Punk dead, if corporate media say so? Dutch MA thesis

Uitgepunkt. De Korte Adem Van Een Subcultuur In Nederland, 1977-1982
Daan van Schijndel, Masterscriptie Nieuwste Geschiedenis Universiteit van Amsterdam 2012.

Consists of two parts: Enter Punk. And: Exit Punk. With special chapters about Groningen and Friesland provinces.

The author of this Dutch MA thesis sees the early years of the Dutch punk movement through the perspective of the establishment media (not of fanzines). He makes mistakes. Eg, he calls Captain Sensible ‘singer of the Damned’. While Dave Vanian has always been the Damned vocalist. And Captain Sensible was originally the bass player, later the guitarist.

This BA thesis claims that punk in the Netherlands supposedly died soon. As the yardstick for that, it says that a 1979 survey of established journalists about what according to them was the best 1970s music, showed that they preferred other music to punk. That is a bit like saying that atheism has died because priests prefer their own religious views to it. The thesis overrates the significance of the Sex Pistols disbanding in 1978: while hundreds of other punk bands worldwide continued and hundreds more were being founded.