Lawrence Grossberg Is There Rock After Punk? On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word 1986

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2 TOP OF THE POPS ( THE STORY OF 1980 ) Séquence de à Synth Pop Séquence de à Roger Daltrey Top of the Pops - The Story of 1982 (SD) Séquence de a Séquence de à «Golden Brown» Stranglers Séquence de à Pigbag Séquence de à Boy George Tubeway Army - Are Friends Electric '79 Gary Numan - Down in The Park

3 Punk and two-tone had two very important consequences. First, in dis-interring the entire wardrobe of postwar styles, they both decoded these styles and greatly expanded the field of stylistic options for an increasingly self-reflexive and stylistically mobile youth culture. After punk, virtually any combination of styles became possible. To name but a few examples: the revival of skins, mods, and teds; rude boys; suedeheads; a psychedelic revival; rockers both the traditional type and the younger, denim-clad heavy metalists; Rastafarians; soulheads (short-haired blacks); disco; Ant-people; Northern soul; jazz-funkateers; Bowie freaks; punk (subdivided into Oi, hardcore, or real punk, plus the avant-garde wing); futurists; new romantics; glam revivalists; beats, zoots, and so on. Second, the new wave eroded the distinction between teenyboppers and youth, which was largely based on the distinction between progressive LPs and pop singles of the early seventies. Punk made singles and singles artists acceptable. Lawrence Grossberg Is There Rock After Punk? On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word 1986

4 As Linda Dowling has argued, beneath the debate between sense and reason in matters of taste was the question of how legitimacy is to be achieved in the liberal polity, how a state that derives its authority from the consent of its people may pretend to be founded upon anything more secure than [ ] the restless, irrational appetites of an ignorant population. To counter such irrational forces, Shaftesbury conceived of taste as a force that educated one to choose virtue and reason over pleasure, thereby fostering an ideal political order. Building on Shaftesbury s theories, Kant s philosophy of aesthetic judgment placed artistic consumption in explicit opposition to the kind of sensual consumption by which the pornographic reader made use of his art, claiming that A pure judgment of taste has, then, for its determining ground neither charm nor emotion, in a word, no sensation as matter of the aesthetic judgment. Disinterested aesthetic contemplation was figured as antithetical to the kinds of physical reaction prompted by the pornographic. Throughout the eighteenth century, the aesthetic was viewed in its most dominantly understood forms as an invisible social contract. The aesthetic was no hedonistic cult of individual sensibility, as it came to be figured later in the nineteenth century, but rather a binding structure between what Kant saw as on the one hand, the universal feeling of sympathy, and, on the other, the faculty of being able to communicate universally one s inmost self properties constituting in conjunction the befitting social spirit of mankind, in contradistinction to the narrow life of the lower animals (CJ 226). Art was that which allowed the growing community of educated and propertied individuals to represent itself to itself. (Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity)

5 I do not see anything more useful than an encyclopedia I cannot think of anything more secure than a credit card I cannot conceive of a state where citizens would have no rights He was educated to be a winner. He was trained to win He made an appearance on TV, thereby earning a good reputation Disco was considered as the opposite of punk I view him as an imposter. I consider them as losers I am no fool (to give all my money away) He is no hero (to change the world)

6 It does not follow from this that there is no meaning in speaking of the culture of an individual, or of a group or class. We only mean that the culture of the individual cannot be isolated from that of the group, and that the culture of the group cannot be abstracted from that of the whole society; and that our notion of "perfection" must take all three senses of "culture" into account at once. Nor does it follow that in a society, of whatever grade of culture, the groups concerned with each activity of culture will be distinct and exclusive: on the contrary, it is only by an overlapping and sharing of interests, by participation and mutual appreciation, that the cohesion necessary for culture can obtain. A religion requires not only a body of priests who know what they are doing, but a body of worshippers who know what is being done. It is obvious that among the more primitive communities the several activities of culture are inextricably interwoven. The Dyak who spends the better part of a season in shaping, carving and painting his barque of the peculiar design required for the annual ritual of head-hunting, is exercising several cultural activities at once - of art and religion, as well as of amphibious warfare. As civilisation becomes more complex, greater occupational specialisation evinces itself: in the "stone age" New Hebrides, Mr. John Layard says, certain islands specialise in particular arts and crafts, exchanging their wares and displaying their accomplishments to the reciprocal satisfaction of the members of the archipelago... (T.S Eliot, Notes on Culture)

7 Even in the nineteenth century the possibility of the domestic cultivation of music like the entirety of bourgeois private life represented only the reverse side of a social corpus, whose surface was totally determined by production through private capital. The dialectic of capitalistic development has further eliminated even this last immediacy offered by music in itself already an illusion, for in it the balance between individual production and understanding by society was threatened. Since Wagner's Tristan, this balance has been totally destroyed. Through the total absorption of both musical production and consumption by the capitalistic process, the alienation of music from man has become complete. This process involved, of course, the objectification and rationalization of music, its separation from the simple immediacy of use which had once defined it as art and granted it permanence in contrast to its definition in terms of mere ephemeral sound. At the same time, it was this process which invested music with the power of far-reaching sublimation of drives and the cogent and binding expression of humanity. Now, however, rationalized music has fallen victim to the same dangers as rationalized society, within which class interests bring rationalization to a halt as soon as it threatens to turn against class conditions themselves. This situation has now left man in a state of rationalization which as soon as the possibility of his further dialectic development is blocked crushes him between unresolved contradictions.

8 The same force of reification which constituted music as art has today taken music from man and left him with only an illusion [Schein] thereof. This force of reification could not simply be reconverted to immediacy without returning art to the state in which it found itself before the division of labor. Music, however, insofar as it did not submit to the command of the production of commodities, was in this process robbed of its social responsibility and exiled into an hermetic space within which its contents are removed. This is the situation from which every observation upon the social position of music which hopes to avoid the deceptions which today dominate discussions of the subject must proceed. These deceptions exist for the sake of concealing the actual situation and, further, as an apology for music which has allowed itself to be intimidated economically. They are also the result of the fact that music itself, under the superior power of the music industry developed by monopoly capitalism, became conscious of its own reification and of its alienation from man. Meanwhile, music, lacking proper knowledge of the social process a condition likewise socially produced and sustained blamed itself and not society for this situation, thus remaining in the illusion that the isolation of music was itself an isolated matter, namely, that things could be corrected from the side of music alone with no change in society. It is now necessary to face the hard fact that the social alienation of music that assembly of phenomena for which an overhasty and unenlightened musical reformism employs derogatory terms such as individualism, charlatanism, and technical esotericism is itself a matter of social fact and socially produced. For this reason, the situation cannot be corrected within music, but only within society: through the change of society.

9 The question regarding the possible dialectic contribution which music can make toward such change remains open: however, its contribution will be slight, if it from within its own resources endeavors only to establish an immediacy which is not only socially restraining today, but by no means reconstructable or even desirable, thus contributing to the disguise of the situation.

Excerpt: Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

Excerpt: Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/epm/1st.htm We shall start out from a present-day economic fact. The worker becomes poorer the