The worst of all possible worlds

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point Phil Cohen's exploration of the subcultural significance of the postwar housing policy of slum clearance and relocation of families on suburban housing estates (the 'worst of all possible worlds'). This article discovers that relocation, or dislocation, at the heart of both the iconography of suburbia and the commercial packaging, and repackaging, of one of the most pervasive and elusive of the postwar subcultures: punk. Drawing on Young and Willmott's now classic account of the crisis of family and kinship in the East End, 'The worst of all possible worlds?' traces the cultural genealogy of punk as a response to what has been happening in the suburbs (the privatization of the family, the suburban uncanny, the ubiquitous television) and begins to question the transgenerational dynamics of punk culture. If this is to tell the story of suburbia as a family romance, it's one that promises to reintroduce into our histories of popular culture the class dimension of the 'blankness' and the 'madness' embedded in a punk iconography of the suburbs.