Punk and Revolution: Seven More Interpretations of Peruvian Reality - Softcover

Greene, Shane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822362740 ISBN 13: 9780822362746

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In Punk and Revolution Shane Greene radically uproots punk from its iconic place in First World urban culture, Anglo popular music, and the Euro-American avant-garde, situating it instead as a crucial element in Peru's culture of subversive militancy and political violence. Inspired by José Carlos Mariátegui's Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, Greene explores punk's political aspirations and subcultural possibilities while complicating the dominant narratives of the war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian state. In these seven essays, Greene experiments with style and content, bends the ethnographic genre, and juxtaposes the textual and visual. He theorizes punk in Lima as a mode of aesthetic and material underproduction, rants at canonical cultural studies for its failure to acknowledge punk's potential for generating revolutionary politics, and uncovers the intersections of gender, ethnicity, class, and authenticity in the Lima punk scene. Following the theoretical interventions of Debord, Benjamin, and Bakhtin, Greene fundamentally redefines how we might think about the creative contours of punk subculture and the politics of anarchist praxis.

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Shane Greene is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University and the author of Customizing Indigeneity: Paths to a Visionary Politics in Peru.

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Punk and Revolution

Seven More Interpretations of Peruvian Reality

By Shane Greene

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-6274-6

Contents

Thanks Go To ..., 
Warning!, 
interpretation #1 On the Risks of Underground Rock Production, 
interpretation #2 El Problema de la Sub-Tierra, 
interpretation #3 El Problema del Pituco, 
re: interpretation #4 The Tongue Is a Fire, an Agent, a Traitor, 
color plates, 
interpretation #5 The Worth of Art in Three Stages of Underproduction, 
interpretation #6 A Series of Situations Resulting in X, 
interpretation #7 Hot Revolution with Punk Pancakes (a drunken dialogue), 
PS!, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

interpretation #1

on the risks of underground rock production

Where in the world does punk come from? Typical answers point to particular moments in US and British rock history: the proto period of sixties US garage rock followed by punk "proper" when the term became linked to New York's midseventies underground club scene and was then exported to London where it exploded into public scandal thanks to the Sex Pistols' infamous "filth and fury" (McNeil and McCain 2006; Savage 2002). More than a collection of musical sounds, punk is a conglomeration of bands and shows, fanzines and fliers, social relations and political statements held together loosely by desires to subvert mainstream cultural production with a gritty aesthetic and a do-it-yourself ethic. Like any form of resistance it is difficult both to sustain and to predict its future lives.

Ultimately, this speaks less to the reports that "punk is dead" (so said Crass in 1978 shortly after its official birth in 1977) or rejoinders that "punk's not dead" (so screamed The Exploited in 1980 two years after its death) than to a clarification. In significant part what punk means is relative to time and context. In this essay, I ask: What in the world is the importance of punk as it emerged in Lima, Peru in the 1980s? It is the radical difference in context that permits us to entertain other theoretical possibilities about punk's place in the world. Let's get this straight. I'm not talking about what punk is in essence. Rather, I have an interest in thinking about what punk intends to be, punk as a peculiar way of directing one's attention. Similarly, the issue is less about defining who punks essentially are — and punks really do hate it when you tell them who they are. It's really more about who I think punks aim to be, even if inevitably intentions never perfectly match outcomes.

Dick Hebdige's (1979) now classic semiotic analysis of punk as a subversive "style" appeared shortly after the UK punk explosion of the late seventies, influenced by the poststructuralist turn and cultural studies debates about youth subcultures as ritualized expressions of systemic discontent, constituting symbolic transgression but not a potential for "real" revolutionary change (Hall and Jefferson 2006; cf. Interpretation #2). Contemporary perspectives suggest different readings of punk, from those fueled by gender critique and the transnational approach to the Americas to those searching for a theory of the global city (Nyong'o 2005, 2008; Muñoz 2013; Habell-Pallan 2004; LeBlanc 1999; Nikpour 2012; Nguyen, 2012; Brown 2011). Collectively, they theorize punk as constituted by more diverse voices and multiple global contexts than what the dominant "whitestraightboy punk" (Nikpour's [2012] shorthand) narrative often suggests.

What happens when we encounter punk in one of the rock universe's global elsewheres? Certainly Lima is such a place despite a history of rock that stretches back to the sixties. The condition of geomusical marginality is one of which Peruvian punks are deeply aware; they rock out in a world region most often associated with Latin rhythms, Afro-Peruvian beats, and Andean folklore. I deal then in rock from a peripheral vantage point but one that also reveals something crucial about punk's global intentions. There is the curious case of Los Saicos, a midsixties garage rock band from Lima that only began making headlines in the 2000s for having anticipated punk's primitive sound and boundary-pushing lyrics. A band named Anarkia began playing punk cover songs in Lima clubs in the late seventies — singing the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Dead Boys tunes in their "bad" English. Yet Peru's punk-inspired music did not come into its own until the mideighties, when it took on the much more particular identity of rock subterráneo ("underground rock"). In fact, it is in this translated idea of "underground rock" that we can identify something about the global importance of rock's subterranean circuits and punk intentionality writ large — the things punk wants to do everywhere even when punks try, succeed, and fail to do them in very particular ways from within specific historical contexts.

On the Risk of Underproduction and Undercutting

The act of naming Lima's punk movement "underground rock" was largely the result of a 1984 flier announcing a show called "Rock Subterráneo Ataca Lima" (Underground Rock Attacks Lima) in which several foundational punk bands played: Leusemia, Narcosis, Guerrilla Urbana, and Autopsia (see figure 1.1). This movement from "underground," an English term with connotations of subversive intent since at least the era of the Underground Railroad, to subterráneo, a Spanish term typically used literally rather than with the connotations of terms such as subversivo ("subversive"), is more than simply direct translation. Most notably, the term "subterráneo" gave rise to a very peculiar urban identity in eighties Lima known as the subte ("under"), a distinctly Peruvian way of talking about punk rockers. A subcultural moniker still used thirty years later, "subte" is rather unique compared to the more direct appropriations of the term "punk" as auto-affirmation in most other global contexts. Fusing Fernando Ortiz (1995) with Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (2006), we might see this as an act of transubculturation — a gesture that transgresses global cultural boundaries (e.g., Spanish vs. Anglo, Latin vs. Euro-American) while simultaneously subverting the hegemony of global cultural forms that circulate across borders in mainstream circuits (e.g., rock culture as mass commerce across geopolitical borders). This explains why I use this Lima phrase "rock subterráneo" as interchangeable with "punk rock." The phrase presumes an exchange that takes place across and below the surface of the borders of language, nation, culture, and global commerce.

The subte irrupts into the global dialogue about punk rock using a Peruvian voz ("voice") that struggles to be heard since it is relegated to multiple margins: punk's relative obscurity within popular culture generally, and rock subterráneo's distinct invisibility within the global circuits of a rock culture completely dominated by Anglo expressions from the United States and England. Yet the subte's voice demands to be heard, and in doing so it suggests something distinct about punk's simultaneously universal intentions and contextual conditions.

We might recall that punk is part of a longer genealogy of subversive aesthetics and critical political desires. In the wake of Dadaism and Situationism (G. Marcus 1989), or as the preferred soundtrack for today's global direct-action movements (Graeber...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822362740
• ISBN 13: 9780822362746
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar