Punk Rock, Thatcher, and The Elsewhere of Northern Ireland Rethinking The Politics of Popular Music

Midwest Modern Language Association
Punk Rock, Thatcher, and the Elsewhere of Northern Ireland: Rethinking the Politics of
Popular Music
Author(s): Robert Martnez
Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 48, No. 1 (SPRING
2015), pp. 193-219
Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43549877
Accessed: 26-07-2016 00:51 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Midwest Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association
This content downloaded from 132.174.250.40 on Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:51:22 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Punk Rock, Thatcher,

and the Elsewhere of Northern
Ireland: Rethinking the Politics
of Popular Music
Robert Martinez
and her policies. As Hann notes,

no figure of contemporary British
JL J^s an avalanche
politics has received such attention
of news of former British Prime
in music: "you'll hunt fruitlessly for
Minister Margaret Thatcher's
well-known songs from the punk-
death - from talking-head
era that attacked Jim Callaghan
news coverage, to Tory praise
by name; even Tony Blair didn't
of her legacy in Parliament, to
provoke mass-selling songs about
vast and numerous celebratory
war crimes."
drinking parties throughout

Britain - stormed the media out-
lets on Monday, April 8, 2013,
Why do the annals of

British popular music contain such
a vast ironic tribute to Thatcher?
some members of the press reflected
She came to power in the direct
on the realm of popular culture
aftermath of Britain's "Winter of
and its fraught relationship with
Discontent" of 1978-1979, and
Thatcher throughout the 1980s.
her remedy for the problems of
In his essay in The Guardian, "Five
the Seventies was a controversially
Songs about Margaret Thatcher,"
conservative agenda to open up
Michael Hann casts some light
British markets, privatize formerly
on the rather large body of popu-
government-controlled businesses,
lar music that targeted Thatcher
and engage in all kinds of union
Robert Martnez
busting, most famously with the Miners' Strike of 1984. On the day of her
death, former English Beat singer/guitarist Dave Wakeling stated online,
"Although I rejoice in no one's death, Margaret Thatcher's passing is an

important event for those who lived under her regime. She made competitors out of neighbors, and people stopped talking at bus stops, even
about the weather, in the shadow of her affected, pretend posh accent."
Wakeling not only alludes to what is now known as "Thatcherism" - the
Thatcher-led Tory charge against welfare-state economics and the erection
of privatization, free-market economics - but also stresses the cultural

effect Thatcher's policies had on the moral environment of Britain.
This stark change in socioeconomic conditions during the introduction of Thatcherism between 1979 and 1983 coexisted with other
provocative events and serious social problems. Unemployment skyrocketed in the early 1980s (a period known as "Maggie's Millions"1); race riots
erupted in Brixton, Southall, and Toxteth; nuclear tensions rose to levels
not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis, courtesy of the American-Soviet
arms race; Thatcher revived colonialist politics in sending Britain to war
with Argentina over the Falkland Islands; and eventually class conflict
exploded with the Miners' Strike of 1984, which ended with whole communities decimated2 by Thatcher's union-busting conservatism. Thus, it
is perhaps no surprise that Thatcher quickly became the favorite target
of criticism for artists and musicians alike. In response to this state of
affairs, British popular music - particularly in the form of punk, post-
punk, and the ska revival - became a prime site to debate and critique
Thatcher's policies.
What much of this music reveals is a newly formed political posi-
tion and the aesthetics of a cultural "elsewhere" in Britain. This sense of

the elsewhere captures pockets of alienated voices that existed outside of
dominant political narratives deriving from the power center of Tory pol-
itics in London that ignored or elided disaffected citizens throughout the
Midlands, the industrial North, and perhaps most perilously in Northern
Ireland. The paramilitary violence of The Troubles, including the questionable tactics of the British military and the Royal Ulster Constabulary
(RUC) therein, was a growing violence next door not being fully assessed
by the British press. Peter Lennon notes that "brief news reports" about
the "sectarian killings in Northern Ireland" often had "no context and
[seemed] carried out by automata" (Rolinson 99). British director Steve
ELSEWHERES | SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 48 | NUMBER 1
Punk Rock, Thatcher, and the Elsewhere of Northern Ireland | 19 5
McQueen captures this political and social neglect of the complexity of

The Troubles in an October 24, 2013, interview with Terry Gross, when
explaining why he made his film Hunger (2008), about Bobby Sands and
the IRA Hunger Strike of 1981: "The Hunger Strike - it was politically
the biggest thing to happen in Britain in the past 27 years. Ten men,
dying of hunger in a British prison cell. It was deafening. But no one was
speaking about it. That's why I made the picture." Thus distanced from
London both geographically and figuratively, Northern Ireland and its
troubles were existentially isolated from mainland Britain and from those
defining official politics like Thatcher.
What I would like to argue in this essay is that punk rock

serves as an aesthetic force to represent the concerns of these "neglected
elsewheres" in Britain. Specifically, I will demonstrate how punk rock

re-articulates the problem of Northern Ireland by enabling previously
suppressed voices to express alternative modes of thinking that defy the
dominant political narratives of The Troubles. By creating a form of

expression of and for this elsewhere, punk rock in turn galvanizes the
space of Northern Ireland out of neglected periphery and re-imagines

its relevance for its citizens and the larger British public. However, in
order to achieve this re-imagining outside of status quo thought, punk
has to overcome not only the warring ideologies of paramilitaries and

politicians and the media/political neglect of the country, but it also has
to fight its own peripheral status as an intellectually devalued form of

pop art. This struggle for artistic legitimacy derives from the complex
relationship popular music has with the exploding, commercializing economics of post-war consumerism, a cultural-economic condition defined
by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment as
the "Culture Industry." Within this system of culture, Adorno specifically
claims that popular music is incapable of producing transformative intel-
lectual, political content precisely because of its status as a commodity

in a capitalist market. My study will show, however, that punk rock can
exist as an art form capable of producing legitimate, original political

and intellectual material in post-war consumerism, and specifically it will
illustrate that the punk rock coming out of Belfast as Thatcher inherits
The Troubles offers Northern Ireland and Britain an opportunity to

radically rethink the nature of political conflict.
Robert Martnez
Punk Rock Versus the Culture Industry

The philosophy of using popular music as a consciousness-raising
tool was laid bare during a 1984 TV news interview between Granada
Television's Tony Wilson and the British post-punk rock band The
Smiths. As Wilson playfully cross-examines the band's wildly popular
and flamboyant singer, Morrissey, about his controversial lyrics - which
address everything from Thatcherite work culture to homosexuality to the
cruelty of the British educational system - he asks, "What right does the
fact that you are a popular and successful pop star give you to comment
on political and local events?" ("Tony Wilson Interviews"). Morrissey's

response is telling:
Well, I feel that if popular singers don't say these things,
who does? We cant have any faith in playwrights anymore; we can't have any faith in film stars. Young people
don't care about those things - they're dying arts. And if
you say, "What right do you have?" the implication there
to me is that popular music is quite a low art, it should be
hidden, it can be there, but let's not say anything terribly
important. Let's just, you know, make disco records or

whatever. So, I really feel that we do have an obligation,
and I know that people respect it, and they want it, and
it's working to great effect. ("Tony Wilson Interviews")

While controversially dismissing the political and intellectual efficacy of
drama and film, Morrissey challenges the cultural attitude implied by

Wilsons question that identifies popular music as a worthless commodity
solely driven by the corporate music industry. His philosophical stance on
popular music rests on the suggestion that music is the most effective way
to share politically charged material with audiences, particularly given its
popularity and easy circulation in a society where informative cultural,

literary knowledge is on the decline (the "dying arts" of film and drama).3
Morrissey expands on this duty of the musician to inform her
or his audience of serious matters during an interview with the BBC's
Mark Allen in 1985. When asked by Allen to explain the controversial

nature of The Smiths' LP Meat Is Murder, Morrissey states, "we believe
that popular music should be used in order to make serious statements,
Punk Rock, Thatcher, and the Elsewhere of Northern Ireland | 197
because so many groups sell masses and masses of records and don't raise
people's level of consciousness in any direction, and we find that quite

sinful - especially in these serious times" ("The Smiths - In the Studio"),
In 1984, during an appearance on Britain's Independent Television (IT V)
Saturday morning children 's program called Data Run, he links this polit-
ical responsibility of the songwriter to the meaning behind the band's
very name: "And I decided [to call the band The Smiths] because it was
the most ordinary name, and I think it's time that the ordinary folk of
the world showed their faces. I thought just singing was such a wonder-
ful outlet, and just to say your own words - its really quite wonderful"
("The Smiths - Live on Data Run"). The Smiths serve as one example
among many bands that emerged out of the punk scene in Britain that
consciously harnessed the energy and openness of punk to experiment

with sound and give voice to a disenfranchised or previously neglected
portion of the public. When explaining the meaning of "This Charming
Man" during this interview, Morrissey underscores the political role that
pop music should have: "I think its nice to instill these words in people's
brains, and who knows? It might rub off on a new generation" ("The
Smiths - Live on Data Run").
However, the possibility for popular music to act as a kind of
intellectual messenger and broker more complex, meaningful ways for
self- and communal understanding during times of social strife is made
all the more problematic by the Frankfurt School analysis of postwar

Western society. The problem that Morrissey 's seemingly nave theory
of popular music encounters is the already existing economic marketplace of Western capitalist culture - a cultural system that the Frankfurt
School of critics, most notably in the work of Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, saw as the next greatest threat to

individual freedom since the Nazis.4 The Frankfurt School critiques the
postwar model of "democratic" capitalism as a kind of fascism. Their

critical assessment of Western capitalism and modern media technology
reveals a world where the possibility of the critically thinking individual
perishes in a system that only allows for existence based on exchange

value of goods (including human relationships) or in a system that has
a rigged sense of free speech and equality, knowing all the while that
status quo culture excludes minority voices and participation and access
to economic advantage.
Robert Martnez
For Adorno and Horkheimer, any attempt at creating art that
could enlighten individual consciousness falls prey to capitalism precisely because in the capitalist economic model "[e] very thing has value
only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in
itself For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the
fetish - the social valuation which they mistake for the merit of works
of art - becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy" (. Dialectic
128). This problem of use value versus exchange value lies at the heart
of what constitutes "art" for Adorno and Horkheimer. The suggestion
here is that a work of true art would be a work not designed for, or to be
a mere reflection of, the current rules of the system of reality - in this
case, a tool for capitalist consumerism - but a work that can enable a
critical assessment of reality, thereby producing self-reflection and deeper
awareness of one s surroundings (a kind of self-development). The market-
place, however, stipulates meaning only in terms of exchangeable goods,

rendering people less able to interpret the true meaning of art and causing
them instead to fetishize the art object.5 The "fetish," as Adorno and
Horkheimer note above, is the "social valuation" - the hipness or social
status deriving from the exclusivity associated with a work of art - that
supplants real artistic meaning. Adorno defines the concept of the fetish
further as "the mere reflection of what one pays in the market for the
product. The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself
has paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert. He has literally made'
the success which he reifies and accepts as an objective criterion, without
recognizing himself in it. But he has not 'made' it by liking the concert, but
rather by buying the ticket" (Culture 34). In terms of music, Adorno dis-
tinguishes between "serious music" (i.e., art) and "popular music" (fetish
art). He sees serious music as an art with
Every detail deriving] its musical sense from the con-
crete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of

the life relationship of the details and never of a mere
enforcement of a musical scheme. For example, in

the introduction of the first movement of Beethoven's
Seventh Symphony the second theme (in C-major) gets
its true meaning only from the context. Only through the
whole does it acquire its particular lyrical and expressive
quality - that is, a whole built up of its very contrast

with the cantus firmusAikt character of the first theme.
Taken in isolation the second theme would be disrobed
to insignificance. ("On Popular Music")

The "life relationship of the details" can be seen as the competing components within a work of art that form a system of meaning with which an
audience can engage and dialogue. By evaluating the tension of the parts
in concert together, the individual can be exposed to something "new"

in the work of art, an unfamiliar experience that can be transformative.
This intellectual exercise is quite different from the "mere enforce'
ment of a musical scheme," by which Adorno means the main mechanistic
features of popular music: standardization and pseudo-individualization.
Adorno scholar Dominic Strinati argues, "Standardization defines the

way the culture industry squeezes out any kind of challenge, originality,
authenticity or intellectual stimulation from the music it produces, while
pseudo-individualization provides the 'hook/ the apparent novelty or

uniqueness of the song for the consumer" (58). Adorno clarifies how the
standardized nature of popular music ("dance types ... home songs, nonsense or novelty' songs, pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost girl")
eliminates any possibility of an intellectual experience: "This inexorable

device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will
lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally
novel will be introduced" ("Popular"). The structure of popular music,

then, denies the existence of true art for Adorno; its features are nothing
more than artistic gimmicks meant to purposefully elicit a predictable
response in an audience in order to tame them. Such a response would

fit nicely into a commercial market system whose sole and end goal is to
attract and obtain consumers (i.e., profit). For Adorno and Horkheimer,
then, popular art could never provide a force to "raise people's level of
consciousness," as Morrissey claims above; "exchange value will always

dominate use value in capitalism because the production, marketing and
consumption of commodities will always take precedence over people's

real needs" (Strinati 50).
As a trained musician and theorist, Adorno took particular

interest in how the Culture Industry affected the state of music and how
it spawned the growth of popular music. In his essay "On the Fetish
Robert Martnez
Character in Music and the Regression of Listening/' Adorno sees the

capitalist infiltration of music as an art form being the very end of music
itself: "all contemporary musical life is dominated by the commodity

form" ( Culture 33). In such a system, music provides a purely superficial
function and produces a crassly onanistic pleasure: "In a film, the outcome
can invariably be predicted at the start - who will be rewarded, punished, forgotten - and in light music the prepared ear can always guess
the continuation after the first bars of a hit song and is gratified when it
actually occurs" (Dialectic 98-99). What is striking about Adorno and

Horkheimer s claim is that even the trained listener ("prepared ear") falls
to the seduction of "light music" designed for profit. The gratification the
listener receives is a kind of pornographic satisfaction that overcomes
her or his analytical abilities and is reinforced as narcissism since the

listener now feels superior in predicting the song's qualities. By having
an individual's analytical faculties manipulated into superficial pleasure,
the commodity nature of music can penetrate the psyche and reassign
the individual's status solely in capitalist economic terms: "The delight
in the moment and the gay faade becomes an excuse for absolving the
listener from the thought of the whole, whose claim is comprised in proper
listening. The listener is converted, along his line of least resistance, into
the acquiescent purchaser" (Culture 29). The popular music of the Culture
Industry makes the listener not a critically self-aware person but rather
an ironically self-confident consumer.
While Adorno 's critique of popular music may ring true for a
whole host of purposefully commercialized postwar rock-n-roll and pop
music in Britain - for example, the vacuous glam rock of Gary Glitter
or the celebratory pop of Wham! - the nature of the punk movements
anti-authoritarian, anti-market stance raises a stronger possibility for
how popular music can become a platform to challenge oppressive

socioeconomic systems and politically fraught environments. The Sex
Pistols' explosion in Britain in 1976 and the subsequent public outrage
they provoked (e.g., offending public sensibilities through their foul-
mouthed encounter with Bill Grundy on the Today show in December

1976; playing a gig on a boat following the Queens flotilla on Jubilee Day,
1977; and, most famously, releasing their ironic version of the national
anthem, "God Save the Queen," during Jubilee Week in 19 77) clearly signaled a kind of political disruption of social and political mores. However,
given the commercialization of the band and punk at large that quickly
followed the "Sex Pistols explosion" of 1976, is it possible for punk rock
truly to escape the clutches of the Culture Industry and transform the
ills of consumer society?
American music critic John Roderick bluntly argues that punk

never managed to break free from the forces of the culture industry.
In "Punk Rock Is Bullshit/' Roderick identifies punk culture as just

another marketable clique that practices pretentious exclusivity: "Punkrock culture is the ultimate slow-acting venom, dulling our expectations
by narrowing the aperture of cool' and neutering our taste by sneering

at new flavors until every expression of actual individualism is corralled
and expunged in favor of group-think conformity/' The snobbery of

this private-club mentality that Roderick sees as the essence of punk
reinforces Adornos argument about popular music's characteristic of

"standardization" - the repetitive hooks and novelties of pop songs that
eliminate provocative original ideas and replace them with sonic or fash-
ionable frills that encourage a false sense of individualism. Moreover,

Roderick argues that punk's "cliquish approach to a confusing world"
did not produce critical thought, but rather the same old flawed system
of binary thought, "where things were either in or out, cool or not, punk
or unpunk/' This culture of pseudo-intellectual rockers, of "dumbasses
teaching dumbasses" (Roderick), echoes the condition Adorno outlines

for subjects enmeshed in a culture of popular music: "Not only do the
listening subjects lose, along with the freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, which was from
time immemorial confined to a narrow group, but they stubbornly reject
the possibility of such perception" ( Culture 41). This loss of critical consciousness signals, perhaps, the advent of zombie culture: a society where
citizens possess no capacity to think and only exercise a right to buy what
the marketplace tells them to buy.

Johnny Rotten 's reaction to the punk explosion of the Sex Pistols
even foreshadows Roderick's harsh assessment of punk's pointlessness.

In 1978, as the Pistols imploded, Rotten returned to his birth surname
of Lydon, broke with the punk style that Malcolm McLaren and Vivian
Westwood had engineered through the Pistols and their boutique shop,
SEX, and founded the more experimental Public Image Limited (PiL).
Lydon then penned the band's namesake song, "Public Image," a blatant
Robert Martnez
attack on the commodification that happened to him through the commercialization of punk and the Pistols: '"It s [about] what I went through
from my own group. They never bothered to listen to what I was fucking
singing, they don't even know the words to my songs. They never bothered
to listen ... they just took me as an image'" (Brazier). Lydon's lyrics call
attention to the death of punk, a short two years after the Pistols' intro-
duction. The song's opening lines are an actualization of what happens

to the self in the Culture Industry:
You never listen to a word that I said
You only see me

For the clothes that I wear
Or did the interest go so much deeper
It must have been
The colour of my hair
The media and fashion spectacle of punk may have initially carried a
Situationist kind of energy, but Lydon's lyrics to "Public Image" are all
too clearly a warning of how the market forces driving popular culture
can cannibalize the politically subversive meaning of punk rock.
The problem with Roderick 's critique of punk rock and punk
culture, however, is that despite its wit and humor it suffers from cultural
myopia. His frank and comic vision of punk performs its own kind of
fetishism of American culture, as if all of punk music and its effect on
society were nothing more than a collection of the detritus of American
popular culture of 1980s.6 This critical version of punk does not take into
account the cultural nuances that helped to shape punk music. When
Roderick does address the cultural conditions of punk's heyday of the
1970s and 1980s (he rhetorically asks us, "What has punk rock done for
us? Did it defeat Reaganism and Thatcherism and end the Cold War? Has
it brought us social justice?"), he does so only to deliver an emphatic state-
ment of punk's utter failure to enact political change. To dismiss punk at

large based on a caricature of American punk culture does not address the
urgency of violence and failing socioeconomic conditions that gave birth to
punk and to which some punk music responded in late Seventies Britain.7
Roderick does rightly question whether punk rock effectively dealt with
Thatcherism and Reaganism, but his clear dismissal of punk overlooks
how such conditions in Britain and the emerging ideology of Thatcherism
galvanized punk rock and the experiments of post-punk music well into
the 1980s and created effective music subcultures that actively opposed
the political violence and economic disenfranchisement associated with
Thatchers policies.8 Michael Hanns observation of the anti-Thatcher

music culture, mentioned at the start of this essay, acknowledges the
very real existence of such subcultures and how the social, economic, and
cultural transition to Thatcher s Britain and her divisive politics become a
natural site for an examination of Adorno s theory of popular music and
punk s political efficacy. In particular, the concentrated violence in and

social neglect of Northern Ireland that cast the territory as an elsewhere
during the transition to Thatcher s reign make the foundational Northern
Irish punk music of Stiff Little Fingers an inviting case to test the limits
of the Culture Industry and to demonstrate the intellectual and social

efficacy of punk music.
Changing the Rhetoric of Northern Ireland; lhe

Language of Stiff Little Fingers' Inflammable Punk
Margaret Thatcher's moniker "The Iron Lady" was coined by
Soviet Captain Yuri Gavrilov, who, in the January 24, 1976, edition of
the Soviet newspaper Red Star , used the epithet to describe and crit-
icize the vehement opposition to socialism and Soviet politics that

Thatcher espoused in her address to Kensington Town Hall ("Speech
at Kensington Town Hall"). The nickname, however, encompasses more
than just Thatcher s disgust for leftist ideology; it captures the nature
of her intransigent and fractious politics, including her position on

Northern Ireland. Thatcher inherited the escalating problem known as
"The Troubles" when she took office in May of 1979, and her political
position on Northern Ireland, perhaps best captured in her declaration
"Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom - as much as my

constituency is" ("Anglo-Irish Bilateral Talks"), did little to enable the
multifarious voices of the region to speak.
Even prior to Thatchers ascendency to Number 10 Downing

Street, the politics of The Troubles struggled to reflect a willingness
amongst the Catholic and Protestant stakeholders to find common

ground. As Marc Mulholland notes, the Sex Pistols captured this divisive
state of affairs nationwide in Britain in 1977, when the Pistols released
"Anarchy in the UK" and Johnny Rotten questioned his audience:
Robert Martnez
Is this the MPLA?
Or is this the UDA?

Or is this the IRA?
I thought it was the UK
Or just another country9
Mulholland claims the Sex Pistols rightly understood "the UK" as "one
acronym among many in a neo-corporate Britain/' where "Northern

Ireland seemed only the most extreme example of a general dissolution"
(180; italics added). This fracture of Northern Ireland into ideological

puzzle pieces has its roots in Edward Heath's Tory government of 1970.
Politicians in London were weary of both the growing presence of the

IRA and the rising extremist side of Unionist supporters. In an effort
to stave off growing IRA influence, Heath's government attempted a

compromise of power sharing by refusing "to stand down the devolved
Unionist government [in Belfast], for fear of provoking a unionist back-
lash" (Mulholland 184). Heath's governments argument was to keep

both radical elements of Catholic and Protestant political positions at
the margins: "By vigorously cracking down on Catholic nationalist insurgency, it was hoped that the relatively moderate Unionist government at
Stor mont, led from March 1971 by Brian Faulkner, could be shored up
against the increasingly restive unionist ultras" (Mulholland 184). This

attempt to quell the tension in Northern Ireland by playing to centrist
concerns ultimately failed, primarily due to the "cracking down" cowboy
tactics of the British military and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
Internment Night on August 9, 1971, and the explosive tragedy of Bloody
Sunday on January 30, 1972, were evidence enough of anti-Catholic bias

in Northern Ireland, and both events "served to win Catholic nationalist
support for the IRA" (Mulholland 184).10 What ensued was not compromise but bloodshed, both at home in Northern Ireland and away in
mainland England.11
When Thatcher took charge of the Conservative Party, she did
little to bring oppositional voices together. She appointed Tory hard-
liner Airey Neave as Shadow spokesman on Northern Ireland, and

Neave quickly enacted Thatcher's desire for "military victory, and even
for integration" (Mulholland 186) of Northern Ireland - both Catholic
and Protestant communities - into Britain, In fact, in 1978, Neave

"announced that the Conservative Party had formally buried its support
for a devolved power-sharing administration in Northern Ireland, where
parties from both unionist and nationalist traditions would be required to
govern together, as no longer 'practical polities'" (186) Even after Neave's
assassination by nationalist militants in 1979, Thatcher refused to alter
her imperial designs on Northern Ireland; "she was obsessed with the
idea of solving the problem by somehow creating a purely British enclave
state in Ireland" (Mulholland 190).

We can interpret Thatcher s stance on Northern Ireland and the
growing conflict between paramilitary nationalist and unionist groups as
the ultimate symbol of a failure of imagination in Anglo-Irish politics. It
appears that Thatcher did not heed the lessons of 1970s Northern Ireland;
her refusal to acknowledge Catholic communities and to strategize political power sharing across the diverse nationalist and unionist spectrum of
voices surprisingly ignored the factional verbal and physical fallout from
Edward Heath's effort to tighten the British grip around the six counties. Thatcher's support for an all-British Northern Ireland betrayed her
absolute disgust for the Irish. Former Northern Ireland secretary Peter
Mandelson reported in 2013 that just after he assumed his role as secretary in 1999, Thatcher approached him and said, "'I've got one thing to
say to you, my boy ... you can't trust the Irish. They're all liars - liars, and
that's what you have to remember so just don't forget it'" (qtd. in Meagher
2013). Even during negotiations leading to the Anglo-Irish Agreement

of 1985 - an agreement that suggested a softening of Thatchers stance
on Northern Ireland - Thatcher controversially admitted her admiration
of Oliver Cromwell's murderous campaign in Northern Ireland during

the War of the Three Kingdoms from 1649 to 1653. As Kevin Meagher
reports, Thatcher expressed her approval of Cromwell's methods to "Sir
David Goodall during a late night conversation at Chequers":

She said, if the northern [Catholic] population want to
be in the south, well why don't they move over there?
After all, there was a big movement of population in

Ireland, wasn't there? Nobody could think what it was.
So finally I said, are you talking about Cromwell, prime
minister? She said, that's right, Cromwell.
Robert Martnez
Thatcher s statements reveal an attitude that exceeded the political and

bordered on the pathological in her secret desire to suppress and conquer
Northern Ireland, even at the cost of innocent lives. It could be argued

that Thatcher did not even see the category of "Irish" as legitimate; indeed,
when assessing the role of Irish issues during the Thatcher years, the
BBC's former Ireland Correspondent Kevin Connolly has stated, "This

was a woman to whom Northern Ireland was every bit as British as her
Finchley constituency" (Jacobs).
This brief historical overview of political maneuverings and

hostilities over Northern Ireland reflects an egregious display of binary
conflict, of absolutist positions regarding national identity. Was Northern
Ireland really this rigidly black and white? Northern Irish novelist Robert
McLiam Wilson expresses comic disgust for this kind of limited thinking:
Like most of the citizens of Belfast, my identity is the
subject of some dispute. Some say I'm British, some say

I'm Irish, some even say that there's no way I'm five eleven
and that I'm five foot ten at best. In many ways I'm not
permitted to contribute to this debate. If the controversy
is ever satisfactorily concluded, I will be whatever the

majority of people tell me I am. (135)
Wilson's description of his own identity exposes the failure of politicians
and paramilitaries to understand the nuances of public feeling and per-
sonal identification concerning the question of Northern Ireland. His

own writing about Belfast and The Troubles evokes the very elision of
suppressed voices that make Northern Ireland a kind of elsewhere, and
in the process Wilson uses this condition of the elsewhere to create an

alternative history of or perspective on Anglo-Irish affairs: "Violence is a
part of the material of the city [i.e., Belfast] and its citizens have to work
around it. An awful lot of people in Northern Ireland simply don't care
whether it is Irish, British, or independent. Yet no one speaks for them
and no one reflects their views or even demonstrates the fact that they exist "
(Amoore 41; italics added).

This failure to acknowledge the isolated, neglected voices in
Northern Irish society brings us back to the revolutionary aspects of
punk and post-punk music and its specific responses to the social and
political problems plaguing Britain. Instead of buying into the British

Conservative argument of the late 1970s that saw punk music and culture
as "part of the disease" (Mulholland 180)12 of Britain's social decline, we

can understand some punk music as a specific political attempt to rupture
these master narratives of violence or isolationist stances on national
identity in mainstream politics. Punk music's rupturing effect also radi-
cally calls into question Adornos arguments against popular music and
Roderick's dismissal of punk's overall political efficacy. The Northern

Irish punk response to The Troubles that took shape in the aftermath
of the Sex Pistols gained notoriety in the music of Belfast's Stiff Little
Fingers. The more complex, pluralist thinking about national identity and
belonging that Wilson's comments above call for finds expression in Stiff
Little Fingers' 1979 LP, Inflammable Material Following the breakup

of their first band, Highway Star, Jake Burns, Henry Cluney, and Brian
Faloon discovered the emerging punk rock scene through the foundational music of The Damned and the Sex Pistols in 1976 and formed
Stiff Little Fingers. However, as Jake Burns notes, it was not until his
discovery of The Clash and Joe Strummer's lyrics about life growing up
in North London that the band realized they could create a soundtrack
for their lives in war-torn Belfast:
I'd gotten fed up with heavy metal . . . The big watershed
was the first Clash album. Up to that point, we'd still

been singing songs about bowling down California high-
ways and what-have-you, and I mean it meant nothing

to me - I'd never been farther west than Galway in me
life. To suddenly hear The Clash - I mean, although The
Damned and the Pistols and stuff that we had prior to

this, it was great and really exciting, but it was only excit-
ing musically. I mean, lyrically it didn't - to be honest,
I couldn't make out what they were saying. To realize

they [The Clash] were actually singing about their own
lives, growing up in West London, it was a bolt out of
the blue. (Parker)
This epiphany captures how punk rock enabled previously marginalized
working-class voices to gain a sudden platform to speak about their lives,
Robert Martnez
and thus create a pluralist mode of thinking to attack the dominant binary
concerning Northern Irish affairs* Punk as a social platform created the

opportunity for alternative histories to be told of local, national, and even
international events - there were no barriers of political status or official
news outlets to get the word out. As Jake Burns stresses here, punk rock
could indeed alter reality and change someone's life.

Musically, Stiff Little Fingers' style of punk is particularly significant in the history of Irish popular music precisely for its anonymity
of style. Given the fraught state of affairs of The Troubles during the
1970s and 1980s - the ubiquitous political markings made in murals and
expressed by football club supporters, the dominant ideological binaries
of Catholic/Protestant, British/Irish, IRA/UDA, etc., that engulfed

everyday life in Northern Ireland - a Belfast punk rock band like Stiff
Little Fingers refusing to sound "Irish" marked their music as creating a
kind of elsewhere, a space for alternative thinking. Martin McLoone and
Noel McLaughlin have observed that the identity politics of Trishness"

during The Troubles not only affected debates about Trishness" in popular music but also continue to plague assessments of Irish bands: "Irish
popular music continues to be framed within the hegemonic thrust of
nationalist and international expectations of what Irish music should

be, pushing out to the margins a range of styles and identities that do
not conform to these centralized conceptions" (160-61). The sounds

of Inflammable Material show that the band was clearly influenced by
the likes of The Damned and The Clash - bands already challenging
established attitudes toward popular music and political life in England.
Thus, the influence of this already culturally exiled music from England
is precisely what helped to establish Stiff Little Fingers as an anomaly
within the noise of Irish popular music of the time. In their study of
Irish music from the 1970s and 1980s, McLoone and McLaughlin trace
many Irish bands and artists, from Horslips to Paddy-a-go-go to Sinad
O'Connor, in order to illustrate how critics were and are always quick to
evaluate Irish popular music based on the appropriation of traditional

elements of Irish musical styles, instruments, or vocals. Stiff Little Fingers'
adoption of a Clash-inspired punk aesthetic defied the need to sound Irish
(whether that was an attempt at authenticity through the adaptation of
traditional Irish musical elements or the ironic usage of them), while

the band still maintained a pointed intellectual response to the Belfast
community and national concerns "[Interesting and successful Irish

music need not have to pander to the familiar expectations of 'Irishness'
that exist in wider circulation nor assume that only forms of traditional
music can act as registers of musical identity/' (161) state McLoone and
McLaughlin, and it is precisely in this manner that Jake Burns and Stiff
Little Fingers emphasized their lyrics to forge a new musical and political
identity about The Troubles,

Even though DJ John Peel popularized Stiff Little Fingers' musical intervention into The Troubles on BBC Radio One in November 1977
(Sexton) with the band s first singles "Suspect Device" and "Wasted Life/'
it was not until the release of Inflammable Material in 1979 that the wider
listening public encountered "Alternative Ulster/' which is now considered
one of the classic punk anthems alongside the Pistols' "Anarchy in the
UK" and The Clash's "White Riot" and "London Calling " This song is
perhaps one of the most complex musical statements about The Troubles,
The opening lines of the song emphatically call attention to the ignored
voices of Belfast society. The cityscape of Belfast reflects the larger socio-
economic malaise of the "Winter of Discontent" of 1978-1979, where

boredom and joblessness reign ("Nothin' for us in Belfast/' "We ain't
got nothin'"13) and politicians shirk their duty to serve the public's needs
("They don't even know, you know/ Just want our money"). The song
then takes on the larger gloom of The Troubles, but instead of issuing a
caustic attack on involved parties or a sorrowful post-punk lament about
the state of affairs,14 it invites the listener to re-envision the conflict that
has come to define her or his life:
Take a look where you're livin'

You got the Army on your street
And the RUC dog of repression

Is barking at your feet
Is this the kind of place you wanna live?
Is this where you wanna be?

Is this the only life we're gonna have?
What we need is
An Alternative Ulster
Grab it and change it - it's yours
Robert Martnez
Get an Alternative Ulster
Ignore the bores and their laws

Get an Alternative Ulster
Be an anti-security force
Alter your native Ulster
Alter your native land
For a supposedly violent genre of rock music, Stiff Little Fingers' punk
encourages the audience to think optimistically about Belfast and The

Troubles, and in a way that defies the dominant binary identity politics
of the territory The urgency of the music is about imagining Belfast

outside of the differing, competing narratives espoused by the metropole
of London or local Protestant/unionist and IRA/nationalist paramilitaries, The Belfast audience, and by extension the wider listening public
of Britain, is being invited to envision a peaceful Belfast without relying
on the current maps and markers that divide and categorize Northern
Ireland* While the purposeful repetition of the verbal deconstruction

of "Alternative Ulster" to "Alter your native Ulster" in the chorus could
be seen as a fetishizing structural hook characteristic of the conformity-inducing features of Adorno s "standardization,"15 1 would argue that
this repetitive quality of the song actually leaves the listener not with
formulated answers or bumper-sticker ideology, or even a cheap pop

refrain, but rather a kind of indeterminacy - an open-endedness that
Adorno might admire There is arguably no possibility for standardized
thinking here, for the listener is not being fed any particular ideology. In
fact, the simple call in the chorus is to think differently - "outside of the
box," as it were - and by doing so Stiff Little Fingers elevate a seemingly
simple punk rock song to the production of an elsewhere aesthetic that

lies outside of traditional Irish music and familiar Anglo-Irish political
arguments about The Troubles.
However, Martin McLoone implicitly questions the efficacy

of Stiff Little Fingers' music by noting the band s lack of popularity in
Belfast. In his essay "Irish Soundscapes: Punk Music and the Political
Power of 'What-Might-Have-Been,'" McLoone argues that the subjectivity of the Belfast listener possessed a "local knowledge" of the Belfast
scene of the time that showed "less than universal" (183) approval for
Stiff Little Fingers. Despite his and Noel McLaughlin's acknowledgment
that Irish popular music does not have "to pander to the familiar expecta-
tions of 'Irishness'" (McLoone and McLaughlin 161), McLoone separately

claims the reason for this reaction to Stiff Little Fingers came down to
a lack of authenticity: "The band had been well known in the city as
a heavy metal covers band until a visiting English journalist, Gordon
Ogilvie, turned them into a punk band and helped to write the kind of
songs that he knew would go down well in Britain" (183). This suggestion that the band s version of punk is inauthentic does not accurately
represent the genesis of the band. This assessment completely ignores

Jake Burns's story of the groups transition from heavy-metal Highway
Star to punk rock Stiff Little Fingers - how band mate Henry Cluney
got them into punk by bringing in records of The Damned and the Sex
Pistols, and how Burns found his lyrical inspiration in the music of The
Clash.16 Burns and company also welcomed Gordon Ogilvie s ideas about
their music,17 a situation that arguably demonstrates the very kind of
"cross-cultural, cross-border dialogues" that Iain Chambers argues can

break down "traditional ideologies ... into a type of 'in-bet weenness' or
'fourth space'" (qtd. in McLoone and McLaughlin 157). And it is precisely the implied theoretical indeterminacy in a song like "Alternative
Ulster" and the cross-cultural collaboration between Northern Ireland
(Stiff Little Fingers) and England (Ogilvie) that represents this "fourth
space," with the concept of the fourth dimension as a metaphor for a

space that lies outside of normal experience. Iain Chambers has described
this concept elsewhere as a way of critiquing the self/other dichotomy

underlying Western historiography. He argues, "instead of attempting
to fully explain and assimilate the other, thereby reducing her or him
to our world, we need to open ourselves up to a relationship that goes

beyond ourselves, that exists beyond and apart from us" (80; italics in
original). It is "the ethical event" of this kind of "dialogue that maintains a recognition of difference and distance" (Chambers 80), and thus
prevents the collaborative work of the song from being cannibalized by
the "traditional ideologies" that I have described above and creates the
potential for this punk-inspired peripheral status to be unencumbered
by status quo thinking and practices.
Not only does "Alternative Ulster" represent a cultural "fourth
space" given the collaboration between the Belfast band and English jour-
nalist Ogilvie, but the linguistic playfulness of the lyrics also suggests
Robert Martnez
a mental "fourth space" for the listener. Burns purposefully leaves the
concept of an "Alternative Ulster" open in order to deconstruct both the
dominant ideologies of the time and the very imperative of "Alter your
native Ulster." Burns's use of irony is clear: he is not using a command
in the traditional sense to enforce someone to follow a belief or fulfill an
action; rather, in a Belfast environment marked by signifiers of ideolo-
gies, he is telling his audience not to be commanded by anything. The

only possible command of this lyric, then, is to encourage the listener to
question more critically the life around herself or himself By using irony
in this way, the band refutes any sophomoric or totalitarian attempt to

preach at individuals. The "alternate" signifies possibility - possibility to
imagine a world where politics, violence, and ideology no longer serve as
acceptable modes of response to sociopolitical problems.

In this way, the example of "Alternative Ulster" is a fruitful par-
adox: an un-anthemic anthem that can create a community of critical

thought, which would promote exactly what Adorno laments as lost: the
critically thinking individual and a genuine art of integrity. The lyrical con-
tent of the song overcomes any problems posed by punk rock s repetitive
structural and sonic properties; indeed, the lyrics actively refute Adorno s
notion of "pseudo-individualization" with its lyrical critique of the very

standardized ways of thinking about The Troubles - e.g., the use of the
RUC to rout IRA suspicions; the use of the British military to enforce
law and order when that is precisely what was being abused and denied to
Northern Irish citizens; the Thatcherite pro-empire position that saw all
Irish as suspicious and in need of British control; the age-old containment
politics of policing; and the endless bickering of binary politics that cannot
see beyond "Unionist" or "NationalistV'Catholic" or "Protestant" labels

(what Burns calls "the bores and their laws" in the song).
Most importantly, the songs ironic anthemic quality refuses to

create another acronymic brand of ideological stance or system of belief.18
Rather, StifFLittle Fingers take part in building an indeterminate identity
for Northern Ireland that calls for listener creativity, which can be seen
as an example of how "Northern Ireland's briefly flourishing punk scene"
used "the anti-establishment culture of punk in general":
For Northern Irish punks, the establishment then

meant their slightly older siblings as well as their parents.
Their opposition was to the status quo as well to those

aggressive and violent opponents of the status quo who
had reduced daily life to the abject* Punk was a third

space beyond the fixed binaries of these opposing forces;
it gave a sense that, pace Rotten, there could be a future,
if not in England's dreaming, then certainly in Northern
Ireland's reimagining. (185; italics added)

McLoone 's description of punk as a "third space" articulates the same idea
as Chambers's evocation of a fourth dimension or "fourth space": both

concepts encourage us to press for a radical critique of familiar ideologies founded upon binary logic and to embrace a kind of liminality that
preserves difference through co-existence or hybridity, that refuses the
binary impulse towards totality, and thus creates possibility. "Alternative
Ulster" represents this liminality; the collaborative energies of StifFLittle
Fingers' music creates a cross-cultural and imaginative terrain outside of
the reductionist ideologies of politics and violence engulfing Northern

Ireland signaled by English colonial rule (British soldiers in the streets),
corrupt, one-sided policing (the Royal Ulster Constabulary), paramilitary
opposition (e.g., IRA, UDA, UVF), and all other binary categories.
The legacy of Stiff Little Fingers is indeed a lesson in how popular
music can produce critical thinking through its creative content. The
liminal space created by Stiff Little Fingers offers the citizens of Northern
Ireland and Britain (and beyond) an everlasting opportunity to imagine

themselves outside of the "sectarian politics of Northern Ireland's older
generation" (McLoone 177), 19 and to embrace a surprisingly optimistic
radical line of thinking that opposes Johnny Rotten's original anarchic
mantra "Destroy!" as a catalyst for social revolution.
Eastern Illinois University
Robert Martnez
Notes
1. "Maggie's Millions" was the term used by journalists and the British
public to describe the over 3 million people unemployed in Britain by

1982. The BBC has documented this term in their online "On This Day"
archive of historical events.
2. Evidence of the destruction of families in the mining communities of
Britain still occupies British consciousness. In October 2010, the deputy
leader of Sunderland City Council, Florence Anderson, a grandmother
who led the Eppleton Area Miners' Wives Support Group during the
strike of 1984, stated on Facebook that she hoped Margaret Thatcher
would "burn in hell." She refused to apologize for her post, and added, "I'm
a miner's widow. I remember 84/85 as if it was yesterday. I hate Thatcher
for what she did to my community, what she did to the ordinary people
who live here. I stand by what I said." See Victoria Ward's article "Labour
councillor calls for Margaret Thatcher to 'burn in hell,"' The Telegraph,

29 October 2010.
3. Morrissey's dismissal of "film stars" and "playwrights" as makers of
"dying arts" can perhaps be understood in the context of the British

cultural and literary forces that shaped his upbringing. The son of an
assistant librarian (his mother), Morrissey was an avid reader and was
particularly influenced by the poets W. H. Auden and John Betjeman,
Victorian novels, and the "kitchen sink" realism revolution of the late
1950s and 1960s in Britain. This new genre gained immediate attention
and popularity through drama and through televised adaptations of such
works as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) and Shelagh Delaney s
A Taste of Honey (1958). The Smiths' Louder Than Bombs album features
a picture of Delaney on the cover, and in several Smiths songs, particularly
"This Night Has Opened My Eyes," Morrissey incorporates lines from
Delaney's play. See Stephane's informative online catalog "Under the

Influence: Literature" at Passions Just Like Mine: A Morrissey/ Smiths
Information Archive .
4. Herbert Marcuse in particular makes this claim about the totalitarian

features of Western capitalist society (what he terms the "affluent soci'
ety"). See his essay "Repressive Tolerance" in A Critique of Pure Tolerance
(1969), edited by Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, and Herbert

Marcuse.
Punk Rock, Thatcher, and the Elsewhere of Northern Ireland | 21 5
5. Adorno and Horkheimer further stress the power of exchange value

in its ability to dissolve differences between serious art and low-brow art:
"Sharp distinctions like those between A and B films, or between short
stories published in magazines in different price segments, do not so

much reflect real differences as assist in the classification, organization,
and identification of consumers" (96-97).

6. Roderick provides a list of American cultural stereotypes when defin-
ing punk rock as "an island of lost toys." See paragraph 16 of his essay,
"Punk Rock Is Bullshit," in the March 6, 2013, electronic edition of the
Seattle Weekly News .
7. The Sex Pistols' John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) and Steve Jones
discuss the failing social systems and strikes, the rampant sociopolitical
violence, and the damaged economy of Britain in the mid-to-late 1970s
as the germs that gave rise to the Sex Pistols' music in the beginning of
Julien Temple's documentary The Filth and the Fury : A Sex Pistols Film
(2000). In the introduction to Temple's documentary, Lydon describes

1970s England as being "in a state of social upheaval. They were very, very
different times. Total social chaos. There was rioting all over the place.
Strikes on every kind of amenity you could think of. TV channels would
go on and off randomly. People were fed up with old way - the old way
was clearly not working."
8. Dick Hebdige 's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) is the obvious
landmark argument demonstrating the multifarious groups inspired by
punk that disrupted normative identity politics in Britain. To account
for Roderick's possible distaste for the uses of Marxism in criticism

like Hebdige's (in his essay, Roderick makes fun of the "pinch of pseu-
do-Marxism" in punk and admires kids today who "make music and
art that's smart and clever, with no hard lessons or Marxist undertones
attached"), we can turn to Ben Whalley's informative BBC documentary
Synth Britannia (2009) that smartly illustrates historical examples of the
ways in which disenfranchised, working-class youth, particularly in the
economically impoverished areas of Manchester and Sheffield, used the
energy of punk to create new kinds of music that opposed dominant

ideologies like Thatcherism.
Robert Martnez
9. All quoted lyrics here are from the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the ILK.,"
from their album Never Mind the Bollocks (1990 CD edition). Any further
references to the Sex Pistols' lyrics come from this edition of the album.
10. Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson claim that the Bloody Sunday
massacre caused "youngsters who had seen their friends die that day
flocked to join the IRA" (293). Paul Greengrass's docudrama film Bloody
Sunday (2002), confirms Pringle and Jacobsons interpretation of events.
Following the massacre, Greengrass has his Ivan Cooper character, the
civil rights activist for fair treatment of Catholics, state: "I just want to
say this to the British Government ... You know what you've just done,
don't you? You've destroyed the civil rights movement, and you've given the
IRA the biggest victory it will ever have. All over this city tonight, young
men ... boys will be joining the IRA, and you will reap a whirlwind." See
Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson, Those Are Real Bullets , Aren't They?,
London: Fourth Estate (2000), and Paul Greengrass, Bloody Sunday,

Paramount (2003).
11. In response to Bloody Sunday, the IRA and other militant pro-Catholic groups began a vicious campaign against the British government, with
the Birmingham Pub Bombings on November 21, 1974, igniting worse

tension between Catholics and Protestants.
12. Indeed, upon the release of the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks,
Tory MP Norman St. John Stevas condemned punk music in 1977 as a

sign of social decline: "[This] ... is the kind of music that is a symptom
of the way society is declining. It could have a shocking effect on young
people." See Chris Charlesworth, 25 Albums that Rocked the World,

London: Omnibus Press, 2008.
13. All quoted lyrics here refer to StifFLittle Fingers' Inflammable Material
(2004 CD edition). Any further references to Stiff Little Fingers' lyrics

come from this edition of the album.
14. A classic example of vitriolic British punk is The Exploited 's "Fuck the
USA," while the representative par excellence of the post-punk depressive
style is Joy Division's album Closer (1980).

15. Dominic Strinati stresses that repetitive song structures are a charac-
teristic of Adorno 's concept of standardization: "Standardization means

that popular songs are becoming more alike and their parts, verses and
choruses more interchangeable" (58).

16. See Alan Parkers interview with Jake Burns on the 2004 CD edition
of Inflammable Material
17. See Alan Parkers interview noted above and Jake Burns s discussion
of Ogilvie's influence in Stiff Little Fingers: Song by Song .
18. Northern Irish novelist Robert McLiam Wilson satirizes the binary,
acronymic thinking of Northern Ireland in his novel, Eureka Street : A
Novel of Ireland Like No Other (1996), by creating a never-identified char-
acter that paints "OTG" all around Belfast. The acronym is purposefully
never identified and is meant to mock simplistic ideological thinking and
paramilitary political groups.

19. In Stiff Little Fingers : Song by Song, Jake Burns states that following the
Good Friday Agreement of 1998, a local radio station in Northern Ireland

ran a poll asking for a "completely neutral national anthem" (56) to reflect
the spirit of the agreement. The winning song was "Alternative Ulster."
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. "On Popular Music." Soundscapes : Journal on Media
Culture . N.p.January 2000. Web. 31 August 2014.
Listening." The Culture Industry : Selected Essays on Mass Culture . Ed. J.
M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991. Print.

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment
Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. Print.
Amoore, Topaz. "'If You Repeat What I'm About to Say, You'll Get Me
Shot.'" International Express 28 September 1999: 41. Print.
Bloody Sunday . Dir. Paul Greengrass. Paramount, 2003. DVD.

Brazier, Chris. "The Danceable Solution." Melody Maker . Fodderstompf:
PiL Fansite Archive . 28 October 1978. Web. 25 February 2015.

Burns, Jake, and Alan Parker. Stiff Little Fingers: Song by Song > London:
Sanctuary, 2003. Print.

Chambers, Iain. "Migrancy, Culture, Identity." The Postmodern History
Reader . Ed. Keith Jenkins. London: Routledge, 1997. 77-81. Print.
Robert Martnez
Charlesworth, Chris, 25 Albums that Rocked the World . London:

Omnibus Press, 2008. Print.
Dogmart. "The Smiths - Live on Data Run c. 1984, a British TV Program."
Online video clip. YouTube . 29 December 2006. Web. 31 August 2014.

Gross, Terry. '"12 Years a Slave' Was a Film that No One Was Making."
Fresh Air . National Public Radio. 24 October 2013. Web. 30 October
2013.
Hann, Michael. "Five songs about Margaret Thatcher." The Guardian .

N.p. 8 April 2013. Web. 8 April 2013.
Jacobs, Ed. "Thatchers legacy in Northern Ireland." Left Foot Forward .
N.p. 9 April 2013. Web. 2 August 2014.

Julzei. "Tony Wilson Interviews The Smiths." Online video clip. YouTube .
30 August 2007. Web. 12 August 2013.

McLoone, Martin. "Irish Soundscapes: Punk Music and the Political
Power of 'What-Might-Have-Been.'" Film , Media and Popular Culture
in Ireland : Cityscapes, Landscapes , Soundscapes . Ed. Martin McLoone.
Sallins, Co. Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2008. 173-86. Print.
McLoone, Martin, and Noel McLaughlin. "Irish Soundscapes: Hybridity
and National Musics." Film , Media and Popular Culture in Ireland :

Cityscapes , Landscapes , Soundscapes . Ed. Martin McLoone. Sallins, Co.
Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2008. 143-64. Print.

Meagher, Kevin. "Why did Margaret Thatcher have a jaundiced view of
the Irish?" New Statesman . N.p. 19 April 2013. Web. 30 August 2014.
Mulholland, Marc. "'Just another country?' The Irish question in the

Thatcher years." Making Thatcher's Britain . Eds. Ben Jackson and Robert
Saunders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 180-96. Print.

Parker, Alan. "Jake Burns Interview." Inflammable Material Perf. Stiff
Little Fingers. New York: Restless Records, 2004. CD.

Pringle, Peter, and Philip Jacobson. Those Are Real Bullets , Aren't They ?
London: Fourth Estate, 2000. Print.

Rolinson, Dave. Alan Clarke . Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Print.
Sex Pistols. Never Mind the Bollocks . Warner Off Roster, 1990. CD.
Sexton, Shirley. "Stiff Little Fingers - Bio/' Stiff Little Fingers . N.p. N.d.
Web. 2 September 2014.

Stephane. "Under the Influence: Literature." Passions Just Like Mine: A
Morrissey/ Smiths Information Archive . N.p. N.d. Web. 3 September 2014.
Stiff Little Fingers. Inflammable Material Restless Records, 2004. CD.

Strinati, Dominic. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture . London:
Routledge, 2004. Print.

Thatcher, Margaret. "Speech at Kensington Town Hall ('Britain Awake')."
Margaret Thatcher Foundation 19 January 1976. Web. 20 August 2014.
November 1981. Web. 20 August 2014.

Wakeling, Dave. "The Beat reflects on Margaret Thatcher's death." The
English Beat DaveWakeling.com. 8 April 2013. Web. 8 April 2013.

Wilson, Robert McLiam. "Sticks and Stones: The Irish Identity." Grand
Street 62 (1997): 135-39. Print.
Winemouth. "The Smiths - In the Studio (BBC Whistle Test 1985)."

Online video clip. YouTube. 3 February 2010. Web. 12 August 2013.

Punk Rock, Thatcher, and The Elsewhere of Northern Ireland Rethinking The Politics of Popular Music

Încărcat de

Informații document

Descriere originală:

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Punk Rock, Thatcher, and The Elsewhere of Northern Ireland Rethinking The Politics of Popular Music

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Midwest Modern Language Association

Punk Rock, Thatcher,

and her policies. As Hann notes,

politics has received such attention

of news of former British Prime

in music: "you'll hunt fruitlessly for

Minister Margaret Thatcher's

well-known songs from the punk-

death - from talking-head

era that attacked Jim Callaghan

news coverage, to Tory praise

by name; even Tony Blair didn't

of her legacy in Parliament, to

provoke mass-selling songs about

vast and numerous celebratory

drinking parties throughout

lets on Monday, April 8, 2013,

Why do the annals of

some members of the press reflected

She came to power in the direct

on the realm of popular culture

aftermath of Britain's "Winter of

and its fraught relationship with

Discontent" of 1978-1979, and

Thatcher throughout the 1980s.

her remedy for the problems of

In his essay in The Guardian, "Five

the Seventies was a controversially

Songs about Margaret Thatcher,"

conservative agenda to open up

Michael Hann casts some light

British markets, privatize formerly

on the rather large body of popu-

lar music that targeted Thatcher

and engage in all kinds of union

death, former English Beat singer/guitarist Dave Wakeling stated online,

"Although I rejoice in no one's death, Margaret Thatcher's passing is an

of privatization, free-market economics - but also stresses the cultural

erupted in Brixton, Southall, and Toxteth; nuclear tensions rose to levels

tion and the aesthetics of a cultural "elsewhere" in Britain. This sense of

itics in London that ignored or elided disaffected citizens throughout the

Midlands, the industrial North, and perhaps most perilously in Northern

ELSEWHERES | SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 48 | NUMBER 1

Punk Rock, Thatcher, and the Elsewhere of Northern Ireland | 19 5

McQueen captures this political and social neglect of the complexity of

defining official politics like Thatcher.

What I would like to argue in this essay is that punk rock

elsewheres" in Britain. Specifically, I will demonstrate how punk rock

dominant political narratives of The Troubles. By creating a form of

space of Northern Ireland out of neglected periphery and re-imagines

has to overcome not only the warring ideologies of paramilitaries and

to fight its own peripheral status as an intellectually devalued form of

claims that popular music is incapable of producing transformative intel-

lectual, political content precisely because of its status as a commodity

exist as an art form capable of producing legitimate, original political

The Troubles offers Northern Ireland and Britain an opportunity to

ELSEWHERES | SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 48 | NUMBER 1

Punk Rock Versus the Culture Industry

on political and local events?" ("Tony Wilson Interviews"). Morrissey's

important. Let's just, you know, make disco records or

it's working to great effect. ("Tony Wilson Interviews")

drama and film, Morrissey challenges the cultural attitude implied by