This book examines the birth of punk in the UK and its transformation, within a short period of time, into post-punk. Deploying innovative concepts of ‘critical mass’, ‘social networks’ and ‘music ...worlds’, and using sophisticated techniques of ‘social network analysis’, it teases out the events and mechanisms involved in punk’s ‘micro-mobilisation’, its diffusion across the UK and its transformation in certain city-based strongholds into a variety of interlocking post-punk forms. Nick Crossley offers a detailed review of prior work in this area, a rich exploration of new empirical data and a highly innovative and robust approach to the study of ‘music worlds’. Written in an accessible style, this book is essential reading for anybody with an interest in either UK punk and post-punk or the impact of social networks on cultural life and the potential of social network analysis to explore this impact.
The song with lyrics can be seen as a poetic text due to the evidence of figures of speech, images, and symbolism, as well as, phonetic resources that reflect the musicality of poetic language. In ...this sense, the post-punk revival band Interpol wrote No I in Threesome, the account of a persona trying to convince his significant other to have a threesome. This song includes the metaphor life is wine, which makes explicit the poetic value of the song. But not only that, the metaphor also shows how a statement, in this case a statement part of a literary text, can have different meanings.
Nick Cave is a hugely successful rock musician who has progressed from post-punk outsider in the 1980s to widely lauded singer-songwriter in the twenty-first century, while simultaneously enjoying ...critical recognition in fields such as literature and film. This article uses Cave's 2022 book of interviews Faith, Hope and Carnage, as well as his ongoing blog The Red Hand Files, as a stepping-off point to consider his career trajectory in the context of longstanding accusations of misogyny, his extensive public commentaries on grief (stemming from the 2015 death of his son), and Cave's latter-day excursions into conservative political commentary.
This article addresses the question of the relationship between the underground and the mainstream through two examples bracketing the period under consideration (1977-82 on the one hand and 2014- on ...the other). The first example concerns the establishment in Great Britain of an independent production and distribution network associated with the punk and post-punk scenes. The second consists of a subcultural formation on a smaller scale served by a promotional approach which has the particularity of relying almost exclusively on digital communication.While claiming a musical radicality that distinguished them from a more generalist production, both have come to negotiate an intermediate position between the oppositional strategies associated with the underground and a growing popularity, betraying an ambivalence on the subject of their inclusion in a market or commercial network.
This article is a discussion piece that reflects on the authors' video article 'Obsession: Redux - Sounds from a Garage-Film' (Cumming and Potter 2019) and the digitized soundtrack of co-author John ...Cumming's film Obsession (1985). The authors explore
the processes of, and concepts behind, creating the original multi-layered analogue soundtrack for Obsession, an artefact of creative practice from a specific moment on film culture and of filmmaking within Melbourne 'post-punk' culture of the early 1980s. As a personal
and self-reflexive work, the Obsession soundtrack is replete with memory, both personal and popular, local and global. It is a collection of oral objects - an audio archive of live recordings and media samples made in Melbourne, Australia, between 1978 and 1985. The discussion
piece revisits the Obsession soundtrack, alongside the redux of this film, in the context of contemporary literature and practice in sonic thinking. The representation of the self and relationships in sound is underpinned by Michel Chion's (1994) understanding of palimpsest and
Raul Ruiz's (1995) ideas on poetic objects and shamanic films. The purpose of this investigation is to link sonic memories and subjective self-representation to specific practices of soundtrack composition and specific sites and moments of cultural history. The synthesis of concepts,
methods and works that we examine here contributes to an emerging discourse around embodied and reflexive sound.
Existing scholarship considering the relationship between "DIY" music and popular music has tended to focus on how and why the former differs from the latter. This paper generates new insights into ...the specific character of DIY music by inverting that focus, asking instead, why is DIY quite so similar to popular music? I stress the under-acknowledged similarities between the "core units" of popular music culture and DIY music in order to theorise their relationship as fundamentally ambivalent. I then apply this theoretical framework across three historical case studies - UK post-punk, US post-hardcore indie, and riot grrrl.
This article analyzes the sources of the anger in the early work of Courtney Love and rock band Hole, which-in contrast to much of today's mainstream rock, pop, and indie music, which more often ...draws from singer-songwriter, country, and electronic forms-was inspired by confrontational punk, underground, and post-punk influences. I argue that Hole's early work, especially debut album Pretty on the Inside, constitutes a coherent protest against the broken promises of the 1960s counterculture and the second wave of feminism. I consider the price paid by Love for playing the "angry woman" and lessons for today's artists.
This article seeks to analyze how socio-political changes in the Iberian Peninsula, in the post-dictatorial period affected the course of youth cultures and the penetration of cosmopolitanism. ...Through a documentary analysis, we examined the diferences/similarities among youth cultures with a focus on the emergence of the Portuguese (post-punk) movement in the late 1970s, the 1980s boom of Bairro Alto and the night in Lisbon, and the 1980s musical and cultural scene of La Movida in Spain. This research promotes knowledge outside the Anglo-American worldview, as a starting point for an analysis of the -unknown dynamics of the Iberian Peninsula.
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