Suicidal Tendencies best illustrate the ethos and representation of skate punk through several mediums: their lyrical content, their music genre, their affiliation with skateboarding, their fashion and style, their D.I.Y dissemination, and importantly, their music videos. Skate punk has been a relevant and essential subculture for over three decades now, managing to continue to portray the ideologies and ethos it was founded upon when it began in Southern California in the early 1980s. Suicidal Tendencies were one of the first acknowledged skate punk bands, most likely due to the location of where they were formed (Venice Beach) and also that lead singer, Mike Muir’s older brother, was an original Z-boy member who also founded and ran Dogtown Skate. The importance of these videos as propagation of an authentic music subculture and indeed a way of life, are still just as popular and relevant in conveying meaning on an international scale in the present age. They are a visual representation of a time and a place, but include an attitude that still prevails to this day. It is intriguing to investigate how this band, as a representation of skate punk subculture, sustains its ideologies, whilst also challenging mainstream and conservative political and societal modes of being. Thorough analysis of the two music videos, “Institutionalized” (1984) and “Possessed to Skate” (1986), and their consequential themes, will illustrate the importance of the music video in conveying ideas of subculture to wider society.
The band, Suicidal Tendencies, is positioned within the Southern Californian locale of Venice Beach, a place where skateboarding folklore was born, proliferated and further enhanced through the skate punk music genre, developing a strong youth subculture within the area. Venice Beach skate punk band, Suicidal Tendencies, were the original purveyors of the concept of the skate punk scene as mediated through their music. They were instrumental in creating and perpetuating skate punk as a way of life and can be seen to express many of the aspects outlined in Gelder’s six key ways in which subcultures are understood. Suicidal Tendencies are an important illustration of subculture as they distinctly signify certain codes of behaviour that further reinforce Hebdige’s proclamation that youth subcultures resist hegemony through style. For example, their clothing, band logos, opposing attitudes toward mainstream society, the D.I.Y. ethos and the lyrical and slogan content that represented not only their band, but also was repeated and adhered to by their dedicated and loyal fans. This began in the early eighties and is still continuing now, illustrating the influence and longevity of skate punk subculture, which is implicitly manifested and perpetuated in the band Suicidal Tendencies. A major reason this band is more successful than others in representing an “authentic” and “real” skate punk rhetoric is largely due to it’s front man, Mike Muir, whose carefully driven lyrics, self representation, collaborations with the skate industry, and tireless efforts in keeping the music going on his own terms throughout the decades has meant he can be seen as a personification of skate punk.
Suicidal Tendencies and the music video
The focus of this analysis is on the representation and lyrical content of two Suicidal Tendencies music videos that were created in the 1980s and still continue to be relevant and enduring examples of skate punk subculture in contemporary society. Just as Suicidal Tendencies were on the rise, so was the new music television station, MTV. As Will Straw expresses in his chapter, “Popular Music and Post-Modernism in the 1980s” which was published in Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader (Frith et al., 1993, p3) the “music video was one of a number of innovations producing major structural changes in the music-related industries” during the early 1980s.
MTV launched in 1981 and heralded a new era in music consumption, greatly influencing American society. It became an important and powerful medium and the videos it presented meant increased success for those bands or artists whose videos were featured. Suicidal Tendencies provided MTV’s first hardcore punk appearance with the video for their song “Institutionalized” in 1984 (Butz, 2012, p187). In a pop music world, this was a significant coup, not only for Suicidal Tendencies, but also for punk and skate punk music in general. In 1986 they followed with their seminal skate punk video for the song “Possessed to Skate”, which received similar interest and raised the profile of skate punk music, infiltrating into many middle class homes via the television.
The most influential way in which to mediate all of the signified aesthetic representations of skate punk was through the music video, especially for a band like Suicidal Tendencies in which their message could be further enhanced through the use of visuals and signification. The music video gives public identification to the artist (Shuker, 1994, p126) and is a very useful source in conveying codes that generate information from a sociological, ideological and cultural perspective, as well as the musicology perception. Musical and visual codes show “these operations at work in a temporal flow” (Vernallis, 1998, p153) and we can learn much about representation of ethnicity, gender and sexuality from music video representations. As the lyrics of Suicidal Tendencies were highly politicised and used as a tool by the band to express their views, ideologies and individualism, the music video became an effective tool of getting their message out to the public. The way in which MTV picked up on one of their earliest hits “Institutionalized” (1984) was quite a unique and revolutionary occurrence on a television station that was reluctant to play music videos of minority artists or bands. It was the first time many viewers had seen a representation of this subculture and its rebellious individualism in a mainstream format.
The use of the music video by a band such as Suicidal Tendencies was essential in communicating their political and social views and also their strong stylistic approach to their music, as defined in the subcultural theory presented in Hebdige’s book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). The symbolism, style and use of parody through the exaggeration of the patriarchal and parental figures (Gelder, 2007, piii) which are caricatures of dominant hegemonic modes of society, in both “Institutionalized” and “Possessed to Skate”, are essential in further enhancing meaning to the consumer of the music. The fact that “Institutionalized” was played so early on in MTV’s history is interesting in itself in light of the conservative politics that were enforced on America at the time. The importance of the music video in providing further meaning to the social and economic commentary that permeated through their lyrics, was exemplified through their use of parody, that is prevalent throughout both videos. Both of these videos were directed by acclaimed American filmmaker, Bill Fishman, early in his career. Fishman also directed numerous music videos for the Ramones and Georgia Sattelites, but his understanding of the Suicidal Tendencies lyrics and skate punk attitude were instrumental in propelling them to a wider audience and ultimately becoming a world wide iconic skate punk band. These videos were not just about the music, they distinctly had a message, both lyrically and aesthetically. The symbolism that permeates through the videos will be discussed as representational of a multitude of musical parameters (Vernallis, 1998, p179), which reveal the correspondence of music, image and message.
REFERENCES
Butz K. (2012) Grinding California: Culture and Corporeality in American
Skate punk, Transaction Publishers: New Jersey
Frith, S., Goodwin, A., Grossberg, L., (Eds) (1993) Sound and Vision: The
Music Video Reader, Routledge: London
Gelder, K. (2007) Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice,
Routledge: New York
Hebdige, D (1979) Subculture – The meaning of style, Routledge: New York
Shuker, R. (1994) Understanding Popular Music, Routledge: London
Vernallis, C. (1998) “The aesthetics of music video: an analysis of Madonna’s
‘Cherish’”, Popular Music, Volume 17/2, Cambridge University Press: UK
[This is an excerpt from my Bachelor of Arts (Sociology) Honours Thesis, submitted to the University of Wollongong Arts Faculty in 2013. I am publishing excerpts from this thesis in multiple posts. The thesis aimed to explore the youth subculture of skate punk, how its expression perpetuated authenticity through the aesthetic form of the music video, and how this was reflexive of society at a deeper social level].
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