Pajamas Media's Generic Punk List

"So You Think You Hate Punk Rock? 5 Bands That Will Change Your Mind" sounds promising. It has precisely one band that most mainstream music fans haven't already heard of and associated with Punk Rock: Radio Birdman. The rest are the Damned, The Ramones, the Sex Pistols, and the Clash. All of which are fine (with reservations on the Clash that I'll go into later), but hardly a fresh look at the (non) genre. I would have added instead:

• The Voidoids
• Television
• The Misfits
• The Buzzcocks

All of which are second-tier bands of slightly less renown, and all of which bring a slightly different element. And as Glen Reynolds points out, there's a lot of good ground to be covered in Proto-Punk like the MC5 or the Stooges. That may not be Iggy Pop in the picture atop the article, but it's someone actively copying him.

C for effort. F for execution.

This Rolling Stones Video is Pretty Cool...

But I'm going to do a better one for my Apologetics Class as an intro to reading The Screwtape Letters. Look for it sometime in the spring. Bit busy at present.

Rating My CD's: The Sound of the 90's

49. Radiohead -- The Bends


When the history of 90's rock is written, two bands will dominate it, bookends of the decade. The first band everyone wanted to be, and copied shamelessly. The second band everyone stood in awe of, and dared not imitate. Nirvana was the band that inaugurated the 1990's, and for many fans and musicians defined the sonic landscape of that decade. But by any objective standard, Radiohead owned that landscape, and expressed the zeitgeist for jaded critic and gushing fanboy alike.

For myself, I never much cared about Radiohead. I mean, we all heard "Creep" a hundred thousand million times back in the day, enough so that we began to sing along to it by sheer cultural osmosis. It hit the same sweet spot as "Comfortably Numb," allowing you to wallow in the melancholy that permeates late adolescence/young adulthood like water. But their titanic fin de siecle trilogy of albums -- OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac -- made no dent on my consciousness. To date, I still haven't listened to the last two.