Writing about punk is dominated by the English-speaking world even though there are punk scenes everywhere. One of the insights of Dick Hebdige's (Reference Hebdidge1979) analysis is that first-generation punk in the UK was mediated by the weekly music papers, television and the London newspapers: the famous Daily Mirror headline on December 2, 1976 was ‘The Filth and the Fury’. Kids in other parts of the world also saw this on their television sets. And it inspired some of them to follow along, even if they were probably more impressed by the Clash than by the Sex Pistols, who they would have seen, in part incorrectly, as working-class kids reclaiming rock music and having their say. This mediated version of punk gave rise to imitators in many countries, sometimes older musicians jumping on the bandwagon and sometimes kids who just wanted to join in the fun. This first wave of punk often quickly declined, to be replaced in a few year by a more organic and underground hardcore scene. The American fanzine Maximumrocknroll publishes reports of these scenes in many parts of the world.

There is a theoretical debate about how to understand punk in countries from Malaysia and Japan, to Spain and Mexico. Followers of Arjun Appadurai (Reference Appadurai1996) might be tempted to view punk in Mexico City or Tijuana as cultural hybridity or as a border culture. According to this argument it is neither global nor local but a hybrid culture. And Appadurai's general emphasis is a kind of chaos theory that celebrates the unintended and unpredictable consequence of the global circulation of media (bootleg tapes of The Exploited), ideas (the Situationist element in punk), and people (the Clash on tour). Against this version of globalization theory, the argument has been made that punk actually grafts itself onto the local habitus (Pierre Bourdieu) so that punk in Mexico City is very much a product of the lifeworld of punks in that metropolis. Punk is turned into what the local kids need it to be and this is not a hybrid culture but shaped by their own lives and struggles (Tatro, Reference Tatro2017).

This is the argument of Shane Greene's book on punk in Peru. Whereas dissertations in the USA speak of ‘the punk subculture’ almost as a reflex of the middle-style required of academic writing, Shane Greene strays into a low style (‘punk as fuck’) to describe the ‘rock subterráneo’ that emerged in Lima and other cities in Peru in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, he points out that whereas kids in the USA were able to buy vinyl records, for punks in Lima it was a matter of cassette tapes. Punk bands in Peru recorded a maqueta (demo tape), often using improvised recording equipment. These tapes circulate in third and fourth-generation copies, with photo-copied cassette covers.

The context for all this is the militancy of the Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru, and the state violence that accompanied it. One of the spaces in which punk emerged in the 1980s was the university, where many radical students sympathized with the Shining Path. In the 1980s we interpreted the Clash album Sandinista! as a gesture from afar of solidarity with revolutionary Nicaragua, but punks in Peru were in the thick of armed conflict, which soon spread from the countryside to the capital city. With the election of Alberto Fujimori in 1990 on a promise to end the insurgency, some punks were caught up in the increased state repression, or became refugees. Even bands that identified as anarchist had somehow to take a position viv-a-vis the Marxist-inspired movement of campesinos and indigenous peoples. The after-life of these punk bands can sometimes be found on YouTube or on the website that accompanies this book: http://www.punkandrevolution.com/en/soundtrack/

Punk and Revolution is in part based on ethnography (hanging out and interviews with participants from the 1980s scene) and like many recent accounts it describes the social class of punks as established working-class to the middle sectors of the middle class: not from Lima's most impoverished and precarious districts (p. 59). There are always a small number of exceptions. The explanation for this has little to do with the supposed ‘homology’ between a subculture and a social class and more to do with the cultural capital of youth who are likely to play around with making music and get interested in underground culture. For a sociological study based on a large sample of youth in Germany see Zillien and Hargittai (Reference Zillien and Hargitai2009).

One of the themes of the book is conflicts within the Peruvian scene. Anyone who has participated in contemporary punk scenes will be familiar with this drama, often described as personality conflicts, rivalry between bands or tensions between different sectors of the scene. Green provides an analysis of conflict between cholo-punks and pitu-punks (the terms do not translate well into English) in terms of overlapping racial, class and spatial antagonisms (p. 57). Asked about the conflict, participants said it had to do with Lima, with which side of Javier Prado you came from. The major thoroughfare divides the city, with poorer and browner people (cholo) to the north and wealthier and whiter people (pituco) to the south. Tensions between punks in the city got to the point where one band member started carrying a gun to shows. All of this in the context of massive rural migration into the city and the ongoing violence between revolutionaries and the state. The cholo-punks were at the receiving end of most of the police violence; the middle-class pitu-punks were mostly left alone. A discussion later in the book about affiliations between avant-garde artists and punk-inspired musicians also suggests the usefulness of Bourdieu's concept of a cultural or artistic field: position-taking in relation to other positions in the field and from a particular habitus.

There is more in the book about gender and such subjects, but that will do for now. The subtitle of the book is a gesture to José Carlos Mariátegui's, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, originally published in 1928 (Mariátegui, Reference Mariátegui1971). Mariátegui was a Peruvian socialist who understood, along with all major Marxist thinkers, that revolutionary theory needed to be adapted to each social formation. There is no universal (read European) theory. Shane Greene shows that theories of punk must also be rethought for each society. A substantial section of the book consists of edited statements by punks who speak of revolution and not subculture. Punk and Revolution is quite different from Hebdidge's (Reference Hebdidge1979) semiotic approach; making the two books an ideal juxtaposition for an upper-level undergraduate course on punk rock. Or you can just read it for fun.