Raymond A. Patton tells a history of punk in the 1970s and 80s that knits together communities, musical trends, and social movements across the Iron Curtain. Punk's tension-filled uproar between local movements, transnational networks, and institutional intervention characterizes, for him, the interaction between culture, politics, and society during the late Cold War. This musical subculture, Patton suggests, bears witness to the rise of individualism and cultural identity—and the constraint of and complaint about this shift in global politics. As a transnational history, Punk Crisis asserts a fresh take on east European cultural history that is of value to anyone who weaves cultural production into their classroom environment; is interested in the history of music, the arts, or emotion; or takes seriously questions of expressive culture's political efficacy and value. Patton rejects, contextualizes, and nuances myths of east European artistic isolation and impoverishment as well as reactionary cultural politics using punk as his focus. There are detours into other popular musics, too. He pushes back at the academy's consistent valorization of popular culture as a de facto site of resistance to communism. By reading the autobiographies and published recollections of many of punk history's main protagonists, Patton shows that this thirst for subversion is in part fueled by a memory culture that clings to rock-as-rebellion—and not only in the communist east.
Across his navigation of punk's global circulation, historical and cultural significance, and political imaginary, Patton roots a subcultural studies perspective in east European scenes. This perspective breathes insight into and develops a welcome critique of some of the stock narratives of punk history. At the same time, it also draws attention to the exclusion of communism from anglophone subcultural theory, which so often develops postcolonial critique within and of capitalist contexts. The author deftly combines historical methodologies, evocatively describing the range of sounds that have constituted punk to its makers, listeners, and detractors along the way. Engagement with music studies’ literature on punk in performance and sound studies’ theorization of the voice might have further supported the author's insistence that these live acts were busting with intentional and improvisational, creative, and political decisions. There is substantial historiographic payoff, however, to Patton's archival fastidiousness. His economic history nuances the anti-capitalism of a range of DIY scenes by evidencing the growth of record labels and state radio broadcast support. The materials (reviews, manifestos, radio dubs on tape, imported records) he traces through punk's networks show transnational collaborations that defy Cold War binaries. Finally, his analysis of governmental responses to punk along with the complexity of cross-racial alliances within grassroots initiatives like the UK-based Rock Against Racism reveals shifting conversations about what kinds of expression constitute culture as a political category. Punk Crisis makes a strong and consistent case that punk—and popular cultural broadly—is neither a roaring rebellion against the state nor a fear-induced reactionary chorus in which conservatisms thrive.
With the title's “global revolution,” Patton captures the dynamism of punk movements: the local complexities that provided scenes energy as well as the transnational listening, communication, and political mobilization that have shaped the genre's terrain. The book has a wide cast of characters: not just band members and their fans, but mediators, promotors, writers, and record label managers. Each has their own relationship to what Patton refers to as the Third World, following the language of his subjects. Questions about punk and postcolonialism emerge in particular across Chapters 5 and 6, in which punk becomes a means, potentially, of understanding the rising affection, fantasy, solidarity, and suspicion accorded subaltern subjects and sounds. People are fascinated by the sounds of reggae and ska, compelled by social movements in Latin America, and suspicious of postcolonial flows. Patton sensitively, if not exhaustively, analyzes the ways in which punk is sometimes racist, racialized, and anti-racist.
But Punk Crisis is still very much a history of punk in the Euro-American context. Each of the seven chapters is shaped around the analysis of punk history in England, North America, and eastern Europe—primarily the People's Republic of Poland, where Patton undertook his original archival research. The book's clear writing is crafted to speak to the subculture's insiders and new listeners alike. It is as multifaceted as punk's performances, sounds, fashion, and images. The chapters each integrate the three sites along a central thread. First, Patton burrows into the ethnic multiplicity and cosmopolitanism that characterized many of punk's hubs, painting portraits of familiar figures and foregrounding experiences of forced migration and student study abroad. Chapter 2 suggests that punk's aesthetic balance of DIY materials, postmodern rejection of elitism through art, and embrace of experimentalism are the products of transnational conversation and negotiation. In Chapter 3, the author virtuosically analyzes punk's many entanglements with money under capitalism and communism: the increasing commercial viability, the aesthetic-ethical accusation of “selling out,” and the emphasis on amateur practitioners were in constant tension.
In Chapter 4, Patton considers the stakes of understanding punk as political ideology, highlighting the moments when this subculture was endowed with political potential—and when it was dismissed—by organizers and local governments alike. Chapter 7 follows these questions through to the end of the 1980s and its “culture wars.” The stories of censorship, police surveillance, bureaucratic pencil-pushing, and infighting are captivating. Patton operates with a refreshingly capacious understanding of punk, so that we hear new wave, post punk, ska, and even reggae alongside each other. Punk is not just political because it is loud, amateur, and formally straightforward: it can invite listeners to dance, it can slow down, and it can carry a tune. At times I wished he would extend the same complexity to his understanding of other musical subcultures and consider what cultural theorist Barry Shank has called the Political Force of Musical Beauty (2016). Some performances and genres, like the Polish opposition's cherished sung poetry (poezja śpiewana), with its acoustic guitars and tendency toward lyricism, may sound “folksy” to Patton's ears, but the iconic performances he cites—at major unofficial festivals and behind the doors of curfew during martial law—have their own growls, frustrated murmurs, and audience exhortations on tape recordings still audible and in memories retold.
Punk Crisis is the authoritative take on punk in Poland, building on superb smaller-scale histories in the Polish language. Patton rigorously refutes that a history of Polish punk could be circumscribed by geographical, linguistic, or even musical borders. By strategically bringing Poland—along with a few other east European examples, like the abrasive, celebrated, and ideologically charged Slovenian collective Laibach—into the center of punk history, Patton asks: What are the limits of thinking punk as global and the limits of equating punk with rebellion? He does not conclude that punk has one history, nor that punk is history (or politics). Instead, he suggests that in thinking about punk we must think about history, and to understand about how “1989” became a global moment we must listen to punk.
