“Punks don’t dead!”

A Report on Subculture: The Meaning of Style [Dick Hebdige]

To the Tune of “The Ramones”

Punks not dead: This was something I used to see splattered red on the walls (next to “Mabuhay ang NPA!” and “Post no bill”) of the Catholics schools and the Archbishop’s Palace in Naga City in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Since I would usually see this as I walked to the jeepney stop from my weekly confession, I would hurriedly look away because I thought that reading it again and puzzling over its meaning would be a sin and would probably earn me another round of praying the rosary on my knees. Later on, I would hear my childhood best man scream this every time the Philippine Violators’ “Sikat na si Pedro” was played, and this was when everyone was into Seattle Grunge (and I was into 7-Year-Bitch and Nirvana, especially their 1989 Bleach) Eraserheads, Rivermaya et ce90’sra (and some were even still into Introvoys because of Jonathan). He tried explaining punk to me but I was more interested in hating Courtney Love for being Kurt Cobain’s wife.

Whenever punk was mentioned, I thought of the 1980s in terms of spiky hair, body piercing, black plastic, heavy make-up, and synthesizer-ridden music. And in my head, this subculture was summarized by movie characters like Willem Dafoe’s in “Streets of Fire” (and one punk villain there was really the drummer of the infamous American punk band “Hole”) or Mary Stuart Masterson’s in “Some Kind Of Wonderful”. It was a word being thrown around as I was hauled by alcoholics through and into the 21^st century to those so-called scenes in Manila like the “dredd”, “rave”, “goth”, “trance”, “metal”, “reggae” and “indie” scenes. They would joke about the squatter’s version of punk, which was “punks don’t dead” and I would laugh because of the phrase’s horrible syntax.

But let’s understand the implications of a subculture. According to Hebdige, subculture is the expressive forms and rituals of subordinate groups. [Rivkin, Julie, Michael Ryan 1065] He discussed subculture in relation to the writing style employed by Genêt, and this style was an act of revolt against a dominant culture through the use of mundane objects that eventually became symbols. These symbols became icons that represented two things: the values upheld by the subculture and a threat to the dominant order/culture or “signs of forbidden identity” that signified the presence of something different, if not deviance. [Rivkin, Julie, Michael Ryan 1066]

This act of revolt, both as a sign of impotence and power, is epitomized by the punk subculture. Punk has swept through music, dance, fashion, media etc. seemingly signifying chaos. In this subculture, everything forbidden was permitted, however nothing was held sacred or fixed, even the signifiers that they have adopted. Meaning cannot be simply deciphered because everything was being transformed: the “natural” or ordinary meanings of objects were lost and transformed to mean something and ultimately to mean nothing at all for they had become empty of any identifiable values.

Yet punk is characterized as chaos that cohered as a meaningful whole, subscribing to Levi-Strauss’s homology. [Rivkin, Julie, Michael Ryan 1070] This chaos had an underlying unity and this unity was pinned on two commonalities in all the members of this subculture: location in culture and location in experience.

The working-class youth were restating their opposition to dominant values and institutions. [Rivkin, Julie, Michael Ryan 1072] They were disillusioned with the decadence and inequality of capitalism and the punks were revolting against how life was established in this period. Noise was actually that “calmly orchestrated crisis of everyday life” and the way mundane objects were used was calculated to shock. [Rivkin, Julie, Michael Ryan 1071] It was a unified effort to escape being identified and categorized beyond what the average person could understand and to disassociate itself from the parent culture. They were all unified in this subversion because they all came from the working class and were all experiencing the same things, hence reacting to the circumstances in the same way.

But the punks took it a step further than just being a mass of working-class youth that looked and acted alike in their rebellion and divorce from the parent culture. Since one of their underlying philosophies was one based on rupture, the punks even dislocated themselves from the experience that unified them. Before the second dislocation, a punk looked and acted like a punk and came from a working-class background. After the second dislocation, anyone could be a punk as long as you looked, acted and upheld the punk philosophy, like do-it-yourself among other things.

This brings the issue on who are genuine members of a subculture and who are the poseurs, because then, the style of a certain subculture would be put into question.

Let’s relate it: I remember one member in GothManila who (showed me a lot about music and teases me about my penchant for Industrial like Sister Soleil) complained of the so-called poseurs; that just because they all dressed in black and have read all the published works of Anne Rice or Poppy Z. Brite do not mean that they can now claim to be Goths. Or that instance wherein Courtney Love cleaned up her look when she dabbled in acting in Hollywood and she was accused of being a sell-out (which sparked her “You don’t think I’m punk enough?!” confrontation with one journalist). Or the fact that people laugh over some Filipino punk who writes “Punks don’t dead” on a wall because he/she didn’t even get it right.

And really, how many people even know that it’s “Punk’s not Dead” and it’s a song by The Exploiteds or that it had influenced the Nazi punks’ anti-communist slogan “Punk’s not Red”?

In any subculture, there will be individual differences and levels of commitment. [Rivkin, Julie, Michael Ryan 1074] A subculture can represent a major dimension in a person’s life, a distraction or escape from his/her everyday reality, or even as a means of returning to the dominant culture. Despite these differences, Hebdige states that a subculture must share one language so that it may be able to capture its sensibility --- the ideas that define this subculture and the resulting style. It should be conscious of what it is, what it embodies and how it would represent itself. And for this style to become popular, it should be able to “anticipate and encapsulate a mood or a moment.” [Rivkin, Julie, Michael Ryan 1074]

The more a subculture is coherent, the more popular it is and it goes beyond the moment that it had anticipated and captured. It continues to initiate and influence other subcultures, and perhaps even become a dominant culture.

In literature, the more progressive texts produced are those that are products of a subculture. The style employed in the writing reflects the style of the subculture itself and initiates changes on what literature is (producing new sub-genres and genres) and how we perceive life, just like Genêt’s novels. Perhaps, we should all become, in some level, punks when it comes to the production and criticism of literature. And who knows, maybe one day “Punks don’t dead” would even make sense.

So let’s all be new-age-hard-core-new-wave-punks again and come to Mag:net Katipunan on September 13 night! I’m going to jump around in my pink bunny panties and bunny-ears-hair-band and scream PRETTY IN PUNKS! while the late goth bands wail their new wave dirges and my favorite dudongs hoot WASAK!

Yeah, style.