À l'heure du punk ! Quand la presse musicale française s'emparait de la nouveauté (1976-1978)

This article seeks to study the reception of punk in the French music press. Through an analysis of the publications of the two music magazines which dominated the coverage of popular music in France between 1976 and 1979 (Rock & Folk and Best), we show how these forms of media played an important role in the diffusion of punk rock which, far from being confined to the listening experience, was a genre of music which was also made up of words and images, reviews and points of view, and thus read. By covering punk, by focussing on some of its features, by exaggerating and sometimes inventing some of its codes because of the way it staged the phenomenon, the music press both brought to wider public attention and helped shape this raucous, edgy new culture of resistance. This study investigates the media mechanisms and processes which accompanied and even determined the transformations that the punk image underwent in France by markedly shifting the boundaries between counter-culture and mainstream.