Some Scholarly Articles

Albiez, Sean. "Know History!: John Lydon, Cultural Capital and the Prog/Punk Dialectic."

So glad I found this particular article. It probes the relationship between punk rock and progressive rock. It explicitly states the differences between the two genres, but suggests that the two are alike too. According to Albiez, "Progressive rock is a slippery term that attempts to contain a diverse range of music promoting experimentation, individualism, an art aesthetic, and paradoxically, golden age romanticism and futurist hyper-modernism" (359). Albiez also says that the conflict between punk and prog had a lot to do with class. While punks represented the working class, progressive artists represented the middle class. The article makes several references to Pink Floyd and even touches on my argument a little bit: "Van Der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill embraced punk due to the similarity of its anti-establishment ethos to that of the late-60s counter-culture..." (359). A very promising source!

O'Connor, Alan. "Local Scenes and Dangerous Crossroads: Punk and Theories of Cultural Hybridity."

This article traces the different punk scenes from Washington D.C., Austin, Toronto and Mexico City. I think it is interesting and important to note that the article is "part of a larger project of multi-site ethnography of youth subculture and resistance to globalisation." Essentially, O'Connor argues that punk "scene" translates into the "active creation of infrastructure to support punk bands and other forms of creative activity. This means finding places to play, building a supportive audience, developing strategies for living cheaply, shared punk houses, and such like" (226). O'Connor's description suggests that the punk movement revolves around a group of people and stresses collective, collaborative effort. Very different from the progressive rock movement, which stressed the individual. Although the article offers a good look into the different punk scenes, especially the scene in D.C., O'Connor openly states that "this article is not about the first generation of punk bands in England and the United States" (226). Nonetheless, I can still pull some stuff from the article, perhaps read it side by side with Andersen's Dance of Days, which O'Connor uses as a source.