Mallot, Curry and Peña, Milagros. (2004). Punk
Rockers’ Revolution: A Pedagogy of Race, Class, and
Gender. N.Y: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
Pp. viii + 145
$27.95 ISBN 0-8204-6142-3
Reviewed by Dominique Johnson
Temple University
October 14, 2005
|
“We are born with a chance. Rise
above.” | |
| |
Black Flag as performed by Tribe 8
|
Postmodern theory in education enables us to consider how
dominant structures present limit situations (Freire) to social
change, and how countercultures play a role in resisting the
ideas and interests of the dominant classes. Systems that uphold
these powerful ideologies, whether they are racist, sexist,
ethnocentric, classist, genderphobic, and/or homophobic, also
work to support what Mallot and Peña describe as
late-capitalist American society. In their book, Punk
Rockers’ Revolution: A Pedagogy of Race, Class, and
Gender, Mallot and Peña portray the influences of an
American youth counterculture born of late 1970s white straight
working/middle class men on subsequent generations of American
youth seeking resistance to oppression.
Framed by a Foreword from Rudolfo Chávez and an Afterword
by Peter McLaren and Jonathan McLaren, Mallot and Peña
present a class-based study of the particular contributions of
punk rock art and music to social change. Conducting a content
analysis of three major punk rock record labels in order to
understand how the trends in ideas, values, and beliefs of the
song lyrics evolve over time, they provide an important
counterpoint and contribution to the increasingly popular and
noteworthy discourse surrounding youth (counter)culture and its
potential for innovation in curriculum and instruction. What is
more, Mallot and Peña offer us another way of approaching
this area of research, expanding beyond the boundary of current
work which almost exclusively focuses on hip hop music and
culture and African American youth. Here, they offer us a bridge
between a pedagogy of race, class, and gender, showing us that
this type of inquiry is not bound to one specific youth
counterculture, oppression, or set of experiences. They enable us
to see how understandings of youth counterculture can be
strengthened by these intersections of identity and demonstrate
the applicability of this method of inquiry.
The potential for inquiries centered in youth counterculture
and music in particular, as demonstrated by hip hop scholars and
now by Mallot and Peña, show us how they can be interrelated
and how they might share a common goal. Rose (1994), when
speaking of the pedagogy and power of hip hop music and culture,
writes:
"Let us imagine these…principles as a blueprint for
social resistance and affirmation: create sustaining narratives,
accumulate them, layer, embellish, and transform them. However,
be also prepared for rupture, find pleasure in it, in fact, plan
on social rupture. When these ruptures occur, use them in
creative ways that will prepare you for a future in which
survival will demand a sudden shift in ground tactics."
When the influential punk band Black Flag writes about rising
above, they are speaking from a perspective that represents the
values and beliefs of many marginalized American youth, something
that can resonate with young people across identities. When the
all-female queer punk band Tribe 8 sings about how “we are
born with a chance,” they are giving an empowering voice to
an even more underrepresented group of young people and asserting
their place in the world. In both these instances, as well as
across the punk rock genre, Mallot and Peña describe how
bands and their songs offer a reflection of youth culture, and
illustrate how this can be a site of pedagogy and power.
After describing the bias they carry with them as authors,
including who they are and where they come from (Mallot is
Midwestern, white, and from a middle-working class family, and
Peña is a New Yorker, Latina, from a working poor family),
they describe the focus of their study at the end of Chapter 1.
Framing it as a “small but important aspect of our struggle
for social change” (p. 12), they analyze the lyrical
stances of punk rock records. They operationalize this by
conducting a content analysis of the lyrical content of the music
produced by three punk rock record labels in the 1980s and 1990s:
Alternative Tentacles, Decay Music, and Cesstone Music.
Describing their theoretical framework in Chapter 2, they
discuss the influences of Marx and Gramsci. They then go on to
bridge these theories to punk practices, highlighting the
commentary punk artists make about schooling and institutions
such as schools. After this discussion of class-based theories of
popular culture, a history of selected popular music genres
(Chapter 3), and a argument as to why there is a connection
between punk rock and skateboarding cultures (Chapter 4), they
trouble the larger context of their study (Chapter 5). In their
research design (Chapter 6), they create six distinct population
lists in order to compare lyrical content across their sample of
3886 songs: white females from the 1980s, nonwhite males from the
1980s, white males from the 198s, white females from the 1990s,
nonwhite females from the 1990s, and white males from the
1990s.
Their findings (Chapter 7) indicate that, as expected, white,
presumably heterosexual males perform most songs across the two
decades. Most songs are coded as being social protest in content.
Lyrics were coded as being either social protest, antiracist,
antisexist, anti-love/romance, homosexual, antisocial protest,
racist, sexist, love/romance, homophobic, or absent of any such
content (p. 91). In addition, songs were coded as to whether they
had resistant or dominant messages, and the number of such
messages were also calculated according to subgroup of punk
artist (p. 92). Results were given in a correlation matrix,
statistically significant at the .05 level, according to value
content of lyrics and race and gender breakdown over the two
decades analyzed.
|
“We got life for sale what’s yours worth? Four
bux an hour or a grand? There’s no such thing as class here
is America. There’s only lazy crazy people. See the way
they treat their kids…” | |
| |
—Tribe 8
|
Music reflects our society while contributing to its exchange
of ideas. It is through this exchange that we negotiate the
boundaries of our complex social world. In their discussion
(Chapter 8), Mallot and Peña do not define punk rock as a
social movement but they outline how it is an identity-based
counterculture that struggles for social justice. Nevertheless,
it is linked to hegemonic principles, namely white supremacy, and
it is a genre typified by white presumably heterosexual male
musicians with some exceptions, most notably Tribe 8 (a racially
diverse queer female band out of San Francisco, CA).
Mallot and Peña’s analyses might be strengthened by
allying their findings with previous work on cultures of
resistance. In doing so, we could be in a position to better see
how their study allows us to propose new hypotheses about the
relationships between youth counterculture, pedagogy,
communities, and identity. We can consider punk rock as a viable
social movement site using Roberta Ash Garner’s (1997)
definition of social movements as, “collectivities engaged
in noninstitutionalized discourses and practices aimed at
changing the existing condition of society” (p. 1).
She further states that when discourses and practices are not
a part of the institutions of society, they are therefore deemed
illegitimate. Garner identifies three distinct periods of social
movements in the fifty-year period from roughly the end of World
War II to the mid-1990s, all worth mentioning for their unique
paradigm shifts and for the fact that Punk Rockers’
Revolution is based on music from the 1980s and 1990s. This
conceptual framework reveals how punk rock music and art is a
culture of resistance, a statement supported by Mallot and
Peña’s findings. Because it is a culture of
resistance, it is a valuable site of pedagogy and identity
construction.
Furthermore, Garner (1972) discusses counter culture phenomena
as a powerful force when paired with a political movement. She
posits, however, that these combined forms in social movements
are often suppressed most aggressively because of their potential
for a multi-faceted assault on the social order. Garner further
contends that these counter-cultural movements are dismissed by
the social order as “youth movements,” implying
transitiveness and immaturity. More than an example of a
generation gap phenomenon, cultural and political movements
created by and oriented towards youth can uniquely speak to the
importance of changing the social structure of the new industrial
and post-industrial society.
|
“Tables are going to turn. What side are you going to
be on?” | |
| |
—Tribe 8
|
Members of oppressed groups are mindful of collective identity
and oppositional consciousness, often finding inspiration for
social protest in the cultural establishments of their
communities. Morris (1992) contends that music and informal
conversation are among these entities. Activist theory and
identity change can be further understood through agency frames
(Gamson, 1992) and collective efficacy (Bandura, 1997). These two
concepts elucidate the potential for engagement in collective
action by individuals and groups, respectively. The capability
one believes he or she has to affect social change through
collective action determines individual agency or collective
efficacy.
McAdam (1983) argues that those lacking institutionalized
power must create protest techniques that correct for their
powerlessness as challengers, thus innovating their tactics. It
can be expected that their opponents will counter and adapt to
such new tactics. But the collective identity and action of punk
rock youth that is based in their music and art are central to
the power of their counterculture. Gamson (1992) posits that
collective identity is located in culture, manifested publicly
through expression in language and symbols, such as music and
performance. Members of a collective identity are given
visibility through cultural markers, whether they are artifacts
or icons, as seen in styles of dress, language, and demeanor
(Gamson, 1992). Cultural workers, such as punk rock artists and
musicians, raise the consciousness of new recruits to the social
movement (Morris, 1992).
Bourdieu (1991) describes the power of naming as a symbolic
struggle for the production of common sense, or the ability to
name the legitimate vision of social world and one’s place
in it. He further describes symbolic power as a means by which
the vision of the world can be transformed and as a result,
action on the world. Symbolic power rests in its ability to
obtain the equivalent of that which is gained through physical or
economic force and violence. The economic capital of language
therefore holds much symbolic power according to Bourdieu (1991),
where words are the unit of exchange. He writes, “what
creates the power of words and slogans, a power capable of
maintaining or subverting the social order, is the belief in the
legitimacy of words and of those who utter them” (p.
170).
Innovations in cultural production, through the very process
of modifying existing dominant cultural forms, may be the
necessary requisites for the reproduction of culture (Williams,
1982). Cultural innovation can be socially related with the rise
of new social classes, the redefinition of a social class’
conditions, and changes in the means of cultural production
(Williams, 1982). As Mallot and Peña show, dominant culture
can attempt to appropriate such emergent cultural practices,
however, there is always new cultural work that strives to
transcend dominant cultural forms. In spite of this, cultural
work is purposely produced and consciously attached to emergent
groups, particularly in the cultures of oppressed peoples
(Williams, 1982).
|
“Old Skool, new skool. I didn’t go to
school.” | |
| |
—Tribe 8
|
According to Christenson & Roberts (1998), music is the
medium of choice for adolescents. They spend between four and
five hours listening to music and watching music videos. It is
their preferred way to spend their time outside of school. Mallot
and Peña demonstrate the power and pedagogy of punk rock,
and they are effective in communicating the importance it plays
in the lives of many youth. Issues they bring to bear highlight
the importance of critique within the genre, for instance how so
many of the bands are white, male, and presumably straight.
Indeed, men historically have dominated artistic production,
despite the great number of females in cultural production
(Collins, 1992).
A primary critique of Punk Rocker’s Revolution is
that it does not contextualize the communities from which these
bands emerge, particularly the queer and dyke punk rock
communities, and it does not concentrate as much as it could have
on nonwhite punk bands and their lyrics. For example, the Tribe 8
song “Butch in the Streets, Femme in the Sheets” is
coded as homosexual, social, protest, and sexist. In coding the
song as sexist, the authors are not considering the dynamics of
female queer communities and, as McAdam (1983) suggests, that
such a group lacking institutionalized power must create protest
techniques that correct for their powerlessness as challengers,
and often these tactics innovate those of dominant culture.
Quetzal, a Latino band out of Los Angeles, is discussed at
length in the Afterword by McLaren & McLaren, however this is
the only point in the book at which minority bands are given such
prominence. Inclusion and discussion of bands such as
Ricanstruction, a co-ed Puerto Rican band out of New York City,
might aid the authors’ goals of demonstrating a pedagogy
that more fully explores the intersections of race, class, and
gender. Though the end of Chapter 8 does include part of a
transcript of an interview with Leslie Mah (Tribe 8) and two
other Asian punk rockers in which Mah discusses being a Chinese
and a Lesbian punk rocker, this is the only part of the book
where we are introduced to an embodiment of this pedagogy.
Because most bands in their sample are white, male, and
presumably straight, Mallot and Peña’s data speak to
issues involved in speaking for others. Often when issues of
representation, specifically of those who are marginalized, are
addressed, problems emerge in matters of ambiguity, context,
control, and empowerment. Alcoff (1991) argues that the danger of
the misrepresentation of a group lies in the ambiguous ease with
which a communicator can describe the subject’s situation,
therefore speaking about them instead of speaking for them.
These points are also crucial to researchers when conducting
content analyses such as this study. As noted by Alcoff (1991),
this transition between speaking for and about is also one that
is difficult to distinguish in all cases. The context and control
of communication situations are problematic because the
definition of the communicator often depends upon if he or she is
addressing the audience from the group or to the group, such as
Mallot’s subject-positioning as a member of and participant
in the punk rock community. This fact often defines a
communicator’s authority. Solutions to this dilemma offered
by Alcoff (1991) include one in which the communicator does not
assume a position of authenticity, yet allows for the oppressed
group to produce a counter statement that could suggest a new
historical narrative. (Note 1)
With this said, Mallot and Peña convey the power and
potential in using youth counterculture such as music, punk rock
in particular, as a pedagogical site in order to articulate the
dynamics of identities, whether they are racial, gender, and/or
class. They show how “punk can serve to subvert not only
dominant society but also punk itself” (p. 25). And, most
importantly, “it is this smashing of definitions that
characterizes what punk and punk rock is all about…that new
forms of punk are evolving, but still rooted in the hope of
revolutionizing society” (p. 117). Giving voice to youth
communities whose borders are broadening to encompass more
diverse members, the authors contribute to the ever increasing
discourse about the role of youth cultures in pedagogy, allying
themselves with other scholars, especially those interested in
hip hop, rap, and rock music and introducing youth punk
communities as vital contributors to this dialogue. By
illustrating how punk is an identity that emerges from a
political community, Mallot and Peña configure this youth
culture as not only a political site but also a pedagogical
site.
Note
1.
See also hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race
and representation. Boston: South End Press, p. 89.
References
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Cultural Critique, Winter 1991-1992, 5-32.
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Ash Garner, R. (1977). Social change. Chicago: Rand
McNally College Publishing Company.
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The experience
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Bourdieu, P. Language and symbolic power. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Christenson, P.G., & Roberts, D.F. (1998). It's not
only rock & roll: Popular music in the lives of
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Collins, R. (1992). Women and the production of status
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insurgency. American Sociological Review, 48(6):
735-754.
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action. In Morris, A.D., and Mueller, Carol M., (Eds.),
Frontiers in social movement theory. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Rose, T. (1994). Blacknoise: Rap music and black
culture in contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
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About the Reviewer
Dominique Johnson (BA, Bryn Mawr College; MA, Stanford
University; PhD student, Temple University) is the founding
executive director of The Joseph Beam Youth Collaborative,
focusing her work on LGBT youth, social justice in schools,
mentoring, and anti-racism with particular emphasis upon
developmental benefits for LGBT youth of color. She is an
Assistant Editor of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in
Education.
Copyright is retained by the first or sole author,
who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.