Reconsidering punk: how women are rewriting punk’s timeline

  • Sammy Jones

By talking to a range of artists involved with the Arnolfini's 'Moving Targets' season, in this feature I argue that punk's history needs a reevaluation.

If you believe that punk’s story began with the fabled moment in 1976 when Sex Pistols had their first gig, you’ll likely believe that 2016 is punk’s fortieth birthday, and that punk is yet another movement that belongs to white men. That’s certainly the approach the British Library took when they wrote a blurb for a night of conversations on punk featuring one of the most important names associated with the scene, The Slits’ Viv Albertine. Upon reading the signage that named the Clash, the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks as the godheads of the countercultural movement, Albertine took a biro to the wall, scribbling ‘The Slits’ across ‘Sex Pistols’ with a flourish, and later proudly claimed her graffiti on Twitter. Albertine’s well-founded frustrations rippled over music news sites, chiming with a new generation of punk women and non-binary people who are becoming increasingly exasperated with the regurgitated timeline of punk events that erases female and non-binary experiences and repeatedly, lazily, elevates men.
Read more: http://crackmagazine.net/article/art/women-rewriting-punk/