LAUSR

Abstract La Movida is generally considered to be a cultural phenomenon that emerged in Madrid and elsewhere in Spain in the late 1970s as a reaction against the draconian nature of the Franco dictatorship (1939–75). This article will nuance and challenge some common misconceptions about the scene(s) in relation to Spain’s Transition to democracy by advancing three interrelated arguments. First, the Franco regime was not as antagonistic to popular music as we have frequently been led to believe. Second, the dictator’s death was a necessary but not sufficient condition for an outpouring of Spanish musical creativity, centred primarily albeit not exclusively in Madrid. Third, the music, iconography, and ideology associated with La Movida were at least as much influenced by Warhol and the subsequent CBGB’s scene in New York as by British punk. These claims, both individually and collectively, suggest the need to revise the critical vocabulary employed to variously celebrate or denigrate La Movida, revealing its frequent positioning as a belated importation of the “swinging sixties” and/or a watered–down version of British punk to be both culturally chauvinistic and politically tendentious. My underlying hypothesis is that popular culture in Spain not only transcended mere imitation but, as a result of various socio–cultural factors, anticipated a series of debates that would only subsequently come to the fore in Anglo–American contexts.