Punk Rock

Courses
Written By Andrew Mall

Northeastern University

Semesters taught: Fall 2024; Spring 2020; Spring 2018; Spring 2015

DePaul University

Quarters taught: Spring 2012, Spring 2010, Spring 2009, Winter 2009

Course description

Punk rock is simultaneously a music genre and a lifestyle, an attitude and a philosophy, a political orientation and a commodified fashion. Insiders, outsiders, in-betweeners—everyone’s perspective on punk is different, distinct, and necessarily individuated. Punk is what you make of it, yes—but it also has rules, boundaries, and its own self-appointed border police: punk is always already what others make of it. Although it initially emerged in the 1970s as a reaction against very specific social, cultural, and musical moments in the U.S.A. and the U.K., the punk subculture has become larger than itself in the intervening decades, spawning sub-subcultures and subgenres that would be unrecognizable to Joey Ramone, Richard Hell, Joe Strummer, Johnny Rotten, and other originators. In this course we address the long narrative of punk: we start with proto-punk genres including garage rock and glam rock; we examine punk’s origins in the 1970s’ N.Y.C. and London scenes; we assess its transformation into post-punk, hardcore, anarcho-punk, and straightedge in the late ’70s and 1980s; and we consider its legacy outside the U.S.A./U.K. nexus and in 1990s-era genres such as riot grrrl, grunge, and pop-punk.

Narratives of Anglo-American popular music locate 1970s punk as a pivotal point for subculture and youth music: everything that came before laid the groundwork for punk, and everything that has come since must take punk into account. Yet, somehow the further removed we are from the 1970s, the harder it is to pin punk down. What, in fact, is punk? What are its communities, politics, sounds, styles, and values? How do we account for punk’s contradictions, explain its marginalization, and assess its commercial successes and popularity (or lack thereof)? In this course, we will explore the ideological, musical, and social characteristics of punk rock, its precedents, and its descendants. We use punk to learn approaches to cultural studies pioneered by critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Antonio Gramsci, Dick Hebdige, Karl Marx, and others. Our course texts will include academic readings, albums, biographies and memoirs, contemporaneous music criticism and journalism, documentary films, and oral histories. By the end of the semester, students will be able to discuss the historical narratives of punk rock and several subgenres, assess common discourses within the interdisciplinary field of punk studies, and explain multiple approaches to the academic study of popular music genres and movements.

Readings

In this course, I assign a wide variety of readings, swapping several out every time I teach it again. These include academic readings from a variety of disciplines, pieces by music journalists (both traditional and fanzine writers), memoirs, interviews, oral histories, and other genres. Additionally, we read and discuss several selections from Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 seres of books that focus on individual albums. I always choose new 33 1/3 selections for each iteration of the course. Here are the ones I’ve used, listed first by term then alphabetically by artist:

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