Punk

Punk in these diary entries is both a publicity label and an emerging cultural presence: it attaches to a film attracting attention in Paris, prompts a forecast about the Sex Pistols in the United States, and appears in the people and styles gathered around Andy Warhol. Rather than define a movement abstractly, the entries record how the word travels through reviews, touring plans, and New York social life.

A label for film and publicity

On a flight from Venice to New York in September 1977, Warhol read a favorable Paris review of Bad. Twenty-five films had opened in the city that week, the diary noted, but Bad was receiving the publicity; reviewers were calling it the first punk movie. The entry turns that attention into a personal label as well, reporting that Warhol was being called the Queen of Punk. Punk here works as a category that links a film’s reception to the public image forming around its maker.

A forecast for the United States

In January 1978, as the Sex Pistols arrived in the United States, Warhol predicted that punk would become very big. He attributed the tour’s choice of Pittsburgh as its starting point to the idea that young people there had little to do and would therefore respond intensely. The observation connects punk’s anticipated reach to the tour’s geography and to the expectation that a new act could provoke a strong reaction beyond established cultural centers.

Style and social presence

The diary also gives punk a social face through Edwige, introduced as the Queen of Paris Punk. She came to lunch in New York on January 4 with a hairdresser, after recently marrying; her husband, the entry says, had stayed home while she went on her honeymoon. Later, about twenty young people Warhol had met at Studio 54 visited. The group encountered Edwige and the hairdresser, and Warhol distributed copies of Interview. In this scene, punk sits alongside distinctive personal presentation and the magazine’s social circulation, rather than being presented as a formal definition or a single musical event.