we could step back into the music and think about the progression here, and it's not going to be a straight line, but I wonder if you could kind of maybe start with the pistols and kind of come forward as this and walk us through as punk kind of evolved. And what are some of the bands that come to mind?
Are you talking about my favorite punk bands? Or just like I was gonna ask
you your favorite punk band after but you don't have to include just your favorites, but, but what is your favorite punk band?
Like you, I'm a clash guy. I was basically they changed my life more than any other group. But I have to say I have so many and in so many eras. But as far as if I was to have a simplistic timeline, I think the starting point one has to give credit to what I would call the Big Three, because they defined three strains of punk, Ramones, Clash, Sex Pistols. And I think if you're thinking in terms of the political tradition, one has to go through the clash, and you can trace that through into bands like The Gang of Four. Now, the Gang of Four were a lot more sophisticated with their politics, but their political influence and impetus came from the clash who were willing to bring social concerns and social justice to their music, the Sex Pistols, that kind of nihilistic strain of punk, that kind of just sense of negation, that fuck you. Punk comes out of that tradition and the Ramones are worth considering, as well as an important phenomenon, just in relation to, in my mind, the esthetics of minimalism, which can't be underestimated, in relation to what punk is as well. Punk is not sophisticated. It's not intended to be sophisticated. Its rawness is a political statement in itself. It's supposed to be expressive of the streets. Now that's sometimes a pose. That's sometimes a performative element. And of course, the Ramones were nowhere near as dumb as they wanted you to think they were. That is part of the punk tradition as well. The idea that the outsider is not necessarily someone who has to be poor and working class, the outsider is someone who wants to position themself as an outsider. I grew up in a middle class town. I wasn't a street punk like a lot of the kids in the East End of London, but I wanted to position myself there. I wanted to be that outside. I wanted to be that rebel. And that is as old as youth rebellion itself. So it taps into broader traditions of youth, of youth rebellion, but from that early primary punk, I mean, you can trace it through so many different strains and avenues. I've been listening to a lot of music lately coming out of Britain that it just reminds me so much of a lot of the punk rock that was happening in the late 1970s what I've called post punk as there's a band playing in a couple of weeks here in Lawrence called fontaines DC, that I think cut from that cloth, group like idols. Sometimes they're political slave mods. These are the new generation of young kids, and they're responding to things that I was responding to back in the day, the rise of the far right in Britain, Brexit, things of that nature. They similarly are starting to be the voices that are coming forth, because punk always will respond in a political way with a small p. It's not party political. There's
no doubt. There's plenty of people out there that want to be heard, yeah, and some will be heard loudly. Turn it up to 10.
What is that rage? It's the it's the sound of punk. I
think it's all the time we have for there. I want to thank our Kansas reflector guest, Ian Ellis, author of punk beyond the music tracing mutations and manifestations of the punk virus. Thanks for listening. I'm Tim carpenter. Thank you.
