Thursday, 12 April 2012

...Why?

I've spent a lot of my Easter break reading up books that relate to the essay that I will write on 'Punk'. I visited all of the library's that I know of in my borough to find factual information on this topic from all sides of the story:
How & why it arose?- Politics at the time- recession
The Fashions?-Westwood, Mclaren- DIY/customisation - no money for nice things
Music?- Rock and roll, Angry, political, DIY approach also- anyone can do it.
Media & outsiders view?- Moral panics, Bill Grundy, sociological studies of youth subcultures
Contemporary?- how is it recycled in modern day & referred back to.
At the moment I only know a small bit about the movement as my parents were a part of it - this is what initially interested me, my mum used to tell me about protests and political debates she would take part in as well as all of her outrageous clothing, hair styles & bands that her group of friends listen to.
I found tons of books on the Punk theme, many written by people who were a part of the subculture and others written by people interested in the era or were studying it, but 90% of these books focused on only the musical side of it.
I only found 2 books on the fashions but even then, the sections were only two pages long with an image of Vivienne's fetish clothing or a shot of The Sex Pistols. I also noticed that whenever the books speak of the clothing, its mainly McLaren's name you hear rather than Vivienne, who I'm sure was the one in charge of the fashion side.
I Also found that in every book that I looked at there was only a tiny page or paragraph that spoke about the political side to the scene, which I personally see as the largest part as this is what led it to come about in the first place, teenagers were angry, there were no jobs for people that had just left school, no money to buy anything, everyone did as their parents did and they wanted this to change radically, leading to the fashion and the the music and the media portraying it in a negative way. Most of the books only have a short section where they say it is a working class scene.
So I decided to just look at a few political books that explain how it got so bad to reach its peak in 1979's celebrated 'winter of discontent', I want my essay to have a detailed section explaining the politics of punk and how it got in that state.

No comments:

Post a Comment