Post-Punk's Attempt To Democratise The Music Industry The Success And Failure Of Rough Trade

Post-Punk's Attempt to Democratise the Music Industry: The Success and Failure of Rough Trade Author(s): David Hesmondhalgh Source: Popular Music, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Oct., 1997), pp. 255-274 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/853045 . Accessed: 10/03/2011 18:32
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Popular Music (1998)Volume 16/3.Copyright(C)1998Cambridge UniversityPress.

Printedin the United Kingdom

Post-Punk's attempt to democratise the music the success and failure Trade
DAVID HESMONDHALGH

industry: of Rough

Punk's widely accepted status as a watershed in British music-making has produced some fine academicand journalisticstudies. GreilMarcushas devoted much of the last twenty years to an assessment of thelegacy of punk rock (Marcus1989, 1993). Dave Laing's One ChordWonders provides a multi-layered approach which might serve as a model for any analysis of a particularmusical-culturalmoment (Laing 1985). The most detailed and thorough account is Jon Savage's England's Dreaming (1991), a paean to the mischievous self-consciousness of punk and a sly put-down of its earnest political wing. Yet there aresome important gaps in this literature. Only Laing (1985, pp. 14-21) has addressed the institutional and economic effects of punk in any detail, but his account ends, like that of Savage, with the incorporation of punk imagery and sounds into the mainstream of British culturallife at the end of the 1970s. The symbolic death of punk is marked by the election of MargaretThatcheras BritishPrimeMinisterin May 1979. Marcustraces the underground simmering of punk in 1980sAmerica, and his vision of post-punk as a lasting source of vitality and rebellion in an increasingly conformist culture is a compelling one. But he is drawn primarily to the situationist and dadaist elements of punk politics. As in Savage (1991), lasting institutionalrepercussions are sidelined in favour of an explorationofpunk's culturalimpact. What follows, then, is an assessment of punk's significance as a long-term intervention in the British music industry. This means tracingthe development and mutation of punk initiatives into the 1980s-long after its supposed incorporation.l A potentially useful normativeconcept for assessing post-punk's institutional effectiveness in the 1980s is democratisation. 'Democracy'is a term notoriously prone to abuse, but nevertheless a number of ideas closely associated with the term continue to be ones which animate progressive politicalaction: self-determination, collectivism and participationare amongst them. What would a democraticsystem of media production involve? Drawing on a tradition of writing which I want to call alternative mediaactivism(e.g. Benjamin 1986,...