Punk Rock and the Value of Auto-ethnographic Writing about Music

Abstract

Why do many of the books on punk rock and hardcore punk come with punk attitude? Why are a good number of the books written from a personal perspective? What kind of value do the diary entries of Nils Stevenson in 'Vacant: A Diary of the Punk Years 1976-79' have compared to an article on the rhetoric of class by David Simonelli in the journal 'Contemporary British History'? In some respects scholarly writing on punk rock seems like a contradiction. How can music so rooted in anti-establishment sentiment be appropriated into an institutional setting? The auto-ethnographic approach found in many of the studies of punk might be an answer to this question. The writers have used their own experiences as musicians and fans to reflect on and analyse the music and scenes which arguably provides the reader with a more immediate insight. This paper argues for an auto-ethnographic approach to the writing of punk and hardcore punk and suggests that this style of writing about music offers the reader an ‘authentic’ insight into these particular music scenes.

Correspondence and improvisation: An autoethnographic exploration of drumming in nature

“…My personal music-making in nature – for myself and my own sense of well-being – models key aspects of DIY culture, such as deliberate isolation (Quigley and Smith, 2021) and music-making for non-commercial (Smith and Gillett, 2015); this is musicking I am doing by myself (at least from an anthropocentric point of view) and for myself. This autoethnographic paper is a continuation of that DIY ethos, as a process of reflection on personal practice in writing (Attfield, 2011; Stephens-Griffin and Griffin, 2019). The improvised, woodland drumming described in this article also provides examples of DIY learning, construed as part of a punk pedagogical practice (Lee and Smith, 2023; Smith et al, 2022; Torrez, 2012) wherein I ascribe what Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) term ‘pedagogic authority’ to nature and the environment.…”

Art-cycle model: a holistic approach toward artistic experience in music performance

“…Apart from the controversies, the impact of autoethnography is understandable given the flexibility of the method in embracing not only individual but also collective contexts (including Doğantan-Dack, 2012;Armstrong & Desbruslais, 2014;Sutherland, 2015) across different musical genres -from Western art music (Benetti, 2017) and pop (Kennett, 2008), to jazz and blues (Spry, 2010), punk rock and hardcore rock (Attfield, 2011). Furthermore, contemporary forms of recording, documenting and disseminating have become attractive to researchers due to the needs arising from the artistic nature of the object of scientific study, such as audio-collage and creative writing (narrative fiction, creative non-fiction, ethnodrama, poetry) (Wiley, 2019).…”