The Death and Life of Punk, The Last Subculture

Abstract

--graffito in use since 1970s Punk had to die so that it could live. With the death of punk, classical subcultures died. What had, by the 1970s, emerged as ‘subcultures ’ were understood to be groups of youths who practiced a wide array of social dissent through shared behavioral, musical, and costume orientations.2 Such groups were remarkably capable vehicles for social change, and were involved in dramatically reshaping social norms in many parts of the world. These ‘classical’ subcultures obtained their potency partly through an ability to shock and dismay, to disobey prescribed confines of class, gender, and ethnicity. But things changed. People gradually became acclimatized to such subcultural transgressions to the point that, in many places, they have become an expected part of the social landscape. The image of rebellion has become one of the most dominant narratives of the corporate capitalist landscape: the ‘bad boy ’ has been reconfigured as a prototypical consumer. And so it was a new culture in the 1970s, the punk subculture, which emerged to fight even the normalization of subculture itself, with brilliant new forms of social critique and style.

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