1994 was an important year for punk rock. It was the year that Green Day’s third album, Dookie, reached mainstream success on the Billboard charts, garnering the band significant attention from the mainstream media. In the same year, the Offspring’s Smash became one of the most successful records to be released on an independent label (Epitaph Records), with over 10 million sales worldwide since its release (rollingstone.com). Twenty years later, these punk bands, along with numerous others, still frequent the pages of music magazines across the country. They have acted as the poster-children for punk rock, allowing unfamiliar readers to become acquainted with the subculture through countless articles, album reviews, and interviews. According Dietram A. Scheufele and David Tewksbury (2007), media framing “refers to modes of presentation that journalists and other communicators use to present information in a way that resonates with existing underlying schemas among their audience” (p. 12, citing Shoemaker & Reese, 1996). Drawing from previous framing research, the purpose of this dissertation chapter will be to investigate how the media frame punk rock and how this frame has changed over the last twenty years. Using textual analysis and the online archives provided by Rolling Stone magazine, I will analyze reoccurring themes within the press coverage that surround punk rock from 1994 through 2014, using specific keywords and terms to guide my research. The goal of this study is to help us understand the press coverage and subsequent discourse that has surround punk rock for the past two decades. It will also help us determine how the mainstream discussion of the genre allowed punk rock to be accessible to a wide audience.
About the presenterEllen Bernhard
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