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Amsterdam, the son of an architect and a school nurse, both of whom professed leftist politics. He was raised to call them by their first names and dislikes describing his class background, refusing to, as he says, “put himself into a box.” As a fifteen-year-old punk sporting a Mohawk, he became involved in the squatters movement when he read a newspaper article interviewing squatters who were preparing for the eviction of their mansion. Excited, he skipped school to help with the barricading. Having spent half his
aesthetic illusion – was counter-productive. (Habermas, 1986c : 173) A case stronger, and perhaps more naive, than Benjamin’s is made by Marcus: punk was most easily recognisable as a new version of the old Frankfurt School critique of mass culture . . . But now the premises of the old critique were exploding out of a spot no one in the Frankfurt School, not Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, or Walter Benjamin, had ever recognised: mass culture’s pop cult heart. (Marcus, 1989 : 70
and allegations of corruption over the course of their preparation.60 As a result, a variety of civil society actors, including freedom of expression advocates, campaigners for the abolition of the anti-homosexual legislation, environmental activists and anti-corruption activists, were united in offering opposition to the Sochi Games on economic, environmental and political grounds. Importantly, they were able to gather considerable Western media attention.61 Indeed, media outlets followed one civil society actor with particular relish. Pussy Riot, a disruptive punk
encouraged its readers to ‘Smile Please – It’s Almost Over’, whilst noting that ‘There is much to remember about the punk-ridden, terrorist-laden seventies. But there is much more we would prefer to forget.’ 6 The former Labour Cabinet Minister Lord George Brown, by the late 1970s a Thatcher sympathiser, saw it as a period of ‘despair and disintegration’ and ‘one of the worst decades Britain has known’. 7 In slightly more philosophical terms, an Observer editorial described the prevailing mental condition of the 1970s as an ‘inert, numinous stupor’. It had been a
a contrary development, in that the more segments of a population develop their identities as part of public society, the more possibilities there are for plural or multicultural identities, which may be simple alternatives to prevailing identities or, like punk in the 1970s, a deliberate eschewing of expensive or dominant style. There was a movement from a horizontally diverse to a vertically diverse society, a development with several possible consequences. One possible consequence is that resentments arising from dissatisfied emulation which previously would
