REPRESENTING PUNK SUBCULTURE IN THE MEDIA: EXOTICIZATION, COMMODIFICATION AND RADICAL ACTIVISM IN POST-SOCIALIST SLOVAKIA

• Authors: Michela Miroslav
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper aims to analyse how Punk was represented, primarily in Slovak (and Czechoslovak) printed media from the 1970s until the beginning of the 1990s. As the state-socialist regime collapsed, previously marginalized music scenes flourished. Punk music and related genres transitioned from the fringes to the centre of the music industry in 1990, gaining regular attention from the mainstream media. During this period some punk bands gained a nationwide popularity while others started to build up a new underground hard-core or anarcho-punk scene, based on ethical and political values imported from abroad. In the case of Slovakia, the patterns from Czechia gained a special significance. The paper argues that the boundaries between alternative music scenes and the mainstream become more fluid at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. During this “transitional period” cultural boundaries were reshaped, contributing to new meanings influenced by domestic developments and by the transfer of ideas from abroad. While mainstream media helped to establish punk as a fully recognized cultural form, fanzines gained a very important position in communication inside the punk subculture and simultaneously served as agents spreading the radical activist agendas and new representations of the subculture.

Keywords

EN

CZECHOSLOVAKIA; SLOVAK REPUBLIC; PUNK; ANARCHISM; TRANSITION; MEDIAL DISCOURSE

• Publisher: Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Historický časopis (Historical Journal)
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 72
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 947 - 966

Contributors

author

Michela Miroslav

• Institute of Czech History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Nám. J. Palacha 1/2, 116 38 Praha, Czech Republic

• https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1391-1746

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/histcaso.2024.72.5.5