With Contemporary Punk Rock Communities, Ellen M. Bernhard makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on punk. She shows that punk in the US today is not identical to what it was in the past, and teases out a lot of detail about the changes that have occurred. She writes in an engaging way, weaving herself into the narrative in a manner that I found quite effective: it becomes clear, from the introductory pages onwards, that Bernhard is someone who knows these communities well. I do have a few aspects of the book to query in this review, but I certainly think it is a very welcome output which will have great value for those of us who are interested in the way US punk has changed since the 1990s.
The shift in question begins with ‘the popularization of the genre during the mid-90s and early 2000s, following the decline of grunge’ (p. 7). From that time onwards, ‘access to contemporary punk rock was accomplished with relative ease’ thanks to MTV, ‘video games’ (Bernhard may be thinking of the likes of Skate 3) and a chain-store called Hot Topic which the author mentions at several points in the book (ibid.). Bernhard emphasises the pivotal importance of 1994 for the rise of ‘pop punk’ (Green Day's Dookie being released that year, for example) and demise of grunge (pp. 8–9). These days, it seems, a punk festival can be sponsored by a company like Pabst Blue Ribbon (p. 12) without many punks batting an eyelid (Bernhard herself passes over this datum without commenting that, in the 1980s, such a company linking itself to punk would have been unthinkable). The contemporary US punk scene, she argues persuasively, is more influenced by popular culture than pre-1990s punk was and is very much focussed on ‘inclusivity and diversity’. She notes that her punk respondents showed ‘little derision directed toward bands who signed to major record labels or agreed to allow their music to be used in an advertisement’. The respondents were ‘ambivalent’ about co-optation in general (ibid.).
Bernhard draws some interesting links between hegemony and the co-optation process, suggesting that the relationship between punk and the mainstream is not antithetical today, owing to ‘the normalization of punk fashion, the music, and the punk lifestyle’ (pp. 26–7). I was a little disappointed that she did not tap into longer debates around co-optation, such as the arguments within the Frankfurt school, and was surprised at her declaration ‘I believe that the mainstream is neither bad nor good when discussing contemporary punk scenes’ (p. 27). That said, I recognise the veracity of her suggestion that ‘issues of representation, sexism, homophobia, and so on’ have today overtaken the more explicitly counter-hegemonic character which punk used to (and sometimes still does) have (p. 27).
These issues of ‘representation’ are core to the distinction between contemporary and older punk. For Bernhard's generation, punk's main purpose is not to change the world in some economic or anarchistic way, to change everything and start again: rather, punk needs to be as inclusive as possible and can be enjoyable (‘fun’) as long as it is clearly working against sexism, homophobia, transphobia and so forth. The author herself mentions that ‘I generally found punk rock to be a welcoming place that echoed my own personal and political beliefs’ (p. 28). This sense of feeling comfortable and welcome within the echo chamber is reflected by her respondents: ‘looking out for the well-being of other people and celebrating diversity and celebrating independence’ (p. 31) are crucial, although this independence is not antithetical to anything (such as ‘the mainstream’ – see last paragraph). Sentiments like this are very common among the individuals to whom Bernhard spoke: ‘when you listen to punk you already sort of have … thoughts about how the world should be and how we should treat each other, so you already kind of have this base-level understanding with most other people who listen to punk’ (ibid.). As far as political analyses go, many of the comments come across as rather naïve: ‘I want everybody to stand in a circle holding hands and be friends’ (p. 32); if punks aren't ‘super nice’ then it is fair to desire ‘less of those people’ (p. 37); ‘we're just asking that you be nice’ (p. 48); punk should mean ‘fun for everyone’ (p. 50); and so forth. However, there is a clear message that issues such as feminism (‘it's like the frontrunner right now’, p. 38) have eclipsed ‘more like anti-government or like anti-The Man’ (pp. 38–9) political sentiments.
That said, punk remains a ‘sanctuary for outsiders’ (p. 32), so clearly not everything about punk has changed (such refuge is highly traditional in punk's nearly half a century of existence, and in the end is perhaps the defining characteristic of punk, I would argue). However, a ‘growing dichotomy between different generations of punk’ (p. 47) is identified by Bernhard, bringing a ‘paradigm shift’ (p. 49). A decline in eagerness to ‘shock and offend’ is constitutive of this shift in the author's view: today, ‘punk should have a more constructive purpose’ she prefers (p. 47). Bernhard explicitly links the traditional punk tendency to ‘be offensive and crass’ with ‘outdated and exclusionary ideologies’ (p. 49).
Given that the very word ‘punk’ (long associated with prostitutes, victims of male-on-male rape and petty criminals), and couplets such as ‘queerpunk’, are intrinsically offensive to many, Bernhard's position gets a little dubious at these points. I found myself wondering whether the scene she describes ought to drop the word. I also wondered how Bernhard could be so enthusiastic about Dead Kennedys (p. 57) given how offensive many of their lyrics and record sleeves are. I also felt there was a latent homosociality of a certain stripe implied within many of the comments: ‘I feel incredibly comfortable around these people’ (p. 52); ‘There's very few people I know outside of [the punk community]’ (p. 76); ‘Everybody's just on the same level’ (p. 78); and so on. Bernhard shows that this is nested within a desire to be inclusive and diverse. However, the critical reader might consider that her respondents are more interested in non-punks becoming punks than in the idea (not raised once, but I think it should have been) that punk ought to change its character in order to make it easier for, say, people of colour to participate. For example, a remark that ‘most of my friends that are people of color, they're not involved in punk and they're like “you're weird”’ (p. 44) is passed over with little comment. The difficulty, it seems to me, is that to be an ‘Afropunk’ is very much to make oneself in a sense ‘queer’ relative to dominant African American culture. An Afropunk, therefore, is likely to shock and offend their family and, consequently, the idea that punk can be more inclusive by being less offensive is not as logical as it might otherwise seem: it seems likely that being offensive to cultural norms may be precisely what is attractive about punk for a range of ‘minorities’. For this reason, to attempt to neutralise the shock value of punk could be to remove the very thing that makes punk attractive to, for example, the minority of ‘persons of colour’ who do participate in it at present. I would have liked to have seen Bernhard, and her respondents (many seem very smart and thoroughly decent people), consider more deeply the difficulties around the formula ‘punk minus offence equals greater inclusion’, in short.
I also think Bernhard could have achieved greater critical distance from her subject matter. To state that ‘Streaming services have democratized music’ is too bald (p. 100). Although ‘it takes the same number of steps to access Green Day's latest album on Spotify as it does to access an album by [a] small band that played a local basement show’ (p. 100), streaming services certainly do allow mainstream music to maintain dominance in a range of more subtle ways, and Bernhard should have acknowledged this. ‘If it becomes cool, it's going to end up in mainstream culture … It's a sign we're doing something good’ (p. 107), suggests one respondent, and Bernhard affirms that ‘external forces that commercialize and popularize various aspects of punk rock … are inevitable’ (p. 120). This swiping away of a key ambition of much agency in the punk tradition, however, is problematic: without a desire for independence from the mainstream, punk arguably becomes nothing more than a breeding ground for multinational corporations to cherry pick music which is likely to bring them profits. Bernhard and her respondents point to other radical aspects of contemporary punk, but it will be hard for many older readers to accept this over-arching surrender to the mainstream so easily. Possibly this reviewer shows his own lack of critical distance with this comment, of course, but if prioritisation of economic challenges to the status quo, including ‘the music industry’, is no longer perceived to be as important as it once was by a majority of contemporary punks, this does not in itself prove that co-optation is ‘inevitable’.
One problem for this reviewer was that the number of respondents, and their demographic status, was not revealed at the beginning of the book. Around two-thirds of the way through, we learn that there were 14 participants (p. 123) and that these were ‘mostly millenials’ (p. 106) but it would have been helpful to have gained this detail earlier in the book, and to have known their gender, class, ‘race’ and so forth. In any case, although I was persuaded (partly from my own familiarity with the contemporary US punk scene) that Bernhard does capture a significant current trend in discourse around punk, I was conscious that contradistinctive voices (for example, the more countercultural punk milieu in Bloomington, Indiana) do exist currently. For Bernhard, there are ‘real-world obligations’ which are more ‘realistic’ than such contradistinction and which need to be a ‘priority’ in punk (p. 131). Perhaps so, of course, and perhaps it is this faith which allows her to see the Hot Topic chain-store as ‘countercultural’ (p. 110), but it is certain that there remain many in punk who would see such a shop as surreal and not in the least contrary to dominant culture; changing the ‘real world’ ought to be the priority for punk, such individuals might say. Even if ‘all participants took the [same] position’ (p. 49) during her period of study, Bernhard could and I think should have acknowledged that a study of 14 individuals will not give a complete picture of contemporary punk.
A ‘fan's freedom to determine whether or not to purchase an album’ (p. 142) is certainly a freedom of a sort, but should it be the limit of punk's radicalism? A reader unfamiliar with punk might draw the conclusion that punk retains a valuable commitment to inclusion and diversity but that its most radical and countercultural properties have largely disappeared. Perhaps this really is where punk has arrived in the 21st century, and if so Bernhard's book has done us a great service in making the situation clear, but I found myself not entirely convinced that punk's old ambition to not only enter but actually change the mainstream culture has quite disappeared. Whether or not the picture she paints is accurate (on balance, I think it broadly is, in terms of contemporary punk in the US at least), this book is distinctive and will be very helpful to those of us who want to study relationships between punk, culture, society and the economy not just in the 1970s but over the several decades since.
