“Here We are Nowhere”

Stiff Little Fingers’ track “Here We are Nowhere” is the shortest track on “Inflammable Material.” The song captures the boredom experienced by Northern Irish youths. It is a quick and succinct track whose rapid-fire lyrics ask for a third space to alleviate Northern Irish tedium. Stiff Little Fingers’ influence come from their ambiguity. The lyrics refer to a generalized youth experiencing Northern Ireland’s tedium, not drawing on the differences between Catholics and Protestants. Bandleader Jake Burns shouts, “Is it a crime to be young / Cause’ every time we have some fun / They put us down and tell us we’re wrong / Every time they sing the same old song / Here we are nowhere that’s where we belong.” Thus, Northern Ireland’s conditions–most notably its innocuous and authoritative structures–is a consequence experienced by all Northern Irishmen, regardless of religion or political affiliation.

Grappling boredom is a significant theme in punk music. Several academics frame punk as a response to post-modern capitalism that globalized markets and over saturated individuals with media and technological overhauls. The post-modern world transformed domestic space and related it to the transnational sphere. This expansion and over saturation of information caused individuals to lose the ability to think freely and creatively. Burns feels these effects in Northern Ireland when he shouts “Nothing on the telly, there is no late-night show / No shows in town, there is no place to go.” Stiff Little Fingers and punk demand to find a new  space and form of entertainment that can excite the Northern Irish experience. Therefore, not only was it violence that effected how Northern Irishmen functioned, but the overall structure of the post-modern world. Violence may have been a normal function of Northern Irish living, but outside of violence, in one’s daily routine, they still felt a hollowness and lonesomeness that was carved by post-modern living. This consequence was experienced by all Northern Irishmen and expressed a universality in the way Stiff Little Fingers understood Northern Irish life and audiences.

Stiff Little Fingers, like Lamar, demanded an authenticity and a community that challenged the structures that deprived individuality. While hip-hop music developed its own sector of African-American culture, using specific references and sampling black artists, Stiff Little Fingers and punk examined the world with a much larger scope. The consequences of African-American living were concentrated and targeted specifically on black individuals. However, boredom was a result of much larger structures at work that effected all individuals, independent of race, ethnicity, or social community. Punk, therefore, sarcastically and sometimes nihilistically re-appropriated the spaces and bodies they believed post-modern living repressed. Hence, the piercings, tattoos, dress, and hairstyling associated with the punk aesthetic. These new bodies and new spaces–spaces that held punk shows and contained audiences’ bodies–were a visceral reminder to individuals that they have the agency to alter their bodies and their spaces. Punk was a realization and a hyperbolic response to reclaim the structures that global capitalism altered. Songs like “Here We are Nowhere” articulated this idea using quick, visceral shouts, unconsciously reminding peoples they’re capable of making their voices heard, and implored individuals to reexamine their spaces.

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