Writing Punk: Punk Narratives in the 1990s and John King’s Novel Human Punk

Abstract This essay explores narratives of punk which were written in the 1990s, a decade which saw a renewed interest in the subject, probably mainly due to the former participants’ autobiographical impulse, as well as to a debate about the death of rock music. However, rather than attempting to reconstruct the ‘real’ history of punk, this essay sets out to analyze conflicting representations of punk. The focus of this investigation is on John King’s novel Human Punk (2001), which presents punk as social practice, deeply rooted in the ‘ordinary life’ of ‘ordinary people’ (as King puts it). To a certain extent, King’s novel argues against an alternative rendering of punk-history, epitomized by Jon Savage’s influential cultural history of punk, England’s Dreaming (2001). In contrast to King, Savage conceptualizes punk as art and thus ascribes different ideological and aesthetic functions to punk determining and defining its place in contemporary cultural memory.