Abstract
Punk in China suffers from the stigma of inauthenticity and the dilemma of belatedness. That is, it comes ‘after’ the original punk moment in the West and is understood as derivative and therefore inauthentic. It does not follow, however, that in places that came ‘late’ to punk, such as China, punk is merely an echo of Western practice. Recent scholarship has embraced the concept of ‘global punk’, alongside projects to decolonize punk studies, to destabilize Western-centric understandings of punk authenticity. Consistent with this agenda, we undertake a comparative analysis of 60 seminal 1970s UK and US punk songs and 60 Chinese punk songs released since the founding of Chinese punk in the 1990s, to analyse the translocal durability of punk. Punk in China, we argue, mobilizes a durable ethic of do-it-yourself resistance to interrogate local political conditions and adds weight to the catch-cry that ‘punk is not dead’.
Introduction
The claim that ‘punk is not dead’ has long been a persistent trope in punk discourse (Davies, 1996). Yet despite anxieties about its possible death, punk has experienced a perhaps surprising afterlife, not only in the US and UK where the punk ethos of the 1970s remains influential but in places such as China, Indonesia, Portugal and Brazil (Bennett, 2006). This continued interest in punk, even rebirth, is reflected in the scholarship. A recent resurgence of scholarly interest in punk includes nine monographs and edited collections (Ambrosch, 2018; Bernhard, 2019; Bestley et al., 2021; Dines et al., 2017; Dunn, 2016; Patton, 2018; Smith et al., 2017; Worley, 2017; Xiao, 2018) and a growing body of work focused on the ongoing lives of punk in places such as Portugal (Guerra, 2014, 2018; Guerra & Bennett, 2015; Guerra & Santos Silva, 2015; Santos Silva & Guerra, 2017), Brazil (Guerra & Gomes, 2017), Canada (Fauteux, 2017; O’Connor, 2002), China (Field & Groenewegen, 2008; Xiao, 2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2018; Xiao & Stanyer, 2017), Malaysia (Mura & Yuen, 2019) and Indonesia (Baulch, 2007; Donaghey, 2021; Dunn, 2016; S. Martin-Iverson, 2011, 2014, 2017; Saefullah, 2017).
The persistence of punk as a translocal cultural phenomenon suggests considerable opportunities for further scholarship. In particular, we argue that the ongoing lives of punk in places beyond its originating centres in the US and UK offers an opportunity to investigate the relationship between early punk and its later iterations, especially punk outside the West. Another gap in the literature, notwithstanding some notable exceptions, is the relative lack of sustained attention paid to the lyrical content of punk songs (Ambrosch, 2018; Davies, 1996; Gelbart, 2011; Laing, 1985). Yet punk’s raw and provocative lyrics are central to its appeal and are a primary means through which its powerful social critique is conveyed.
In this article, we seek to supplement the literature on the transnational lives of punk through a comparative analysis of punk lyrics in early US and UK punk and recent Chinese punk. Our argument is that while punk has often been defined through reference to its origin moments in the US and UK, the adoption of punk practices of ‘resistance’ and do-it-yourself culture making in other national contexts deserve further attention. Punk, we argue, can be understood as a set of durable cultural practices and tools for resistance that are applicable in other cultural contexts with no diminution of their authenticity. Ongoing processes of punk reinvention and renewal, we argue, taking places in locations such as China, demonstrate that punk both endures and yet is endlessly made and remade in so far as its key themes and practices recur in cultural contexts unimagined by early punks. Punk can thus be understood as an instance of how processes of globalization and localization are intertwined in a complex matrix of network flows such that it is increasingly difficult to trace a ‘pure’ origin point for transnational cultural forms, even as local practices remain distinctive and faithful to their context (Huq, 2006, p. 39).
Consistent with our focus on punk in China, our approach, further, is mobilized by an impulse to challenge colonialist modes of cultural criticism and historicism. By undertaking a comparative analysis of punk lyrics in these three sites, we seek to de-Westernize assumptions about punk practice, which tend to centre 1970s US and UK punk practices and Western experience and carry an implicit colonial stance that tends to render non-Western experience ‘inauthentic’. Rather than understanding punk in terms of the authenticity of its foundational moments, we argue, it is potentially more revealing to understand punk as a culturally mobile and durable set of ethical and aesthetic practices far more versatile than a focus on punk’s origin myths permits. As such, our approach is inspired by recent calls to decolonize and de-Westernize scholarly practices in media and cultural studies more generally (Curran & Park, 2005; Thussu, 2018; Waisbord & Mellado, 2014; Wang, 2011). This includes Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2008) call to decentre Western universalism by ‘provincializing’ theoretical practice to re-emphasize local meanings; a practice that challenges, even, the ways in which de-Westernizing can inadvertently recentre the West (see authors). We also seek to embrace what Ana Alacovska and Rosalind Gill (2019) have called an ‘ex-centric’ approach based in decentring Western experience in scholarly practice and, following Guo-Ming Chen and Yoshitaka Miike (2006), seek to question foundational assumptions about what constitutes knowledge with particular attention to Asian-Western dynamics. Kuan-Hsing Chen’s (2010) concept of ‘Asia as method’ is similarly useful as a frame to reconsider cultural regionalization. As he argues, the West has served as fragment internal to the local formation of modernity rather than the sole point of reference; a point we wish to take onboard in our consideration of Chinese punk. Following Chen’s example, rather than understanding 1970s US and UK punk as a benchmark against which other forms of punk should be judged, we assume other self-described punk cultures are valid and work from Chinese punk back to early US and UK punk to ask how the ongoing lives of the punk impact Western understandings of punk culture.
Our approach, too, is consistent with that taken by other scholars of punk who understand punk as a translocal phenomenon, defined by DIY practices of resistance, that Kevin Dunn has called ‘global punk’ (2016). Jian Xiao and Jim Donaghey (2022) describe how
Punks embrace this ‘global punk’ network and are acutely conscious of its contours—it is only in the repression against these punk communities (or in some academic circles) that the ‘cultural imperialist’ framing is maintained, with punk in Indonesia and China dismissed by the authorities (or scholars) as Western imports.
As Paula Guerra and Andy Bennett (2015, p. 501) have said of punk practices in Portugal:
Our perspective is thus the opposite of the understanding of punk as a form of cultural imperialism or as a straightforward British invasion. Instead, we suggest that punk was brought forth by a process of cultural eclecticism; it is (re) appropriated and redefined on a local level, in accordance with local resources and needs, in a process that mixes the global characteristics of punk and its local idiosyncrasies.
To demonstrate the ongoing translocal lives of punk we take a comparative approach, analysing the lyrics of punk songs from the US, UK and China in two different periods, the late 1970s in the case of the US and UK and from the late 1990s to the present in the case of China. These periods have been chosen because they are formative in the history of punk in each country. The nations have been chosen on the basis that the US and UK are generally regarded as foundational punk nations, each with its own history, notwithstanding debate about whether punk ‘began’ in the US or UK (Lentini, 2003). China has been chosen because it is relatively neglected in the literature despite a strong punk scene that we argue provides a telling example of how punk practices offer versatile tools for political expression and resources for resistance in a climate of extreme repression. The core of the analysis is a content analysis of lyrics from 30 1970s US and 30 1970s UK punk songs to demonstrate the concerns of punk in its canonical, foundational mode and its focus on questions of resistance, repression, alienation, conformism, and relationships and sexuality. The thematic content of these songs is compared to that of 60 Chinese punk songs written and performed in Chinese and English from the formative moment of Chinese punk in the late 1990s to the present. In the case of China more songs have been analysed in part to match the combined UK and US sample of 60 songs, in part to canvass the over 20-year time span involved, which encompasses the three main periods of Chinese punk; pioneering, developing and diversifying (Xiao, 2018). While this process is not comprehensive, we argue that it is sufficient to establish a sense of the durability and consistency of punk subcultural strategies of resistance across time and place.
Punk Histories, Subcultures and Resistance
Punk culture is a complex phenomenon that gives rise to multiple conceptual questions that bear on our analysis. The first of these is definitional. There is no single definition of punk and the question of how to define punk itself raises questions to do with periodicity, authenticity, style and politics. Punk, we take it, is a particular cultural formation that most famously emerged in New York in 1974–1976, followed by the emergence of the British punk scene in London in 1976–1978. Another point of origin was Australia, with the formation of seminal punk band The Saints in 1973 and the release in 1976 of their first single,
The concept of resistance is consistently invoked to understand punk practices. Early accounts understood punk as a mainly symbolic and impotent class-based subcultural reaction to the dominant culture (see Hebdige, 1979). Through exploring the working class’s social experiences, Hebdige’s analysis of subculture centres on ‘imagination’ and its subversive sense occurs through its creative invention and reinvention (Blackman, 2020). Subsequent studies, in particular post-subcultural analysis, moved away from the subcultures frame to focus on ‘scenes’, conceptualized as a space for gathering that is bounded by music taste rather than class (Bennett, 2011; Peterson & Bennett, 2004; Straw, 1991). A critique is further provided by Blackman (2014) who points out that post-subculture theory has ignored collective social formations within wider social, historical and political moments, and avoided critical engagement with issues of class, feminism and ethnicity by focusing on individual meaning in subcultural practice. Consistent with the ongoing critique of earlier subcultural models, particularly the Birmingham School subcultural theory, J. Patrick Williams (2011) has reintroduced the resistance paradigm through a three-dimension account of subcultural resistance via which consumptive acts of youth resistance can be understood as meaningful micro-oriented resistance to class conflicts, in contrast to early accounts that dismissed punk as a mere gesture towards macro-oriented resistance. According to Williams (2011, p. 104), private subcultural spaces function as useful gathering spaces that while covert can nevertheless be understood as meaningful sites of resistance ‘intended to foster social change’. An important component of punk resistance is do-it-yourself culture, which frames itself as resistance to the dominance of capitalism through practices of self-making, for example by refusing to sign with major labels and setting up small record labels, and through self-promoted gigs, self-made fashion and so on. As Kevin Dunn (2016, p. 38) argues, ‘Through its employment of DIY, punk offers a guide for action and self-empowerment’.
There is ongoing disagreement about the ‘resistance’ paradigm as a framework for understanding punk. For example, Raymond A. Patton (2018, p. 7) argues that the resistance paradigm is a hangover from subcultural studies and that in its place no compelling alternative model has emerged ‘to explain the sociopolitical relevance of a cultural phenomenon like punk’. Ethnographic research suggests that ‘resistance’ is not so much an artefact of scholarly framing but is spontaneously and collectively articulated by punks themselves (Dines et al., 2017; Dunn, 2016; Guerra, 2018; Xiao, 2018). As Augusto Santos Silva and Paula Guerra (2017, p. 219) argue,
Punk’s discourse is hyper-political, because it puts directly into question the power structures of the surrounding society and has special predilection for the ‘inconvenient’ problematization, with no limits nor conditions, of some of the most untouchable values (such as the military and religious institutions, and the national symbols, etc.), and because it often promises nothing less than the violent, total destruction of that order, regardless of how democratic it can be.
While Patton is sceptical of the resistance paradigm, he nevertheless convincingly argues that more contextual analysis is needed to understand how punk is intertwined with and functions as a response to, the changing global politics of the late Cold War era, a point relevant to our analysis. Patton (2018, p. 9) identifies four such contexts. The first of these is ‘the third wave of globalization of the 1970s, as the Second and Third worlds gradually merged into the global capitalist economy’. The second is ‘the cultural watershed often described as the era of postmodernity and postmodern culture’, which Patton (2018, p. 9) argues is ‘important for contextualizing punk amid contemporary developments in popular culture and avant-garde artistic circles’ given ‘the blurring of high and low culture, the integration of the aesthetic and the everyday, and the collapse of metanarratives structuring the modern world’. The third is ‘a transformation of subcultures…spurred on by the globalization of the music industry, the spread of market capitalism, and the advent of postmodern culture’ (Patton, 2018, p. 9). The fourth is ‘a transformation in the relationships between politics and culture that might be described as the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics’. As Patton (2018, p. 10) argues, punk is ‘intertwined with the transition from the late Cold War world to a new era, defined by global neoliberalism and politics expressed primarily in terms of cultural identity rather than socioeconomics’.
While Patton’s account is Western-centric, his point that we take up here is that punk, wherever it has emerged, has done so in the context of social rupture. Economic decline, the end of post-war consensus politics and the adoption of neoliberal, marketized approaches to governance in the West from the mid-1970s onwards is one such rupture. In ‘peripheral’ locations such as Portugal, Indonesia and China, punk emerged alongside social rupture that included in Portugal the democratic revolution of 1974 (Guerra & Santos Silva, 2015), in Indonesia the decline in the 1990s of the authoritarian New Order and its replacement with a form of oligarchic neoliberalism (S. Martin-Iverson, 2012), and in China the wake of the ‘opening up’ of 1979 and the reassertion of power by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1980s (Xiao, 2018).
Here it is important to briefly map out some of the specifics of these contexts with respect to punk in China, which emerged in the 1990s, a period of burgeoning economic prosperity and cultural openness due to reforms led by Deng Xiaoping, as well as of declining political rights as the CCP reasserted its dominance. These reforms forced Chinese youth to confront a changing society in the process of integrating individualistic values into collective-oriented social values, with an emphasis on the centrality of the family and conformity with state power (Weber, 2002). Young people lost the security of stable social structures and career paths yet found themselves subject to new curbs on freedom. The chronology of Chinese punk divides into three periods. The first, from 1993 to 1995, saw the emergence of pioneering artists such as He Yong and bands such as Underbaby and Catcher in the Rye, which presented themselves as the voice of alienated youth. The lyrics of Underbaby’s ‘awakening’ no doubt expressed many young peoples’ attitudes in this transitional period: ‘leave me alone, like I am leaving this society’. Even more symbolically they expressed an aggressive attitude towards the status quo of Chinese society: ‘then let me blow myself completely. I want to take my blood and excrements, and throw all of it on the flag’. The second phase, from 1996 to 1998, was a period of rapid development that saw the emergence of bands such as New Pants, SMZB and post-punk bands such as PK14 in the context of growing individuation and the emergence of Chinese market society. The contemporary period from the early 2000s onwards witnessed more variety in punk music as it intermingled with other styles. While many classical Western punk bands enjoyed considerable fame and, in some cases commercial success, Chinese punk is through all three periods a distinctly underground affair, conducted against the grain of highly repressive state security. From this perspective, we can see that punk subculture is engaged with the social structure and emphasizes the collectivity of young people’s identity. The lyrics can be seen as a reflection of this subculture.
Punk Lyrics and Performativity
Lyrics are a basic component of songs yet are never simply words. As Simon Frith argues, a song, to be meaningful, needs to be performed and the words spoken out. In considering lyrics it is thus necessary to consider performance conventions which, as Frith (1989, pp. 90–91) argues, ‘are used to construct our sense of both their singers and ourselves, as listeners’, since ‘Songs aren’t just any old speech act—by putting words to music, songwriters give them a new sort of resonance and power’. In the case of punk, performance is absolutely paramount. Punk is the music of rejection. A key aspect of punk performativity, as Greil Marcus (1990) has explained, is ugliness and a self-conscious articulation of being out of place. This was music designed not to be played on radio. The British punk bands that followed the Sex Pistols, as Marcus (1990, p. 75) says, played music ‘so brutal, haphazard, or obscene, that airplay was out of the question’. This anti-aesthetic extends through every aspect of early punk performativity, from fashion to haircuts, to the delivery of songs. Machine gun guitar riffs, aggressive bass lines and speed drumming are part of the punk aesthetic as much as fashion ‘shock tactics’ such as the use of swastikas, safety pins and razor blades as fashion statements.
We agree with Frith that lyrics, to take on their full meaning, must be performed. But this does not mean that there are no insights to be gained from studying lyrics as stand-alone units of meaning. Lyrics, as Gerfried Ambrosch (2018, p. 19) argues, ‘have a poetic life of their own, independent of vocalization’. In what follows we understand lyrics as a form in which punk musicians express their ideas in ways open to interpretation and analysis, and to thematic comparison.
Punk lyrics have distinctive characteristics. Dave Laing (1985) has for example pointed out a fundamental difference between mainstream pop lyrics and punk lyrics: the former tends to address lovers whereas the latter addresses individuals such as male friends or male enemies. As a form of protest, there are no lyrics in punk music aimed at a friendly but non-committal listener. Thus, for Laing, punk does not allow politics as persuasion. Lyrics are accordingly frequently bluntly declarative and, indeed, shouted, because ‘lyrics were so full of anger that they could not conceivably be delivered in any other form’ (Ambrosch, 2018, p. 27). A widely acknowledged characteristic of early punk music is its open politics and ethics of refusal. This includes an embrace of themes rarely heard in popular music such as anarchy, gender and sexuality issues, race and ethnicity, and anticapitalism, also encapsulated in punk’s DIY ethos (Ambrosch, 2018).
A related issue is language. The widespread use of English in punk lyrics, as Santos Silva and Guerra (2017) argue, is an important factor in the global spread of punk. Yet the centrality of English helps cement in place a perception that punk elsewhere is secondary and derivative, especially in so far as punks in non-English speaking countries often perform in English. Chinese punks often sing in English for various reasons that include being inspired by Western bands (author interviews with the lead vocalist of Subs and the lead vocalist of SMZB), such that English language usage has been an issue of contention within Chinese punk practice (Xiao, 2016). Yet it is possible to see the use of English not simply as derivative or ‘inauthentic’ but as belonging to a complex performative strategy that may involve, for example, ‘talking back’ to punk’s Western practices and origin narratives as well as speaking to its current transnational communities in the ‘global punk’ network (Dunn, 2016); that is, as part of a process of engaged dialogue with the dynamics of cultural flows.
Accordingly, our analysis of lyrics is not intended to reify their textual meanings into some simplistic reflection of ‘what punks think’. Lyrics are complex interplays of performativity, role playing and modes of address. All may be fictional. We nevertheless argue that, despite these important caveats, punk lyrics are important because by looking across the corpus of lyrics from a given scene and from given bands it is possible to identify how punks frame the dominant concerns that define their subcultures. These concerns can then be located in the historical contexts in which they emerged so as to shed light on the ongoing sociocultural significance of punk.
Analysing the Lyrics
To ascertain continuities and differences between US, UK and Chinese punk lyrics we took an approach based on qualitative content analysis. As discussed above, the US and UK were chosen because they are regarded as foundational originating sites for punk, while Chinese punk scenes emerged two decades after Western punk and potentially provide insights into the durability of punk as a set of cultural practices. At the same time Chinese punk lyrics have received almost no scholarly attention, leaving a gap in the scholarship. The 120 songs that make up the analytical corpus, 30 songs each from the UK and US punk scenes of the 1970s (1975–1979) and 60 songs from the Chinese scene (1998–present), were chosen as follows. In the case of the US and the UK, we selected eight bands from each scene, chosen using a purposive approach on the basis that they are widely regarded as seminal, prominent and central to their respective scenes, and that played a pivotal role in establishing the seminal phase of punk from 1976–1979. In the case of US, bands selected are Bags, Dead Boys, Dead Kennedys, Germs, the Heartbreakers, the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and Television. In the case of the UK we selected Buzzcocks, Sex Pistols, Souxsie and the Banshees, Stiff Little Fingers, The Clash, The Damned, The Undertones and X-Ray Spex. Nine Chinese bands were selected on the basis that they are seminal to the scene and encompass the three main periods of Chinese punk since the 1990s: Demerit, Discord, Hell City, New Pants, Mi San Dao, PK14, SMZB, Underbaby and Ye Hong.
Songs were selected for analysis on the basis of their centrality to the canons of the bands that performed them, based on their status as singles and popularity. Four songs were chosen from each of the UK and US bands, with the exception of the most famous bands in each scene, the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, for which six songs each were chosen. Since Chinese bands vary enormously in the size of their corpus, the number of songs chosen roughly reflects the longevity of their careers as follows: Demerit (9), Discord (3), Hell City (5), New Pants (13), Mi San Dao (3), PK14 (7), SMZB (10), Underbaby (9) and Ye Hong (1). Lyrics for each song were sourced in their original language of performance, including Mandarin in some cases, from a variety of sources such as online lyrics sites and band webpages. The lyrics of each song were then coded using a grounded approach (Charmaz, 2008) to identify major themes and preoccupations across the corpus. While this approach is not completely comprehensive since not all bands or songs from the respective periods and countries could be analysed, and since qualitative coding is to an extent always subjective, it is sufficient to demonstrate thematic continuities across the overall corpus.
The predominant preoccupation across the songs was with resistance to authority, by which, following Williams (2011), we refer to active (as opposed to passive) resistance, expressed via direct calls to resist authority. Such resistance, widely regarded as a hallmark of classical punk (Dines et al., 2017; Dunn, 2016; Guerra, 2018; Xiao, 2018), is an obvious theme in UK punk songs such as The Clash’s ‘Clampdown’ (1979) with its call for action and use anger as power or the Sex Pistols’ pointed refrain to express the desire to be anarchist from ‘Anarchy in the UK’ (1976), or their invocation, in ‘God Save the Queen’ (1977), to refuse social constraint. The Damned’s ultimatum of refusing orders (‘Machine Gun Etiquette’, 1979) expresses a similar will to challenge established loci of power.
The US punk lyrics analysed here, by contrast, are more concerned with individual experience than with collective struggle. Iconic bands such as the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, or Television, have little to say about political resistance. An exception is the Bags, in songs such as ‘Survive’ (1978), with its threat that commodities would be desecrated and rampaging kids are looking for opportunities to kill, or ‘Babylonian Gorgon’ (1978) and its contempt for lying politicians. The Germs, too, offer an open challenge to authority in songs such as ‘Lexicon Devil’ (1979).
These invocations of resistance from Western bands are exceeded by Chinese punk bands, which understand punk as a form uniquely able to express resistance given the authoritarian environment in which they operate. Such resistance is both cultural and political. As Xiao (2018) has argued, Chinese punks resist the mainstream by insisting on their own lifestyle culturally, as well as through their willingness to oppose the Chinese government by offering direct challenges to state power on stage or by organizing performances focused on sensitive topics. In this sense, anti-government speech, either in the form of talking or singing in the public space can pose a threat and as well as being politically risky can risk intervention by government officials. Thus, a persistent theme is critique of the nation, for instance, ‘BYE BYE MY COUNTRY’ from Demerit, or a call for destroying the nation from Hell City.
Since Chinese punk musicians often sing in English, it is not surprising that similar lyrics portraying authorities can be found across the corpus of Chinese songs. For instance, ‘Wall’ as a symbolic term to represent authoritarian control has constantly appeared in songs such as ‘You are Punk’ by the band Mi San Dao with its line, ‘Fuck the government wall’, or in Discord’s song ‘Keep Yourself’, with its line, ‘break the wall on the way’. Hell City’s ‘Dead End’, with its invocation to ‘Keep fire, keep power, ready to fight, knock down the wall’, echoes the lyric about destroying the political wall from The Clash’s ‘Clampdown’, released in 1979. Another contrast in the lyrics can be seen is that Chinese punks use terms such as ‘chaos’, ‘rebellion’ or ‘fight’ rather than terms advocating direct political action, such as ‘protest’ or ‘guerrilla’, as used in British punk. This difference relates to the restricted political environment in China, where public protest is forbidden thus rarely seen. Chinese punk, here, is inspired by Western punk and also responds to a much more repressive political climate in which free speech is forbidden.
The aggressive, highly coded lyrics of Chinese punk are thus often accompanied by a similarly noisy and sometimes violent performance style intended to underpin their political message. For instance, punk musicians often purposely seek to ignite chaos in the audience in the name of pogo or mosh, precisely because of the challenge this chaos poses to government-related institutions.
The flipside of this commitment to resistance and critique is a sense of alienation, expressed as marginalization, pointlessness, disillusion, loneliness and a sense of a lack of future, which emerged as a major preoccupation across the corpus. Perhaps the starkest invocation of punk marginalization is the The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ (1977), with its famous lines about a lack of future. The Buzzcocks sing with a similar desperation about their lack of a future in ‘Boredom’ (1977). US band Bags express a similar sense of alienated pointlessness in ‘Survive’ (1978). In ‘Sonic Reducer’ (1977) the Dead Boys make a decision to depend on no one, and a similar sense of alienated helplessness animates Television in ‘Friction’ (1977). Richard Hell and the Voidoids give US punk perhaps its most famous and starkest invocation of alienation and use the description of the blank generation to name themselves (‘Blank Generation’, 1977). Alienation, for many bands, shades into a wilful celebration of being ‘dumb’, as heard in the Buzzcocks ‘Boredom’ (1977), or in the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’ (1977). For the Ramones the idea that the best response to modern life is to stop thinking is heard in songs such as ‘Teenage Lobotomy’ (1977) or in ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ (1978).
Stark expressions of alienation can be also heard in the lyrics of founding Chinese punk band Underbaby’s first hit, ‘Everything’s the Same’ (1999): ‘I do what I can to hide my inner void’. It can be found too, in much later Chinese punk songs such as Discord’s ‘China Rockers’ (2018): ‘he has been standing on the edge of society’. From another perspective, the Chinese songs clarify the social conditions that lead to alienation, for instance the high life cost of conformism as expressed in the lyric ‘pay the society and the government or you’ll be left by your country’ from SMZB (‘Born to Pay’, 2008), the price paid by those who refuse to conform and who criticize or deviate from the standard lifestyle, as heard in Hell City’s lyric ‘walk on the street, all people dodge you’ (‘Drunk Bastard’, 2015). Despite these echoes, there is a critical difference between these songs and how foundational UK songs express feelings of alienation, for example the Clash’s ‘Lost in the supermarket’ (1979), with its refrain that ‘the silence makes me lonely’. For Chinese punks the decision to become a punk involves making considerable sacrifice with little possibility of reward and every chance of profound social ostracization and high levels of official harassment.
This pairing of resistance and alienation is given context by a strong awareness of political repression, expressed via political critique, found across the corpus. This can be seen in classical UK punk songs, such as The Clash’s ‘Guns of Brixton’ (1979) or Stiff Little Fingers’ ‘Alternative Ulster’ (1979). The general sense of ennui and repression in the period leading up to the election of Margaret Thatcher is summed up in The Damned’s ‘I Just Can’t Be Happy Today’ (1979) in which political power is described as the devil’s command. Song such as the Sex Pistol’s ‘God Save the Queen’ (1977) invokes the possibility of a fascist regime to make an even more direct statement. The Clash’s ‘White Riot’ (1977) laments white passivity compared to the willingness of ‘black people’ to protest.
Such direct invocations of political repression are rare in the US punk songs of the period. An exception is Dead Kennedys’ ‘California Über Alles’ (1979) with its brutal critique of then-California Governor Jerry Brown.
Political repression is a central theme through all the phases of Chinese punk, as evoked in songs such as New Pants’ ‘Love Tear Gas’ (1999), in which they sing ‘Shattered all the meaning of anger/Suppressed you who resisted’. Demerit’s ‘Bye Bye My Country’ (2008) expresses a similar disdain for political authority to accuse leaders of being greedy for money. In ‘Nobody Knows’ (2008) SZMB’s lyrics express anger about innocent victims of history. The band Mi San Dao sings in ‘Fight for the Right’ (2015) about the government’s misbehaviour towards people. In ‘Dead End’ (2015), Hell City accuses the government of shooting at people. In ‘You Are Punk’ (2011), from Mi San Dao band, this critique of political repression is coupled with a rueful reflection on the difficulties of resistance through a punk lifestyle. These lyrics are at the same time evocative. ‘Punk’ in this scenario is likely to represent the Chinese people in general, who are in a political environment that forbids political protest or rebellious political speech in public. A direct manifestation of these restrictions is that the punk musicians often suffer targeted surveillance and the cancellation of performances by officials. Thus, singing about the difficulty of being punk from a punk musicians’ perspective becomes a statement about repression in China, delivered to the global punk scene.
This critique of political repression is for many punk bands coupled with a critique of everyday life more generally, including in many cases a critique of conformism and consumerism, which can be understood as a form of soft resistance. For British punks TV, radio and advertising were popular targets, as seen in lyrics such as The Buzzcocks’ ‘Harmony in my Head’ (1979), with its observation that people are duped by advertising, or the Clash’s pungently sarcastic ‘Koka Kola’ (1979) with its equally savage critique of advertising. Conformism is the target of Souxsie and the Banshee’s ‘Suburban Relapse’ (1978) which positions suburbia as a form of illness. An implicit critique of everyday suburban life can also be heard in the Ramones ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’ (1976). For the protagonist of the Ramones’ ‘Sheena is a Punk Rocker’ (1977), punk offers release from the mundanities of urban conformism.
A similar disenchantment emerges in Chinese songs, as seen in Demerit’s ‘Fuck the Schemers’ (2008) about the despair about their parents’ requirement that they work for a corporation. Their ‘Voice of the People’ (2008) implores people to wake up to the conformist realities of working life. In ‘Ten Year’s Rebellion’ (2008) SMZB sings against the lifestyle of the parent generation. While Chinese society, under Confucianism, encourages conformity to the different levels of authorities, such as the government, parents, or schoolteachers, these Chinese songs express a strong cultural critique through the very act of singing about opposition to their parents.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the reputation of punk for having ‘banished the love song’, relationships and sexuality emerged as themes across the corpus (Marcus, 1990, p. 77). This is most obvious in unabashed love songs such as the Buzzcocks’ ‘Ever Fallen in Love’ (1978), or The Damned’s ‘New Rose’ (1978). This talk of love, however, is often underpinned by cynicism, negation and an emphasis on sex over love. As the Undertones conclude in ‘Teenage Kicks’ (1978), love is purely about ‘kicks’. Love, for Dead Boys, in ‘What Love Is’ (1977), is rendered mechanical. Richard Hell and the Voidoids reduce love to its most basic masculinized physicality: ‘Love Comes in Spurts’ (1977).
In the case of Chinese punk, love emerged as a topic with the emergence of post-punk bands in the second Chinese punk period (from the late 90s to early 2000s). While early Chinese punks sought to recover an ‘authentic’ punk and its ethics of resistance in a context in which there was no prior history of punk and a small population making it or listening to it, Chinese punks of the late 1990s saw little need to hold true to the idiosyncratic exercises of punk’s overseas originators. If, according to Laing (1985), the ‘internal’ communication of punk lyrics mostly addresses male friends or enemies, for the second phase and later Chinese punks the ‘internal’ communication in the lyrics often addresses lovers or would-be-lovers. Compared to the rather bold style of singing about sexuality in songs such as the UK band Buzzcock’s ‘Boredom’ (1977), with its candid emphasis on physical seduction, Chinese punk musicians tend to be more modest in talking about love. The tone of such songs, again, is hardly euphoric. Chinese punks who sing about romantic love often sing with the bitterness of loss in combination with despair about the future. As New Pants put it in ‘I am OK’ (1999):
Today we don’t have girlfriends, Tomorrow we don’t have girlfriends The day after tomorrow we don’t have girlfriends … we don’t have future only have the present. Another song New Pants song, ‘Our Times’ (1999), is bitterly sarcastic about the political role of romantic love: There are no more concerns, everything is about love … This is our times.
Here the despair of not having love or the joy of having love are both contextualized as belonging to a desperate period with no future. The lyrics of other Chinese songs, such as ‘if I need your love, I will ask you to come anytime’ (New Pants, ‘Come and Go’, 1999) or ‘come come come we need you, you are our only one’ (New Pants, ‘Hey, You!’ 1999), demonstrate a mode of love that is individualistic and self-centred, which potentially shows the gradual transformation of a society based on collective values to one with an individualistic orientation. Meanwhile, some of the love songs can demonstrate the challenging and resistant aspects of the mainstream value. For instance, P.K. 14 sing in ‘Comrades’ (2001), ‘You know you have to pay for love’. ‘Comrades’ can mean a member of the same communist or socialist political party as the person speaking. Nevertheless, according to online discussions on the P.K. 14’s Douban forum gathered by their fans, 1 the song ‘Comrades’ has a deeper meaning and is interpreted as a song describing homosexuality. The lyrics ‘you know you should pay for love’ implicates that gay and lesbian lovers have to constantly struggle against mainstream norms and values in Chinese society, as the LGBT community are marginalized and very often unaccepted by Chinese authoritative units such as the government, school and parents. In that sense, the intention of resisting can go along with a turn of individualistic-oriented trends, vividly demonstrated in the lyrics.
Conclusion
As this brief analysis demonstrates, Chinese punk, while inspired by Western punk, does not simply rehearse its concerns but rearticulates punk practices of resistance and DIY and uses them as a tool for critique in their local, Chinese context, in the wake of the economic opening up, individuation and authoritarian repression, that characterize post-1989 China. By decentring Western experience, it is possible to understand punk as a durable and adaptable toolbox of ideas and forms of expression with translocal and transnational applicability. By mobilizing ‘Asia as method’ and centring Chinese punk as authentic to its local ‘provincialized’ contexts, Western punk can be understood as necessary to but not determinate of Chinese punk practice. In China, as in the UK and US, punk operates as a specific response to the social rupture associated with marketized economic reform (Patton, 2018), and to the plight of young people as a result of those reforms. Where US punk speaks to disillusion and UK punk openly advocates insurrection, Chinese punk wants to create ‘chaos’, a code term for a social insurrection that cannot otherwise be advocated. In assuming that the ‘margins’ of punk practice deserve to be understood as no less ‘authentic’ than the Western ‘centre’ (Chen, 2010), we provide, we hope, grounds for understanding the recent resurgence of punk on the global ‘margins’ not as a belated echo of Western punk but as an expression of the ongoing applicability of punk as an ethical response and form of resistance to ongoing, political crisis and their impact on young people.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Research on urban cultural governance from the perspective of creative field, supported by ‘the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, 2022’.