{"id":574,"date":"2008-02-13T00:29:59","date_gmt":"2008-02-12T23:29:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/?p=574"},"modified":"2015-03-29T23:02:14","modified_gmt":"2015-03-29T22:02:14","slug":"counterculture-punk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/counterculture-punk\/","title":{"rendered":"Counterculture punk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Break on thru to the other side\u2026<\/p>\n

After blogging away in greengalloway for nearly three years now, the speed at which KYPP moves is disconcerting. Instead of one or two occasional comments, there are hundreds here and it can be difficult to keep up. (Must be old age, will be 50 this year).<\/p>\n

So I am trying to step back for an hour or so (assuming Callum has fallen asleep and Elizabeth and AL junior are busy playing World of Warcraft) before I slip into unconsciousness\u2026<\/p>\n

The Making of a Counter-Culture<\/p>\n

Looking back at stuff I was posting on greengalloway in 2005 like this<\/a> I was trying to find ways to move \u2018anarcho-goth-punk\u2019 as I called it out from under the shadow of Crass by looking at \u2018it\u2019 from the bigger picture of the counter-culture. That the reason Crass cast such a large shadow is that they injected a whole wodge of counter-culturalness into punk. This had a dramatic effect because it effectively undid Malcolm Mclaren and Vivienne Westwood\u2019s attempt to present punk as something brand new and unique – undid the 1976 as Year Zero myth.<\/p>\n

For the 76\/77 generation of punks, this myth was always a necessary lie. They knew their own histories, knew they were re-inventing themselves as punks . Only someone who already has a Pink Floyd t-shirt can scrawl \u2018I hate\u2026\u2019 on it. As we now know, John Lydon also liked Captain Beefheart and Van Der Graaf Generator<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n

Punk’s rejection of musicianship, artistry, and complexity might have appeared diametrically opposed to Van der Graaf Generator’s core characteristics, which were the very things the class of ’76 supposedly sought to purge. However, something in their aesthetic definitely resonated with figures like Mark E. Smith, Howard Devoto, John Lydon, and Nick Cave, all of whom have expressed admiration for the band. Most famously, during a July 1977 Capitol Radio show, Lydon treated listeners to some of his favorite tunes: alongside surprising inclusions like Captain Beefheart and Tim Buckley, Lydon included a track from Peter Hammill’s 1975 solo album Nadir’s Big Chance, recorded with Banton, Jackson and Evans.<\/em>
\nBut for the next generation of punks, the ones who were at most 12 or 13 when they first heard punk, the pre-punk counter-culture was an absolute unknown and so Crass\u2019 powerful mix of punk and pre-punk (\u2018hippy\u2019) counter-culture references were a revolutionary revelation. Thus 1978 , the year of \u2018feeding the 5000\u2019 became another year zero. As Debord put it in 1967 (Society of the Spectacle : 157)<\/p>\n

The lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery. Conversely, what is really lived has no relation to the society\u2019s official version of irreversible time, and conflicts with the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time\u2019s consumable by-products. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle\u2019s false memory of the unmemorable.<\/p>\n

The Situationists were not part of ( and refused to be\/ hated) the counter-culture, but through slow osmosis their critique of the spectacle\/ the fetishisation of commodities became part of it.<\/p>\n

To conclude briefly and abruptly – since it s now time for me to go to bed – rather than \u2018anarcho-punk\u2019, we should say \u2018counterculture-punk\u2019. Counterculture-punk is big enough to embrace (if not resolve) the contradictions and confusions which still adhere to \u2018anarcho-punk\u2019 . If \u2018hippy\u2019 is the thesis to which ‘punk’ was the antithesis, then ‘counterculture punk’ was, and still is, the synthesis.<\/p>\n

Don’t you just love dialecticism?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Break on thru to the other side\u2026 After blogging away in greengalloway for nearly three years now, the speed at which KYPP moves is disconcerting. Instead of one or two occasional comments, there are hundreds here and it can be difficult to keep up. (Must be old age, will be 50 this year). So I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-letter-from-the-editor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8223,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions\/8223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}