This chapter examines the longevity of the do-it-yourself (DIY) cultural aesthetic and its evolution in a global context. It illustrates, from its roots in the punk movement, the concept of DIY has grown to encapsulate a highly complex and vibrant alternative sector of cultural production and consumption on a global scale. The ‘DIY’ first begun to be heard at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was used and understood in the context of home improvement. The chapter explores the task of beginning to delineate and define a new framework of DIY culture and cultural practice that can be applied in more contemporary global settings. From a point during the mid-1970s, the notion of DIY culture has developed from a punk-focused ethos of resistance to the mainstream music industry into a more widely endorsed aesthetic underpinning a broad sphere of alternative cultural production.

This article focuses on presenting, analysing and understanding the ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) representations of over 200 participants in Portuguese punk music scenes between 1977 and 2014. Through an ethnographic study of punk and the DIY ethos in Portugal, the article depicts its local interpretation and significance, and highlights the singularities of this socio-historical context. Our approach has three focal points: (1) the importance of DIY punk manifestations in the development of youth (sub)cultures, including forms of production and consumption of music, fashion, aesthetics, leisure, the night and cosmopolitanism; (2) the singularity of DIY punk manifestations in Portugal and related resistance practices in their correlation with social, political and economic development in a country outside the Anglo-Saxon context; and (3) the embedding of a DIY ethos and the associated claim to authenticity in the professions and careers in which punks engage today.

This article analyses how different forms of involvement in underground punk and/or alternative scenes develop into specific do-it-yourself (DIY) careers. From a corpus of 214 interviews, the various DIY representations of social practices held by Portuguese punk scene members are studied, especially regarding the way they experience and develop knowledge, networks, and skills. These social representations are particularly important in terms of their insertion into the labour market. At the same time, the centrality of DIY in Brazil’s funk, electronica, and alternative rock scenes is compared with the Portuguese punk context through a recent analysis carried out in Brazil with 32 members of those scenes – mostly women – showing the importance of DIY beyond punk and the Global North.

The main goal of our approach is to analyse the social representations of alternative rock in Portugal (or, using a terminology more akin to 1980s Portugal, of the “modern music vanguard”) from 1980 to 2010. This is part of broader research into the 30 years of modernization of the country (from the post-revolutionary period initiated in 1974 on), in which alternative rock is regarded as a significant social practice within the scope of the social, artistic and musical structuring of the country itself. We consider that alternative rock is a subject that is illuminated by Bourdieu’s theory of fields, without overlooking its clear interconnection with ‘art worlds’ or music scenes, and the aesthetic cosmopolitanism of late modernity. The article is a pioneering work on the Portuguese sociology of culture, whose results may be the starting point of a debate to problematize the functional logic of popular music in various Anglo-Saxon settings.

In Western societies, punk represented a benchmark for rupture towards the existing social structure while providing a soundtrack for it. So, it is in this context that we will approach the Portuguese punk considering its importance in a society engaged in relatively recent processes of democratization and modernization. Thus, we propose here to take a look at the punk from its protagonists’ discourses and the text that they form. We will consider the words used by the bands in two ways: when they name themselves and their lyrics. In each case, we will deal with the self-representation issues in the light of the polarity between identity and difference: who we are, how we position ourselves, how we distinguish ourselves, what we have to say about ourselves, our time and our world; what are our values and what we have to say regarding the dominant social values; which causes move us, how we want to act, how we want the world to be. As in any other discursive self-representation, the content is not independent of the forms of expression. Therefore, the identification and dialogue questions (who is speaking, who is he or she speaking to) and the language questions (how does the speaker express, with which codes, in which forms) are also examined. Our analysis suggests that the punk discourse on identity tends to be structured by three main axes: a) cosmopolitanism, b) the radical assumption of an irreducible difference regarding social order and c) an ambivalent attitude towards politics and the political action.