Girls were made for housework and boys were made to fight, andthe naughty pictures on page 3 make everything all right:

approaches towards teaching punk – complexities, ambiguitiesand profanities.

I was recently sent an email asking my views on the idea of

punk pedagogy by a fellow popular music scholar. ‘I recently

saw your call for papers on the pedagogy of punk rock,’ he

begins ‘[and] I have to say as a scholar of popular music, the

call for papers left me scratching my head a bit’. He

continues, ‘why would punk rock need to be taught in academia?

I thought the whole point of punk rock was that it was anti-

establishment and against any kind of orthodoxy? I’m not sure

enshrining the music in academia is really in the best

interests of the music. Also, isn’t the charm of punk…that the

artists figure out how to do stuff themselves and present the

music in their own way?’ Of course I had thought about the

problems with ‘teaching’ punk. But this email kind of brought

it home to me. Was the guy right? Should we really be

‘enshrining’ the music in academia? Is that what we’ve already

done with the music of Mozart, Schubert and Mahler? I mean,

The Beatles are taught on the AQA A-Level syllabus alongside

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Beethoven, and Oasis are transcribed within the Edexcel A-

Level Music Anthology along with the rest of the Western musical

canon. Would punk be on an A-Level syllabus next, taught to

youngsters as they sit behind a desk, where they are given

pogoing and spitting lessons and with curriculum design being

concerned with upsetting old ladies at bus stops: a kind of

armchair DiY culture gone wrong?

Of course, there has also been a rather ambivalent

relationship between punk and the educational establishment.

‘I don’t wanna be learned’ sang The Ramones, ‘I don’t wanna be

tamed,’ accompanied by their notorious back-to-basic

aesthetic; with The Dead Kennedys pulling on the analogy of

the primate to describe their experience within the school

system: ‘You really like gorillas? We’ve got the pet for you,

it’s the way you’re forced to act, to survive our schools.’ Or

indeed, the all-girl punk band The Devotchkas, who have an

emotional take on the system: ‘sitting in his office behind

his desk, Harvard badge on his wall – he thinks he’s the best,

a smile on his face to seem like he cares I’m just another

troubled youth holding back the tears’.

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So, as a music scholar I’m beginning to wonder if it’s all

worth it. I mean, colleagues within the field feel that punk

shouldn’t really be on the curriculum, and punk itself doesn’t

really want to be on the curriculum either, and musical

analyses – I mean, if we turn to writers such as Heinrich

Schenker and Rudolph Reti for example – don’t really tell us

anything new about punk (we all knew it was just three chords

going over and over again didn’t we?) We also know that that

it can also be pretty noisy at times, with the shouting of

unintelligible subject matter, it’s not something that you

would want to listen to whilst relaxing at home and isn’t the

sort of music we would like to see on an academic syllabus.

But is this really the whole story? I mean, should we just say

that due to its musical simplicity, its anti-establishment

stance and its Mohawk haircuts, that we should leave punk well

alone?

Obviously, I believe that we should not. Leave it alone, I

mean. And my apologies to Schenkerian and popular culture

scholars with us today: but I’ve clearly been playing agent

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provocateur. Schenker never meant his method of musical

analysis to be used on such a simple style as punk. Moreover,

not all punks wear Mohawk haircuts, and not all punks are

particularly anti-establishment. In fact, some were really

funny, such as The Ejected’s ‘Have You Got 10p?’ or

Slodgenessabounds’ ‘Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisp

Please’, a triple A-side single shared with the two other

tracks – ‘Simon Templar’ and ‘Michael Booth’s Talking Bum’ –

released in 1980 and which gained number 7 in the UK singles

chart. Furthermore, if we dig deeper, we find that punk was

not merely around in the UK in 1977, and was not really just

about The Sex Pistols, The Clash or, indeed, on an

ethnographic basis, London and Manchester. Instead one can

argue that punk lies within a wider context: one that needs to

be studied; needs to be on the curriculum; and one that needs

to be heard.

But, the question arises of how we teach it. Within Cultural

Studies circles, the study of punk – or, should I say ‘youth

culture’ – has been apparent since the inception of the

University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural

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Studies formed in 1964. With Richard Hoggart as its first

Director, the Centre emphasised a new intellectual approach to

looking at popular culture and subculture, drawing upon a

myriad of theoretical frameworks, including Marxism, post-

structuralism and feminism (to name but a few) to raise

questions over and explore the complexities of popular

culture. Indeed, influenced by his studying within the CCCS,

Dick Hebdige was one of the first to engage with punk, writing

his book Subculture: The Meaning of Style in 1979.

Hebdige’s book is a pretty good read. I mean, it has its

obvious problems – not least in the way in which Hebdige

doesn’t actually talk to any ‘real life’ punks when embracing

his ideas on homology, bricolage and semiotics, it is still

the seminal work from which everyone seems to take as their

starting point. If you’ve written an essay on subculture, a

PhD on punk or a Masters thesis on mod culture, then you have

definitely referenced his work. Indeed, it is a brave attempt

to try to pull-apart and unpack the notion of subcultures. In

his work on punk, for instance, he notes the ‘orderliness’ in

the chaotic: the way in which for the outsider, the subculture

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appears almost fragmented – safety-pins, bondage trousers and

brothel creepers – but from inside the subculture, those items

make sense: they come together to create a cohesive whole.

It seems to me that this is a microcosm of Hebdige’s work. A

sociologist trying to make sense of this ‘otherness’, this

youth culture of contradictions and inconsistencies, and

trying to dismantle this world for the reader and observer.

What is glaringly obvious, however, is the way in which

Hebdige becomes this font of academic and theoretical

placement. He draws upon anthropological and sociological

ideas so almost prove his theories, instead of allowing punk

the room to unfold and declare itself on a more holistic

level.

I would argue, therefore, that Hebdige’s critique almost

reflects a teacher-led approach towards the teaching of punk.

Here, repertoire, subcultural values and ethnography are

explored and unpacked from the top. Canonical works are

established and seldom held up to scrutiny, as the major

players of the punk scene are rolled out time and time again:

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the Pistols, The Damned, The Clash, etc., etc. Moreover,

ethnographic considerations are often overlooked: the centre

of punk was of course London, with a close second being

Manchester. Timescale too, reflects this stringent framework:

the ‘heyday’ of punk was 1977, the Silver Jubilee, the moment

that the post-war consensus had finally fallen on its face.

Punk, put simply, was a reaction to all of this, and perhaps

not much more. Mohawks, bondage trousers, spitting and

swearing on the Bill Grundy show. Easy.

Yet, when the teacher – or, in this case the author – become

the sole-transmitter, then the varying complexities and

intricacies of punk are left at the side of the road.

Importance is shifted from subculture to the theoretical, or

from understanding to learning. In other words, there becomes

little room for the student to explore his or her own

understanding of the subculture: little room for students to

express their opinions and ideas, and little room for those

involved in the punk subculture to contribute to the debate:

instead theories are ‘rolled out’ and validated, without any

real analysis of punk. I was at a conference recently, where

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one academic paper discussed the way in which anarcho-punks

and so-called ‘first-wave’ punks – such as those who followed

The Exploited – did not get on, and in fact Crass (an anarcho-

punk band) had openly criticised The Exploited on a number of

occasions. Unfortunately for the academic, however, Penny

Rimbaud from Crass was at the conference, and was able to put

the individual right: Crass had never been rude about The

Exploited, and in fact Wattie, the lead singer and Penny both

got on really well at the time, playing at the same gigs on a

number of occasions. Rumours, gossips and Chinese whispers had

merely created this façade of a relationship.

Furthermore, if we look at the Sex Pistols in 1977 you will

find, for example, that there aren’t actually any mohicans,

nor ripped-jeans and Dr. Marten boots: in fact, as you can

see, the Pistols were more influenced by the clothing of the

teddy-boys than punks: but is that because ‘punk’, as we know

it, was not ‘invented’ then? But, if that’s the case, what

were the Sex Pistols? Weren’t they (aren’t they) the ‘fathers’

of punk? But what about the ways in which punk developed,

incorporating many new strands of subversion: the

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politicisation of the anarcho-punk scene, the feminism of Riot

Grrrl and the anti-racist stance of bands such as the Cockney

Rejects or Cock Sparrer? Punk was far more about just the

pogoing, far more than the Pistols and certainly far more than

just a London-centric phenomenon.

Indeed, if we are look at the ethnographic significance of

punk, then one can see how an analysis of subculture cannot

merely be made through this placement of grand, meta-

discourses such as bricolage and homology, without first

talking to those who are part-and-parcel of that culture. Punk

was played out very differently to individuals who lived in

places such as Norwich, Newcastle and Bristol. Sounds were

different, political focus was diverse and subcultural symbols

had differing connotations and meaning. Even more so,

individuals within those scenes had varied experiences. Can

you compare a 16 year-old punk in St Ives to an 18 year-old

punk in Carlisle? How much difference does distance and age

change their perspective of punk? How much more isolated did

they feel not being ‘part’ of the London (or Manchester)

scene?

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Yet, if we have problems with this method, should we therefore

teach punk from the bottom-up? Should we be teaching punk from

a predominantly student-led pedagogy? Although student-centred

learning stretches back towards the writings of Hayward (1905)

and Dewey (1950s) it is widely perceived that the ‘father’ of

this method was the writer and theorist Carl Rogers. In his

book Freedom to Learn for the ‘80s, for instance, Rogers notes the

shift from the ‘teacher-knows-all’ approach towards the

student learner, driven by the need for an environment where

students become passive, apathetic and bored. Instead,

students are placed within the centre of the learning process,

are given a more central role in the development of the

curriculum and are given more of a say so in pedagogical

matters.

Before I continue, I would like to emphasise that there is not

a clear delineation between an active learning method and a

passive method of teaching (i.e., the teacher-led approach).

Instead, it may be more useful to consider both methods as

terms at either end of a continuum, with the possibility of

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moving further or closer to each method. To think of these two

approaches as being mere opposites would not only simplify

their pedagogical positions, but would also undervalue the

dynamic nature of both. Of course, both are needed in learning

(and, in this case, subcultural debate), and both are needed

to provide a balance of influence from both: here I am merely

using both frameworks to highlight an ethnographic analogy.

In this case, a student-led approach towards punk would

involv

However, one could argue that the ideas surrounding the very

basis of punk – intelligent political debate, inclusion of

feminist, anti-fascist and queer ideologies – and their

inclusion within the classroom is not just an issue that

involves the teacher/student-led educational dichotomy.

Indeed, a more subtle and inclusive analysis of punk pedagogy

could be seen through the lens of the notion of critical

pedagogy, developed by the likes of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux

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and Peter McLaren. Here, punk values are enabled within

pedagogy, as authoritarian affinities, development of

consciousness and the questioning of power per se, becomes

part and parcel of the learning process. ‘Habits of thought,

reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface

meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official

pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere

opinions’, notes Ira Shor, in an attempt to define the notion

of critical pedagogy’. She continues by noting that it is in

able ‘to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social

context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action,

event, object, process, organization, experience, text,

subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse.’ (Empowering

Education, 129)

In this sense, marginality – an often-quoted inherent trait of

punk – ceases to be seen as the negative, and instead becomes

a source of empowerment. In both the learning and the teaching

of the global punk scene, therefore, one brings into play a

range of social, political, religious and philosophical

ideologies. From the anarcho-punk scene of the 1980s, to the

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American straightedge scene; from the Riot Grrrl Movement

espousing feminist ideals, to the Hare Krishna crossover

between straightedge and ISKCON (Krishnacore); from the

tenacity of DiY scenes all over the world, including those in

Iran, China and Indonesia, to the LGBT aesthetic within

Queercore. Punk has used a myriad of devices and practices to

side step and undermine authority.

Another way of looking at this stance can be seen through

Peter Woods’ idea of ‘alienated learning’, found in his paper

‘Critical Students: Breakthroughs in Learning’. Here, Woods

notes how learning in schools is almost alienated at source,

‘in the sense that it consists of other people’s knowledge

purveyed in transmissional mode. Pupils have no share in the

knowledge or any control over the learning processes. In

addition, it is difficult to see the relevance of such

learning for their own interests’. Woods’ observations are

useful, because it highlights the often disconnected – almost

objective – education that some music students around us

experience: they are told what repertoire to listen to, what

is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ and, on a more subtle level, told

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how to listen to it. Shostakovich and the Beatles become

therefore measurable in terms of an A-Level examination, and

‘real’, ‘proper’, ‘right’ use of harmony can be found in

Reimensheider’s 371 Bach Chorales. Instead, as Woods, notes

critical pedagogues ‘aim to empower students through

emancipating them from ideologies and discriminatory

practices’.

Woods discusses a case-study whereby a teacher – named here as

‘Peter’ – compares two very different learning experiences:

one from the school environment, and the second from his own

fascination in the natural world. At first, he talks of the

experience that gained at school, an environment that was

‘constraining, directive [and] alienative’. On the other hand,

he talks of the autonomous, the holistic, realistic and, as

Wood describes it, ‘totally absorbing world of nature’.

Moreover, Woods notes that,

It is what gave him a point of reference, his epistemological

framework, for defining other situations. It gave him

choices, where the world of school stamped them out. It was

expansive, not restrictive; inspiring rather than deadening;

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educative rather than indoctrinating; co-operative rather

than conflictual…This kind of escape was a necessary tonic

for him to balance the alienative forces of school and to

maintain the fine productive edge of marginality. But the

school viewed marginality as deviant. Degradation ceremonies

were frequent.

Obviously one has to be careful in romanticizing this

marginality, but Peter’s experience sounds very similar to my

own experiences being a young mod, then, punk and then crusty.

I remember as a teenager (about 13) listening to The Who and

The Kinks, and experiencing this holistic aesthetic that was a

sharp contrast to the strict, rules-based environment of the

classroom. From The Who I graduated to Hendrix, and from

Hendrix to the Pistols, and from the Pistols to bands such as

The Subhumans, Jesus and Marychain, The Smiths and Bauhaus. I

became fascinated with subculture, loved going to gigs, loved

spiking my hair on its end and loved going to festivals. At

school I was merely going through the motion; but when I was

out at the weekend hanging around in bikers’ pubs and watching

punks and National Front skins beating each other up, I felt

alive.

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But my own positioning within each subculture also had more

depth than just music, pubs and spikey-hair. In Hebdige’s

world, my own use of the various items when I was a mod, for

example – the parka, the jam-shoes, the hair-cut and the

fascination with scooters – and the way in which I was the

bricoleur, plundering from the past to build my own identity

is useful: but at the time I was more concerned with growing

quicker. My parka that I had, the one I’d saved up for and

bought from my local ex-government store was way too big for

me. In fact, it was like a bloody tent, and of course I didn’t

really need to wear it, as I was far too young to ride a

scooter anyway, and so I was more of a ‘plastic’ mod than a

‘real’ one.

Then, as I moved towards my ‘punk’ days, the frustration in

the lack of decent hair-products came to the fore. We had a

gel called ‘Shockwaves’, but this stuff wasn’t that good, and

to keep our hair spikey we had to back-comb the hell out of

it, after blow-drying it whilst standing on our heads. And then,

to really keep ‘it up’ we would use soap, only for it to tip

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down with rain on the way to the pub. At least in my crusty

days I had little to worry about in that department, as I grew

dreads, didn’t wash and basically looked as if I was living on

the streets. Which was also quite embarrassing, as I was

living at home at the time; which didn’t quite fit with the

image. I mean, these are pretty laughable examples, but to me,

they were real at that time.

Moreover, with hindsight, my own marginality was already in

place. At school I was told I was thick. But, when I went on

holiday with my family at the age if 13 – where I was reading

Dostoyevsky – with hindsight there was something adrift. Also,

my own parents have never read a book from start to finish,

let alone one of a Russian genius such as this, and so they

had no idea that I was reading this kind of stuff. I was

already playing Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, even though my

parents were not that musical. I mean, my dad likes The

Beatles – only the early stuff though – and the reason he

likes that is because ‘that was when music was music’.

Therefore, as I grew up, my marginality was already secured.

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And if my folks and my teachers didn’t quite know how to deal

with me, then I was at a loss too.

But of course, through this ‘negativity’ I now stand here. But

it is only because of the experience of marginality that I am

able to have such a perspective on my own learning, and of

course my own teaching. Furthermore, the discussion of

critical pedagogy also brings us back to the earlier

discussion of the Birmingham school. As I have already noted,

one of the chief concerns with writers such as Hebdige was his

lack of dialogue with those involved in the subculture in

which he was writing. In other words, Hebdige would almost

test his hypothesis by those means that sit neatly within his

rationing. A good example, for instance can be found in his

non-inclusion of middle-class kids in his discussion of punk,

an oversight that means that his ideas and thoughts around the

classification of that subculture in terms of class to be a

tad flawed. This was, however, put right a number of years

later when sociologists and musicologists alike took on the

anthropological idea of the ethnographic study as a means to

uncover the mores, values and ideas underpinning a given

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subculture. Indeed, it is only recently, through the work of

Sheila Whitelely, Stan Hawkins and Andy Bennett that the term

‘subculture’ has been wholly dismantled, in favour of the term

‘scene’.

This dialogue between subculture and sociologist/musicologist

therefore set up a new set of dynamic relationships:

relationships that I feel are just as important in the

classroom and lecture theatre. Indeed, to highlight such a

relationship, we need only to go back to the late-1980s to the

Department of Education and Science’s Task Group on Assessment and

Testing – A Report. Here, the Task Force recommended using a wide

range of presentational skills for the assessment of students

‘in order to widen the pupils’ abilities that they reflect and

so to enhance educational validity’. Although one could argue

that the report did not go far enough in its analysis – as

argued by Patricia Murphy in ‘Integrating Learning and

Assessment – it may indeed be a useful framework in which to

explore further the ideas around punk pedagogy.

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Murphy critiques the learning and assessment process within

constructivist and socioculturalist frameworks. Being a

dominant view of education over the last few decades,

constructivism is useful because it mirrors the relationship

between ethnographer and subcultural practitioner, but this

time in the classroom. Used as an umbrella term,

constructivism ‘is essentially a theory of knowledge which

involves conceptions of the learner, of knowledge and the

relationship between them’. As such, those working within a

constructionist framework believe that students are not merely

passive learners, but also active individuals, where knowledge

is transformed and appropriated actively by each student. In

other words, ‘it is…widely held by constructivists that

personal knowledge rather than informing us about the world

tells us about our experiences and they are best organized’.

There are, of course, issues with the constructivist set of

ideals. In the most extreme of cases, students are almost seen

to be isolated individuals, failing to take into account of

the socially constituted nature of those individuals. As such,

socio-cultural theories have stemmed from the former’s more

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conceptual approach. Here, ‘the basic goal …is to create an

account of human mental processes that recognizes the

essential relationship between those processes and their

cultural, historical and institutional settings’. As such,

teacher and students alike come to share meaning and import

through negotiation and discussion. As he psychologist Jerome

Bruner points out, ‘implicit, semi-connected knowledge of the

world from which through negotiation people arrive at

satisfactory ways of acting in given contexts’.

As such, pupils are encouraged to be actively engaged in

thinking and learning. Whereas constructivists often argue

that pupils’ interpretations are private, and that meaning is

often individualised, and thus to an extent unknowable,

socioculturalists consider that meaning derived in interaction

is not exclusively a product of the individual. Instead, ‘we

should think of an individual acting in a setting engaged in

relational activities with others’. As such, they believe that

pupils act in a way that reflects a shared understanding of

those around them: in other words, socioculturalists emphasise

‘the homogeneity of people in established communities and look

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for patterns in social and cultural practices’. In conclusion,

‘human knowledge from this perspective is therefore situated in

that activity’ is not separate to learning but is indeed part

of the process; it is the action itself that provides the

learning and cognition for that individual.

In my own experience therefore, it was the marginality that

constituted my own experience – both as a punk and as a

scholar, as a teenager and as a musician. Cultural practices I

found within the punk subculture – in particular those in the

anarcho-punk circles – began to inform the way in which I

acted, the texts that I read and the way in which I viewed the

world around me. Musical material began to inform my

consciousness through a process of self-reflection and self-

analysis. Not in a Freudian sense, but through the application

of subcultural – and anarchistic – ideals on those around me.

I began to trust people, I began to look outside the box,

began questioning my own ideas and views and, most

importantly, began questioning the punk subculture itself.

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Perhaps to highlight this position, we could turn to the

anarcho-punk Culture Shock. During the early-1980s, punk

became increasingly politicised, turning the chaotic anarchism

of the Pistols into a more political-based anarchism, and thus

drawing upon ideas of planned and predetermined discontent.

Bands such as The Subhumans, Zound and Crass began to

criticise capitalism: but not through the ‘anarchy and chaos

in the UK’ as is evident in the Pistols work, but rather

through intelligent debate and lyrical content. You have

indeed already heard The Subhumans: they were played at the

beginning of this lecture, as well as their lyrics are part of

the title. From The Subhumans Dick Lucas, the lead-singer and

lyricist formed the band Culture Shock; and as well as the

grand machines of capitalism, he turned his lyrics towards the

individual.

A good example of this is the rather long – in punk terms

‘I.S.D.’ – which lasts for six minutes, Meaning ‘Instinctive

Spontaneity Drive’, the track conjures up this feeling of

self-reflection and examination that I talked of briefly

above. It begins with the negative, ‘the stagnant presumption

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that nothing can be as good as it was in the books, the girl

who lives up to her looks’. But continues with a

deconstruction – and a positive – investigation of morality,

of the issues concerning dissent – ‘til our slogans descend

into figures of speech’ and the ultimate positivity in this

marginality. ‘But forget it, it won’t ever happen to you, if

you’re feeling down and they want you to, up’s the direction

to glorify in’.

Furthermore, Lucas then turns on his own role as transmitter

of ideas. ‘Don’t shout “fuck you” if you don’t like my

choice’, he sings, ‘try thinking of something that gives you a

voice’. Lucas is questioning the very notion of non-

reflection. Whatever idea is thrust in your face, whether it

be capitalist, left wing or anarchistic – or indeed

subcultural – the receiver needs to listen, to interpret and

to breakdown those arguments. Furthermore, instead of the

‘figures of speech’ and the ‘barriers of silence’ discussed at

the beginning of the track, Lucas decides to champion his own

ideal – and it is just that, an ideal – in the idea of being

spontaneous; of talking to strangers, of expressing emotions

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often forgotten and ‘opening your mind and [seeing] what falls

out’.

The importance lies in Lucas’s move away from the domineering

ideology. He doesn’t particularly slag off the government, or

punk, or capitalism: he merely says that we should be more

self-reflective, more ‘instinctive’. As such, Lucas takes his

marginality and presents it in a positive light, celebrating

the anarcho-punk subculture, and enjoying the fact that he is

constantly challenging himself, and others, in terms of

placement and ideology. And I suppose, this is what I wanted

to try to do today. I have been rather ‘artistic’ in my links

between teaching and subcultural theories, between punk and

pedagogy, but isn’t that’s what teaching is about: taking

risks, having fun and, occasionally (only occasionally)

letting that rebellious streak have its day? And now, I’ll let

Dick Lucas finish for me…….

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