Are the Streets Still for Dreaming? Punk Rock, Thrash, and Heavy Metal: Unrecorded Blueprint of Beirut’s Urban Landscape

Abstract

The sphere of skateboarding, Metal, Thrash and Punk rock, interweaved into a self-differentiated, around a decade-old music and DIY underground culture, unfolds into an urban experience and proposes another perspective on the limits of historically framing ‘Punk subculture’. The lifestyle and variable factorial structure of the group defines the shifting identity boundaries of the sphere, where thrashing and music share rituals and practices, and redefine the urban experience on two levels: remapping the city’s axis through thrashing the streets, and the underground and DIY music practices. From the urban fabric, layered and divided with sects, political affiliations, and socioeconomic classes, the group of a young and charged history sparks with an assault with a gesture, from the shapeless, as an autonomous act of a timespace capsule that escapes and disrupts preexisting social boundaries and patterns, through a ‘poetic’ relationship to space. From the sphere of voices, with an alternating rhythm of punctual cuts through the urban layers of identity, an unspoken narrative starts to form, where a new layer, with a mayhem resistance, breaches identity constructs and loaded places. But the rhythm lead the narrative to shape itself as a linear one. Therefore, questions about continuity have surfaced, due to the scene having a differentiated genesis and structure. The sphere has rooted geo-specific practices transmitting, appropriating and constructing a ‘displaced’ musical heritage anchored in its own history, becoming an auto-referential non-place. Permeable to global mainstream, while resisting the postmodern aesthetics’ assimilation the ephemeral ‘Other’, the sphere resists sociological objectification and representation models, accepting no discourse, even that of a subculture, but, in spite, becomes a social agent. If the production of music and space has become a fulfilled or broken promise for itself and for its reception, although a viable and valuable mode to revitalize the study of sociological frameworks, how would sociological objectification then be escaped?