Series: Punk, Law, Resistance

Punk, Law, Resistance … No Future: Punk against the Boredom of the Law (3 of 3)

By
1
11 March 2011
nofuture

Bor­ing life What a bor­ing life /​ How could any­one sur­vive Bor­ing life. (The Slits, “A Bor­ing Life”) Punk spoke not of ideals and dreams but of bore­dom. For punks, the 1960s hip­pie dream was dead and the social­ist uto­pias were as bor­ing as the ideo­lo­gies of the law and order state or the wel­fare state. There was Crass, who had these kinds of uto­pian dreams, but not even The Clash shared them. Punk’s cel­eb­ra­tion of nihil­ism and chaos was some­thing that the old school dis­cip­lined left wing intel­lec­tu­als, with too thick glasses, or the com­mit­ted green hip­pies, with too long hair, could never accept or under­stand. Accord­ing to them, punk lacked polit­ical stance and pos­it­ive polit­ical goals – “And we don’t care” (Sex ...
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Punk, Law, Resistance … No Future: Punk against the Boredom of the Law (2 of 3)

By
1
10 March 2011
Jamie Reed, No Feelings 1977

My new rose, lets go Hey ho, let’s go Hey ho, let’s go They’re pil­ing in the back seat They’re gen­er­at­ing steam heat Pulsat­ing to the back beat The Blitzkrieg Bop. (Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop”) Even if the lyr­ics of punk did not always address polit­ical issues or had expli­citly sub­vers­ive and anti-​establishment lyr­ics they were usu­ally pro­voc­at­ive, con­tro­ver­sial and against moral and social pro­pri­ety as comes clear in Ramones’ extremely short and ener­getic songs: “Now I wanna sniff some glue /​Now I wanna have somethin’ to do”. The drum­mer Tommy Ramone defines punk: “Soon you had end­less solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bull­shit rock ‘n’ roll.” Their music was ...
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Punk, Law, Resistance … No Future: Punk against the Boredom of the Law (1 of 3)

By
1
9 March 2011
Inflammable Material (Stiff Little Fingers)

Pawn in their game And that’s the way they try and run this land How they hold you down and keep you in hand You’re just a pawn in their game. (Stiff Little Fin­gers, “Law and Order”) Being noth­ing other than a pawn in their game – who has not some­times woken up in the middle of the night ima­gin­ing this. The Big Other that pulls the strings has vari­ous fig­ures: the national and transna­tional law and order appar­at­uses, the global cap­ital and the alleged eco­nomic neces­sit­ies, bur­eau­cratic and admin­is­trat­ive reg­u­la­tions, the demands of social secur­ity, edu­ca­tional stand­ards, images, ideas and idols con­stantly pro­duced and re-​produced by the mass-​media, and so on and so forth. Things get from bad to worse when one starts to ...
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Punk, Law, Resistance … War and Piss

By
1
8 March 2011
Art Politics and Reality of the New Russian Actionism

Punk has always been about the real – real voices, real prob­lems, real lives, real people behind the stor­ies. Some­thing dif­fer­ent from what vari­ous ‘dream factor­ies’ are about. The real is not always com­fort­able. It is raw, incom­pre­hens­ible, and it is scary in its wild power. It is a chal­lenge and the chal­lenge is where the real breaks through the safe nar­rat­ive of con­ven­tional cul­ture. Punk is in con­stant danger of being absorbed into a mar­ket­able com­mod­ity. And it reg­u­larly is. Does this mean that punk is dead? Not really, it just looks for new ways to break through, not neces­sar­ily in music that much, and not neces­sar­ily in its his­tor­ical motherland. On 29 May 2009, prob­ably the shortest and most rad­ical punk-​gig ...
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Punk, Law, Resistance … “I have set my affair on nothing”

By
2
7 March 2011
Ripped and Torn

1. I, Punk In 1977 I was six­teen. Everything I have to say about punk is col­oured by that fact, because six­teen was pre­cisely the right age to be if punk was going to have a decis­ive impact on you. Because punk was not about your social class, gender or race, it was about your age, it defined a gen­er­a­tion, and I belong to the punk gen­er­a­tion. It defined, redefined my musical taste, in a way which is still effect­ive, but more import­antly than that, if this is not going to be just another fifty year old telling you about the joys of Richard Hell and Altern­at­ive TV, which may or may not work for you in 2011, punk defined a sens­ib­il­ity that went bey­ond music. Punk, ...
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Punk, Law, Resistance … Introduction

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0
6 March 2011
Punk is Not Being Complacent

Over the com­ing week there will appear on Crit­ical Legal Think­ing a series of posts on the theme “Punk, Law, Res­ist­ance”. The idea for this series was inspired by some of the highly cre­at­ive forms of protest that have recently taken place in the UK by, for example, the Book Bloc and UK Uncut. But why Punk? Wasn’t Punk just some flash in the pan music scene from the 1970s? What rel­ev­ance could it pos­sibly have to the cri­tique of law and polit­ics today? The writer and artist Deirdre King, in an essay pub­lished in Punk; A Dir­ect­ory of Mod­ern Sub­vers­ive Cul­ture (Lon­don: Hol­low Con­tem­por­ary Art 2007), has this to say on the matter: Punk has always been anti-​establishment, a sub­vers­ive form of protest ...
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