Is the Corpse Still Warm

This contribution questions punk not as a musical register but as a practice of resistance against the cultural industry. Do-it-yourself punk carries a set of moral values and practices of autonomy that reveal a political conflictuality with music as a medium. In France, all along its history, its political discourse crumbled. This empirical investigation based on observations and interviews with past and current actors of the French DIY punk scene, looks back at the evolutions of its political contents to see how it influences people and how it is worked by them. Is punk dead? We explain that if the “rupturist” DIY scene has lost vitality because of its commodification, the standardization and the great diffusion of punk music, but also because of the political purism of the late 1990s DIY scene, its body is still warm and some activists seem decided to wake up the dead.