Early hardcore punk, DIY and the reconfiguration of American individualism and secular religious ethics

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This article proposes a reinterpretation of early American hardcore punk's DIY ethos by situating it within the longer moral genealogy of American individualism and religious ethics. Rather than reading DIY practices as a simple rejection of capitalism, authority or mass culture, it argues that American hardcore punk reconfigured enduring moral traditions shaped by Protestant asceticism, self-reliance and disciplined self-governance. Drawing on Weber, Lasch, McLoughlin and Bellah et al., the study approaches DIY as a technique of ethical formation under post-utopian conditions marked by the erosion of collective ideals. Through case studies of Black Flag in Southern California and Ian MacKaye's Dischord Records and Straight Edge in Washington, D.C., it shows how labour, restraint and self-control functioned as moral tests through which authenticity was earned rather than expressed. Far from escaping American moral traditions, these formative trajectories worked through them in austere and demanding ways, revealing DIY as a secularised ethic of responsibility and self-discipline.