Senso estetico e valore sociale del punk. Appunti per una riconsiderazione di un fenomeno prismatico

In the present article, articulated in two sections, we take into examination the aesthetics of popular music, with a particular attention to the punk subculture and the relation between its aesthetic value and its socio-political relevance. In the first section of our contribution we explain why, in our view, it is important that contemporary aesthetics also investigates, among other fields and phenomena, the popular arts, including popular music. In this context, we especially stress the importance for contemporary aesthetics to open itself to the analysis of musical genres that do not belong to so-called mainstream popular music, but are rather connected to subcultural and oppositional styles. On this basis, in the second section we specifically focus our attention on punk, understood as one of the most important subcultures of the last decades. In this context, we examine some of the different explanations that various scholars have provided about punk – sometimes interpreting it only as a musical genre and sometimes, instead, as a more general cultural phenomenon, as an avant-garde artistic movement, as a way of life, or even as a sort of philosophy –, finally arriving at a definition of punk as the performative realization of a concept whose contours are more operational than thematic and as a non-normative way of organizing one’s singular existence.