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“Don’t hate the media, become the media.”

According to Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: the Meaning of Style, punk music and style sought to exist on the line between “natural” and constructed. The use of razor blades, chains, tampons, ripped t-shirts (often covered in blood or dirt), bold and bright patterns, and artificially colored hair as a way of dress paralleled the chaotic, fast yet basic music that challenged social and cultural ideals of “normality” of the time. Those that adopted a punk lifestyle, generally raised in working class families, attempted through “perturbation and deformation” to disrupt and reorganize meaning through the refusal of relationships between objects and their meaning (similar to “form and content” of art). A prime example of this is the punks’ use of the swastika because it guaranteed shock, despite their evident opposition to the Nazi/extreme right party. The symbol was consciously detached from its original meaning, and its value in the subculture derived from its new lack of meaning. It was an attempt at a do-it-yourself way of life, forcing participants away from a traditional way of life for an unconventional one that refused to communicate purpose. Ironically, the punk subculture was formed through the unity of individuals who embraced contradiction and “no future.”