Henry Thoreau's essays, Walt Whitman's poems, and Huckleberry Finn's narrative are all proto-punk -- precursors to punk rock, punk philosophy, and punk culture. In fact, when Huck declares, "All right, then, I'll go to Hell," he utters one of the most punk rock lines in all of American literature.
That thinking, of course, requires understanding punk beyond the stereotypes of spiked hair, mosh pits, and ferocious three-chord downstrokes. Moving punk beyond the music has been asserted and explored by musicians, artists, writers, critics, and scholars almost since its inception. From Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces to Craig O'Hara's Philosophy of Punk to Greg Graffin's "Punk Manifesto," punk is as much about attitude and intent as it is about volume and pace in music.
Moving punk "beyond the music" is at the heart of the new book Punk Beyond the Music: Tracing Mutations and Manifestations of the Punk Virus from long-time punk and American culture scholar Iain Ellis of the University of Kansas. Ellis' knowledge and scholarship is vast, and the work is informative while also being immediately accessible for readers of all familiarity, or no familiarity, with punk.
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