Punk Rockers' Revolution

Book excerpt: For punk rockers, music and art have often been used as tools for resisting and accommodating the interests of society's dominant classes. During the late 1970s, a predominantly white, male working/middle-class counterculture began to develop what is now known as punk rock. This book shows how punk rock serves to both subvert and accommodate the interest of late-capitalist American society by looking at the trends in the ideas, values, and beliefs transmitted through punk lyrical messages, specifically through the content of three punk record labels and how they have evolved over time. The impact of punk will continue because it is a product of the changing face of alternative cultural spaces - spaces that impact and are impacted by increasingly hostile and exploitive relationships between and within oppressor and oppressed groups.