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The mainstreaming of punk rock in the 1990s was disheartening to artists and fans committed to punk's radical political ethos. This paper examines the rhetorical response to punk's popularization in this era, focusing on how the DC-area band, the Make-Up, reorganized the common sense of punk by articulating it to the musical and social elements of gospel and funk. Analysis of the "repertoires for rhetorical living" that result from this juxtaposition of musical discourses leads to the conclusion that the Make-Up offers a transformed understanding of what may count as authentic in punk, reorganizing authenticity, political commitments, and identity around a collectivist subject position. The ethical implications of the Make-Up's ironic appropriations of black culture also are considered.
For punk rock, the 1990s were a watershed and a nightmare. The mainstream commercial success in that decade of bands like Green Day, Rancid, and Blink 182 was unprecedented for a genre that survived the Reagan-Bush era on $3 concerts, indie labels, and the relatively limited broadcast range of college radio. But this success had a downside: the hyper-commercializing and mainstreaming of punk, fast on the heels of the majors' "discovery" of grunge and their search for new scenes to exploit (O'Flaherty) exacerbated the crisis of authority already endemic to punk (e.g. Schalit; Grossberg "Is There Rock"). How could one expect to conjure anarchy, political opposition, and cultural resistance simply by making punk sounds when, by the turn of the century, punk had become literally the soundtrack of the Olympics' "extreme sports" competitions on NBC?
For social critics who saw punk as an always already co-opted form, its assimilation was merely a foregone conclusion: punk's success in the 1990s was the result of the music industry finally figuring out how to capitalize properly on the genre. But for those invested politically in punk's revolutionary ethos-those who traced its lineage to the social politics of bands such as the Clash, X, and Crass, rather than to the spectacle of the Sex Pistols or the New Wave 80s-the popularization of punk rock was a serious setback. It diminished and co-opted punk's political message and, by encouraging self-marginalization as a counter-hegemonic strategy, exacerbated the tensions between community and alienation that have always been lurking just below the surface in...