• DOI:10.1080/03007760410001733152
• Corpus ID: 219728124

Crass Commodities

@article{Thompson2004CrassC,
  title={Crass Commodities},
  author={Stacy Thompson},
  journal={Popular Music and Society},
  year={2004},
  volume={27},
  pages={307 - 322}
}

• S. Thompson
• Published 1 September 2004
• History
• Popular Music and Society

In 1984, after seven years of touring and producing records, the English punk rock band Crass broke up. That same year, Penny Rimbaud, the band’s founder and one of its vocalists, commented “[w]e were no longer convinced that by simply providing what had broadly become entertainment we were having any real effect” (“... In Which Crass Voluntarily”). What made the breakup of Crass different from that of any previous punk rock band—for example, the much more famous collapse of the Sex Pistols in 1978—was what Crass had come to represent for punks across the globe. As the English music magazine Sounds noted in 1986, “Crass became an unwilling legend. Their complete control over their records and their unbridled assault on all things authoritarian made them the reluctant leaders of an anarcho-punk movement that was about anything but leaders” (qtd. in Rimbaud 303). What Crass was about was an attempt to carve out a noncommodified cultural space inside a late capitalist economy that seemed capable of co-opting any cultural production, no matter how aesthetically or economically resistant to the commodity market, for its own ends. In 1984, Rimbaud and the other members of Crass believed that they had failed. It is difficult to disagree with Rimbaud’s assessment that Crass did not achieve its aim of freeing itself from the commodity market. The band’s history demonstrates that even when punk bands refuse to sign with major record labels, attempt to develop an anticommercial aesthetic, and operate as small enterprises rather than corporations, they still remain vulnerable to the very forces of commodification that they oppose. However, the band succeeded, inadvertently, in a different register. The efforts of Rimbaud et al. to resist co-optation into commodity culture successfully map the shape of the very impossibility of such a project. I do not aim, then, to celebrate Crass or demonstrate the band’s resistance to the commodity market, but rather to derive from their failure the logic of their inability to do so.