Monday, November 25, 2019

The Oxford Anthology of Punk

What I am writing is a chapter for the Oxford Anthology of Punk, covering women punk bands and violence and noise.
I don't think the violent environment of the 1970s is written about enough in relation to what it was like to be a young woman back then, and how violent some young punk women had to be in order to survive. So that's what it's about, alongside loudness and so on.
I'm not a musicologist, and nor am I au fait with every bit of feminist writing, so a lot of it concentrates on the way that male and female music critics wrote about it all. They were the bridge between the bands and an audience that often was not in the right place physically or financially to actually witness the music, and sometimes the journalists simply got it wrong.
I'm reading Nesrine Malik's book at the moment and it's making me very angry about myth-making and the ways the it demeans people. It's very good. It's not the sort of book that you should read if you are unable to look at your own views from a critical perspective and it's unleashing a fair bit of latent anger inside me, probably not before time.
Off to the library to pick up a book.
Writing this has been a moment of procrastination, but it's helped to calm me down too.
Something has made me furious today, and it's difficult to back out of it without ruffling my own feathers even more.

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