Styling the Amateur

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the value placed on the ‘amateur’s’ lack of skill in both altcom and punk—rather, an inversion of traditional values (sometimes having parodic effect), whereby being able to play gives way to ‘playfulness’, and thence to room for experimentation. This is discussed as a deliberate strategy for bypassing established procedure and enabling the emergence of raw and unshackled ‘noise’, and the voices of a youthful generation. The paradox encountered here is that this ‘raw’, rough-edged, unpolished quality was itself to some degree constructed and even valorised, as the target style. ‘Newness’ here goes hand in hand with the implied atavism of stripping rock back to its basic building blocks—harking back to the ‘youth’, even mythicised ‘origins’, of rock itself.