Week 2: Rebelling and Rebelling Again

There is a time and place for everything--even music. It’s not uncommon to select music fitting of the situation in which it will be heard, in fact, to not do so would be, in many instances, rather shocking. For example, Brittany Spears’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time” might be welcome at a pre-teen slumber party, but it would be an unlikely and seemingly disrespectful selection at most funerals. Oftentimes, songs are even referred to by the emotion with which they correspond, like love songs, break-up songs, protest songs, and so on. In the absence of a suitable musical manifestation of a particular situation, the need to match our music to our mood has been so compelling as to lead to the creation of entire musical genres to fill the emotional void.

The 1970s weren’t easy for British teenagers. Somonelli (2002) characterizes the British punk subculture as a rhetoric of class culture, a musical means of restoring working-class values to rock and roll music. British youngsters of the era were troubled by the state of the economy, feeling the sting of inflation and unemployment. Of the eight million citizens between the ages of 13 and 21, two thirds were working-class citizens, while others were unable to find work at all. Distressed by their current situation and the apparent bleakness of their futures, British youth were in dire need of some mood music. On an artistic level, the group was also dismayed by the professionalization of rock and roll music. Simonelli (2002) explains: “Bands that had once been great rebels against popular convention--the former Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who--had become pillars of respectibility. Rock stars were now rich and far removed from their audiences.” 

Sensing a need for social revolution, as well as a less “professionalized” music that could reflect their values, punk rockers carried on in the tradition of their predecessors’ social rebellion. They commented on the state of the nation, infusing their lyrics with emotionally charged words like “anarchy,” and adopted outlandish stage presence that challenged, and alert their audience to, the scripted and truncated nature of much popular music. With lyrics like “God save the queen/ The fascist regime/ They made you a moron/ Potential H-bomb” it’s no surprise that the Sex Pistols are ranked among the UK Punk scene’s forerunners (or that they were, at one point, banned from British airwaves). 

Working-class youth were able to identify with the punk rockers’ music and tattered style, facilitating the spread of the trend. The punk fashion of spiked hair and ripped clothes “became an escape from conventional personalities and roles” and the movement as a whole was perceived as an artistic protest against societal issues like the neglect of the lower class (Simonelli, 2002). Punk groups became so popular, in fact, that by the early 1980s, the same punk rockers who protested the disconnection and professionalization of perviously-popular rock stars came to embody just that; they were the new high rollers on the rock scene.

The emergence and destination of British punk rock highlights not only the important role of music in emotional regulation and expression, but also demonstrates the power of popular music to influence trends, spread ideologies, address social issues, and be influenced and directed, like any other commodity, by the tides of market capitalism.

References

Simonelli, D. (2002). Anarchy, Pop and Violence: Punk Rock Subculture and the Rhetoric of Class, 1976-78. Contemporary British History, 16(2), 121. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.