Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)

For more than three decades, a punk underground has repeatedly insisted that 'anyone can do it'. This underground punk movement has evolved via several micro-traditions, each offering distinct and novel presentations of what punk is, isn't, or should be. Underlying all these punk micro-traditions is a politics of empowerment that claims to be anarchistic in character, in the sense that it is contingent upon a spontaneous will to liberty (anyone can do it - in theory). How valid, though, is punk's faith in anarchistic empowerment? Exploring theories from Derrida and Marx, "Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground" examines the cultural history and politics of punk. In its political resistance, punk bears an ideological relationship to the folk movement, but punk's faith in novelty and spontaneous liberty distinguish it from folk: where punk's traditions, from the 1970s onwards, have tended to search for an anarchistic 'new-sense', folk singers have more often been socialist/Marxist traditionalists, especially during the 1950s and 60s. Detailed case studies show the continuities and differences between four micro-traditions of punk: anarcho-punk, cutie/'C86', riot grrrl and math rock, thus surveying UK and US punk-related scenes of the 1980s, 1990s and beyond. Cover 1 Contents 6 List of Musical Examples 8 General Editor’s Preface 10 Acknowledgements 12 Introduction 14 Part I: Anyone Can Do – What? 34 1 What is Punk? 36 2 The Folk ‘Us’ 50 3 Punk as Folk 68 Conclusion to Part I 82 Part II: Can Any One Do ‘It’? 86 4 Punk, Avant-gardism and Novelty 88 5 Marxism, Anarchism and the Issue of Universality 106 6 Justice to Come and the Micromatic Recoil 122 Conclusion to Part II 138 Part III: The Beginning of a Continuation 142 Interlude 1: An Original Rebirth? 144 7 There is no Authority, But ... 146 8 Indie Pop Ain’t Noise Pollution 162 Conclusion to Part III 178 Part IV: The Continuation of a Beginning 182 Interlude 2: Still Birth? 184 9 The Arrival of a New, Renegade, Girl-Boy Hyper-Nation 188 10 Delivering the Groceries at 138 Beats per Minute 206 Conclusion to Part IV 224 Conclusion 226 Bibliography 238 Index 248 The punk underground has repeatedly insisted that 'anyone can do it', grounding itself in a politics of empowerment that claims to be anarchistic in character. How valid is punk's faith in anarchistic empowerment? Anyone Can Do It explores the cultural history and politics of the punk underground. Detailed case studies show the continuities and differences between four micro-traditions of punk.