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Contemporary Punk Rock Communities: Scenes of Inclusion and Dedication. By Ellen M. Bernhard. New York: Lexington Books, 2019. 190 pp. ISBN 978-1-4985-9967-2
With Contemporary Punk Rock Communities, Ellen M. Bernhard makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on punk. She shows that punk in the US today is not identical to what it was in the past, and teases out a lot of detail about the changes that have occurred. She writes in an engaging way, weaving herself into the narrative in a manner that I found quite effective: it becomes clear, from the introductory pages onwards, that Bernhard is someone who knows these communities well. I do have a few aspects of the book to query in this review, but I certainly think it is a very welcome output which will have great value for those of us who are interested in the way US punk has changed since the 1990s.
The shift in question begins with ‘the popularization of the genre during the mid-90s and early 2000s, following the decline of grunge’ (p. 7). From that time onwards, ‘access to contemporary punk rock was accomplished with relative ease’ thanks to MTV, ‘video games’ (Bernhard may be thinking of the likes of Skate 3) and a chain-store called Hot Topic which the author mentions at several points in the book (ibid.). Bernhard emphasises the pivotal importance of 1994 for the rise of ‘pop punk’ (Green Day's Dookie being released that year, for example) and demise of grunge (pp. 8–9). These days, it seems, a punk festival can be sponsored by a company like Pabst Blue Ribbon (p. 12) without many punks batting an eyelid (Bernhard herself passes over this datum without commenting that, in the 1980s, such a company linking itself to punk would have been unthinkable). The contemporary US punk scene, she argues persuasively, is more influenced by popular culture than pre-1990s punk was and is very much focussed on ‘inclusivity and diversity’. She notes that her punk respondents showed ‘little derision directed toward bands who signed to major record labels or agreed to allow their music to be used in an advertisement’. The respondents were ‘ambivalent’ about co-optation in general (ibid.).
Bernhard draws some interesting links between hegemony...