The Blank Generation: Genre Formation & New York Punk Rock 1974-1978

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2008
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
New York City's downtown neighborhoods have long been associated with artistic experimentation. The mid-1970s and 80s, in particular, witnessed an exceptionally vibrant, cross-disciplinary art scene that not only transcended, but sought to undermine traditional genre boundaries. As one author notes, it is important to understand that downtown art "was not a new aesthetic, not a new style, and not a unified movement, but rather an attitude toward the possibilities and production of art." This attitude, though largely unformulated, was nonetheless shared by the multitude of artists living in SoHo and the Lower East Side for their low rent, and was therefore the sole unifying factor of a scene composed of a wide variety of styles and mediums. One such medium was music, a component of the scene that acquired the appellation "punk rock." The purpose of this paper is to determine how punk came to be not only a distinct genre, but in fact one of the most easily identifiable genres in popular music. I will argue that punk, in its original incarnation in New York in the mid-to-late 1970s, was not a musical genre per se. As with the downtown art scene at large, punk bands were united only by geography and a common approach to artistic production. It was constructed as a genre (strangely enough) both before and after the actual movement: in the application of earlier discourses within music criticism, through which it garnered its name, and in its later connection with the British punk explosion, which further consolidated "punk" into a discrete music genre.
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