Iian Ellis, a University of Kansas lecturer who grew up near London during formative years of punk music, says in a new book the attitude, symbols and sounds of punk rockers changed his life by encouraging him to question authority. (Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector)
LAWRENCE — Fourteen-year-old Iian Ellis gravitated to sights and sounds of punk music while growing up in a middle-class town outside London.
He wasn’t alone in anticipating the genre would quickly die off like so many other trends in the industry.
“I wasn’t a street punk like a lot of kids in the East End, but I wanted to position myself there. I wanted to be that outsider. I wanted to be that rebel,” Ellis said.
This anti-establishment sonic experience and the accompanying rogue subculture didn’t fade away. Instead, Ellis said on the Kansas Reflector podcast, it grew over the past 50 years into a powerful cultural epoch that influenced literature, fashion, visual arts, film, humor, education, sports, comics and politics.
Now an English lecturer at the University of Kansas, Ellis drew upon characteristics of this juggernaut for a book, “Punk Beyond the Music: Tracing Mutations and Manifestations of the Punk Virus.” It was published this month by Rowman & Littlefield.
“At the personal level,” Ellis said, “this very much is kind of a life memoir of sorts for me even though it isn’t a personalized book. That is what changed my life. It politicized me. I say it, in many ways, established values that I maintain to this day.”
Ellis, a musician who earned a doctorate at Bowling Green State University, said purveyors of punk always had a political edge. The music wasn’t dissimilar to counterculture performers of the 1960s who urged listeners to question authority, he said.
He said punkers were of an age they filled roles in government in Britain and the United States. He said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the running mate of Democrat Kamala Harris, was a fan of the Replacements. There are politicians in Britain who debate meaning of the Smiths, he said.
“I don’t think punk infiltrated politics. I think punk was always political,” Ellis said. “That’s why it’s been so influential and has had such a legacy and has had such longevity. Punk politicized an entire generation. It was oppositional in nature. It saw itself as antagonistic. It was an argumentative aesthetic and therefore it educated us.”
Ellis said punk was the most political genre in the history of music. The Sex Pistols first single was “Anarchy in the U.K.,” which stirred interest in the political philosophy. Singer Johnny Rotten didn’t care about that, but used the inflammatory song to sell the idea of disruption or alienation.
Politics was engrained in music of the Clash, an English band of the late 1970s and early 1980s inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The band challenged Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, questioned rampant consumerism, ranted about economic prospects of the working class and supported Rock Against Racism. Their songs explored revolutionary government, nuclear threat and substance abuse.
“The political tradition has to go through the Clash, who brought social concerns and social justice to their music,” Ellis said.
Ellis, who earned a doctorate in American studies with a dissertation on music, said he organized the evolution of punk into four overlapping categories.
The arts helped define the “pre-punk” era in the 1970s through writing of William Burroughs, who lived for a time in Lawrence, as well as Andy Warhol and included Situationist International, a group of political theorists and avant-garde artists prominent in Europe from the 1950s to 1970s.
Next came “proto punk,” which was evident in the New York Dolls and Iggy and the Stooges as well as movie instincts of John Waters and humor of Monty Python and George Carlin.
“There is a certain kind of malaise that is hardening the aesthetic. Those old hippie-flowers-in-your-hair idealism is starting to be seen through a cynical lens and through a harder more aggressive response that groups like the Ramones are going to represent in that kind of harder, primitive sound that we hadn’t heard before,” Ellis said.
Next came “primary punk” with the Ramones, Clash and many others. It featured alternative publications and emergence of venues that recognized work of Talking Heads, Blondie and the Dead Boys that were in opposition to pop music saturating the mainstream in the United States.
That set the stage for “post punk” culture with all its mutations that made up the body of the book by Ellis. He said punk had been co-opted and commercialized and long ago entered mainstream culture.
“The music always is rejuvenating itself,” Ellis said. “There’s a lot of music coming out of Britain at the moment that is definitely rooted in punk. It manifests and mutates across the arts, infecting culture, lifestyles and even national heritage.”
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