Dying Scene Book Club – Ian Ellis – “Punk Beyond the Music: Tracing Mutation and Manifestation of the Punk Virus”
Iain Ellis is a senior lecturer in the English department of the University of Kansas. Ellis has released Punk Beyond the Music: Tracing Mutations and Manifestations of the Punk Virus. The text tries to compare punk to a virus with how contagious its spread has been since its introduction. His goal was to find the multitudes of punk rock in different aspects and categories. While some of the information presented was accurate, it is very much up for debate whether he reached his actual goal.
Ellis starts with some basic aspects of punk we can mostly agree on: its DIY aesthetic, being an outsider, the symbols, and politics. He also lists some characteristics of punk attitude: anger, frustration, sarcasm, swagger, bluntness, loathing, and hostility. For comparison purposes, he classifies three time periods: the before, during, and after punk. Pre-punk covers anything before the 1970s and proto-punk. Primary punk indicates the time covering the early bands, Ramones, The Clash, Sex Pistols, and the like. Post-punk is a reference to the genre that emerged after the punk explosion but also refers to the time period after those initial bands.
From here, he breaks into chapters and attempts to find punk in various aspects, mostly having to do with the arts. Things like literature, film, visual and performing arts. The Literature section cites authors William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, and Hunter S. Thompson, who were mostly the outliers of their scene; they don’t acknowledge those scenes. Burroughs was definitely the odd duck of the Beat writers, but Thompson was more in line with the mainstream rock crowd despite his eccentric behavior. Eccentric is being used lightly. The Film section is a run-through of indie darlings like David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and John Waters but also explores punk rock movies. Ellis describes these films as Punksploitation. Films that feature punk rockers as characters with bands sometimes making cameos. Films discussed are Jubilee, Rude Boy, Repo Man, Suburbia, and many more are listed. He also lists some other movies that pushed against norms like Rocky Horror Picture Show, but claims Lars Von Trier and Harmony Korine are punk rock because of their extremism.
Some weird sections seem to be grasping at straws or could have possibly been put somewhere else. The Comedy section gives a quick lesson on the rise of alternative comedy and discusses Monty Python and Rik Mayall’s The Young Ones. Some love is thrown to Saturday Night Live, but National Lampoon only gets a few sentences while SCTV gets nothing. You can debate the punk cred of Harvard grads of National Lampoon until you’re blue in the face, but you cannot deny the punk work ethic of how Second City grew. Comedy could have been put under the section of visual or performing arts, but those sections mostly dealt with the art kids of punk rock. Devo, Raymond Pettibon, and James Reid and how their art promoted their corners of punk rock.
A section on politics is a no-brainer. Describing how the reigns of Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK made the punk rock movement transcend beyond art. A section on business talks about how some indie labels are run. He mentions early punk labels like Crass and Dischord along with the grassroots of Asian Man Records, but completely misses any talk about Epitaph or Fat. The sports section is mostly about skateboarding and its history, but it also tries to link the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right to Party” to the movement. It also links punk to soccer and hockey in their respective countries of origin and/or popularity. A section for Education briefly mentions Greg Graffin and Milo Aukerman’s doctorate degrees, but also shows us the term Edupunk (Which I think sounds better out loud than actual practice) and details drummer Martin Atkin’s (PiL, NIN, Ministry) class on punk rock that comes complete with a merch table.
The remainder of the book has some sections on fashion, crafts, and comics. The comics section links Robert Crumb’s counterculture art and comics as a pre-punk example, but skims the credit from the seminal Love and Rockets by only crediting Jamie Hernandez and leaving Mario and Gilbert out. Superstar comic writer Grant Morrison gets a mention, as does Detective Comics’ punk rock new wave necromancer John Constantine.
The last two chapters kind of just pick up a grab bag of subjects missing in the previous chapters and go over the punk rock scenes in other countries and listing random punk rock occurrences, such as punk rock’s guest-starring villain of the week roles in 1970s TV shows Quincy M.D. and CHiPs, along with some info on the straight edge movement.
While Ellis’s book may be historically accurate in its timeline, the opinions don’t sit well with me in some places. Especially in its assessment of American Culture. I would surmise this book goes off the theory that punk started in England and not with the Ramones in America. There’s a lot of crossover in information, and with that comes a lot of repeating points. There are multiple references to the Marlon Brando film The Wild One, which doesn’t seem lost considering the generation that started using the term punk probably had admirers of it. It just seems the American examples always seem like an afterthought and are not given the proper analysis.
The text takes big swings in a lot of places but fails to connect when by missing important aspects. That being said, if you are going out on a limb for an aspect like comics or crafts or film, make sure your info is correct. It was frustrating having to stop each time and Google things that didn’t sound right. Here are a few of the inaccuracies found, but it’s probably me being picky. Dates of movies specifically Blue Velvet (1986, not 1980) but also calling or spelling people by their wrong name (Raymond Pettibon, not Richard, and Ian MacKaye, not Ian Mackay). There’s a reference to the Bloodhound Gang being a punk band, and maybe they are in a Dead Milkmen sort of way, but even that is stretching it for me.
What becomes clear is punk wasn’t the new thing people thought it was when it came out in the 1970s; we just gave it a name and a space to be recognized. People have been counter-culture for years, but when the winners write history you can’t always document your accomplishments. Documentation is easier to note as tools become more available. While trickle-down effects don’t work with economics, it works with technology. Books, films, and music have been made by different voices as the technology becomes more accessible to the lower classes. This book’s attempts to collate these documentations would work better if there weren’t many mistakes.
Why so picky about the mistakes? There is a difference between argument and art. This book tries to take a firm stance in its argument of punk and compares it to a virus and, in my opinion, fails. Mistakes give art character. Mistakes make arguments wobbly. Could this be considered art? It can, but then why publish through an academic press? There are plenty of (punk rock) publishers who may have wanted to release this. Or this could have been done DIY and released results on your own, like what was preached for a couple hundred pages in the book. Iain Ellis set out to do a Herculean task but ended up on a fool’s errand. Don’t take my word for it, find out for yourself and purchase here.