From the lyrics of “We Are All Prostitutes,” released as a single by Rough Trade in 1979 between the first (Y) and the second (For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?) Pop Group albums. The B-side of the single features the song “Amnesty International Report on British Army Torture of Irish Prisoners.”
“Mark Stewart interviewed by Mark Fisher,” The Wire, July 2008 →.
This essay is a theoretical summary of the research done for the exhibition “Agit Punk” at Kalasataman Seripaja in Helsinki, May 12–June 11, 2023. The exhibition was initiated by Rab-Rab Press and was a joint project of Lilou Angelrath, Sezgin Boynik, Ott Kagovere, Jan Konsin, and Samu Montonen. I am especially grateful to Minna Henriksson and Yrjö Hakanen for their commentary and suggestions.
Mervi Viteli, “Spartakiadien raikkaassa myötätuulessa eteenpäin,” Toveri, no. 13 (1976).
Mikko Montonen, “Pop Group,” two-page typewritten text kept in the Spartakiadit archives at Helsinki Kansan Arkisto (the People’s Archive), Spartakiadit files (1F9 H, folder 20).
“Memos from the meeting,” Kansan Arkisto (the People’s Archive), Spartakiadit files (1F9 H, folder 20).
The Pop Group played two gigs in Helsinki, both organized by Spartakiadit. The first gig was at the political festival at Jäähali (Ice Rink) and the second was at the Tavastia Club, a regular music venue. For Finnish post-punk bands Shadowplay (especially its singer Brandi Ifgray), Kadotetut, 22 Pistepirkko, and Geisha, this was a very influential event.
“Gareth Sager and the Pop Group,” Mojo, April 2021.
David Widgery, Beating Time: Riot ‘n’ Race ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll (Chatto and Windus, 1986), 112.
Neil Davidson, “Carnival, March, Riot,” review of When We Touched the Sky: the Anti-Nazi League, 1977–1981, by Dave Renton, International Socialism 2, no. 112 (Autumn 2006): 121 →.
John Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew, 1936–1981 (Copula, 2008), 853–56.
Dave Wise and Stuart Wise, “The End of Music,” in What is Situationism?: A Reader, ed. Stewart Home (AK Press, 1996), 65. Originally published as a pamphlet in 1978 with the title Punk, Reggae: A Critique.
Chris Cutler, File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music (Rer Megacorp/Autonomedia, 1991), 125.
Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 40, 144.
Quoted in Worley, No Future, 148.
Russ Bestley, “(I Want Some) Demystification: Deconstructing Punk,” Punk & Post-Punk 4, no. 2–3 (2015). Bestley is lead editor of the academic journal Punk & Post-Punk, series editor and art director for the Global Punk book series published by Intellect Books, and a founding member of the Punk Scholars Network. His provocative theses on the “punk school of thought” and his call for “deconstruction” have been well-received in punk studies. Pete Dale, an associate editor of Punk & Post-Punk, introduced Derrida as a primary theoretical influence on punk studies in his book Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground (Ashgate, 2012).
Worley, No Future, 43.
Neil Eriksen, “Popular Culture and Revolutionary Theory: Understanding Punk Rock,” Theoretical Review, no. 18 (September–October 1980) →. Eriksen gives interesting examples of the bourgeois fear of punk, including liberal Guardian journalist Tim Patterson’s 1977 dismissal of punk rock as “a social disease,” a “part of the manipulation business,” and possibly “the crudest cultural hoax in decades.”
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Methuen, 1979), 133.
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 1970 →.
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (International Publisher, 1970), 10.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1968), 45.
Simon Reynolds, “Mark Stewart,” in Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews (Soft Skull Press, 2010), 97–98.
Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (Penguin, 2005), 89.
“Mark Stewart interviewed by Mark Fisher,” The Wire.
Geoffrey Waite, “‘I Was Waiting For the Communist Call’ or, the Future Anterior of Music and Its Theory,” Literature and Psychology 44, no. 4 (1998): 31.
Waite, “‘I Was Waiting For the Communist Call,’” 57.
Waite, “‘I Was Waiting For the Communist Call,’” 52.
Waite, “‘I Was Waiting For the Communist Call,’” 47.
Incidentally, the strongest criticism of this Eurocommunist revisionism was made by Althusser and his disciples, above all Etienne Balibar, who refused to surrender to “bourgeois ideology” and to give up on the idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Pete Dale, Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground (Ashgate, 2012), 6. Marx wrote about “direct production processes” in the Grundrisse.
Commenting on labor under capitalism, the Pop Group told New Musical Express: “Kids are going straight from school to the factory doing what they’ve been taught. Work is sacred, people don’t know how to appreciate freedom … People don’t need money.” Quoted in Max Bell, “The Pop Group: Idealists in Distress,” New Musical Express, June 30, 1979, 27.
When asked about his political—potentially conspiratorial—views, Mark Stewart simply replied that he was interested in “parapolitical and weird things.” “Mark Stewart interviewed by Mark Fisher,” The Wire.
Esko Antola, Campaigns Against European Peace Movements, International Peace Bureau, Peace Union of Finland, Turku, 1984.
Edward Thompson, “Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization,” in Exterminism and Cold War (Verso, 1984), 5, 17.
O. K. Werckmeister, Citadel Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Dan Graham, “Punk as Propaganda,” in Dan Graham, Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects, ed. Brian Wallis (MIT Press, 1993), 102.
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), 4, 8.
Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (BFI Publishing, 1992), 22.
Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 82.
Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 54–55.
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 46.
Fredric Jameson, “Foreword,” in Attali, Noise, xi.
Attali, Noise, 132. Politically, Attali’s critique of “totality” is also a critique of “totalitarianism,” that is, a critique of the dictatorship of (then totalitarian) communism in favor of openness and coexistence. In the 1980s Attali was an economic adviser to François Mitterrand’s socialist government in France, which pushed liberal Eurocommunist reforms.
Jameson, “Foreword,” in Attali, Noise, xi.
See →.
Kodwo Eshun, Dan Graham: Rock My Religion (Afterall Books, 2012), 95.
Hebdige, Subculture, 69–70.
Slavoj Žižek, “A Few Thoughts About the Issue of the Ideological Presuppositions of Punk (1983),” in Slavoj Žižek, Rastko Močnik, and Zoja Skušek, Punk Suprematism: Theoretical Writings on Punk, Nation, State, Art, Bureaucracy, and Socialism, ed. Sezgin Boynik (Rab-Rab Press, 2021). The Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis also produced more sober approaches to punk, such as Rastko Močnik’s “Reason Wins,” also included in Punk Suprematism.
Thompson, “Notes on Exterminism,” 22.