All right, trendsobbers, it's time to spike your hair, rip your shirts, and unlearn everything you have learned about what makes rock n'roll good. We're going to jump into the most unfunky, amateurish, and loudmouthed subspecies of rock ever to lay claim to popular imagination. Behold, Punk Rock.
1. Where the Name Comes From
The word "punk" is of indeterminate origin, and had a dual meaning in early American culture. In the first place, it referred to any prepared substance that will smolder when ignited, so that it may be used as tinder, to light firewood, etc. This had a connotation of something rotten that could be used. In the second place, and as early as 1596, it denoted a harlot or prostitute, and in prison culture referred to those on the ahem, bottom. By the early 20th century referred to a young hoodlum or troublemaker, often an associate of an older criminal.
The musical movement focused on the troublemaker aspect and largely ignored the homosexual undercurrents (although it was the first movement in rock to be even remotely gay-friendly). As Legs McNeil of the influential Punk Magazine put it:
The word "punk seemed to sum up the thread that connected everything we liked -- drunk, obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, funny, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side.
2. Origins and History
The 1960's -- Garage and Proto-Punk
The first bands to be called "punk" played the kind of raucous, speed-freak R&B that now gets called "garage rock." Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus of Creem Magazine coined the term, less as a formal genre than as a descriptive. Any of the bands on the 1972 Nuggets compilation, such as the Count Five, the 13th Floor Elevators, or the Kingsmen with their famous cover of "Louie, Louie", would exemplify the style.
Three American bands in the late 60's opened up the possibilities of what could be done with a basic rock band format and are continually cited as influences on the first generation of official Punk Rock ten years later. The first of these, the Velvet Underground, offered an avant-garde sonic aesthetic liberally lifted from Andy Warhol, who bankrolled the band, and LaMonte Young. They released four criminally-ignored albums from 1967-1970 whose influence belied their tiny sales.[The Velvet Underground in 1967. Left to Right: Nico, Andy Warhol, Maureen Tucker, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, John Cale]
Next, the MC5 married garage rock with left-wing agitprop, free jazz, and pyschedelics. Their influence on punk came through mostly in their greaser attitude and willingness to court controversy. Finally, as the Stooges, Iggy Pop and the Asheton brothers dumbed everything down to raw chords, high energy, and Iggy's manic swagger. Every punk band that ever played walks in the Stooges footsteps.
The 1970's -- 1st Generation Punk and New Wave.
The final shared influence emerged in 1971. The New York Dolls offered a blueprint that dozens of hair-metal bands rode to piles of money and drugs in the 1980's. The Dolls invented the concept of heterosexual men wearing make-up and lace and playing idiot-simple rock to attract women by the truckload. They swirled Mick Jagger's sneer, Ron Ashteon's ironic use of Nazi regalia, and a taste for old-school R&B into an electrifying mix before heroin caught their attention.
After the Dolls, the personalities of what would be called punk percolated on both sides of the Atlantic up until 1975. It remains a bone of contention among those who cannot recognize circular debates whether punk rock "started" in New York with the Ramones or in London with the Sex Pistols. A fairly standard differentiation between the "scenes" has been handed down:
- New York punk bands were bohemian, poetic and intellectual.
Refined New York Aesthetes: The Dead Boys
- London bands were proletarian, political, and tough.
Dangerous London Revolutionaries: Subway Sect
All of these elements shot forth on the first canonical punk album, the eponymous debut by the Ramones. Everything about the record exemplified rock n'roll minimalism: recorded in a week in February 1976, for $6400, it featured 14 songs and clocked in at just over 28 minutes total. The lyrics shouted a faux-moronic, gleeful brattiness, promising to beat children with baseball bats, sniff glue, and be a "Nazi, schatze" in the bedroom. By the summer of 1976, the album had created a buzz if not a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Pistols broke up in January 1978, at the end of their only American tour, and by the end of that year, the music industry, especially in America, walked away from the movement. A safer, industry alternative, called New Wave (a term originally coined by Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren), began to hit the radio waves about this time. Acts such as the Cars, Tom Petty, and the Knack fulfilled the public's desire for new rock sounds without bringing any unpleasant weirdness or anger to the proceedings. This was doubly painful for groups, like Television or Richard Hell's Voidoids, who had written the blueprint for what New Wave became: sharp, angular guitar riffs, long-form song-writing, introspective lyrics. By 1980, the few survivors of the first wave, such as the Ramones, the Clash, or Blondie, had to work in an industry that had lost interest in them.
The 1980's -- Hardcore and Indie
This era codified the style and dress of punk as popular imagination remembers: the demented biker's uniform of black leather jackets, skinny slogan T-shirts, combat boots, plaid trousers, and hair that evoked nothing so much as a mind exploding.
Hardcore codified everything: what punks wore, what punks listened to, what punks believed in. This rigidity allowed the movement to survive without industry support, but it also created the worst aspect of underground punk culture -- its determination to shoot itself in the foot to avoid any kind of mainstream success. Whereas the Ramones and the Sex Pistols wanted to change mainstream culture, hardcore was quick to label any move in that direction as "selling out". In the lean times, confrontation became volume, and freedom, purity. Soon, exhaustion set in. By 1983, few founding hardcore bands still played.CBGB's, 1977. No Mohawks and few leather jackets.
Hardcore's implosion, like that of the Stooges and the Dolls a decade before, allowed space for new modes of expressing the same idea. Some of these came from the detritus of hardcore itself. In Washington, DC, veterans of one of the more seminal hardcore scenes started bringing new musical elements into the mix: funk rythmns, textured arrangments, singing. The style, called post-hardcore, was best heard from Rites of Spring and later Fugazi.
None of this was actually new. Much of it featured on album's as old as the Voidoid's Blank Generation (1977). And other groups, like Sonic Youth, had been following such a path during Hardcore's glory days. But post-hardcore ended the canonical approach approach and allowed punk to play with other elements of the underground, indie groups like Sonic Youth, the Replacements, and R.E.M.
In 1988, Sonic Youth released Daydream Nation encapsulated the frustrations and aspirations of underground rock as the Reagan era closed. Equal parts Dinosaur, Jr. and ZZ Top, Daydream Nation simultaneously challenged and embraced rock music and its history, with frenzied guitars, off-kilter lyrics, and sprawling song lengths. It was this record, more than any other, which set the pattern for the decade that followed.
1991 became "the year punk broke" after Nirvana's Nevermind did what no punk rock record had ever done -- crack the Billboard 200, reaching #1 in January 1992. In the sensation that followed, the media glommed onto the word "grunge,"a term used first by Mudhoney's Mark Arm (who claimed to have stolen it from mid-80's Australian bands) to describe the Sup Pop/Seattle scene. For two or three years after, any group willing to don flannels, grow their hair long(!) and make some anger-y sounding rock records got called "grunge". What the term meant was rock in the Sonic Youth tradition, albeit without their virtuosity: loud, swirling rock n'roll, showcasing more or less the same kind of lyrical content that punk had always put a premium on. Jokes and quips about sex? Check. Mockery of traditional institutions? Check. Declarations of personal power, coupled with self-hatred? Double-check.
So why did it hit this time? There's a handful of reasons, but I think three will suffice:
- Rock fans were waiting for the next big thing. By 1991, hair-metal in the Def-Leppard/Motely Crue/Poison tradition was already done. The transition away from them had been awkward, featuring acts as diversely talented as Guns N'Roses and Skid Row. The decade had yet to define itself.
- Punk had been building an audience for 15 years. Unlike in 1976, when few in America knew what punk rock was, in 1991 every major city had weathered two or three iterations of punk scenes. The idea of snotty, fasterlouder rock n'roll was not exactly novel. All the bands needed to do was drop the traditional punk costume and dress like rock musicians were supposed to, which grunge was more than willing to do. As someone 14 years old in 1991, I can attest that such was part of their charm.
- The industry embraced it. Rock music was by no means the only game in town in 1991. Hip-hop was huge that year, as dance MC's like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice scooped up platinum albums by the truckload. After NWA and Public Enemy, Nirvana did not seem to be the existential threat that the Sex Pistols had been.
Nevertheless, like Hardcore, like 1st Generation Punk, Grunge had a short shelf life. It more or less lived and died in the short period of Nirvana's domination of the charts. When Kurt Cobain committed suicide in April 1994, the clothes lived on, but the movement did not. In truth, it had never been a movement, just a catchall term that had been applied to bands, like Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, and Stone Temple Pilots, that it did not really apply to. The only band in the original Seattle scene that really did make it was Nirvana.Sonic Youth, 1991. Left to Right: Thurston Moore, Kim
Gordon, Steve Shelley, Lee Ranaldo
With that crutch gone, Something of a "punk revival" movement kicked in, centered around bands like Green Day, Rancid, NOFX, and The Offspring. The first and last of these achieved major chart success, although only Green Day has made a long-lasting career out of it. Their sound kept the Ramones' three-chord, three-minute aesthetic alive just as the Ramones themselves, after 20+ years, finally called it quits in 1996.
As the 90's ended, even the memories of Grunge were wiped from the face of the earth as Hip-Hop, Rap-Rock, and Boy Bands took over the charts. As in 1980, everything went back to the underground. When the Millenium came, few could even imagine an era in which a rock band would sell records again.
The 2000's: Neo-Garage, Neo-New Wave, and Emo
No one needed have worried. Just after 9/11, a trifecta of bands allowed Rolling Stone to trumpet "Rock is Back" on their cover. The Strokes got compared to the Velvet Underground a lot, but sounded more like Television or the Modern Lovers. The White Stripes emerged from a late-90's garage revival scene in Detroit with a ready-made gimmick: two, and only two formerly married members pretending to be siblings, who wore only red, white, and black on stage, and performed without a bass player. And Sweden's the Hives dressed in matching suits and spats and played like it was 1965 and their lives depended on it.
All of these carried some aspects of Punk within their DNA, none of them or any of the other rock bands that clawed a space for them in the decade past could define themselves as exclusively so. A noise-punk stir in the middle of the decade may yet bear fruit, if my experience with No Age is any indication, but otherwise punk has morphed into something virtually all rock bands nod to, except the ones who go for twee, punks polar opposite, and even they embrace niceness and non-confrontation in a positively snotty way.
Which brings me to Emo. I'm not going to repeat my thoughts from my Death Cab review from last week, except to say that Emo grew out of punk, and even as it became a laughingstock among punk fans, its supporters never gave up the claim that they too were part of the tribe. That this notion has been heartily rejected by punks, to the point of rioting against emo kids in Mexico in 2008, does not change the truth of it.
3. Why Punk is Not a Genre
That's right, none of the above matters in the slightest. I can trace the history of this thing called "punk rock," or at least trim the more popular names out of the accepted history, while being fully aware that I am dealing essentially in a fiction. Punk is not a genre of rock music. Punk is not a "style" of rock music, which means the same thing. Punk is a marketing category designed to sell a moment of danger and synthesized regression to the reptilian brain. There is nothing in punk different from mainstream rock music in any way, save in the statement that it is.
I said in my Dylan review this week that there was no "more reactionary trend ever existed in popular music than early-60's folk music." In this I was mistaken. For whenever Punk rears its head, it never fails to do so out of reaction to whatever trend is going on at that moment.
Garage rose against the maudlin pop of the early 60's that had swallowed 50's rockabilly. Punk rose against progressive and bloated stadium rock. Grunge rose against the glam-rock 80's. And every time the rockers bless themselves for living in a time of "real music."
Joey Ramone put it succinctly:
We started our own group because we were bored with everything we heard. In 1974, there was nothing to listen to anymore. Everything was tenth-generation Led Zeppelin, tenth-generation Elton John, or overproduced, or just junk. Everything was long jams, long guitar solos. We missed music like it used to be before it got 'progressive'. We missed hearing songs that were short, and exciting, and . . . good! We wanted to bring the energy back to rock & roll.
In other words, punk is nothing more than a means of pretending that what is, in fact, very old is new, a deception that playing loud guitar and fast drums marks you as a unique individual, rather than a placeholder in a tradition that goes back far longer than you dare to imagine. Punk is Rock refreshing itself, an antibody that prevents the ideas inherent in Chuck Berry from ever truly vanishing. It's minimalism in a rock format, a sonic texture that any fool can throw down to make some noise, and many fools have.
4. Recommended Listening
- The Sonics - Boom. Perfect distillation of garage rock. Includes a better version of "Louie, Louie" than the Kingsmen could ever dream of.
- The Monks - Black Monk Time. Four U.S. soldiers in Germany in 1965 with nothing better to do than write the meanest, sneeringest songs of the era.
- The Velvet Underground -- White Light, White Heat. All four of their albums are essential, but this one captures them at their grungiest.
- The MC5 -- Kick Out the Jams. Good, loud fun. Hippies never sounded tougher.
- The Stooges -- Raw Power. The most dangerous Glam Rock record ever made.
- The New York Dolls -- Lipstick Killers. Rare recordings of the band with Billy Murcia on drums
- The Ramones -- Ramones. The first official Punk album. It never gets old.
- The Sex Pistols -- Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. A much better band than anyone ever let on.
- Richard Hell and the Voidoids -- Blank Generation. Still more complex than most of the bands that followed them.
- The Clash -- London Calling. Punk escapes from failure, plays with reggae, folk, and anyone else in town.
- The Misfits -- Static Age. That skull on the jacket of the guy in my first picture? That's their logo. Early forerunners of Goth.
- Bad Brains -- Rock for Light. The inventors of hardcore.
- Minor Threat -- Out of Step. Pure rage.
- Black Flag -- Damaged. The beginning of the long dark haul of the 80's.
- The Dead Kennedys -- Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. Features the best cover of "Viva Las Vegas" yet recorded.
- Rites of Spring -- Rites of Spring. Emo before it was a joke.
- Sonic Youth -- Daydream Nation. Grunge came from here.
- The Pixies -- Surfer Rosa. They aren't punk at all, and they totally are.
- Mudhoney -- Superfuzz Bigmuff. The band that Nirvana beat to the brass ring.
- Nirvana -- In Utero. This is why.
- Sleater-Kinney -- Dig Me Out. Carrying the flag when grunge went south.
- The Strokes -- Is This It. The New New Wave.
- The Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- Fever to Tell. Brooklyn Hipsters bring the noise, bring the space.
- The Hives -- The Black & White Album. Sprawling, underrated masterpiece by the best Sonics cover band ever to plug in.
- The Kills -- Midnight Boom. Punk is a product. They sell the good stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment