I Wanna Riot of My Own
by Peter Rosser
A new collection of essays suggests that Punk is best described as a cultural movement that doesn't move: it is a moment, a punctuation mark, an animal urge, occurring without unity of purpose or logic.
Peter Rosser
White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race
Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay (eds.) Verso, 2011
The usual approach to Punk and its sibling radical subcultures is by way of intergenerational tensions, reasserting the belief that today’s revolutionary will always become tomorrow’s reactionary. This is the main thrust of Daniel S. Traner’s seminal 2001 Punk studies article, ‘L.A.’s “White Majority”: Punk and the Contradiction of Self-Marginalization’, which finds a pivotal place in Verso’s new reader, White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race.
In his article, Traber accepts Punk’s ability to establish a ‘permanent alternative to the corporate apparatus of the music industry,’ but he also knows that, as historical movement, Punk was doomed to failure in its ‘subversive promise’ of sudden arrival at a new world. Punk’s thoroughly white-bourgeois origins, Traner argues, would mean that any attempt at ‘tapping into the aura of the Other’ would always meet its own image at the other end of the circle of poverty fetishism, personal expression, sovereignty of the individual, classical liberalism: ‘Punk’s discourse finally becomes an extension of the parent culture’s belief system; an unconscious affirmation of the materialism and political self-interest this “counter culture” claims to oppose.’
In the same way, and despite its revolutionary zeal (it calls, no less, for the destruction of America as it stands), Joel Olsen’s 1992 ‘A New Punk Manifesto’ can’t really find anything in Punk’s achievements to that date beyond consolation: ‘Out of the waste heap of middle-class values and shopping-mall esthetics, we’ve built a [Punk] culture that has allowed us to survive the post-industrial world while at the same time salvaging some semblance of our independence, freedom, creativity, and human integrity.’
These essays and ideas remain valid, but the strength of White Riot is the way in which it submerges commonplace assumptions with a much broader and altogether more problematic aesthetic, one that extends from the hipsterism of Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay ‘The White Negro’ to the type of Nazi apologia (and Hitler-love/fetishism) that the British band Screwdriver peddled in the 1980s. Patti Smith (pictured) may have established the borderline in her 1978 ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger’ (‘any man who extends beyond the classic form is a nigger — one sans fear and despair — one who rises like rimbaud beating hard gold rhthymn outta soft solid shit-tongue light…’), but punk rockers would soon come to find that positioning themselves along the divide was fraught with danger.
An extract of an essay originally published in the Journal of Music - Continue reading here
Peter Rosser
White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race
Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay (eds.) Verso, 2011
The usual approach to Punk and its sibling radical subcultures is by way of intergenerational tensions, reasserting the belief that today’s revolutionary will always become tomorrow’s reactionary. This is the main thrust of Daniel S. Traner’s seminal 2001 Punk studies article, ‘L.A.’s “White Majority”: Punk and the Contradiction of Self-Marginalization’, which finds a pivotal place in Verso’s new reader, White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race.
In his article, Traber accepts Punk’s ability to establish a ‘permanent alternative to the corporate apparatus of the music industry,’ but he also knows that, as historical movement, Punk was doomed to failure in its ‘subversive promise’ of sudden arrival at a new world. Punk’s thoroughly white-bourgeois origins, Traner argues, would mean that any attempt at ‘tapping into the aura of the Other’ would always meet its own image at the other end of the circle of poverty fetishism, personal expression, sovereignty of the individual, classical liberalism: ‘Punk’s discourse finally becomes an extension of the parent culture’s belief system; an unconscious affirmation of the materialism and political self-interest this “counter culture” claims to oppose.’
In the same way, and despite its revolutionary zeal (it calls, no less, for the destruction of America as it stands), Joel Olsen’s 1992 ‘A New Punk Manifesto’ can’t really find anything in Punk’s achievements to that date beyond consolation: ‘Out of the waste heap of middle-class values and shopping-mall esthetics, we’ve built a [Punk] culture that has allowed us to survive the post-industrial world while at the same time salvaging some semblance of our independence, freedom, creativity, and human integrity.’
These essays and ideas remain valid, but the strength of White Riot is the way in which it submerges commonplace assumptions with a much broader and altogether more problematic aesthetic, one that extends from the hipsterism of Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay ‘The White Negro’ to the type of Nazi apologia (and Hitler-love/fetishism) that the British band Screwdriver peddled in the 1980s. Patti Smith (pictured) may have established the borderline in her 1978 ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger’ (‘any man who extends beyond the classic form is a nigger — one sans fear and despair — one who rises like rimbaud beating hard gold rhthymn outta soft solid shit-tongue light…’), but punk rockers would soon come to find that positioning themselves along the divide was fraught with danger.
An extract of an essay originally published in the Journal of Music - Continue reading here