Perhaps the most difficult challenge in studying punk music today is striking a balance between mythology and history. Punk is a genre saturated with legend. Figures such as Sid Vicious, Joey Ramone and Ian Curtis linger many years after their deaths, inspiring us even as they serve to tether punk to a bygone era. Their ghostly pull is as much a promissory note as it is a flirtation with the grandiose. And yet, the term punk also brings with it a plea for specificity. Punk evokes the local, the scene and the subcultural. It challenges all attempts to elevate music into the otherworldly. The need for caution in discussing punk history has only expanded in the wake of the 1970s, as the term has come to reference a range of subgenres scattered throughout a 40-year history that reaches across the globe. As punk hovers somewhere between New York, London and Jakarta, it is increasingly difficult to speak of it in the singular. It has grown into something larger and stranger than what it once was, whatever that might have been.
Far from unique to punk, this tension between the phantasmal and the concrete situates the genre as one more staging ground for a larger methodological question in music scholarship: how do we balance those moments of music that most enchant us with the intense social activity required to sustain music making? Nick Crossley's new account of British punk is an important attempt to answer that question. Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion takes seriously the power of punk even as it resists its mythological pull. In so doing, Crossley stages a dialogue between punk's legends and its broader cast of actors.
Crossley's text zooms in on early British punk, concentrating on the second half of the 1970s in order to bring out the particularities of that era. His story begins with the formative moments of London's punk scene in the mid-1970s, continues through its explosion into national headlines, and concludes with its subsequent fragmentation into post-punk at the end of the decade. By further focusing on four key cities (London, Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield), Crossley constructs an impressively detailed map of the many hundreds of people who participated in punk in its early years.
While achieving this level of precision is crucial for Crossley's account, it serves a broader claim about the sociology of music. The first four chapters of the text outline his theoretical approach, which largely centres on relational sociology and social network analysis (SNA). Crossley begins from the simple assumption, that ‘social interactions, relations and networks are the most basic elements in social life’ (p. 13). He then argues that punk constituted a series of local networks, a small but centrally massed group of individuals collaborating to create music through a diverse array of social and artistic interactions. Throughout, he provides painstakingly diagrammed reconstructions of the British scene, all of which reveal the complexity of the network structure underlying punk.
Crossley is careful to preserve the aesthetic dimensions within his social model. In his understanding, punk was a musical world, held together by musical interaction, collective identification and meaning making (pp. 28–35). In defending punk's musical orientation, Crossley offers a (potentially controversial) challenge to subcultural studies, which frames the genre as a repository for working-class politics during the UK's tumultuous 1970s. Crossley concedes that the subcultural account is a helpful means of grasping punk's political content, but he contends that such an interpretation risks obscuring the complexity of individual agendas. Even as some sought to recruit punk as a vessel for the left wing, others sought to tether it to the right and still others simply ignored politics altogether (p. 53).
Chapters 5–10 provide an alternative theory of British punk's social character. Here, Crossley's exploration of the dynamics of this quickly shifting musical world is nothing short of virtuosic, managing to integrate punk's most sacred myths with the many ‘micro-mobilisations’ that helped to foster its robust social life. He weaves many (in)famous moments, from the Sex Pistols’ legendary appearance on Bill Grundy's Today to Joy Division singer Ian Curtis's tragic suicide, into an extensive narrative about the larger collective activity that made punk possible. Most striking is the way in which this framework integrates Crossley's theory of social networks into cultural, aesthetic and political questions. Much more than a report about who knew whom and how, Networks of Sound recalls a considerable network of individuals concerned with the broader possibilities facilitated by punk style.
Given that Crossley appeals to this notion of style throughout his text, one can't help but want a more central part for music in the story. Crossley is rightly suspicious of reductive claims about punk's sound and meaning, and the call for interpretive caution is well taken. But it was music that constituted the nexus for punk networking, and the forms such practices took deserve a prominent role in the account. This is a small gripe, and one easily overshadowed by the merits of Crossley's social analysis. His book is a crucial tool for continuing the conversation about punk in that iconic early moment. It will further stand as a model for how to attend to the diverse and often conflicted impulses that continue to drive punk into the 21st century.
