The Punk Art of Failure: The Mekons and Ideology

Notes on Punk Part 1: Ideology, Aesthetics

- Stacy Thompson: "… the best attempts to describe punk aesthetics have focused not on punk as a whole but on one of its six major scenes: the New York City scene of 1974-76, the English scene of 1976-78, the California hardcore scene of the early 80s, the Washington, D.C. straight edge scene of the mid-80s, the New York City second-wave straight edge scene of the late 80s, and the California pop-punk scene of the early 90s." (49-50).

- So in other words, it's complicated. But we CAN generalize.

- Thompson again:  “punks have always mounted aesthetic and economic forms of resistance against commercial music as well as other forms of commercially produced cultural texts” (49).

- For me: resistance to the economic and political organization of post-industrial capitalism, and the aesthetics and values of commercial art/music.

- Jesse Prinz: the three themes of the punk aesthetic are “irreverence, nihilism and amateurism” (587).

- Taken together, these aesthetic qualities produce songs that are “loud, fast, and short” (587), feature “low production values” (587), and are technically simple and “often out of tune, off key, incompetently played, and poorly recorded” (587). 

- An art of aesthetic failure: by writing vulgar lyrics and playing (deliberately or accidentally) poorly, punks fail to meet the aesthetic standards of pop music, and so resist them and their assumptions. 

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