Why Punk?

Guldbamsen wrote: Punk was the right thing to do at the time.....at the very least it brought with it a new experimental wave of musicians that very quickly got beyond 1950s rock n roll riffs played ridiculously fast and choppy. There was so much more to it. Post punk, No Wave, New Wave happened or whatever you wanna call them. They are stickers for a great time in music. The Cure anyone? Siouxsie, Suicide, Chrome, Cocteau Twins, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Dead Kennedys, Mission of Burma, Wire, Gang of Four, Minutemen, The Fall, Pere Ubu, The Chameleons, PiL, Glenn Branca, The Sound, New Order, Swans, Sonic Youth the list is so long that you could wrap it around a small mountain.

As the old saying goes "timing is everything", and so it is in music. I'm interested because punk does not follow a linier progression. It was a type of regression, and that's what throws me. I have nothing against punk as it did not last long and it did lead to post punk and new wave, as you stated. I can't imagine Midnight Oil, for example, evolving without punk coming first. Or dozens of other bands I like from the eighties.

^I see your point. Could it be both a regression and an aggression?

SteveG wrote: I see that this thread is devolving into another 'punk killed prog' debate of which I'm to blame because of the context of my initial post. That being said, I'm sill curious as to why punk started and took off. Any opinions?

A quest for simplicity and the desire by the young to make their own statement. IMO.

Young people in the 70s did not have the money to simply go out and equip themselves with all the paraphenalia of the then chart topping rock groups. Much the same way that a certain Robert Zimmerman began with nowt but an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. Some of them also were looking to reject the foppish costumes and stage personnas of so many established rock acts. If all you do is throw the 1812 Overture at people some of them will eventually yearn for a simple string quartet. 

Don't know how old you are but I was early teens when the Beatles first broke. They were the music of my generation, a reaction against the boring plodding old fogies who were dominating the pop charts of the time. Of course, they in turn became just as boring and as plodding to a newer younger generation who came up after.

So it is then, that today we still find young people bopping to hip hop or any of the punk like bands that still inhabit the inner of any city, at least they do in Australia.

Even for an old fart like me, there are moments when I simply do not want to listen to the same old albums from a previous century and even when I was at my most proggiest I'd still find myself occasionally listening to something more basic. Prog is not the be all and end all of music.

Of course people like to slam punk as musical garbage but really that is unjustified. Toddle off and have a listen to some of the great punk and punkish groups of the 70s. Check out Australia's own The Saints, or the mighty Ramones and do not forget The Clash. No one should simply cannot reject the musical output of those groups as rubbish. You may may not like it but it is not rubbish. Sadly I never saw the Ramones live but nobody could ever have the gall to suggest that The Clash or The Saints e.g. were incompetent musicians. The Clash live were simply effing awesome. Meanwhile punk evolved and ended up giving us the likes of Joy Division and The Cure. For that alone it should be praised.

Ultimately .... its all just rock'n'roll .... and I like an awful lot of it.

Now if only I could get my head around all that hip hop garbage. Call that music ? Piffle.


ps - Toaster Mantis mentions garish and shocking fashion ...... jaysus ! Check out the crap we were trotting around in during the 60s. I know that the first time I heard a punk band live (Radio Birdman 1974ish) I was wearing flares and platform shoes. Thankfully there is no photographic evidence.


Edited by t d wombat - August 27 2015 at 19:15

t d wombat wrote: SteveG wrote: I see that this thread is devolving into another 'punk killed prog' debate of which I'm to blame because of the context of my initial post. That being said, I'm sill curious as to why punk started and took off. Any opinions? A quest for simplicity and the desire by the young to make their own statement. IMO. Young people in the 70s did not have the money to simply go out and equip themselves with all the paraphenalia of the then chart topping rock groups. Much the same way that a certain Robert Zimmerman began with nowt but an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. Some of them also were looking to reject the foppish costumes and stage personnas of so many established rock acts. If all you do is throw the 1812 Overture at people some of them will eventually yearn for a simple string quartet.  Don't know how old you are but I was early teens when the Beatles first broke. They were the music of my generation, a reaction against the boring plodding old fogies who were dominating the pop charts of the time. Of course, they in turn became just as boring and as plodding to a newer younger generation who came up after. So it is then, that today we still find young people bopping to hip hop or any of the punk like bands that still inhabit the inner of any city, at least they do in Australia. Even for an old fart like me, there are moments when I simply do not want to listen to the same old albums from a previous century and even when I was at my most proggiest I'd still find myself occasionally listening to something more basic. Prog is not the be all and end all of music. Of course people like to slam punk as musical garbage but really that is unjustified. Toddle off and have a listen to some of the great punk and punkish groups of the 70s. Check out Australia's own The Saints, or the mighty Ramones and do not forget The Clash. No one should simply cannot reject the musical output of those groups as rubbish. You may may not like it but it is not rubbish. Sadly I never saw the Ramones live but nobody could ever have the gall to suggest that The Clash or The Saints e.g. were incompetent musicians. The Clash live were simply effing awesome. Meanwhile punk evolved and ended up giving us the likes of Joy Division and The Cure. For that alone it should be praised. Ultimately .... its all just rock'n'roll .... and I like an awful lot of it. Now if only I could get my head around all that hip hop garbage. Call that music ? Piffle. ps - Toaster Mantis mentions garish and shocking fashion ...... jaysus ! Check out the crap we were trotting around in during the 60s. I know that the first time I heard a punk band live (Radio Birdman 1974ish) I was wearing flares and platform shoes. Thankfully there is no photographic evidence.

Having been born in 1951, I have memories of such fashions that still haunt me so don't feel alone. I also like to go back to basics and listen to American folk and early acoustic blues for a change of pace. Listening only to prog would drive me nuts.

Edited by SteveG - August 27 2015 at 19:32

SteveG wrote: ^I see your point. Could it be both a regression and an aggression?

I think it's not as much that punk "killed" progressive rock as became popular at the same time progressive rock had lost its momentum as a "movement", because culture and society had changed so much in the mean time. Notice that the mid-1970s already saw Peter Gabriel leaving Genesis, Robert Fripp dissolving King Crimson and Yes' extremely ambitious Tales from the Topographic Oceans which there's a general consensus didn't really go down as well as planned. It's certainly the reason Rick Wakeman left! All that stuff had already happened by 1974, when the Ramones' first LP came out in 1976 if I remember correctly, and the UK punk explosion did not happen until 1977.

I actually get the impression that the earliest heavy metal groups were as much of a reaction against progressive rock, but not as jarring because many of them were doing it from the inside. Deep Purple, Judas Priest and Scorpions all came from that background but changed course in a different direction. Indeed, in the Scorpions' case the reason Uli Jon Roth left was that the rest of the band wanted to move even further away from progressive rock.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - August 28 2015 at 05:25

Just checked, the first Ramones album was in '76. Just as I said, punk did not become really popular until progressive rock had already gone downhill from its peak as far as mainstream impact was concerned. I think it was more "stadium rock" culture in general, and how rock music had gone off key from its roots as something democratic and grassroots (as well as somewhat subversive) into something elitist, spectator-oriented and conservative.

Come to think of it, the Rock In Opposition movement in progressive rock was coming from a similar place.

LearsFool wrote: SteveG wrote: LearsFool wrote: Punk was hardly a regression. It grew up alongside psychedelia and prog, simply going off in a different direction from them, becoming its own thing. It isn't because it didn't really go back to rock's roots, since rock's roots were the soul, R&B, blues, boogie-woogie, and country styles of the '40's, and a much safer - if of course never properly safe - sound than most psych, prog, and punk, and a compositional style that, before Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, wasn't actually crunched into 4/4.  Punk opened the doors for post-punk, new wave, and post-hardcore because it was a new way of doing things. Ok, then if was not a regression, that what did put forward, musically speaking? Did it form a rock fusion with some other genre? Introduce new or different instruments? Where's the progression aside from crunching R&R into 4/4? They built off the rough riffs of garage rock by making them fast-paced and uniquely toned, built off the distortion stylings of Dick Dale and the early hard rock bands to create a "buzzsaw" quality, and enshrined power chords as being as much the tools of non-metallic bands as metal ones by crimping them from The Kinks and The Who. In combination with a DIY philosophy and a conquest of the underground, they offered a particularly lucrative replacement for pre-1977 rock, one with plenty of immediate room to experiment.

Hmm, again all of this is, IMO, retro. The heavy guitar reverb that early punks used was lifted from the 13th Floor Elevators, who had ripped it off from Dick Dale. And recycling crunch riffs from the Who and Kinks is also backward looking. Playing simpler chords too is also backward looking.

SteveG wrote: t d wombat wrote: SteveG wrote: Having been born in 1951, I have memories of such fashions that still haunt me so don't feel alone. I also like to go back to basics and listen to American folk and early acoustic blues for a change of pace. Listening only to prog would drive me nuts. As for hip hop, I'll focus on punk for the time being. Pretty much my thought as well. I'm pretty much content to delve into the Americana/Alt-country thing and Blues off pretty much any description. The likes of Townes van Zandt and Guy Clark are long time favourites. There is some truly wonderful stuff out there. Otoh I'm also a fan of many of the indy rock bands that came along around the same time as punk. Another Oz band, The Go-Betweens did some wonderful things back in the day using the get back to basics of the punk movement with less aggro, great playing and superb songwriting. Wow, I have everything, well almost everything, recorded by Clark and Van Zandt as well Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, Bravo!

Townes is probably my all time musical hero, Clark is simply a wonder while Earle and Williams are right up there. Williams is touring Oz in a couple of months but alas I couldn't get a decent seat for her only Sydney show.

^To me, punk is more culturally important. I know that it was culturally derived somehow, so that maybe why it's hard to get a handle on it's development. As I said once before, to figure out certain genres, a sociologist may be of better help, assuming one has actually researched the punk phenomenon.