Critical Studies in Mass Communication

Is There Rock after Punk?

LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

0- This symposium essay offers a

broad framework within which to inter
pret the place of rock and roll in the
everyday lives of its fans. It uses this
framework to analyze the current "cri
sis" of rock and roll, arguing that the
instability of the rock and roll culture is
due, on the one hand, to the paradox
which punk presented to rock and roll,

and on the other hand, to the intersection

of events which are currently changing
the very significance of "youth" in con
temporary culture. The three critical
responses and ProfeHor Grossberg's
reply that follow this essay hold signifi
cant theoretical and methodological im
plications for the cultural study of all
forms oj mass communication.

to talk-sympathetically

and the economic practices that surround

the rock and roll culture. As evidence of
the former, I might point to the increas
ingly common rhetoric of the "death of
rock and roll" and to the changing tastes
at both the upper and lower chrono
logical boundaries of the potential rock
and roll audience. Although these have
occurred before, they are so widespread
within the culture today that it seems
reasonable to take them as indicating
significant shifts. As evidence of the
objective crisis, I can point to the
decreasing sales of records (despite the
industry's claim that the recession is
over, the number of gold and platinum
albums has significantly declined) and
the decreasing attendance at live venues.
Furthermore, the industry increas
ingly segregates rock and roll from popu
lar music, which contrasts sharply with
the tendency of the past 25 years to
collapse these categories. For example,
the major format distinction in radio
today sets "'contemporary hits," with its
flavor of fifties AM radio but with a
wider range of musical sounds and

Iabout the current situation of rock and

WANT

roll in the United States. To understand

its specificity and possibilities, we must
first ask how rock and roll works for its
fans for, as I will argue, to call something
"rock and roll"-and more than music is
encompassed by that term-is to say that
it works for its fans. Hence, I define
"rock and roll" as a mode of functioning.
I do not intend to speak either as a fan
(although I am one) or as a critic (al
though I have been one) for, from either
of these positions, one can only make
judgments about the quality of the music
or the appropriateness of the audience's
response.
The uniqueness of the present situa
tion is visible, subjectively, as a "crisis"
for many fans, and objectively, in the
changing place of rock and roll within
both the larger category of popular music

Mr. Grossberg is Associate Professor of

Speech Cummunication at the University oj
Illinois at Urbana.
Critical Studie, In Mass Communication
3 (1986), 50-74

C:opyright 1986, SeA

51
CSMC

styles, against "album oriented rock"

which plays predominantly heavy metal
and new wave. The former is described
as "horizontal" because it appeals to
diverse audiences (including teenage
girls and parts of the "adult-contempo
rary audience"), while the latter defines
the narrower, "vertical" appeal of rock
and roll (teenage boys and college-age
youth). Finally, we may point to the
increasing ease and rapidity with which
various styles of rock and roll have been
incorporated into, and exploited by, com
mercial interest (e.g., network television
has discovered the virtues of rock, not
only in sports but in dramatic program
ming; and is there any product that has
not tried to use breakdancing?) and
reduced to harmless stereotypes.
These "facts" are neither merely
symptoms of some hidden causal deter
mination, nor the causes of the changing
articulations of rock and roll. What I
will offer, then, is not an exhaustive
causal explanation of this situation but a
description which places these "facts" in
a context of mutual determination. The
contemporary effects of rock and roll are
inseparable from its conditions of exis
tence, from the contradictory structure of
the rock and roll culture itself, from the
lines of force-the "political" tendencies
and contradictions-that have displaced
and redefined its effects1 In particular, I
will point to two intersecting vectors
which have deconstructed (and perhaps
reconstructed) the possibility and power
of rock and roll. First, punk not only
opened up new musical and sociological
possibilities, it also restructured the mus
ic's relation to itself and its audience.
Second, the very notion of youth culture,
so crucial to rock and roll, is being
dismantled and undermined, partly by
rock and roll itself, but also by other
social and cultural discourses.

GROSSBERG

ROCK AND ROLL

AS AFFECTIVE
EMPOWERMENT
Before describing the changes taking
place in what I will call the rock and roll
apparatus, we must acknowledge the
surprising lack of research on it (despite
its obvious economic and cultural impor
tance).' This is symptomatic of the lack
of any significant effort to describe the
way popular culture functions in the
lives of its fans. And this is due, in part,
to the dictates of our paradigms, which
not only place us within a dualism of
textuality and sociology but increasingly
reduce both domains to the category of
signification.' The failure of contempo
rary communication theory to study this
most visible of popular forms is based on
its demands that the music speaks for
itself, and that the fans define their expe
riences within the structures of meaning
that are articulated. But music-perhaps
unlike other forms-need not claim to
represent, or even to signify.
Rock and roll is a cultural event which
emerged at a particular moment into a
particular context' Part of its power is,
in fact, that it has constructed its own
history through which it has maintained
a unity for itself within its differences.
That is, despite the changing musical,
stylistic and political parameters of rock
and roll and its fans, the category itself is
constantly reiterated, created, albeit not
quite anew, with both a changing past
and a confident future ("Rock and roll
will never die"). My concern is to iden
tify what it is that constitutes this unity
and opens a space within which differ
ences function positively: what does it
mean to say that rock and roll works?
Three features of rock and roll miti
gate against treating it primarily within
the terms of communication theory.

52
IS THERE ROCK AFTER PUNK?

MARCH 1986

First, and it should come as no surprise and struggles that are enacted around,
to communications researchers, whether and in, rock and roll in various contexts.
one looks for meanings (interpretations) Thus, while it is often true that the
or uses (gratifications), one finds hetero "ideology" of rock and roll appears con
geneity. Different people not only inter servative and that its consumption
pret the music differently but use it merely reinforces the capitalist hegemo
differently as well. A 13-year-old girl, a ny, there is always a remainder of non
college student and a blue-collar worker signifying effects in such calculations.
may all be fans of The Police or Prince The fact that we think of it as "pleasure"
or Van Halen, but all for very different is often used to justify our dismissing it as
reasons. Even further, there is no neces the sugar coating that makes the ideolog
sary correspondence between the mean ical pill go down. I will argue that it is
ing someone gives a genre or text and the much more.5
ways they use it. The issue is not one of
The third feature of the way rock and
individual taste because one can identify roll exists within youth cultures is that,
audiences, but the crucial correlations oddly enough, the genre cannot be
remain unexamined.
defined solely in musical terms. Dif
Second, in many cases, the music ferent audiences not only define the
appears "hollow." The significance of boundaries of rock and roll differently
the music is not in the music, nor in the but are differentially capable of listening
fan. For example, the meaning may be to, and finding "pleasure" in, different
found outside the text, in the way it forms of rock and roll.
marks our history. Or the meaning may
These three features suggest that one
be irrelevant, subserviant or simply cannot approach rock and roll by using
absent. As many a rock and roll fan has anyone's experience of it, or even any
commented, the power of the music lies collective definition of that experience.
not in what it says but in what it does, in Yet one cannot deny its popularity, not
how it makes one move and feel. To find merely in quantitative and economic
how rock functions, it is necessary to terms, but also in terms of its importance
explore effects that are not necessarily in the lives of its fans and its role in the
signifying, that do not necessarily involve "youth cultures" of the United States.
the transmission, production, structura Further, they suggest that one cannot
tion or even deconstruction of meaning. read the political effects of rock and roll
Rock and roll is corporeal and "inva off the text (although this does not deny
sive." For example, without the media the relevance of the musical/lyrical text).
tion of meaning, the sheer volume and Understanding rock and roll requires
repetitive rhythms of rock and roll pro asking what it gives its fans, how it
duce a real material pleasure for its fans empowers them and how they empower
(at many live concerts, the vibration it. What possibilities does it enable them
actually might be compared to the use of to appropriate in their everyday lives>
a vibrator, often focused on the genital Treating functions/effects in terms of
organs) and restructure familial rela empowerment avoids the textual and
tions (by producing immediate outrage social-psychological reductionism of
and rejection from its nonfans, e.g., par communication theory. It may help to
ents). If we assume, further, that rock give some rather simple examples of
and roll fans are not "cultural dopes," "empowerment": A record is a commod
then we must examine the contradictions ity to be purchased, consumed and dis-

53
CSMC

GROSSBERG

posed of. But within the larger networks rock and roll is seen as dangerous. For
I want to investigate, such an accommo example, it is not that the music sounds
dation to capitalism may also empower like black music but that it makes its fans
its fans in ways that contradict the con act like "animals" (in the rhetoric of the
sumer economy's attempt to regulate the fifties, blacks). As Duncan (1984, p. 1)
structures and rhythms of daily life. For says, "My father always blamed it on the
the disposability of the commodity also rock 'n' roll. The drugs, the sex, the
places the record at the disposal of its faithless wild boys and girls obeying no
fans: they can control its uses, use it in authority and bearing no responsibility,
new and unintended ways, restructure playing havoc with America in a mind
and recontextualize its messages, etc. less quest for the good time they believed
Second, a song may, in both its ideologi was owed them by the world. My
cal messages and the patterns of its gen father's not stupid." Of course, empow
dered consumption, reproduce the social erment may function conservatively as
definitions of sexuality and social roles. well as oppositionally; this points to a
And yet, in its restructuring of the body level of empirical analysis beyond the
as the site of pleasure, in the ways it scope of the present essay.
makes a space for and inserts the female
This suggests that we look at the ways
body and voice into its physical and of behaving-the practices-that define
social environment, it may challenge the rock and roll culture, including the
hegemonic constraints on sexuality, fact that particular texts exist and are
desire and even gender construction. And popular, which is not the same as being
finally, to combine these two examples, commerically successful. That is, rock
although early rock and roll (especially and roll is not defined by the Billboard
rockabilly) was marketed as if it were charts. Even the briefest study of the rock
male produced and consumed, women and roll culture points to the existence of
were not only fans of the music, but also a boundary between popular music and
sang and even recorded it. The politics of rock and roll, but again, this distinction
the economic decision not to market such cannot be made in solely musical terms.
efforts is not the same as the politics of Not all popular music is rock and roll,
the functioning of the music within the and not all of the fans of popular music
everyday lives of its fans.
are rock and roll fans. Both the music
Furthermore, looking at the networks itself (in its self-references, in the fact
of empowerment within which rock and that performers-from the slick com
roll functions also points to its poten mercialism of Culture Club to the
tially oppositional role in American cul avant-gardism of Fred Frith-struggle
ture. Rock and roll has, repeatedly and to assert that they make "rock and roll,"
continuously, been attacked, banned, in the use of cover versions of songs, etc.)
ridiculed and relegated to an insignifi and the fans compulsively encapsulate
cant cultural status. The fact that so rock and roll. The power of rock and roll
much effort has been brought to bear in depends upon that part of the population
the attempt to silence it, makes it reason which makes a particular investment in
able to assume that some struggle is it, which empowers it within their lives,
going on, some opposition is being which differentiates both the music and
voiced. And despite the changing social themselves. Rock and roll fans (used now
sites and discourses of the attack, it is in this narrower sense) enact an elitism
consistently as a way of behaving that (an inverse canonization) in their rela-

54
IS THERE ROCK AFTER PUNK'

tion to music. Rock and roll does not

belong to everyone, and not everything is
rock and roll. This is visible in the
judgments they make: rock and roll fans
distinguish not only between good and
bad rock and roll, but also between rock
and roll and music which cannot be
heard within the genre (they have a
variety of names for it: co-opted, sold
out, boring, straight music)' While a
rock and roll fan may enjoy other forms
of popular music, the boundary is always
drawn. If there must always be some
thing which is not rock and roll (and
which the fan can recognize because he
or she knows what is really rock and
roll), how does this boundary work>
I will make three general claims about
this encapsulation. First, it works on the
audience as well as the music; it marks
them as different without necessarily
defining any positive (visible, readable)
identity: You are not what you don't
listen to, which cannot be simply reduced
to you are what you listen to. One cannot
predict individual tastes; one can only
invoke a "social cartography" of taste
(Bourdieu, 1984). Encapsulation creates
what I would call "nomination groups"
(rather than taste cultures) which func
tion, by naming rock and roll, to create,
not subcultures but what are only nomi
nal groups. Second, the music always
functions in a larger context, a rock and
roll apparatus. That is, the way in which
particular music is inserted into the
everyday lives of its fans depends upon
the overdetermined relations between the
music and a variety of other social, cul
tural, economic, sexual, and discursive
practices. Rock and roll is always located
within a seemingly random collection of
events that interpenetrate and even con
stitute the specific rock and roll culture,
including styles of dance, dress and inter
action, images of the band and its fans,
etc. Third, rock and roll's importance in
the experience of its fans depends upon

MARCH t986

its functioning affectively within their

everyday lives. A rock and roll apparatus
(there are always many competing ones)
locates what sorts of "pleasures" or ener
gizing possibilities are available to its
fans; it restructures social life by rear
ranging the sites at which pleasure can
be found and energy derived, at which
desire and power are invested and opera
tive. For example, the rock and roll
culture transforms many of the struc
tures of contemporary boredom (e.g.,
repetition and noise) into the structures
and pleasures of its musical and listening
practices. Similarly rock and roll is about
transforming the possibilities of an
oppressive technological environment
and the frustrations of its reproduction of
the environment. This is not merely a
process of giving them a new meaning; it
establishes, for example, a new relation
to the material fact of repetition which
already colors or inflects any attempt to
interpret it. As Chambers' (1985) sug
gests, such groups regularly transform
the modes of subordination (music, fash
ion, style, consumerism) into their own
pertinent realities.7
The work of encapsulation might be
clarified by comparing it with the com
mon argument that the car has become
an extension of the house. Inversely, rock
and roll might be seen as an invasion of
the house; it creates a kind of "bubble," a
mobile environment surrounding its
fans, sometimes weak and transparent,
sometimes strong and opaque. It thus
radically reshapes the real, not merely
symbolically, by placing the rock and roll
apparatus in a (limited) struggle within
and against the structures of everyday
life. The functioning of rock and roll
within "everyday life" cannot be reduced
to or equated with the lived experience of
its fans. Experience-the product of
struggles among competing and contra
dictory ideological practices-is only a
part of the context in which we live and

55
CSMC

act in ways over which we have no

control and about which we may be
unaware (Foucault, 1981). Everyday
life, following Baudrillard's (1983,
p. 88) notion of the simulacrum, is "not
only a game played with signs; [it
implies] social rapports and social pow
er." The term is, of course, Lefebvre's.
Everyday life (Lefebvre, 1971, p. 14)
eludes natural, divine and human myths.
Could it represent a lower sphere of mean
ing, a place where creative energy is stored in
readiness for new creations? A place that can
be reduced neither to philosophical subjective
definitions nor to objective representations of
classified objects ... because it is more and
other than these? It is not a chasm, a barrier,
or a buffer but a field and a halfway house,
... a moment made of moments (desires,
labours, pleasures-products and achieve
ments-passivity and creativity-means and
ends-etc.), the dialectical interaction that is
the inevitable starting point for the realiza
tion of the possible.

Everyday life is the functioning of the

social machine as the active context
within which experience is itself both
determined and determining. Lefebvre
proposes a history of everyday life, com
parable perhaps to Baudrillard's (1983)
"three orders of simulacra." In late capi
talism (Lefebvre, 1971, p. 72-73),
everyday life must shortly become the one
perfect system obscured by the other systems
that aim at systematizing thought and struc
turalizing action, and as such it would be the
main product of the so-called "organized"
society of controlled consumption and of its
setting, modernity. If the circuit is not com
pletely closed it is not for want of purpose or
strategical intent but only because "some
thing" irreducible intervenes, "something"
that is perhaps Desire.... The only way to
stop the circuit from closing is to conquer the
quotidian, attack it and transform it by mak
ing use of another form of strategy.

It is precisely as such a strategy, operat

ing within the structure of everyday life

GROSSBERG

that I will shortly introduce as the "post

modern," that rock and roll empowers
not within a dialectic of use and
exchange value but rather, between the
operation of a historically specific social
machine and its ideological mystifica
tions. And it is this strategic space that I
am describing as the level of an affective
politics.
Thus, I want to locate the effects of
rock and roll at the level of an (at least
potentially) oppositional politics which
produces a rupture between the rock and
roll audience (in their everyday lives)
and the larger hegemonic context within
which it necessarily exists. But how is
this politics constructed? There are two
analytic moments to this work. The first
I have already implicitly described: rock
and roll selects and uses pieces of its
material environment as the raw mate
rial with which to articulate a youth
culture or, more accurately, a series of
different and allied youth cultures
embodied within the various rock and
roll apparatuses. In fact, rock and roll at
all levels of its existence constantly steals
from other sources, creating its own
encapsulation by transgressing any sense
of boundary and identity. This is the
stage of "bricolage." The second moment
actively structures this material context
into an organization of "pleasure" and
power, of the social energy which defines
the possibilities for both domination and
resistance within everyday life. The rock
and roll apparatus is a kind of machine
which, like a cookie cutter constantly
changing its shape, produces or imprints
a structure on the fans' desires and rela
tions by organizing the material pieces of
their lives, within the apparatus, along
certain axes. The rock and roll appara
tus works by inscribing a geography of
desire on its youth cultures, on the space
within which the audience exists.
I now want to briefly describe the
circuits of empowerment within the rock

56
IS THERE ROCK AFTER PUNK'

and roll apparatuses, the space into

which the musical practices are them
selves inserted at particular sites, articu
lated as having particular meanings and
effects. The task is made more difficult
by the fact that the position of each axis
within the network of social practices-a
position which determines its possibili
ties-is constantly changing because of
the continued functioning of the appara
tus itself. Nevertheless, the unity and
continuity of the rock and roll culture is
determined by its construction of a three
dimensional geography.' The three
dimensions can be described as youth,
the body (or pleasure), and "attitude,"
embodied in a practice of "excorpora
tion."
Most obviously, the energy of the rock
and roll apparatus is constructed around
the categories of youth and the body.
Rock and roll celebrates youth, not
merely as a chronological measure but as
a difference defined by the rejection of
the boredom of the "straight" world.
The politics of youth celebrate change,
risk and instability; the very structures of
boredom become the sites of new forms
of empowerment. The powerlessness of
youth is rearticulated into an apparatus
in which it becomes the site of "plea
sure" and power. The "pleasure" of
empowerment/empowerment of "plea
sure" is, furthermore, articulated around
the material pleasures of the body. It is
its emphasis on rhythm and dance, and
its affirmation of sexual desire which
may, occasionally, challenge the domi
nant gender categories. Rock and roll
seeks pleasure in the different ways the
body can be inserted into its social envi
ronment.
However, it is the third axis of "atti
tude" that locates the radical specificity
of rock and roll as a response to the
specific structures of contemporary
everyday life-postmodernity. This re-

MARCH 1986

sponse is manifested in rock and roll's

celebration of surfaces, styles and arti
fice. For those who have grown up in the
United States after the Second World
War, existence has qualitatively changed
(although one need not assume that this
rupture is experienced as such). Ob
viously, its experience will be deter
mined in part by the ideological struggles
within the social machine:' the structures
of historical consciousness and of mean
ing, purpose and even order, which have
been taken for granted, have apparently
collapsed. In Baudrillard's (1983) terms,
"reality" has disappeared, leaving only
its image; without origins, everything
becomes a rerun, another style. Given
the rapid rate of continuous change, the
increasing knowledge of risk and danger,
the sense that the rules for survival no
longer guarantee a good life, the com
modification of all value, life is increas
ingly lived in "a controlled panic." If
"life is hard and then you die" (as a
popular T-shirt says), or "nothing mat
ters and what if it did" (John Cougar),
or "if nothing is true, everything is per
mitted" (Jim Carroll), have become
maxims for life, then the insertion of the
rock and roll apparatus into the equation
becomes a strategy of resistance and
more directly, of survival. The rock and
roll apparatus not only energizes new
possibilities within everyday life, it
places that energy at the center of a life
without meaning; the postmodern situa
tion. Thus, the program notes for Cul
ture Club's 1984 tour: "It is said that
love and hate amount to the same thing.
If this is true then feel the energy, if not,
any feeling however reactionary is better
than none." Moreover, if there is no
truth beneath the surface of everyday life
which can be identified as the source of
meaningfulness and direction, then not
only the materiality of "pleasure" but
that of style or attitude as well rearticu-

57
CSMC

lates the structures of everyday life. Rock

and roll rearticulates the powerlessness
of confronting the postmodern condition
into a celebration of new forms and sites
of empowerment.
This postmodern context makes one
historical appearance of the generation
gap into a permanent difference, and the
practice of excorporation defines a
response by which the rock and roll
apparatus constantly reinscribes a
boundary between "us" and "them." It
steals and transforms the practices, frag
ments and signs of other cultures and
cultural moments, both those marginal
ized and repressed by the hegemonic
culture and those located in the heart of
the hegemony; it relocates them within
its own reduction to surfaces-all a mat
ter of attitude (or in its more visible
forms, style). It celebrates the very condi
tions of its oppression in postmodernity
by making them into the sites of "plea
sure." It takes musical practices and
styles from black culture, rural and
southern culture, gay culture, working
class culture, etc., and relocates them
within an apparatus whose differences
cannot be defined outside of its "atti
tude," its practice of excorporation.
Thus, rock and roll need not celebrate a
liberatory politics of pleasure, nor need it
represent the anarchic explosion of pos
sibilities. Rock and roll locates itself in
the empowerment, the "pleasure" or
energy of transitions.
These three axes circumscribe the
boundaries of rock and roll while allow
ing for the local production of different
apparatuses within which both the music
and the audiences are defined and
empowered. One can describe a rock and
roll apparatus in terms of the particular
ways it inflects each of the axes, and the
ways it uses the pieces of other cultural
domains it has excorporated into its own
spaces. The particular difference that the

GROSSBERG

apparatus constructs for itself and its

fans can be described as an "affective
alliance."
I want to use this framework to sug
gest two of the elements-one specific
and one general-which have contrib
uted to the current uncertainty marking
the rock and roll culture. The first con
cerns the appearance and effects of punk
rock. Punk was, after all, a watershed of
some sort, at least in the sense that
everything that has come after it-and
there has been a real explosion of musics
and styles-must be read as "post
punk." This is not merely another turn
ing of the rather tedious critical circle of
authentic and co-opted music. I will
argue that the particular structure of the
punk apparatus problematized, in cer
tain important ways, our ability to
empower rock and roll. Punk made visi
ble a contradiction within the rock and
roll apparatus by foregrounding the axis
of excorporation. By foregrounding "at
titude," it not only problematized the
investment in any particular attitude but
also, in pleasure as well. It was able to
rescue them and thus, to rearticulate the
affective power of rock and roll, only by
placing the axis of youth at the center of
its apparatus, by reinscribing the imper
ative of generational differences that had
marked the historical emergence of rock
and roll. It celebrated rock and roll as the
music of youth, manic fun and risk even
as it implicitly called that attitude into
question. Contemporary rock and roll
apparatuses have had to confront the
contradiction which both animated and
perhaps destroyed punk, choosing either
to further deconstruct the power of rock
and roll by celebrating the very artifi
ciality of any attitude, or to find alterna
tive alliances within which its affective
power could be reconstructed. The sec
ond element was already operating in the
punk apparatus, manifested in its dual

58
IS THERE ROCK AFTER PUNK?

existence as both populist (an expression

of youth) and avant-garde. It involves the
growing historical contradiction within
the very axis of youth itself as a social
category, making punk's attempt to place
it at the center of its apparatus precar
ious at best. Rock and roll emerged in
part as a resistance to the 'discipliniza
tion" (Foucault, 1977) of youth in the
institutions of the family and schools. In
this context, empowerment can be seen
as a form of struggle against the hege
monic construction of social categories
and identities. Rock and roll found an
alternative model in the peer group street
cultures of both working class (and
immigrant) urban and southern commu
nities. Yet the very resistance which
helped construct a youth culture has
made rock and roll an agent, in the
context of other social changes, in the
deconstruction of youth.

PUNK: ROCK AND ROLL

AGAINST ITSELF
What is punk? (Listen to the first
albums by the Sex Pistols, The Clash, or
the Ramones.) The music is loud, fast,
simple and abrasive. But funk is what it
did and how it worked.' First, it chal
lenged the control of the so-called "ma
jor" record companies which have, since
the sixties, dominated the economics of
rock and roll. It was not, however, anti
capitalist; for the most part, it substituted
small capitalists for big ones and, if
Malcolm McLaren (manager of the Sex
Pistols) is taken as an example, it used
capitalist practices to beat the system
(e.g., the Sex Pistols were paid by a
number of record companies without
ever releasing a record). This is not a
criticism: there is nothing wrong with
using rock and roll as a form of economic
work and mobility. Second, it returned
the single to the center of the production

MARCH 1986

of rock and roll, making it easier for new

groups to record and release music. Thus
it empowered the raw sounds of such
records. Third, it rejected the criteria of
aesthetic and technological expertise
which had dominated and often defined
the musical practice of rock and roll in
the seventies. Fourth, it rejected the star
system which had become so pervasive
and had fractured the relation between
musician and fan. And finally, it con
sciously sought the minimal musical con
ditions of rock and roll. To many, it
sounds like anarchic noise. Creil Marcus
(1980a, p. 452) described it as music
stripped down to "the essentials of speed,
noise, fury and manic glee."
The significance of punk is commonly
located in its supposed working class
origins. Punk was "dole queue rock"
which translated the unemployment of
angry white youths into leisure. There
are two problems with this view: first,
the impact of punk cannot be explained
by its origins, and second, this view of its
origins is factually problematic. It
ignores the existence of a punk move
ment in New York which in fact helped
to stimulate the British movement. This
American punk (listen to Patti Smith,
Television or Talking Heads) was more
self-consciously avant-garde, with a
more explicit sense of distance, irony,
and contradiction than the British music
which came to define the movement.
Further, even in England, many of those
who shaped this apparatus were either
art school students or existed on the
fringes of debates in politics and the
visual arts (e.g., situationism [Frith,
1978, 1980; Frith & Horne, 1983 D.
Even the sound of the British punk
voice belies its working class origins.t1
The voice (as in Johnny Rotten of the
Sex Pistols) appears, at first glance, to be
the expression of working class anger
and to use working class cliches. But

59
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CSMC

what is heard at one level as class deter

mined is, at another level, a particular
sort of consciously chosen inarticulate
ness-a voice which is anonymous and
distant from its own words. The punk
singer clearly chose to reject the conven
tions of both the soul singer and the pop
crooner, returning to a particularly
"rock and roll" grain of voice. The punk
is not the voice of an individual, a class,
or a community but rather, the voice of
the "crowd," or as I will suggest later, of
youth. Its artificiality is comparable to
that of the convention of filming docu
mentaries in black and white. The ano
nymity of the voice is reflected in the
chosen anonymity of many of the per
formers.
This suggests a different reading of
punk. 12 Rather than transforming unem
ployment into leisure, it transformed a
history with "no future" (a particular
economic appearance of the postmodern
condition) into a celebration and empow
ering of "youth." It triumphed over its
visions of a society in decline by embody
ing them in music and style. It was
"music to watch England go down the
toilet" (D. Hebdige, personal communi
cation April, 1980). Locating punk in
this broader context (which was made to
appear to correspond to a particular class
formation as much by hegemonic media
practices as anything else) makes it a set
of strategies for living in the face of the
collapse of meaning and increasing para
noia:
Where there's no future
How can there be sin
We're the flowers in your dustbin
We're the poison in your human machine
We're the future
Your future. (Coons,

1978,

p.

128)

This reading is reinforced by the fact

that other, more mainstream rock and
roll groups had hits shortly after the

punk explosion which, both musically

and affectively, confronted the cynicism
and postmodernity that punk fore
grounded (e.g., Pink Floyd's The Wall,
J. Ceil Band's "Love Stinks").
How then are we to understand
punk's effects as a response to postmod
ernity? We might begin by considering
what is, in my opinion, the most em
blematic of all punk songs-Sid Vicious
(and the Sex Pistols) singing "My
Way." The song is composed of two
parts: first, a thoroughly awful (wonder
ful!) and off-key cover of Sinatra's origi
nal version which reduces the latter's
honesty and sincerity to absurdity and
artificiality; second, a thoroughly punk
version (fast, noisy, grotesque, etc.) in
which the lyrics clearly reflect the vio
lence and horror of "my way" in the
contemporary world. The point of the
song, its effect, is not to substitute one
version for another, or to offer the punk
rewrite as the new authentic expression.
The obvious parody of the first part
renders both Sinatra's absent version and
the punk version equally problematic,
equally undecidable. The song makes
punk into just another style, another
musical choice. Someone can now do a
cover of Sid Vicious' version as well-an
endless chain of signs with no point at
which some authentic meaning and sin
cere expression are given.
Hebdige (1979, 1983) has given a
convincing description of punk style as
deconstructive. Its fragmented and out
rageous style celebrated impotence as a
strategy for avoiding surveillance. Punk
cut up every style or surface and threw
the pieces together. While earlier rock
and roll apparatuses had stolen the
material of their styles primarily from
other marginal cultures, punk stole from
its own history (i.e., from other, earlier
rock and roll cultures: see the early pic
tures of the Sex Pistols) and from the

60
[S THERE ROCK AFTER PUNK'

MARCH 1986

heart of the hegemonic culture (e.g., the possibilities of image and movement.
garbage bags, safety pins) and the hege Punk played with the iconography of sex
mony's most sacred history (e.g., swasti and gender; the body became a fractured
kas). It took these objects, cut them up surface on which punk could play out its
and through them back into the face of image-games. Such deconstructions of
the nonpunk world (which included old pleasure challenged, not only the ide
rock and rollers-hippies and heavy ologies of romance and gender difference
metal fans-as well as the straight adult (punk was the first rock and roll appara
world) as their worst nightmares. In the tus that did not rely heavily on songs
fifties, kids were prohibited from going about romance and love), but the very
out looking like trash. In punk, they legitimation of sexual pleasure as well.
went out literally dressed in trash.
Pleasure itself had become passe. The
Punk foregrounded the axis of atti crescendo of rock and roll rhythms was
tude, placing its own excorporative prac replaced by the continuous noise, pulses
tice on its surface. It treated every sign as and droning of punk, suggesting some
if there were no meaning behind it; its thing other than sexual satisfaction.
motto was "Xpose." It demonstrated Again, Johnny Rotten summed it up:
that anything could be excorporated, "What is sex anyway> Just thirty sec
treated as a fragment without meaning, onds of squelching noise?" And in
history or feeling. Style became, not an groups like the Voidoids, Blondie, the
identity, but a measure of its effects. Gang of Four, Patti Smith (and later,
Anything could become punk, anything even more explicitly in Joy Division and
could be used by punk, and so punk was Au Pairs), the body appears only to be
there to be used and used up. Implicit in another artificial site on which style is
this practice was the fact that punk style enacted. Punk questioned the naive cele
was itself artificial. Yet style was all that bration of pleasure and its significance as
punk had; it demonstrated, in its atti a moment of resistance or transcen
tude, on its surfaces so to speak, that dence.
A similar result might have been pre
attitude, style and surface is all that
dicted for the axis of youth-that is,
there is.
This particular inflection of the axis of youth itself would have been seen as just
attitude had a significant impact on the another pose, in fact, as passe.14 If car
way punk articulated the axis of the body ried to its "logical" conclusion as a cul
and pleasure within its apparatus; in tural project (and this was perhaps true
particular, it deconstructed the body as in the avant-garde articulations of the
the site of its pleasures. In both its punk aesthetic), punk made obvious the
fashions and dance styles, punk cut up arbitrariness of any style or attitude, the
and even attacked the body, denying its impossibility of any investment. Bring
claims to be privileged. This had a num ing glitter rock's (e.g., David Bowie)
ber of intriguingly positive effects: it attempt to display the artificiality of all
opened up new possibilities for sexual surfaces to the surface, punk pointed to
voices and positions within rock and roll, the construction of an "aesthetics of the
especially for women," who used punk's fake." As Joe Jackson would later sing,
techniques to deconstruct and challenge "Look sharp, just keep looking over your
the sexual/gender definitions of both the shoulder. "
Punk's practice recognized, if only
straight world and the rock and roll
culture. It also significantly restructured implicitly, that all cultural life is con-

61
CSMC

GROSSBERG

structed. By excorporating even the most into a populism of postmodern youth.

innocuous signs, it celebrated the unna (The more avant-garde groups that
tural and denied the very category of the refused this displacement, groups that
"natural." All it could do was demystify were already marginalized within the
and problematize any construct, any atti dominant punk apparatus, were able to
tude, any style. This would, presumably, move more II uidly into the context of
have meant rock and roll itself, including post-punk apparatuses.)
Punk emerged at, and responded to, a
punk. When Johnny Rotten said, "All
we are trying to do is destroy every particular moment in the history of rock
thing," he presumably meant to include and roll. It is, after all, not coincidental
rock and roll's own empowerment. that in 1976, the first of the baby boom
There was, after all, no reason to assume ers were turning thirty. Punk attacked
that this self-appointed "Antichrist" rock and roll for having grown old and
would exempt the salvations offered by fat, for having lost that which puts it in
rock and roll.
touch with its audience and outside of the
In fact, punk did acknowledge rock hegemonic reality. It attacked rock and
and roll's status as a commodity and the roll in the guise of megagroups and
apparent inevitability of its co-optation. arena rock, hippies and baby boomers
It established a new relation to its own who had clearly become part of that
history of rock and roll. As Marcus which was supposed to be outside of rock
(1980a) has argued, rock and roll and roll. If the rock and roll apparatus
became, not only the first principle of works when it draws a line between
any youth revolt but also that revolt's "them" and "us," encapsulating its fans
.
first target; rock and roll became a in a mobile environment of their own,
weapon against itself. Punk at least punk did so more clearly and outra
opened the possibility of questioning geously than at any point in the seven
rock and roll's exemption from the ties, precisely by articulating a particular
oppressively boring world. It placed any structure of the apparatus. Even as it
one seeking the affective empowerment deconstructed the naturalistic claims of
of rock and roll in a rather awkward culture, it reasserted the power of its own
position: one could no longer believe in expressionism. While it denied that rock
"the magic that will set you free." This and roll represented the emotional life or
questioning of the power of rock and roll real social experiences of its fans, it
(again, this can be heard in the later, reconnected the music and the fan. When
more mainstream recordings of David it looked inside itself, it did not find
Bowie, Peter Gabriel, etc.) changed the nothing; it found the emptiness of the
ways one could listen to rock and roll, not "blank generation," postmodern youth.
merely by refusing to take rock and roll Even as it seemed to celebrate anarchy
seriously (rock and roll has always done and the pure negativity of its deconstruc
that) nor even by attacking it directly, tion (the insanity, dissonance, its threat
but precisely by making rock and roll ening difference), even as it projected a
work against itself. But punk continued potentially expansive pluralism of appa
to exempt itself by centering its own ratuses and styles (a pluralism which
apparatus upon the privileged axis of could arise only after punk celebrated its
youth, the privileged access of youth into own death), it re-encapsulated rock and
its encapsulations. It thus displaced its roll within a surprisingly circumscribed
foregrounded, self-conscious artificiality range of sounds, styles and attitudes.'s

62
IS THERE ROCK AFTER PUNK'

Deconstruction as attitude was articu

lated to, and limited by, the axis of youth.
Youth remained the site of rock and roll's
investment and empowerment, even if it
was a youth with neither a past nor a
future. By reinvesting the axis of youth
at the center of the apparatus and dis
placing the question of style, punk was
able to reaffirm its existence as rock and
roll. But this was obviously a strategy/
structure that was condemned to failure.
In fact, punk reproduced, almost perfect
ly, the contradictions-the impossible
situation-in which youth and youth
culture increasingly found itself.

THE DECONSTRUCTION
OF YOUTH
The place of youth in the rock and roll
culture has been unsettled by the con
junction of the history of rock and roll
and a series of other social events. In the
eighties, the contradictions of '''youth''
are becoming increasingly explicit. We
might begin trying to make this visible by
returning to the contemporary discus
sions of the death of rock and roll. For
the real power of this discourse lies, not
in its connection with that part of the
audience struggling to rediscover or rein
vest its faith in rock and roll but rather,
in its pointing to a part of the audience
for whom rock and roll is neither possi
ble nor desirable.
The typical description of the crisis of
the rock and roll audience goes some
thing like this: There is, apparently, a
new generation of youth who have con
fronted a number of events: (1) Style and
culture have been increasingly commod
ified and incorporated into hegemonic
discourses through advertising, fashion
and the media. (2) They have been
raised under the threat of continuous
economic recession. While rock and roll
has survived earlier recessions, its fans

MARCH 1986

had previously believed that there was

something after the recession and that
fun was a sufficient strategy (on the
surface) for getting through it. Rock and
roll offered an economy of transitions, of
magical transformations. (3) Images of
youth, which so dominated postwar baby
boom America, have been replaced
increasingly with images of the baby
boomers' attempts to deal with growing
old and having responsibility. (4) Rock
and roll has become nostalgic. It is not
only the music of parents but of advertis
ing as well. How can it possibly mark a
difference and constitute some kind of
resistance? Its claims to have provided
some form of transcendence or revolution
have been dissolved in the gray morning
of Reagan and yuppies. (This may
partly explain why the current explosion
of revivals has not often led to a rediscov
ery of the originals. The originals belong
to someone else; they cannot exist as rock
and roll anymore.) (5) A new generation
of conservative youth has appeared
variously characterized as the "me gen
eration" and the "mean generation"
for whom HHipness isn't hip anymore"
(Truman, 1985, p. 23). (6) New technol
ogies, and in some cases, older cultural
forms, have replaced rock and roll as the
dominant leisure activities of youth. The
result is that, for many young people,
rock and roll has become just another
moment of hegemonic leisure, back
ground music to which they relate in
ways more reminiscent of an earlier gen
eration's relation to Tin-Pan Alley's
music.
There is, obviously, a good deal of
truth in all of these observations. And
young people do seem to have turned to
other forms of culture to seek their own
strategies of "pleasure" and survival
within a context of "controlled panic."
This was already visible in the late sev
enties, in the popularity of absurdist

63
CSMC

humor. Saturday Night Live not only

gave youth access to rock and roll but
also, to the increasingly adult status of
that world. In the popular movies which
followed upon that show's success, the
painful absurdity of the humor ("It just
doesn't matter," as one crucial scene in a
Bill Murray film says) became the
source of its own pleasure and impor
tance. More recently, the connection
between youth and rock and roll is being
challenged by the growing investment of
youth in the video-computer technology.
Video games produce a radical sense of
enclosedness. In this, they are like the
"walkman" rather than the "ghettoblas
ters" of the seventies (and later, of break
dancing). But their encapsulation is pro
tective rather than resistant. There are,
however, two more significant forms of
this new technologically based popular
culture. The first is the proliferation of
personal computers and the increasing
computer sophistication of youth. This
not only provides them with a clear-cut
space of their own (an apparatus which
is defined technologically but which has
empowering effects as well), it has
become a form of pleasure. Thus, on a
recent television show, when a "whiz
kid" was asked why he would spend
hours programming a computer to do a
task that would take a few minutes to
work out with a pencil, he responded
"Computers are fun, pencils are bor
ing."
Television, too, is being reinserted into
this new apparatus. Contrary to common
wisdom, the rock and roll generations
were not the television generations.
Television was new, exciting, but it cer
tainly did not belong to them; they did
not control its programming nor did they
have a special competence in its unique
languages (although they may by now).
But that has changed. Television has
become so much a part of our taken-

GROSSBERG

for-granted lives that it is now available

to the younger generations, to be reap
propriated as their own. If youth in the
fifties, sixties, and even seventies, would
have sacrificed anything rather than give
up their music, there is increasing evi
dence that television plays the same role
in the life of younger generations.
Of course, this sliding of the signifier
of "youth" from rock and roll to video
computers is made that much easier by
the advent of Music Television. MTV
has provided what American radio never
would-a national network of music.
But it has accomplished this only by
recontextualizing the music, by demand
ing that it take on a visual and more
particularly, a video existence. It rearti
culates the music into different rhythms
and structures. It is interesting to com
pare MTV with other, earlier attempts
to incorporate rock and roll into televi
sion (e.g., unlike American Bandstand,
the video-jockies of MTV constitute a
family without parents). All differences
of style-in both the music and
audiences-are displaced into the ab
stract principle of style which can then
be actively copied (Goldman, 1984). It is
too early to speculate on the effects of this
new cultural form. We can note that it is
immensely popular among the very
young, that the way music works is
significantly altered by its (re?) entrance
into processes of the visualization of cul
ture, and that it will undoubtedly
reshape the listening practices and the
investments in the music of these new
fans.
I want to suggest-and that is all that
I will be able to do here-that there is
something else taking place which is
radically altering the possibility of rock
and roll in the contemporary world.
There is a sense in which the category of
"youth" as we know it is once again
being reshaped. The emergence and

64
IS THERE ROCK AFTER PUNK'

shifts of this social category have been

the subject of much debate." They are
located within a larger network of power
that takes the body of the population
itself as its object of control, what Fou
cault (1977, 1978) has described as the
various technologies of "discipliniza
tion." Thus, I am neither proclaiming
the "end of youth" nor interpreting a
mere change in its meaning. I am point
ing to its rearticulation, not only as a
cultural category, but as a social and
material body as well. The very sites and
forms of its public existence are being
restructured (from marches to malls,
from drugs to alcohol, etc.). The issue is
not whether the various discourses about
youth and childhood are referentially
accurate, but that they are themselves
part of the context in which youth is
organized. The discourses and practices
that interpenetrate and surround youth,
articulating its very existence-these are
what need to be mapped out.
In all the contemporary discussions of
youth, we are caught in the uncertainty
of generations. Youth today is caught
already in the contradiction between
those who experience the powerlessness
of their age and the generations of the
baby boomers who have tried to redefine
youth as an attitude. If the former is
increasingly uncertain, it is partly
because the status of the latter has also
become problematic. As more and more
people point to the increasingly troubled
and adult-like qualities of young people,
they are also observing the failure of the
baby boomers to accept and arrive at
traditional notions of adulthood. But we
must not assume that we already under
stand these relations. If we too quickly
reduce the context to simple questions
Is youth disappearing' Are youth and
adulthood merging?-we are in danger
of ignoring the real struggles and frus
trations that still characterize the dif-

MARCH 1986

ferent groups and their relations to each

other and other social groups.
Nevertheless, it is clear that changes
are occurring: in the rapidly increasing
suicide rate and drug-dependency of
youth; in the changing child-rearing con
texts and practices; in the increasing
willingness to sacrifice educational bud
gets, to treat juvenile offenders as adult
criminals. If contemporary youth has
been constructed at the intersection of
particular dominant institutions and
technologies, its identity depends upon
its social location. Following the indus
trial revolution, the image of childhood
as innocence justified children's location
within privileged institutions qualified to
"protect" and Hinstruct" them: the
school was devoted to the acquisition of
the skills of economic and political adult
hood; more important was the alliance
between schools, medical institutions and
the family as the protectors of physical,
psychological and moral health (Donzel
ot, 1979). Such a construction of child
hood obviously required an enormous
economic investment; society "'chose" to
keep children out of the labor market
and to provide the necessary services.
After the Second World War, with the
enormous boom in the number of chil
dren, it became even more of an eco
nomic priority to keep them out of the
labor market and to use this as a way of
extending the already expanding service
basis of the economy. This large segment
of the population was also constructed as
consumers. The insularity of childhood
was extended to youth (or adolescence)
as a unique transitional moment.17 The
transitional status of youth, defined as a
time between childhood and adulthood, a
time of continued protection, provided
the freedom for mobility and for the
project of (Iacquiring" an identity. But
just because youth was hegemonically
defined with its own specific freedom, it

65
CSMC

could become something more than tran

sitional. It took on its own privileged
identity. This new youth was ambigu
ously valued (Hebdige, 1983): on the one
hand, a time of fun, a time in which one
could take risks and, on the other hand, a
potential threat, a risk to the hegemonic
structures, "delinquency." This specific
space of youth, which emerged in the
fifties and was intimately connected with
the wedding of rock and roll and youth,
is being displaced by at least three events:
the increasing redistribution of knowl
edge; changing representations of youth;
and the effects of the rock and roll appa
ratus itself.
To put it quite simply, kids today
know too much and they are, at some
level, too cynical. There is evidence that,
for the first time, new generations of
youth do not think that the general con
text of social life is getting better. Nor do
they place particular faith in traditional
institutions such as relationships or
meaningful and satisfying careers. This
is not to deny that they may, individu
ally, seek such impossible pleasures; they
simply no longer invest in them in the
same ways." Nor do they believe, appar
ently, in the elusive search for an identity
out of freedom; no longer privileging the
transitions, they deny the specific iden
tity of youth; they have returned to a
conception of youth as training for adult
hood with its own leisure activities, its
own fun. It is an attitude in which
everything is taken both too seriously
and, at the same time, as a joke, with a
certain irony. Anything can be ridiculed
even as one struggles to achieve it. If
"ambivalence toward life is their only
myth, their only dream, the only context
in which they can find comfort" (Mof
fitt, 198 1 , p. 6), then "to be modern is to
be hard-edged, cooly aggressive; to cele
brate the synthetic and the artificial; to
reject softness and easy intimacy and

GROSSBERG

fuzzy-headed visions of what life has to

offer; to feel the pull of polarization in
every fiber. . . . Modern youth is show
ing America how to tighten its sphinc
ter-and like it" (Rose, 1981, p. 1).
This is of course reinforced by, and
reflected in, the incorporation of this new
cynicism (notice its similarities to punk's
inflection of the affective axis of attitude)
into the mainstream of everyday life.
Calvin Klein advertises jeans by asking
"Is there a real me, or am I just what you
see?" Pepsi and others represent rela
tionships through fragmented images of
the body. Cartoons reflect the increasing
identification of love with domestic vio
lence. In a remake of a Grassroots' hit,
the lyrics are changed from "Let others
plan their future, I'm busy loving you,"
to "Let others plan their future, that's
one way to get through." Even in media
aimed for youth, such statements have
become increasingly visible, if not domi
nant. In the movie of S.E. Hinton's
Rumblefish, the hero is described by his
father: "He can do anything he wants
but there's nothing he wants to do." And
in a movie popular with kids, Bless the
Beasts and the Children, at the climactic
scene when they finally manage to free
the buffalo that are about to be shot, one
youth muses about their future in terms
of roaming the prairies. Another youth,
perhaps 14, responds: "I wish I were
young enough to believe that"; and of
course, the closing scene shows us that
the buffalo are about to be shot anyway.
One can see more sophisticated represen
tations of this attitude in the current
generation of "new wave" movies (e.g.,
Repo Man, Liquid Sky, Buckaroo Bon
zai [ Rosenberg, 1984]). One can hear it

in Chloe's (the child of the eighties in

The Big Chill) description of her love
affair with a now deceased sixties per
son: "We got along fine. I had no expec
tations and he had too many." Or in

66
IS THERE ROCK AFTER PUNK?

Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth: "We

have no dreams so we can't see them
destroyed." There is no pathos in
Chloe's voice when she asks what it is
like to be happy, since she has never
known many happy people.
Thus, part of what I am calling the
deconstruction of youth has come from
the erosion of the boundaries of knowl
edge in the everyday lives of youth.
Knowledge and events have made the
cynicism of punk hip, but without the
anger and frustration. Youth increas
ingly begins with the artificiality of all
styles, categories and commitments.
They are obsessed with the transition
into adulthood. Obviously, the above
examples are merely that-examples of
a changing system of possible statements.
I do not intend to interpret their world
view, merely to point to the fact of their
existence and proliferation.
There is also a change in the ways that
youth is represented. In the late seven
ties, movies and television offered few, if
any, positive images of or heroes for
youth. The models which were offered
were so simplistic that they could be only
taken ironically. Increasingly, youth is
often represented only in its absence.
This absence may function not only as a
real lack, but also by placing youth in a
position in which it makes no difference
that they are, in fact, young. In a large
number of popular horror movies of this
period, youth is represented either as
pure victim or as pure evil. In fact, it
makes no difference that they are young,
unless it is as the victims of some
unnamed social rage; it only deconstructs
the very difference being obliterated.
Tom Carson (1984, p. 73) has recently
described the new "sour view of chil
dren" on prime time television in which
either "negative characteristics usually
associated with adulthood" are displaced
onto children -"children are treated as
mercenary and calculating while parents

MARCH 1986

are seen as passive, endearingly hap

less"-or they are seen as "alien, inher
ently Other."
The enormous popularity of Spiel
berg's films (Close Encounters, ET, Pol
tergeist, Gremlins ) is the most recent
manifestation of this shifting representa
tional code. These films are all struc
tured around the disappearance of chil
dren and their eventual return. The
movies offer themselves as a new "foun
tain of youth"; they project adult fanta
sies of youth and their surfaces resemble
advertising. The category of youth has
been appropriated by others who not
only define but essentialize it. They
speak as if from a position of youth, for
youth, but they speak as adults, for
adults. Thus it is increasingly common to
find the baby boomer heroes and
heroines of prime time television con
fronting their ambiguous relations to
both youth and adulthood, appropriating
the former category and dissolving it into
their reluctance to enter the latter catego
ry. Perhaps all this encodes a new resent
ment of youth by a generation that was
never taught to be adults or even to value
that identity, and whose identity is still
imbricated in their investment in youth.
This incorporation of youth into adult
hood has taken on a new form in the past
few years: the increasing sexualization of
youth (and more recently, even child
hood, perhaps partly in response to an
increasing ambivalence about our will
ingness to make the necessary personal
and economic sacrifiees that have con
structed the category). This sexualiza
tion is also taking place within the rock
and roll/youth culture itself. One need
only look at the way in which dancers
present themselves, not to each other but
to the camera, on programs such as
American Bandstand, to realize that the
sexualization of youth has taken on new
inflections.
In fact, it was perhaps almost inevi-

67
CSMC

GROSSBERG

table that rock and roll would define and sexual arrangements similarly chal
even more, help bring about its own lenges the stability and adequacy of the
death, that the rock and roll apparatuses traditional nuclear family. One might
would dismantle their own possibility of add that, similarly, the other institutions
empowering alliances. Consider where which have direct responsibility for the
rock and roll constructed its own culture, disciplinization, control and construction
the physical spaces which it appropri of youth-schools, medicine, juvenile
ated and created as its own: the street, the courts-are coming under broad attack.
Finally, these changes can be related
jukebox, the party and the "hop/dance."
The significance of these spaces is that, to one other reconstruction of youth and
to some extent, they all attempt to exist its relationship to the body in the con
outside of the family and the school. In temporary world. This newly emergent
fact, it is these two institutions which structure makes pleasure something to
rock and roll has most consistently work for (not merely a political struggle,
attacked. Frith and McRobbie (1978- it is a physical and economic one). Youth
1979) have argued that the antidomestic is something to be held on to by physical
ity of rock and roll is an expression of its effort. That is, youth has become a state
basic male orientation and its antifemale of the body, presumably one which offers
ideology. I disagree: the antidomesticity its own pleasurable rewards. This emer
of the rock and roll apparatus is an gent cultural formation is most clearly
attack on the place in which its own embodied in the current transformation
youth is constructed. It is a resistance to of sports/health into a form of leisure
the very disciplinization which is, para with its own styles, and to the remark
doxically, constitutive of its "youth." able appearance of the "yuppies" on the
Such resistance is a crucial aspect of the public scene. It is interesting to note that
rock and roll apparatus. But what if rock this emergent culture not only has grown
and roll begins to succeed in challenging out of the rock and roll audiences, but
the control of the hegemony over the often continues to use at least some of the
category of youth? For example, if youth music within its own structures of
is defined in part by its ambiguous and empowerment (Flashdance and Michael
risky relation to sexual practice (espe Jackson's Thriller, two of the most suc
cially intercourse), what happens to it cessful albums of 1983, are widely used
when that relationship is fundamentally for various styles of exercise).
The result is that while rock and roll
changed?
The antidomesticity of rock and roll has been crucial in constructing a youth
(as well as its antischool stance) is culture, it has also been crucial in erod
increasingl y supported by other hege ing the conditions for the particular con
monic discourses and such alliances struction of "youth" upon which it is
surely make rock and roll's status prob built, not merely because of its own
lematic. The family as an adequate site practices but in conjunction with a whole
for the protection of the child is increas series of events which have intersected
ingly under attack. For example, and interacted with it. But if the institu
although issues of childbeating and tions and disciplines that construct youth
incest have been raised by feminists since are deconstructed, how can rock and roll
the nineteenth century, they have never define itself by its resistance to them>
been taken up in widespread public How can the rock and roll apparatus
debate until the present moment. And invest itself in an unstable axis of youth>
the demand for more flexible social and Thus, the relationship between rock and

68
IS THERE ROCK AFTER PUNK'

MARCH 1986

roll and youth has become contradictory: pop sensibilities and disco practices. It
rock and roll exists not within the rise of constructed around itself a number of
youth but rather, at the cusp between the apparatuses which placed the axis of the
rise and the decline of a particular con body and pleasure at their center. This
struction of youth, one which so privi axis was inflected with different em
leges its transitional status as to reify and phases given to dance, fashion, sexuality
celebrate transitions. The rock and roll and romance, as well as to its relation to
apparatus attacks the very conditions of the axis of youth. A second response to
its existence. The current identification the contradiction of attitude is to con
of young people with the video-computer tinue celebrating it, not only foreground
technology does not merely make them ing it but placing it at its center as well;
different from the straight world, it the various practices of "post-punk"
denies their "youthfulness"; they are (e.g., Joy Division and later Talking
better-more adult-than adults. They Heads) and "new music" (e.g., Laurie
too are implicated in a complex and Anderson, DNA, Birthday Party) in
contradictory historical process by which creasingly deconstructed any structure or
the existence of youth is being reshaped commitment taken as necessary to rock
and relocated in social, cultural and and roll. Such apparatuses often
attempted to restructure notions of the
material space.
body (i.e., through new structures of
sense/noise and rhythms) and youth.20
CONCLUSION: IS THERE
As the deconstruction of youth has
ROCK AFTER PUNK?
become a more effective presence in
We can now return to the task of everyday life, the ability to make such
interpreting the current situation of rock discriminations seems to have disap
and roll. After punk, the dominant con peared (however oversimplified the cate
tradiction around which rock and roll gories may already seem). Rock and roll
was rearticulated was that of "attitude." has exploded into an almost maddening
There were two possible responses. proliferation of sounds and styles with no
First, the practice of excorporation could musical center. In fact, it is almost as if
be submerged below the surface of the rock and roll today were running
apparatus (a position which character through, metonymically and synchroni
izes much of the history of rock and roll), cally reproducing, rock and roll's entire
allowing the axes of youth and/or the history. It is also expanding its possibili
body to dominate its affective empower ties, partly by combining and rearrang
ment, to define both the center and sur ing other styles, partly by "excorporat
face of rock and roll's politics of "plea ing" a wide range of new musical prac
sure." This helps us explain why heavy tices and technologies. And this is true,
metal and new wave" defined the split not only musically but stylistically as
center of a narrower vision of rock and well. This can be seen in a new genera
roll in the late seventies. Heavy metal tion of rock and roll movies which move
has been and remains a strong affirma fluidly among and combine a wide range
tion of the difference and pleasures of of rock and roll styles (e.g., Streets of
youth (often ideologically entangled with Fire, Buckaroo Bonzai, Repo Man). It
images of working class culture and fan can also be heard, I believe, in individual
tasy). New wave was largely a synthesis records (e.g., Hiisker Dii's Zen Arcade
of punk attitudes (and historical roots), contains a history of rock and roll

69
CSMC

GROSSBERG

although it is given no coherent shape or perhaps works for the rebirth of "au
thentic" rock and roll or an idealistic
order).
However, this description leaves un rock and roll audience. Or finally, one
answered whether, in this situation, rock argues for an interaction between music
and roll is affectively empowered and and audiences, leading one to look for
whether it is or can be oppositional. and privilege the marginal, the subcul
Recently, I was asked to write an article tural, that which remains outside the
for an Italian magazine explaining the musical and sociological mainstream.
increasing "conservatism" of U.S.-onian Such a view not only takes the latter
youth, the existence of a generation of relationship for granted, it fails to locate
rock and roll-ing Reaganites. (Obvious it within specific historical contexts
ly, by contemporary reckoning, this (Hall, 1 981). Furthermore, by repro
includes more than one generation, ducing the unreflective elitism of rock
stretching from the yuppies and baby and roll, it recreates all of the problems
boomers to the current generation of of elitism within its politics.
precollege adolescents.) The question
I would prefer a politics which
assumes both that they are conservative attempted to locate the points at which
(in a way that is consistent with our rock and roll continues to struggle. This
historical understanding of the meanings is, however, a complex matter for, as I
of the term) and that there is, at least have argued, the energy of that struggle
intuitively, a contradiction between is at the level of an affective resistance to
youth and rock and roll on the one hand, the structures of everyday life. More
over, even if a particular rock and roll
and conservatism on the other.
I have suggested that one cannot apparatus is effective at this level, there
answer this question by separating the is no guarantee that its resistance will be
music and its audience within the terms articulated into an active struggle against
of traditional communication models. In hegemonic (ideological, economic and
such a model, one can assume that the political) structures. These two issues
music is determining, that its politics are then define the sites at which the battle
inscribed within it. One would then must be waged for the cultural critic. Is
argue, for example, that rock and roll rock and roll working affectively for
has become so much a part of the hege particular audience fractions and how is
monic, capitalist system that it has lost it positioned within hegemonic politics?
any oppositional power. Listening to it The question must remain open for it is
contributes to the conservatism of youth, an empirical one. But to say that it is
reinforcing the already existing conser empirical is not to say that it is behav
vatism which enabled them to enjoy the ioral, exegetical or phenomenological.
music in the first place. Alternatively, How then is it to be answered?
one can assume that the audience (par
I have attempted to do three things in
tially determined by its social and histor this article: (1) to lay out a conceptual
ical context) is determining. One then vocabulary with which we can investi
argues that the current generation no gate the politics of rock and roll in more
longer needs or desires oppositional rock subtle and complex ways, a framework
and roll. Both of these views lead to within which rock and roll is a set of
identical political alternatives: one an strategies for struggle, the nature and
nounces the death of rock and roll as an effects of which are never predetermined;
oppositional form; or one awaits and (2) to argue that at least two significant

70
IS THERE ROCK AFTER PUNK'

vectors of change have to be taken into

account as we consider the present politi
cal position of rock and roll. This is not
to deny other vectors of determination,
merely to acknowledge that the complex
array of changes that have taken place
over the last 25 years have changed the
relations between rock and roll, youth
and society; (3) to suggest a different
approach to the empirical question. Let
me, in conclusion, make some explicit
comments about this last concero.
Admittedly, many of the observations,
interpretations and conclusions I have
presented are not themselves written on
the surface of our social experience.
There are many objections that could be
raised 2-gainst my argument. For exam
ple, one could disagree with my descrip
tions of the functioning of rock and roll,
or punk. One could reasonably ask if the
fact that the punk apparatus had only a
marginal presence in the United States,
or that it continues to exist, contradicts
my reading.21
I might respond that all critical argu
ments are based, in the end, upon rela
tive (and hopefully educated) perspec
tives and critical dialogue: one offers an
interpretation and asks, "this is so, is it
not?" However, since I believe that the
crucial issues upon which questions of
culture turn are political, I would prefer
a different model. I have offered a partic
ular reconstruction-at a particular level
of abstraction-of a complex and contra
dictory historical context. The task is
comparable to trying to reconstruct a
multidimensional jigsaw puzzle without
knowing the image represented. More
over, each level of abstraction has its own
appropriate demands for evidence and
argument. Alternative constructions are
always possible, and the connections
between different levels of abstraction
(i.e., between what we conveniently label
the " theoretical" and the " empirical")
must constantly be taken into account.

MARCH 1986

Nevertheless, in the last instance, I

would appeal to the political implica
tions of different constructions, to
whether they allow us to identify and
elaborate sites of resistance and struggle.
At this point, the questions of contempo
rary cultural politics enters a different
terrain. "Postmodern theory" (e.g.,
Baudrillard, 1983; Grossberg, 1984c)
argues that contemporary popular media
can no longer empower through the pro
duction of affective apparatuses and
alliances. Rock and roll works, if at all,
by inserting fragmented individuals into
the contradictions and interstices of the
hegemonic structures. Its resistance is
hyper-localized. The real "pleasure" of
rock and roll in the present situation is
precisely that of the dispersion of any
stable site or structure of '''pleasure'' and
power. On the other hand, while such
forms of struggle may be necessary and
even important at the level of everyday
life, this should not prevent us from
seeing the need, and the possibility, to
organize structures and alliances which
resist at both the affective and hegemonic
levels.
We will not arrive at an adequate
practical understanding-"pessimism of
the intellect, optimism of the will" -of
the current situation in rock and roll by
focusing on either the phenomenology of
its fans or the message of its texts, even if
we locate both within the context of a
conservative hegemony. The crucial con
tradiction, the point at which rock and
roll is inserted, is that between everyday
life and the ideological struggles of con
temporary hegemonic politics. For those
ideologies-both of the left and the
right-continue to mystify that which
rock and roll empowers: the changing
structures of our affective existence.
However naively optimistic it may seem,
I believe that the contemporary rock and
roll cultures are "all revved up with no
D
place to go" (Meatloaf).

71
CSMC

GROSSBERG

NOTES
I In fact, the project of the present essay can be read as an attempt to rearticulate pop sensibilities to
the political left, much as Hebdige (1 979) attempted to articulate punk in England to British black
culture.
2The best work on rock and roll is: Frith (1981); Duncan ( 1984); Young (1984). See also Hebdige

(1 979); Chambers (1981, 1985, in press); Wicke (1 982); Lull (1 983).

3For a discussion of the reductionism of contemporary communication theory, see Grossberg (1982,
1985 ).
"The argument presented here summarizes Grossberg (1 983-1984, 1 984a, 1 984b, 1 984c, and pieces
in press), My use of genre terms, like "rock and roll" and "punk" unavoidably relies upon the
ambiguity of such categories: they connote, simultaneously, a set of musical practices, a broader set of
cultural practices and a particular affective alliance. ]n most cases, the context should make clear the
appropriate level of abstraction. Further, I am aware that key theoretical terms, like "pleasure" and
"empowerment" remain undefined. I believe this is, albeit unfortunate, unavoidable. Hopefully, they
can be understood by the function which they play in the context of my argument.
5Throughout the essay, ] will use " pleasure" to refer to this broader sense of the asignifying and
pleasure (without quotation marks) to refer to the narrower sense of sensuous enjoyment.
6Much of the following description of "encapsulation" holds true as well for other forms of "popular"
culture. See Hall (1981).
7This can be seen embodied in particular songs which take a particularly negative phrase and,
through rhythms and repetition, transform it into the site of celebration. For example, Gang of Four's
"Anthrax" ("Sometimes I feel like a beetle on its back . . . love will get you like a case of anthrax") or
Ack-Ack's "Precentage" ("I'm one of the, one of the, percentage, let's go") or the Talking Head's
transfiguration of paranoia into rock and roll.
8For a different and more elaborate discussion of the three axes, see Grossberg (t 984c).
9For a discussion of postmodernism, see Grossberg (1 985) and Foster (1 983). For a discussion of
"attitude," see Unger (t 982).
JOlt is important to note that many of the same effects were being produced at the same time by the

disco apparatus, arising out of urban black, gay and hispanic subcultures. See Dyer (t 979) and Frith
(1 978).
li The discussion that follows is the product of conversations with Dick Hebdige.

12For discussions of punk and its aftermath, see Dancis (1 978); Laing (1978, 1985); Hebdige (1979,
1 983); Marcus (1 980a, 1 980b, 1981a, 1981b, 1981c, 1 983); Erikson (1980); Frith (1981, 1983);
Marchetti (1982); Grossberg ( 1983-1984); and Savage (1 983).
13S. Frith (personal communication, September, 1983) has suggested that the differences in the sexual
politics of British and American rock and roll may be due, in part, to the fact that women re-entered
(and feminist concerns entered) British rock and roll with punk, while in the United States, this had
occurred earlier in the decade with the singer-songwriter movement.
14"Youth" in rock and roll is always connected to the real frustrations and powerlessness of
adolescents, despite attempts to define it in terms of an attitude of "eternal youth." See Christgau
(1 984).
151n my opinion, the best punk and post-punk music foregrounded this contradiction (e.g., the Sex
Pistols, the Buzzcocks, the Voidoids).
16Two recent arguments for the "disappearance of youth" are Postman (1 983) and Meyrowitz
(1984). See Rowntree (1968) and Jacques (1973) for class-readings of youth and youth culture. For a
good summary of many of the arguments, see Frith (1 984). One can find discussions of the crises of the
various youth populations (yuppies, baby boomers growing up, and the new youth) in almost every
major publication. Particularly useful examples are Wellborn (1981) and Trippett (1981). What I am
suggesting is the need for a "genealogy" (Foucault, 1980) of youth. I am grateful to Ellen Wartella and
Philip Sellars for their contributions to this discussion.

72
[S THERE ROCK AFTER PUNK'

MARCH 1986

nit is interesting to note that the other major attempt, albeit failed, to construct a youth culture, was
in the 1 920's, following the First World War. Certainly, the contemporary construction of youth needs
to be understood in the context of specific events and developments throughout the twentieth century.
See Fass ( 1 977) and Wohl ( 1 979).
18For example, "Young people are now getting married cause they see how their parents followed
every desire and got totally disrupted and how the nihilism of 1979 caused nothing but O.O.'s and
cancer" (Acker, 1982, p. 78).
19"New wave" is a particularly problematic genre term. It is sometimes used as if one can assume that
it is the form in which punk and disco were appropriated by commercial interests, thus making it
inherently co-opted. Obviously, I refuse such an assumption.
20It is important to remember that how a particular musical text is located within apparatuses is not
inscribed within the musical practice, and hence, that the same text can function in different, even
contradictory apparatuses. Consequently, the lines between these different genres is neither simple nor
stable. See Grossberg ( 1 984a).
211 would argue that the contemporary punk apparatus, for example, as built around hardcore music,
differs significantly from the moment I have described. Further, the question of punk's influence at the
affective level cannot be read off of some quantitative measure of its cultural presence.

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Critical Response
SIMON FRITH
I haven't heard i t lately (so maybe rock is

ingratiating voice, a satisfied voice, pulling

dead), but the shout used to go u p about half

every event, from Bob Marley to the Au

way through every concert I went

male voice:

"ROCK

AND

to. A lone,

ROLL!"

An

Pairs into a received concept of fun. An

American voice. '"'It will stand!" sang the
Showmen in 1 96 1 and that sense of itself as a
monument, an achievement to be recurring

Mr. Frith is Professor of Sociology at the

University of Warwick, Coventry. He is the
author (if Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and
the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll.

ly, ritually honored is, perhaps, what most

clearly differentiates rock and roll from other
forms of popular music.
G rossberg has a different voice from those