Market failure: Punk economics, early and late

College Literature, Spring 2001 by Thompson, Stacy

Introduction: Punk Merchandise?

In the early 90s, a line of tee shirts emerged in both independently owned and chain record stores. The shirts claimed, on their fronts"This is not a Fugazi T-shirt." The producer of the tee shirts assumed that fans of the punk rock band, Fugazi, were aware that its record label, Dischord, refused to market its bands. On the backs of the shirts appeared the lyrics, "You are not what you own," from the Fugazi song, "Merchandise." Dischord allowed for the possibility of such shirts when it refused to copyright its bands' names in a conscious attempt to eschew the commercial impulse to create intellectual property. What the shirts represent, however, is Dischord's lack of control over its products within the marketplace: in this instance, a tee-shirt manufacturer who might or might not run an independent business successfully mobilized the anti-commercial impulses of Dischord to integrate his or her own product into the commodity market.

Punks and punk businesses have, at best, a conflicted relationship with commodification and capitalism, around which aggregates of anxiety coalesce in material form as punk `zines (fanzines), songs, liner notes, and activism launched against what punks perceive as the encroaching realm of capitalism. What I propose is that, after 1979, both in response to the initial "sell out" of punk's late 70s English scene and in order to preserve control over their field of production, punks adopted economic strategies for resisting capitalism. In fact, the attempt to oppose commercial music in economic terms became crucial to the definition of punk in 1979 and has remained so through the present. However, punk has failed and continues to fail, even on a relatively small scale, to overturn the dominant mode of economic production that is proffered it-the commercial practices of the major record labels. Punks are unable to absent themselves from commodification and small-scale capitalism; but, in their attempts to resist these economic forms, they fail commercially, which is a sort of punk success after all. In their continual effort and failure to establish a zone of exchange that is qualitatively different from late capitalist commodity exchange, punks testify to the need and desire for such a zone and refuse to abandon the possibility of creating one.

Punk: A Provisional Definition

One of the most difficult tasks that mapping punk demands is that of formulating a working definition of the term from which to strike out. I want to begin by acknowledging that I will not offer a history or genealogy of punk here. However, I do want to advance three propositions in order to narrow (and, perhaps, broaden) the field that I will be investigating. First, there are several major genres of punk textuality: music (recorded and performed), style (especially clothing), the printed word (including `zines), film, and events (punk happenings); together, these texts make up what I will term the "punk project."

Second and more importantly, two vectors constitute punk. From punk's birth in 1974 in CBGBs (a small nightclub in New York City's East Village) to its present multiplicity of"scenes" that literally span the globe, punks have always mounted aesthetic and economic forms of resistance against commercial music as well as other forms of commercially produced cultural texts. Because punk's forms of resistance have radically changed over the past twenty-six years, it is impossible to establish a trans-historical definition of punk aesthetics or economics; consequently, the best attempts to describe punk aesthetics have focused not on punk as a whole but on one of its six major scenes: the New York City scene of 1974-76, the English scene of 1976-78, the California hardcore scene of the early 80s, the Washington, D.C., straight edge scene of the mid-80s, the New York City second wave straight-edge scene of the late 80s, and the California pop-punk scene of the early 90s., On the other hand, punk's economic modes of resistance have never been well-documented, and it is to this task that I turn in this article.

My third proposition assumes that the conditions of the first two have been met. For punks to consider a text "punk," they must identify it as such themselves. In short, a band, zine, film, etc. that both aesthetically and economically resists commercialism does not automatically qualify as "punk," unless punks recognize it as such and understand it as contributing to the "punk project."2

Early Punk Economics

The economic history of punk can be divided into two unequal parts: early punk economics, from 1974 to 1979, and late punk economics, from 1979 to the present. 1979 is a logical year to posit a break, because until that year the economic vector of punk's negation took a back seat to its aesthetic vector, while the "selling out" of the English scene (which I will describe below) in 1977 marks the moment at which punk begins to move underground economically, and its economic vector subsequently becomes at least as important as its aesthetic one.