Week Seven Flashcards
Punk (Punk Rock, Punk Culture)
Punk is arock musicgenre/aesthetic that emerged in the mid-1970s. Rooted in 1950srock and rolland 1960sgarage rock, punk bands openly rejected the corporate nature of mainstream 1970s rock music. They typically produced short, fast-paced songs with hard-edged melodies and singing styles with stripped-down instrumentation. Lyricism in punk typically revolves aroundanti-establishmentandanti-authoritarianthemes.
Punk embraces aDIY (do-it-yourself) ethos that resulted in vernacular aesthetics; ex: many bands self-produce recordings and distribute them throughindependent labels. The musical style also sometimes deliberately involved out-of-tune, “poor” or “sloppy” musicianship as part of their vernacular “anti-aesthetic” ethos.
DIY (“Do-It-Yourself”)
“DIY” refers to the practice of vernacular praxis of “making do” with limited wealth/ resources. It evolved from poor people’s necessary practices of adaptation/finding creative solutions to fix things, and eventually became a political/cultural statement perpetuated by people from different class backgrounds, for different reasons: sometimes, it is co-opted and celebrated by the mainstream “outsider art,” (ex: Banksy), and sometimes it remains grounded in its vernacular contexts as its own autonomous, community-based praxis.
Rasquachismo (aka “Rasquache”)
Rasquachismo is a Chicana/o/x version of DIY. It originally was derived from the observation of queer camp and drag culture, and often involves the use of flamboyant colors, clothing, and excessive accoutrements.
Internationalism (also, “Latinx Internationalism” in the context of our class)
Internationalism generally refers to a philosophy or mutual aid praxis that extends out from localized personal/ national contexts. In this class, it refers to growing political understanding/concientización of an inextricably interconnected world, which leads activists to develop their methods by understanding the local relationship to the global and vice versa. In contemporary political contexts, this has involved individuals joining insurgencies throughout the world as “internationalists,” but the concept also resonates at the national level, such as “isolationism” vis-à-vis “internationalism” as regards policies by specific national leaders, international mutual aid (esp through activist organizations), etc
