Claire Smyth AAD010 Introducing Studio Practice : Graphic Design & Illustration (Punk Vinyl Research)
Visual research and examples of images throughout the punk era (punk subculture) and vinyl records of their music / contained artists through the displayment of a Pinterest Board as linked below:
Punk rock (or simply punk) is in which a music Genre that emerged within and throughout the mid-1970s. Rooted in 1960s garage rock, punk bands rejected the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock as they typically began to produce short, fast-paced songs with hard-edged melodies and singing styles, stripped-down instrumentation and often political, anti-establishment of lyrics. In great relevance, the era / overall subject of punk tends to embrace a DIY ethic, as many bands throughout the year commonly go about self-producing their recordings and distributing them through independent record labels. The term punk / punk rock was in fact first used by American rock critics in the early 1970s to describe 1960s garage bands and certain subsequent acts. When the movement now bearing the name developed from 1974 to 1976, acts such as Television, Patti Smith and The Ramones in New York City; the Sex Pistols, The Clash and the Damned in London; The Runaways in Los Angeles; and the Saints in Brisbane formed its vanguard. Punk had become a major cultural phenomenon in the UK late in 1976. It led to a punk subculture expressing youthful rebellion through distinctive styles of clothing an adornment (such as deliberately offensive T-shirts, leather jackets, studded or spiked bands and jewellery, safety pins, and bondage and S&M clothes) and a variety of ani-autorotation ideologies. As a result, in 1977, the influence of the music and subculture spread worldwide, taking root in a wide range of local scenes that often rejected the affiliation with the mainstream. In the late 1970s, punk and its overall design processes had in which experienced a second wave to where new acts that where not active during its formative years began to adopt the style. By the early 1980s, faster and more aggressive subgenres such as hardcore punk (Minor Threat), street punk (The Exploited) and anarcho-punk (Crass) gradually became the predominant modes of punk rock. Musicians identifying with or inspired by punk also pursued other musical directions, giving rise to spinoffs such as post-punk, new wave and later the likes of indie pop, alternative rock and noise rock. By the 1990s, punk fully remerged with the success of punk rock and pop punk bands such as The Clash, Green Day, Rancid, The Offspring and blink-182
The punk subculture includes a diverse array of ideologies, fashion and other forms of expression, visual art, dance, literature, and film. It is largely characterised by anti-establishment views, the promotional of individual freedom, DIY ethics, and is centred on a loud, aggressive genre of rock music called punk rock. The punk ethos is primarily made up of beliefs such as non-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism, a do it yourself ethic, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate greed, direct action and not selling out. There is in which a wide range of punk fashion including and such as deliberately offensive T-shirts, leather jackets, Dr. Martin boots, hairstyles such as brightly coloured hair / spiked mohawks, cosmetics, tattoos, jewellery and body modification. Women in the hardcore scene typically went about where much more masculine clothing. Punk aesthetics tend to solely determine the type of art punks enjoy, which typically has underground, minimalist, iconoclastic and statical sensibilities. Punk has generated a considerable amount of poetry and prose, through having its own underground press in the form of zines, along with the making of punk-themed films, documentaries and videos
For a musical and social movement that snarled in the face of authority and wasn’t averse to spitting at its friends, punk has received a great many shelf inches in the last 30 years respectfully devoted to histories, reassessments and eyewitness accounts. Over the years and even from today, there is even an academic journal exclusively devoted to the pursuit of punk and post-punk studies, which has just published its second issue. All in all, there can’t be much left to say about the music, clothing, media outrage and legendary gigs, but the graphic expression of punk has received less critical attention. For example, within weeks of each other, two thick, illustrated volumes have appeared: Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli) edited by Johan Kugelberg and John Savage and The Art of Punk (Omnibus Press/Voyageur Press) by Russ Bestley and Alex Ogg. Kugelberg and Savage have also curated “Someday all the Adults Will dir”, an exhibition of punk posters, handbills, record covers and ’zines at the Hayward Gallery in London.
An editor’s approach towards the punk era / style of music can carry / implement a number of various, styles, techniques, colors, texts or imagery etc. Kugelberg and Savage’s book is more of an album, with the images presented in an art-book style on a plain white page, which can be referred to as smart writers as Savage, author of Englands Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and beyond, is a key participant in the era, his punk archive is now stored at Liverpool John Moore’s University. But neither author / designers are a historian or critic of graphic art, design or visual culture. “The history of the punk aesthetic cannot be told, only shown,” claims Kugelberg, somewhat unpromisingly. Savage made punk collages with the artist Linder Stirling and he has some good observations about punk montage, in the act of dismembering and reassembling the very images that were supposed to keep you down and ignorant, it was possible to counteract the violence of The Spectacle and to refashion the world around you. Throughout his produced work, he often continues to point to the visual influences of the likes of John Heartfield, Martin Sharp’s work at oz magazine, the feminist artist Penny Slinger, the Beach Books 1960s pamphlets and Dawn Ades’ photomontage (1976). Bestley and Ogg go about writing / designing with a carefulness of phrasing and appearance of academic detachment that only partially masks the same devotion to punk as listeners and fans. Punk graphics was the subject of Bestley’s PhD and he curated the earlier exhibition “Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns”; he is course director of the graphic design MA at the London College of Communication. Ogg is the author of No More Heroes, a history of British punk and an editor of the punk and post punk journal. “It is important to question the notion of a direct association between work by prominent early punk designers and the emergence of a radical new visual language of parody and agitprop,” they write. “To an extent, the techniques adopted by Jamie Reid, for instance, were already widely accepted as the natural languages of anger and protest.” Such a comment can only be addressed to readers who know nothing about the histories of graphic design and graphic protest. As Savage and Kugelberg point out in their exhibition intro, punk’s precursors and putative influences include Dadaist collage, the Situational International, the mail art movement, the graphics of counter-culture protest and the 1960s underground press.
When designing / producing punk records, the relationship between punk D.I.Y. design in its most basic or amateur forms and the later development of graphic design cannot be avoided for anyone who is both sensitive to punk’s impact and legacy (“the immediate implementation of D.I.Y. grassroots culture among the young” — Kugelberg) as it is committed to graphic design as a medium. Kugelberg and Savage say that the “anarchic upsurge in graphic creativity truly revolutionized design,” through the clear attempt to assert punk graphics’ significance beyond the punk subculture, yet this claim, too, can only be substantiated by a lot more detailed research. Within the UK especially, punk related designers that had most influence towards their produced records within the early 1908s were in which a handful of individuals such as and including the of Malcolm Garrett, who been formally educated as graphic designers (in his case at the University of Reading and Manchester Polytechnic), through designs mainstream was, in fact, slow to learn from and assimilate the lessons and styles of subcultural music designs. In any case, the graphic sensibility of Garrett’s work for Buzzcocks and Magazine, shown in The Art of Punk, has always seemed closer to post punk graphic design than to what is commonly understood as punk, even allowing for Bestley and Ogg’s precautionary advice that “there is no one standard punk visual language” and that “a notion of a pure or authentic punk style is difficult to justify.”
For example and in regards to famous worldwide record covers / albums from various punk bands, it is no accident that the stencil-based graphic identity of Crass, one of the most highly politicised punk bands, is so well coordinated and trenchant as a result and due to their use of simplistic imagery, text, stencils but highly effective and intriguing to the reader / listener through the approach of collating a set text, shapes, style and colour palette etc.
Throughout this era of punk and punk subculture there is an old slogan and rallying cry that insists, “Punk is not dead.” Bestley and Ogg certainly believe that. Their book ends with examples of more recent punk design. Punk over the years might, as they say, have employed a fairly broad set of graphic conventions, but they remain as consistent and constrictive over time as those found in heavy metal. Kugelberg deduces from punk a more general lesson for today: “Form a band, start a blog, become an artist, a DJ, a guitar player, an editor.” No one can argue with that, though many might see it as a stretch to claim that, in 2012, these possibilities derive from punk’s mid-1970s example — unless, perhaps, one was to view punk prophetically as a form of science fiction. Interestingly, this is just how Savage does regard punk: as a “jump cut” into the future. “People in Britain see punk in terms of social realism and rock music. It was pure science fiction and it was very informed by J.G. Ballard and by The Man Who Fell To Earth, among a lot of other things.
In the last few years, there has in which been a revival of interest in the music that came after the mid 1970s punk. As a result, bands such as and from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers to Franz Ferdinand commonly acknowledge their debt / debut to post punk original such as gang of Flour / The Clash. In relevance to this, the latest issue of The Wire magazine has an ad for a compilation of underground Brazilian groups citing the British post-punk bands Joy Division, The Slits and The Pop Group as influences. There have in fact been further collections of post-punk music, along with British music critic Simon Reynolds’ 500-page history of the genre from 1978 to 1984, with the invigorating title Rip It Up And Start Again. It’s a brilliant book. Reynolds, who lives in Manhattan, started researching it in 2001 and it has arrived at exactly the right moment to benefit from, and propel, the growing wave of interest. He argues that post-punk music’s explosion of creativity equals the golden age of popular music in the mid-1960s, but that it has never received its full due. Aspects of design has in which always continued to portray and be a key part or / within the record-savouring experience for many music fans and so it remains today, as previously noted in a recent Momus interview / article, within society towards the punk subculture there is in fact an immense continuation in the fascination with record covers of the post-punk period. For example, Dot Dot Dot has in which gone onto published pieces regarding / about the record sleeve designs of XTC, John Fox, Scritti Politti and Wire, to where its editors where in kids when these original records came out.
Seaming as quite inconsequential as they are only record sleeves, after all, but to me especially what truly makes post-punk so interesting and inspiring, even now, as Reynolds shows so well, is the exceptional range of cultural influences of that truly shaped the music, including its refusal to stand still, its disinclination to cede any ground, especially to commercial priorities, along with its intellectual energy and artists ambitions, where all of this is in which reflected in the most inventive, audacious cover arts of the time, through stating and mentioning that: the seven Post-punk years from the beginning of 1978 to the end of 184 truly did see the systematic ransacking of the 20th Century modernist art and literature as the entire punk period transcribes and looks like an effective / influential attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music etc. Commonly, most / any visual survey of post-punk graphics that concentrates solely on album covers overlooks a crucial part of the story. The discovery that it was possible to record, manufacture and distribute records relatively cheaply spurred the development of a thriving independent scene. The 7-inch and then 12-inch single with picture sleeve went through a great flowering. The year of 1978 saw the arrival of an advance guard of lo-fi synthesiser singles that heralded a new direction for electronic pop in the 1980s: T.V.O.D. / Warm Leatherette by The Normal; “Being Boiled” by The Human League; United by Throbbing Gristle; Cabaret Voltaire’s four-track Extended Play; Paralysis by Robert Rental; Private Plane by Thomas Leer. It can actually be quite hard to convey the excitement that various records generated among music fans at the time, as a large part of it was the feeling that the usual channels had been bypassed. Only committed readers of the music press were in on it. The audience had taken control of the means of production and anything seemed possible. It was a new kind of do-it-yourself electronic folk culture and the kitchen-table designs that gave this sensibility an image that were raw but thrilling. The photo of crash test dummies, borrowed from the Motor Industry Research Association, and use of the Din typeface to represent Daniel Miller’s Warm Leatherette underscores the cold, sociopathic lyrics about the eroticism of a car crash (“Hear the crushing steel, feel the steering wheel”). Listeners instantly registered the song as a homage to Ballard’s cult novel Crash. This Ain’t No Disco breaks its own remit by featuring a few singles, but it largely misses this side of post-punk music. However, one of the pleasures of Reynolds book is its excellent picture research with the assistance of British music writer Jon Savage.
https://designobserver.com/feature/the-art-of-punk-and-the-punk-aesthetic/36708
https://designobserver.com/feature/but-darling-of-course-its-normal-the-post-punk-record-sleeve/3377
https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-punk-rock-kickstarted-the-do-it-yourself-record-revolution-39a41d78e12a
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