Design it yourself? Punk’s division of labour

Abstract

Punk's do-it-yourself call to arms led to a widespread adoption of the rhetoric, if not always the practice, of independence from traditional means of production. During the early period of punk's development in the United

Was punk DIY? Is DIY punk? Interrogating the DIY/punk nexus, with particular reference to the early UK punk scene, c. 1976–1984

“…Thus we find such laying bare most clearly in the cover art for the records of a small number of acts such as the Desperate Bicycles, TV Personalities, Scritti Politti, and the Door and the Window, which, as we will see further below, included detail of how each record was made, and a breakdown of costs for key elements of the final product (such as recording studio, mastering, pressing, and sleeves). Occasionally this minor meta-discourse of DIY praxis was extended: at least one of these acts (Scritti Politti) also produced a booklet one could mail order about how to make your own record (Bestley, 2018: 13); another (the Desperate Bicycles) propagandised further by singing about the process of making their own record in the lyrics of one of the recorded songs.…”

“…Pete Dale confirms that technology was the driver for both the practice and the discourse of ‘ so-called Xerox music’ (emphasis added), ‘because basic multi-track recording equipment was being mass-produced as never before, and because Xerox copiers enable fanzine writers to easily produce discourse about the recordings produced’ (2008: 175). 6 Yet, while Xerox – photocopying – arguably suggested a challenge to ideas of copyright, possibly to notions of ownership and access too, it was also duplicatory, offering not just sameness, but the guarantee of sameness, while, as Russ Bestley notes, ‘even the production of fanzines and flyers required access to often elusive technical processes’ (Bestley, 2018: 8). The Xerox machine was generally located in that least punk of everyday spaces, the office, where one might have to work one's dread daily drudge prior to night-time excitements.…”

Beyond boundaries? Disability, DIY and punk pedagogies

“…DIY is often viewed as a core element of punk, an aspect that enabled activism against an assumed authority and power (Guerra, 2018; Martin-Iverson, 2014). It is therefore often lauded as a means of engaging with/utilising punk in a pedagogical sense (Bestley, 2017; Cordova, 2016). It should be capable of working in tandem with education in developing and encouraging the ‘movement against and beyond boundaries’ (Hooks, 1994).…”

Fan artefacts and doing it themselves: The home-made graphics of punk devotees

“…(LWT 1976). However, in practice such hierarchies were harder to budge, particularly outside the realm of punk performance (Bestley 2018), though even here the mythology only briefly outweighed the brutal reality that some musicians were simply more capable, or more interesting, than others.…”

“…There is, of course, a tension here between Fig.01 Clothing advertisements, New Musical Express, November 1977 andJuly 1978. punk as attitude and ideology and punk as a new and distinct form of popular music; between a philosophical approach to the subculture and the consumer-driven, traditional music industry that saw an opportunity to access emerging markets and new audiences. Certainly when it came to punk 'products' -records, clothing, promotional material -the more traditional business-led operations of branding, marketing, professional design and copyright held sway (Bestley 2018, Dale 2018. Punk clothes, always displaying a tension between the punk high fashion of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren and the charity shop adaptations and home-made, do-ityourself outfits of many early fans, also witnessed a boom in copycat items sold by smaller traders and mail order sellers advertising in the back pages of the music press ( Fig.01).…”