WHAT DID I GET? : Punk, memory and autobiography

Abstract

When you teach, as I do, university courses which look at the history of popular culture, there is one kind of student you learn to dread. This is the student who knows exactly what it was like during a particular aspect of a particular period of that history because they took part in it, because ‘I was there’. Such a claim is a preemptive strike that seeks to dismiss all the claims of retrospective thinking, all the writers and theorists who have subsequently put forward interpretations of cultural events, in favour of the apparently unchallengeable testimony of first-hand experience. ‘I was there’ is a badge proclaiming the authoritativeness of autobiographical authenticity, and it’s a difficult badge to dislodge. Eventually, however, the student-who-was-there can usually be persuaded to recognise that critical hindsight may have some value, that simply inhabiting a moment is no guarantee of fully comprehending it, and that personal recollection is but one discourse among many. Knowing this as well as I do, it is very disconcerting when I read academic accounts of 1970s punk, because all of my intellectual convictions shrivel and wither under the onslaught of more emotive and irrational imperatives. Reason and distance arc subsumed by the urge to shout-no, I know more about this than you, because I was there.

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