Punk rock as English heritage

Dr Ruth Adams’s latest publication is a paper for the academic journal Popular Music and Society entitled ‘The Englishness of English Punk: Sex Pistols, Subcultures, and Nostalgia’. The paper considers “the Englishness of the Sex Pistols and the cultural productions associated with them”, asking whether “the challenge that they posed to conventional, Establishment, consensus notions of Englishness has merely been recuperated as an entertaining diversion within a broader hegemonic nationalist history or whether this challenge has had a more fundamental impact”. It argues that “the Pistols facilitated a reframing and a re-imagining of English culture and left a legacy, which has been drawn upon by a number of subsequent art and music subcultures.” If you have a subscription to Routledge journals, you can access the paper here.