Some Punk Archaeology

Somehow the popular press noticed an article published on an assemblage of graffiti associated with the punk rock band the Sex Pistols (h/t Richard Rothaus). The graffiti appeared on the walls of a London flat where the Pistols lived on and off during their heyday in the late 1970s. The graffiti received somewhat idiosyncratic study by Paul Graves-Brown and John Schofield in an article in an article titled “The filth and the fury: 6 Denmark Street (London) and the Sex Pistols”, Antiquity 85 (2011), 1385-1401.

Despite the potentially edgy topic, the article follows a rather traditional trajectory. The first parts of the article call for a more careful and sophisticated study of material like graffiti and the contemporary urban landscape. The article then turns to a brief study of the architecture and history of the building on Denmark Street and finally, the graffiti itself. A Beazley-esque study of the style and hands involved allowed the authors to associate more of the work with John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten). They then historicize the graffiti through appeals to the master narrative of the Pistols tumultuous career as a band. In their analysis, the graffiti largely served to illustrate the chaotic and tragic story of the band including tensions between Lydon and John Ritchie (Sid Vicious) and manager Malcolm McLaren.

Despite the suggestion that documenting the material culture associated with punk could serve as a kind of anti-heritage (presumably because of the anti-establishment themes in punk rock music), the article itself is conservative in methods and conclusions. The effort made to document the history of the 17th-century Denmark St. flat was traditional heritage management at its finest and completely at odds with the iconoclastic streak in the punk ethos.  The reference to the traditions of squatting associated with the punk movement showed that the authors recognized the ephemeral character of “punk settlement pattern”, but their study embraced a place bound approach to the history of the band.  In fact, the effort to document the graffiti left behind by the various bands who stayed at the Denmark St. flat worked against the explicit purpose of the punks in creating the graffiti. According to the article, Rotten and company made the decision to draw on the walls of the interior of the flat so it would not appear “too posh”.

By making the flat part of a heritage landscape, Schofield and Graves-Brown used the practices of heritage to subvert the message of punk rock by bringing out some of its internal contradictions. For example, despite the association of punk rock with practices typically reserved to the lower classes or other marginal groups in society (squatting, petty theft, threats of revolt), punk rock appealed as much to the middle classes as to any imagined working class or lower class. In fact, many of the punk rock icons themselves used punk as a means of rejecting or questioning their own middle class origins. The decoration of the Denmark Street flat with graffiti speaks to this attitude toward the middle class and the performative nature of punk’s rejection of middle class sensibilities.  (Yep, punk rock embraced irony. How shocking is that?)

Publishing the graffiti simply continued the long-standing practice among punks of laying bare their private lives as an important context for their music. The outrageous clothing, drug use, chaotic personal and professional relationships, and unpredictable behaviors, validated punk’s authenticity. By documenting the graffiti at the Denmark Street flat, the authors have worked, on the one hand, to continue this practice of making the private, public. On the other hand, they’ve appropriated part of the public narrative of punk rock by embedding it within the larger discourse of heritage management which has roots in middle class (if not unapologetically elite) practices. In particular, heritage management seeks to ground history in particular spaces while the punks themselves eschewed (generally) such grounding (especially public property).

A true anti-heritage would resist the temptation embed the transgressive practices of punk within a heritage management context.

Summer Cyprus Reading List

My summer will be broken in half this year with the first five weeks in Cyprus and the second part of the summer in beautiful Grand Forks.  So it makes sense to break my summer reading list in half as well.

I’ll admit that I am somewhat embarrassed by some of my goof-off reading. I’m still trying to figure out if cyber-punk goes beyond William Gibson. I managed half of Neal Stevenson’s Diamond Age or A Young Ladies Illustrated Primer (1995). I also brought along Bruce Sterling’s Distraction (1998).  I also found a copy of George Effinger’s When Gravity Fails (1987) figuring it never hurt to have some Orientalism in my cyberpunk.

To prove that I haven’t given up completely, I also plan to read A. Bonnier’s dissertation: Harbours and Hinterlands: Landscape, Site Patterns, and Coast-Hinterland Interconnections by the Corinthian Gulf c. 600-300 B.C. (2010). I’ll also work my way through the most recent volume of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology which is called Going Places: The Archaeology of Travel and Tourism (2011).

Mostly, I plan to read drafts of chapters for the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project monograph that is now well underway. And of course, I’ll be reading the Polis Notebooks and trying to make sense to the complex remains of a church at the site called EF2.

Punk Rock, Materiality, and Time

Crossposted to Punk Archaeology

I spent part of the weekend doing three things: learning how to make pasta with my new pasta maker, listening to low-fi punk, and reading Kathleen Davis’s Periodization and Sovereignty (Penn 2008). I am not sure that I learned much applicable to this blog from making pasta (although it was delicious last night at dinner), but low-fi punk, a short Twitter exchange, and Davis’s book did bring together some ideas that I had been meaning for some time to post to our semi-dormant Punk Archaeology blog.

The low-fi sound that has become popular thanks in large part to bands like the White Stripes, the Black Keys, and other purveyors of so-called Punk Blues positions itself as an antidote to the austere, “over-produced” stylings of contemporary pop music.  (Recently, I’ve been hanging out with the album “GB City” by Bass Drum of Death, but I also listened to Soledad Brothers self titles solo album and their more polished 2006 offering The Hardest Rock. My original idea for a post was to compare the low-fi, thoroughly average sound of “GB City” to the produced sound of Arcade Fire’s “Suburbs”, but that seemed too easy). The sound harkens back to garage rock and rough live albums produced in make shift recording studies on 4 and 8 track recording machines.  Low-fi recordings replaced the spaceless character of the recording study with the gritty and flawed presence of the garage, the basement, or the warehouse. Echoing and distorted vocal tracks compete for space against raw guitars and abusive drums. The best low-fi captures something of a hastily-arranged live recording without actually being anywhere in particular. Low-fi comes from anyone’s basement, garage, or abandoned strip mall.  It embodies marginal (maybe even abandoned) spaces (it’s not surprising that Detroit has become a Mecca of low-fi sound) and pushes out music that speaks to haste, temporary accommodations, and immediacy without specificity.

With the advent of digital music, low-fi has projected the materiality of its sound by producing vinyl LPs or even cassette tapes.  The sonic texture of the 8-track recorder in the basement or garage comes packaged in neatly anachronistic forms that insists upon a material presence even more physical than the music itself.  A friend of mine (on Twitter ironically enough!) suggested a track from an Oblivian’s album recently. When I asked whether she could share the track with me, she told me that she only had it on vinyl! So the grounding of low-fi music in a time and place moves from the practice of recording and to its materiality as a recorded product. Digital music, which can exist simultaneously in an infinite number of places resists any effort to impose physicality (and with music moving to “the cloud” in the very near future the location of music recordings will become all the more ambiguous).

The link between the physical sound of the low-fi recording and its circulation in physical media positions low-fi (and punk) to resist (in an ironic way, to be sure) the ephemeral character of so much “cultural” production today. From blogs and ebooks to musings in the indistinct space of social media, the viral distribution of music and video, and claims of a reimagined-ascetic minimalism, the space or even material nature of cultural production is collapsing in on itself.  In the future (bee-boop-boop-boop-beep), the diagnostic rims of Late Roman fine ware vessels will be stray bits of sound, text, or video clinging to the deteriorating disks of disused servers or discarded along with iPods and Kindles in modern middens.  Unlike the vinyl LP or even the (comparatively) primitive cassette tape, there is little on the iPod or Kindle that links it physically to the music or text stored on the device. Moreover, the use of these devices  do not cause the music or text to deteriorate.

So, I sat around this weekend, grading papers, making pasta, reading Kathleen Davis’ book, and listening to the space of low-fi sound spooling off a hard drive and running through my stereo. I could listen to it as much as I wanted and wherever I wanted.