Urban memories are remediated and mobilised by different - and often conflicting - stakeholders, representing the heritage industry, municipal city branding campaigns or anti-gentrification ...struggles. Post-punk ‘retromania’ (Reynolds 2011) coincided with the culture-led regeneration of former industrial cities in the Northwest of England, relaunching the cities as creative clusters (Cohen 2007, Bottà 2009, Roberts & Cohen 2014, Roberts 2014). Drawing on my case study of the memory cultures evolving around Manchester‘s post-punk era (Brunow 2015), this article shows how narratives and images travel through urban space. Looking at contemporary politics of city branding, it examines the power relations involved in adapting (white homosocial) post-punk memories into the self-fashioning of Manchester as a creative city. Situated at the interface of memory studies and film studies, this article offers an anti-essentialist approach to the notion of ‘transcultural memory’. Examining the power relations involved in the construction of audiovisual memories, this article argues that subcultural or popular memories are not emancipatory per se, but can easily tie into neoliberal politics. Moreover, there has been a tendency to sideline or overlook feminist and queer as well as Black and Asian British contributions to post-punk culture. Only partially have such marginalised narratives been observed so far, for instance in Carol Morley’s documentary The Alcohol Years (2000) or by the Manchester Digital Music Archive. The article illustrates how different stakeholders invest in subcultural histories, sustaining or contesting hegemonic power relations within memory culture. While being remediated within various transmedia contexts, Manchester’s postpunk memories have been sanitised, fabricating consensus instead of celebrating difference.
Urban memories are remediated and mobilised by different - and often conflicting - stakeholders, representing the heritage industry, municipal city branding campaigns or anti-gentrification ...struggles. Post-punk 'retromania' (Reynolds 2011) coincided with the culture-led regeneration of former industrial cities in the Northwest of England, relaunching the cities as creative clusters (Cohen 2007, Bottà 2009, Roberts %26 Cohen 2014, Roberts 2014). Drawing on my case study of the memory cultures evolving around Manchester's post-punk era (Brunow 2015), this article shows how narratives and images travel through urban space. Looking at contemporary politics of city branding, it examines the power relations involved in adapting (white homosocial) post-punk memories into the self-fashioning of Manchester as a creative city. Situated at the interface of memory studies and film studies, this article offers an anti-essentialist approach to the notion of 'ranscultural memory'. Examining the power relations involved in the construction of audiovisual memories, this article argues that subcultural or popular memories are not emancipatory per se, but can easily tie into neoliberal politics. Moreover, there has been a tendency to sideline or overlook feminist and queer as well as Black and Asian British contributions to post-punk culture. Only partially have such marginalised narratives been observed so far, for instance in Carol Morley's documentary The Alcohol Years (2000) or by the Manchester Digital Music Archive. The article illustrates how different stakeholders invest in subcultural histories, sustaining or contesting hegemonic power relations within memory culture. While being remediated within various transmedia contexts, Manchester's postpunk memories have been sanitised, fabricating consensus instead of celebrating difference.
This article compares two of the groups generally regarded by critics as the most important in Australia in the post-punk period, The Birthday Party and The Scientists. While they had much in common ...– each was governed by the vision of one man, Nick Cave for The Birthday Party and Kim Salmon for The Scientists, both had record deals in Australia and both went to London – The Birthday Party became a cult success while The Scientists are only now, 30 years after their heyday, receiving the popular credit due them as a foundational noise group. There were important differences between the groups. The Birthday Party came from Melbourne and their members were middle-class. The Scientists came from Perth, at that time a small city remote from the cultural centres of Australia, and Salmon and his associates were working-class. The Birthday Party was self-consciously in a High Art tradition of nihilism going back to Dada while The Scientists’ music was an existential critique of the values of the middle-class suburbia that dominated Perth.
“To the centre of the city in the night waiting for you.” Centre and peripheries in English post-punk subculture. Since the first industrial revolution, large mass consumption has always had a ...decisive impact on cities’ territorial configuration, in relation to centralisation, migration, urbanisation, in an often-unequal relationship between metropolis and de-urbanized contexts. In this scenario of development and geographic change, even the production of the cultural industry has undergone the effects of increasingly evident polarisation between suburbs and centres, implementing the movement from the outskirt towards the centre in an osmotic dialogue between subculture and mass production. Over the years many subcultural phenomena have been born from the suburbs as antithesis to the dominant culture. These, then, became, through the dialectic process of birth, growth and legitimation, part of the integrated system of the mainstream culture. This is the case of the post-punk movement, born in 1978 from experimentation in the outskirts of northern England and in the Midlands in antithesis to the state of emptiness, darkness and disintegration of the period of the post-industrial punk crisis, which was characterised by a more solid identity, built through a methodical research far from anti-music and anti-punk style. This paper intends to draw a map of the English musical subculture of post-punk and new wave, showing how the process of cultural production born from the residential and industrial suburbs has rewritten a new geography of the storytelling. To this end, the centripetal displacement from the outskirt towards the centre can be understood under a double perspective. On the one hand, the geographical migration from the suburbs of Manchester and Sheffield redraws the map of cultural ferment and new artistic production. On the other hand, the narration of the binomial periphery/centre permeates the cultural imagination of this movement, which, over the years, has come to touch every sector of contemporary cultural industry and which, through continuous recalls and re-enactments, re-uses the same subcultural models under different guises.
By June 1993, when Washington, D.C.'s Fugazi released their third full-length album 'In on the Kill Taker', the quartet was reaching a thunderous peak in popularity and influence. With two EPs ...(combined into the classic CD 13 songs) and two albums (1990's genre-defining 'Repeater' and 1991's impressionistic follow-up 'Steady Diet of Nothing') inside of five years, Fugazi was on creative roll, astounding increasingly large audiences as they toured, blasting fist-pumping anthems and jammy noise-workouts that roared into every open underground heart. This work features interviews with all four members of Fugazi and members of their creative community, including members of Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill and Nirvana.
In 1979, from the basement of a London squat, the Raincoats reinvented what punk could be. They had a violin player. They came from Portugal, Spain, and England. Their anarchy was poetic. Working ...with the iconic Rough Trade Records at its radical beginnings, they were the first group of punk women to actively call themselves feminists. In this short book – the first on the Raincoats – author Jenn Pelly tells the story of the group’s audacious debut album, which Kurt Cobain once called “wonderfully classic scripture.” Pelly builds on rare archival materials and extensive interviews with members of the Raincoats, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Hole, Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, and more. She draws formal inspiration from the collage-like The Raincoats itself to explore this album’s magic, vulnerability, and strength.
The present paper intends to propose a methodological framework inspired by second generation practice theories and by John Law's concept of enactment for the study of subcultures related to music ...and style, as a way to circumvent the frontal contraposition between subculturalist and post subculturalist approaches that characterize the field. Addressing the case of goth (or dark, as the subculture is known in Italy) in Milan in the 1980s, the paper shows how the subculture was not internally homogeneous, but also how its internal variations did not simply depend on personal interpretations. In Milan, in fact, it was possible to observe different and stabilized ways of enacting dark, depending on the bundle of practices in which subcultural participation unfolded: the activist enactment, the music club enactment, and the loner enactment. The three enactments shared the same canon of subcultural resources (music, style, literature, cinema, figurative arts, and others), and yet they differed for relevant aspects as stance to political engagement, forms of socialization, relationship with urban public space, and ultimately forms of identity construction.
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