The first point to clarify with respect to these two books is that, for authors Alan O'Connor and Brian Cogan, punk is not something which happened only in the UK around 1976–1978 with the Sex Pistols as its centrifugal force. For many casual observers, that ‘original’ punk rock moment is supposed to have met an absolute demise with the death of Sid Vicious in 1979, to be replaced by the New Wave, Two Tone and New Romantic movements. One problem with this neat historiography is that the descriptor ‘punk’ had been applied previously to US ‘Garage’ bands of the 1960s (the Sonics and the Standells, for example) as well as the groups clustered around the legendary CBGBs venue in New York (the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith and so on).Footnote ¹ Both Cogan and O'Connor's books (in conjunction with several other recent studies of punk/indie music) indicate that a continuingly significant punk movement has continued during the thirty years since punk is supposed to have ‘died’, especially in the US.

Of the two, Cogan's book is of lesser interest for the casual reader since, being in Encyclopaedia format, its information can feel jumbled and the historical development of the punk movement difficult to follow. For any reader with an existing interest in punk, however, there will certainly be some appeal, since the author provides a good deal of very obscure information alongside detail concerning all the most well-known punk acts. The text is rather biased towards a US perspective: the geographical origins of virtually unknown US bands are given, yet the culturally significant fact that the Fall hail from Manchester is not mentioned, while important agents in UK punk such as Snuff and Billy Childish are absent. In general, the discographical information is inconsistent, with no details for Le Tigre, very few for Ted Leo, a fraction of the Ex's discography and yet an exhaustive list of releases from the Boys (whom even the text acknowledges as a ‘minor band’). Some entries are poorly cross-referenced, so that Fugazi are listed as Dub Reggae-influenced yet are notable by their absence from the entry on Dub, whilst Riot Grrrl appears under ‘R’ yet, amazingly, earns no mention in the entry on ‘Gender and Punk’. Many of the entries have not been proof-read properly.

Punk Record Labels, then, is probably more to be recommended for the reader who wants a general idea of the punk movement since the Sex Pistols. O'Connor's principal focus is the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) record labels which were a fairly innovative feature of late 1970s UK punk. Such labels are established on ‘shoestring’ budgets either by bands wishing to issue their own music and/or individuals with little entrepreneurial know-how (if any) but plenty of enthusiasm for the music. DIY labels have been the subject of a fair number of scholarly investigations (Laing Reference Laing1985; Hesmondhalgh Reference Hesmondhalgh1997, Reference Hesmondhalgh1999; Lee Reference Lee1995, among others). O'Connor's contribution to this scholarship is his emphasis upon the persistence of such DIY punk-inspired labels during the 1980s and, perhaps most surprisingly, their enormous growth during the 1990s. The punk movement was deeply affected by the crossover success of Nirvana in 1991 and Green Day and others around 1994, yet the remaining punk underground seems to have aspired even more strongly for both economic independence and cultural divorce from the perceived mainstream, especially in the USA. The book also offers data on the socio-economic backgrounds of owners of DIY record labels.

If the historicising/socioeconomic element of O'Connor's work is to be valued, however, the study certainly has flaws. Methodologically, O'Connor relies upon Bourdieu to a fault, presuming that the French theorist's work seamlessly maps on to the punk movement whereas, in fact, the correlation is far from a perfect fit. Where O'Connor does offer a more critical ‘possible response to Bourdieu’, with regard to the political efficacy of the ‘new petite-bourgeoisie’ of which this book takes punk to be an example, the challenge is sketchily explained and dubiously valid. The case of Doghouse Records, upon which O'Connor relies for his response, sounds very much like classic bourgeois entrepreneurial capitalism. A fairly recently published piece of research into punk-orientated record labels by Robert Strachan (Reference Strachan2007) effectively contradicts O'Connor's methodology. According to Strachan, such ‘small-scale cultural producers’ are categorically ‘unlike the avant gardes studied by Bourdieu’ and therefore ‘cannot be seen as autonomous from either the dominance of large-scale institutions or the larger field of power’ (pp. 246–7).

Also, the picture of the field created by Punk Record Labels gives little sense of the most radical edge of the scene, the element within US punk which contributed enormously to the anti-WTO uprising of November 1999. Instead, we are given a general impression that ‘punk-rock gold’ (sales of 10,000, according to O'Connor) and ‘punk-rock platinum’ (sales of 20,000, supposedly) are the extent of the punk movement's aspiration. If this were always the case, punk would be simply a smaller component within the larger capitalist structure, nothing more than a microcosm of the dominant order with a slightly cheaper product and a confused jumble of anti-authoritarian poses (precisely the Hebdigean reading of punk which O'Connor has declared himself in opposition to). Stacy Thompson (Reference Thompson2004) has shown, however, that punk's implicit economic critique of capitalism, though faulted, can develop into something more explicitly counter-hegemonic. By failing to emphasise punk's more radical potentials and actualities, O'Connor downplays the very element of punk which one might expect a sociological study to analyse.

O'Connor's account, then, is problematic. Punk's culturally significant Riot Grrrl sub-movement figures only once (in a footnote), whilst the existence of African-American, Queer and Latino punks achieves little or no mention. Instead, the book feels rather like a whitewash in which the ‘struggle’ mentioned in its title is too easily assumed to have been won. ‘No musician is ever free on a major label’, the conclusion states baldly (p. 90). O'Connor's clear implication is that freedom has, by contrast, been achieved by musicians on DIY labels. This picture is over simple, however, because it is clear that even the most ardent DIY practitioners discussed in Punk Record Labels, such as Ebullition distribution, do wield a certain power over the scene by dint of their size and influence. Freedom, therefore, is best thought of as an aspiration for both musicians on major labels and on DIY labels, though perhaps it is more likely to be glimpsed by those recording for punk record labels.