Russ Bestley talks to Jonas Engelmann about two new books on German punk and the Angriff aufs Schlaraffenland compilation album, the sometimes-overlooked history of punk in Germany (and Europe more widely) and the cultural and historical specificity of Deutschpunk.
This article examines the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, focusing on its development, curation and experience-based strategy. The argument is twofold. First, it argues that the paucity of contextualizing and interpretive narrative significantly limits the museum’s exhibits. The ‘unscripted’ approach to curation that the management espouses as a ‘punk’ alternative to didactic narrative, in turn, allows it to disavow accountability for the limiting ‘script’ implied throughout the resulting exhibits. This script largely centres on the US pop-punk that flourished from the mid-1990s onwards – a focus that reflects the musical predilections and social connections of the museum’s founders – rather than offering the more capacious survey and analysis of punk histories that might be expected at the world’s major punk-rock museum. Second, it argues that the museum’s ‘unscripted’ curation, informal social environment and prioritization of visitor ‘experiences’ mirror approaches familiar to the ‘post-museum’, potentially affording community and positioning patrons as creators of meaning. However, the non-contextualized, nostalgia-driven exhibits and experiential installations, along with the museum’s priority of catering to patrons’ enjoyment, serve to celebrate punk rock but do not seek to challenge visitors or to advance new insights into punk . These dynamics, I contend, derive from the museum’s limited framing of punk and the management’s strategy of situating the museum within Las Vegas’s tourist industry.
Since the 1960s, independent artists have incorporated multimedia formats into their works. With the first example documented as multimedia art by Bobb Goldsteinn in 1966, the concept spread across the globe. Specifically, it benefited the punk and, later, indie scenes in America and the United Kingdom. Employing multimedia practices, Icelandic fanzine creators combined local aesthetics and ideas that were ubiquitous in the global DIY context. Such endeavours facilitated the formation of a new identity. Existing on the outskirts of the music industry, artists crafted their own indie realm, delivered through the principle of archivism. Musicians, writers and record producers not only crafted a new identity but also manifested independence from the imposed ‘discursive construction of Iceland’. As opposed to computer-controlled media, human-controlled multimedia embraces personal and communal experiences that feed into a new and, perhaps, more objective narrative. Through cassette compilations, booklets and fanzines adorned with collages, independent labels and the artists they represented (Erðanúmúsik, Ísafjörður Über Alles, Gramm Records) constructed an image of the country existing in a dialogue with other cultures and making itself heard. For this article, we chose three case studies that bring an overview of the independent culture of Iceland in the mid-1980s, shortly before the international breakout of the Sugarcubes. By many historians of popular music, the event was viewed as a turning point in Icelandic pop history. It followed the active phase of punk that, according to Björn Vilhjálmsson, lasted from 1979 to 1982. By the mid-1980s, bands were turning towards more accessible music which was nevertheless distinctive and more appealing for the international audience.
This article examines a configuration of punk life in the city–coast corridor of central Chile characterized by short-stay occupation of unoccupied houses used as bivouacs sustaining urban vagabonding under parallel and semi-parallel time. Rather than approaching occupation as settlement or housing struggle, the analysis foregrounds temporal regimes that organize movement, subsistence and episodic domesticity. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography conducted between 2023 and 2024 across Santiago, Valparaíso and nearby coastal communes, the study combines participant observation, fieldnotes and informal and semi-structured interviews, focusing on approximately fourteen bivouac episodes involving rotating micro-groups. Findings show that houses function as waypoints rather than residential projects: interiors are improvised, sleep is irregular and exits occur through interruption, neighbour pressure or detention. Predictable weekday vacancy in second-home territories reduces surveillance but does not eliminate recurrent misclassification as burglary, vagrancy or ‘squatting’. Analytically, the article distinguishes route bivouac squatting from Latin American campamentos/tomas and from European social centres, proposing it as a temporally governed, thinly social and light-infrastructure form of occupation. By shifting attention from territory to tempo, the study contributes to debates on punk temporalities, mobility and informal urban dwelling, showing how episodic domesticity emerges at the intersection of precarious livelihoods, subcultural rhythms and vacancy landscapes.
Review of: In Too Deep: When Canadian Punks Took Over the World , Matt Bobkin and Adam Feibel (2025) Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 344 pp., ISBN 978-1-48701-268-7, p/bk, GBP 15.00
