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Punk Bands
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Last updated 04 08 11
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What are
Punk Bands:
Punk
rock is a rock music genre that developed between
1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United
Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and
other forms of what is now known as protopunk music,
punk rock bands eschewed the perceived excesses of
mainstream 1970s rock. They created fast, hard-edged
music, typically with short songs, stripped-down
instrumentation, and often political,
anti-establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY
ethic, with many bands self-producing their
recordings and distributing them through informal
channels.
By late 1976, bands such as the Ramones, in New York
City, and the Sex Pistols and The Clash, in London,
were recognized as the vanguard of a new musical
movement. The following year saw punk rock spreading
around the world, and it became a major cultural
phenomenon in the United Kingdom. For the most part,
punk took root in local scenes that tended to reject
association with the mainstream. An associated punk
subculture emerged, expressing youthful rebellion
and characterized by distinctive styles of clothing
and adornment and a variety of anti-authoritarian
ideologies.
By the beginning of the 1980s, faster, more
aggressive styles such as hardcore and Oi! had
become the predominant mode of punk rock. Musicians
identifying with or inspired by punk also pursued a
broad range of other variations, giving rise to
post-punk and the alternative rock movement. By the
turn of the century, pop punk had been adopted by
the mainstream, as bands such as Green Day and The
Offspring brought the genre widespread popularity.
Punk Bands
The
first wave of punk rock aimed to be aggressively
modern, distancing itself from the bombast and
sentimentality of early 1970s rock. According to
Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone, "In its initial form,
a lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting.
Unfortunately, what happens is that people who could
not hold a candle to the likes of Hendrix started
noodling away. Soon you had endless solos that went
nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was
some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock 'n'
roll." John Holmstrom, founding editor of Punk
magazine, recalls feeling "punk rock had to come
along because the rock scene had become so tame that
like Billy Joel and Simon and Garfunkel were being
called rock and roll, when to me and other fans,
rock and roll meant this wild and rebellious music."
In critic Robert Christgau's description, "It was
also a subculture that scornfully rejected the
political idealism and Californian flower-power
silliness of hippie myth." Patti Smith, in contrast,
suggests in the documentary 25 Years of Punk that
the hippies and the punk rockers were linked by a
common anti-establishment mentality.
Punk Bands
Throughout punk rock history, technical
accessibility and a DIY spirit have been prized. In
the early days of punk rock, this ethic stood in
marked contrast to what those in the scene regarded
as the ostentatious musical effects and
technological demands of many mainstream rock bands.
Musical virtuosity was often looked on with
suspicion. According to Holmstrom, punk rock was
"rock and roll by people who didn't have very much
skills as musicians but still felt the need to
express themselves through music". In December 1976,
the English fanzine Sideburns published a now-famous
illustration of three chords, captioned "This is a
chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a
band." The title of a 1980 single by the New York
punk band Stimulators, "Loud Fast Rules!", inscribed
a catchphrase for punk's basic musical approach.
Punk Bands
Some of British punk rock's leading figures made a
show of rejecting not only contemporary mainstream
rock and the broader culture it was associated with,
but their own most celebrated predecessors: "No
Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977",
declared The Clash song "1977". The previous year,
when the punk rock revolution began in Great
Britain, was to be both a musical and a cultural
"Year Zero". Even as nostalgia was discarded, many
in the scene adopted a nihilistic attitude summed up
by the Sex Pistols slogan "No Future"; in the later
words of one observer, amid the unemployment and
social unrest in 1977, "punk's nihilistic swagger
was the most thrilling thing in England." While
"self-imposed alienation" was common among "drunk
punks" and "gutter punks", there was always a
tension between their nihilistic outlook and the
"radical leftist utopianism" of bands such as Crass,
who found positive, liberating meaning in the
movement. As a Clash associate describes singer Joe
Strummer's outlook, "Punk rock is meant to be our
freedom. We're meant to be able to do what we want
to do."
The issue of authenticity is important in the punk
subculture—the pejorative term "poseur" is applied
to those who associate with punk and adopt its
stylistic attributes but are deemed not to share or
understand the underlying values and philosophy.
Scholar Daniel S. Traber argues that "attaining
authenticity in the punk identity can be difficult";
as the punk scene matured, he observes, eventually
"everyone got called a poseur".
Punk Bands
Punk Bands
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