The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Arts & Entertainment => Topic started by: nephilim8 on June 18, 2012, 03:03:25 am
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explore the punk rock movement, specifically the stuff that came before the McDLT and after, til about I don't know, 2000? Is that when stuff like Good Charlotte and Coheed and Cambria burst on the scene and ruined everything? (Not that I think that personally, but that's what I've heard.) I remember a conversation about this very thing on the assetbar forums (RIP) but since those have been reduced to a 500 error, perhaps those that remember could help to recreate it?
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I do not even know how to start explaining or exploring the punk movement.
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But Inev this is exactly the sort of thing I would rely on you for!
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I have a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols that I wore out from being on auto play in my old car. The Sex Pistols have always been what I measure all other so-called punk against. I don't even consider Good Charlotte to be punk, so if that is your turn off you're on the right track.
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PART ONE
I have always considered punk to have started with the Ramones (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMiuOOoeQN4). Before that there were bands that definitely sound "punk" on a small number of tracks, but the Ramones were the first band to go 100% in the "so stupid anyone can do it" direction. You can definitely hear the seeds of punk in a lot of garage rock, The Stooges (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJIqnXTqg8I), the MC5, etc.
Around the time of the Ramones there were a lot of bands playing around the country who are considered part of that first wave of Punk, but who do not necessarily sound "punk" to modern ears. On the one hand you have bands like Television (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwrCUEMl76U). They do not really sound "punk," just... weird. But they were the first band to start playing at CBGB, which was the original punk hot spot. They were also important because they cut their hair off, did heroin, and wore neat clothes (ie, not hippy clothes) or ripped up clothes at their shows. Their original bass player, Richard Hell, got kicked out and started The Voidoids (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23oodi_93KQ). He wore ripped up clothes, ugly haircuts, etc before anyone else. Also in this scene was a band called the New York Dolls (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkja45bS-zc), who were a glam band. They were transvestites and wrote awesome, simple rock riffs. A dude from England, Malcolm Maclaren, came over and saw their potential, and tried to manage them into stardom. It didn't work.
MEANWHILE, back in jolly ol' England, this Maclaren dude decided to try again at this whole "punk" thing. Thus, the Sex Pistols. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA2YI4wEEXA) From a modern perspective, they sound pretty tame to me. But obviously it was different at the time. Luckily this mediocre crud inspired the British punk bands like THE DAMNED (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHpDgrG9H1k) and OTHER BANDS I DON'T CARE/KNOW ABOUT. Over there Punk inspired two types of thing:
1. bands that hewed strictly to 3 chords and yelling.
2. bands (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYaN2w6rcgk) that went off (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWuM6QtiDKM) in awesome insane intellectual arty directions. New Wave, Post-Punk.
This divergence also happened in America, which I am more familiar with.
Category one: Minor Threat (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaOzbsv2ZB0), the Bad Brains, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaXikmzQX_I)and Black Flag (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS9B9lLmULE) took punk and turned it into HARDCORE. Faster, harder, awesome.
Category two: much less pretentious than the British variant. Much less art school, a lot more weirdos.
TO BE CONTINUED WITH THE EXPLOSION OF AMERICAN UNDERGROUND ROCK, INDIE ROCK, ALT ROCK, NOISE ROCK, AND COOL ROCK THAT INEV LOVES.
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See that's exactly what I was talking about.
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Luckily this mediocre crud inspired the British punk bands like THE DAMNED (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHpDgrG9H1k) and OTHER BANDS I DON'T CARE/KNOW ABOUT.
Hey everyone! theinev doesn't care/know about THE CLASH!
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I like loud, aggressive music, but there needs to be more than that. Good singing, for a start, and a hummable melody. I also like to hear other instruments besides just guitar, bass, and drums exclusively.
I tried to get into punk when it was new. I listened to The Ramones first album and liked it, sorta, but ultimately it's not very satisfying to me. And I've always really dug the danger of The Sex Pistols even though I thought their music was rubbish. They even led me to create fake Punk bands when I was a teenager. There was The Walking Assholes and The Nazis among them, but my love of The Sex Pistols didn't extend to actually listening to their music.
Whenever I find myself listening to Punk rock I like it for a little while, but usually get bored with it pretty quickly.
*of course, as always, there are notable exceptions to this.
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I just wanted to also add that, if you're political and/or prefer focused rage, your best bet when it comes to punk may be to check out the local scene. In my opinion, there's something about angst that is often best tied to a location and grassroots action. My hubby is into punk in a major way, and putting a purposeful focus on such things seems to really work in his favor.
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yeah, I don't give a shit about the clash except for White Riot (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Eck6rox0s) and a few other songs. Never really gotten what makes them so great. Yeah yeah yeah London Calling. Cool, they made a post-punk album with some classic rock influences and a bunch of filler.
SEE HOW PUNK I AM? KILL YOUR IDOLS!
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Man, their cover of Police and Thieves is the greatest thing ever, what about that..
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Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
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it came up before when people got mad at me for saying The Clash are not punk. I think I would characterize them as the second category I talked about-- they started out punk, but the stuff of theirs that people like the most is going way beyond "punk." Spanish Bombs? Jimmy Jazz? Guns of Brixton? This is not a punk band. This is a rock band with punk influences.
I am the arbiter of what counts as punk. Me. I decide.
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See I once had someone say the Violet Femmes are punk, and no - I like them and all - but they are not punk.
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By that rigid standard, hardly any of the so called punk of the nineties and beyond is punk.
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I think I would even admit that something like Blink 182 is punk. Just not punk I like.
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Maybe I should also mention that I've read through the Nothing Nice To Say webcomic, (page 1) (http://www.mitchclem.com/nothingnice/1/) which essentially makes jokes that hinge on the reader being familiar with the movement, but they mention a lot of punk groups, from The Clash to The Rev Horton Heet to DS-13 to Operation Ivy, so while it's a decent repository of bands to check out, whether or not they are actually any good is left for the reader to find out...
I dunno man, I've gone from Led Zeppelin to 80s metal to prog groups like Rush or Mahavishnu Orch to jazz, so I'm pretty much in unfamiliar waters here.
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blablabla hardcore blablabla metalcore blablabla post-whatever spin magazine article bulshit
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My least favorite topic in popular music is whether rap/hip-hop is music.
My second least favorite topic is what counts as punk and what doesn't. Now that nobody talks about what grunge is anymore.
Like, I hate it when a record store has separate punk, indie, metal, emo, grindcore, post-rock, rap, hip-hop, etc. sections, and then of course just rock. So much guessing. Probably just me.
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The position I try to hold about genre is "If it sounds good, it is good," which is supposed to be something Duke Ellington said, although I don't know if he was addressing the question of the difference between punk, indie, metal, grindcore, rap and hip-hop. (Seriously, is there really a thing called "grindcore"?)
But - and I mean this in the nicest possible way - Inev has evolved from someone whose posts about music used to annoy me, to someone whose posts about music can be extremely amusing. So I may have to reconsider my opinion about not nitpicking about genre because now I see, not nitpicking - what's the fun in that?
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I may get burned at the stake for even asking this, but where do we stand on Green Day? They are sort of billed as punk-esque (or used to be, in the late '90's), but clearly they are not classic punk. Do they fall in that category with Blink 182 of punk-but-not-good-punk, or are they too mainstream even for that?
I like Green Day, but that is probably 85% nostalgia.
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I am pretty sure, as a person who hasn't listened to green day since dookie/ middle school, green day is the best version of that blink 182 thing at the beginning (there could be better 90s punk pop bands, that's not really my thing), then just wrong in every way eventually.
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I think they probably count as Punk, but maybe as "pop-punk." I do not really care. I think that some genres are defined by "historical movement" like 20th Century Classical Music or Indie Rock, and other are defined by sound like Punk or Metal. But really that's probably just me bending things around so that I can say what I want.
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So I may have to reconsider my opinion about not nitpicking about genre because now I see, not nitpicking - what's the fun in that?
That's a really good point. I get involved in genre nitpicky discussions all the time. For some reason I love discussing what counts as "Oldies." Also, somehow I ended up playing Move on Up by Curtis Mayfield for some co-workers, and my boss kept going on about how he loves Motown. Dude! Not Motown! It doesn't even have the Motown sound! It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut.
I think they probably count as Punk, but maybe as "pop-punk." I do not really care. I think that some genres are defined by "historical movement" like 20th Century Classical Music or Indie Rock, and other are defined by sound like Punk or Metal. But really that's probably just me bending things around so that I can say what I want.
It's funny you say that, because to me, Indie Rock is more about a sound and Punk is more about a movement. I mean, without a doubt there's a sound too, but take two punk albums I genuinely like, Pink Flag and Punk in Drublic. Pink Flag is way more punk, even though most people would insist on throwing post or art in front of punk to describe it.
I lied, I love this kind of discussion. But not talking about whether rap is music.
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"Seriously, is there really a thing called 'grindcore'?"
its real. first, you take some mud. then, you add pine cones and a box of 16-penny nails. for the last step, you force all that BS into your brain via the ear canal.
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To me, real punk consists (consisted) of bands of friends/acquaintances of barely educated, marginalized kids circling the drain of nihilism and drug abuse who found some outlet for the anger and despair in simple arrangements of really angry music that gave them some status above the crowds of other kids in the same boat and but not much else PLUS the music industry types who realized that while any given band would rise, produce and disintegrate in at most 3 years, a pretty good revolving door of revenue could be created around calling the scene Punk and riding that wave as long as it lasted. Against that backdrop the occasional legit musician would come along, be a part of all that, then get bored and actually start creating some music. This was known as selling out, but would form the nucleus of "pop-punk" bands like The Offspring, NoFX, Green Day, etc.
I was a big fan of Punk when I was 16-19, but more because I was a testosterone soaked, socially marginal kid than because the musical structure, melodies, and lyrics were so transcendent. Truth be told, even then I found it boring unless it was at a show or a club where there was the mob mentality to lift me out of my skull. Metal and Industrial music on the other hand was actually something I could listen to for more than 3 songs in a row.
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So, is that it then? Basically I should just roulette it and pick a group from wikipedia's "punk musical groups" page listing and go for it?
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no, you should listen to the bands I told you to listen to.
In addition:
Minor Threat
Wire
Black Flag
X
Minutemen
Some of those are probably "not punk."
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X
Minutemen
Dead Kennedy's
The Damned
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Ok after rereading the thread I see where you were going with your posts Inev, I guess maybe I should have asked for a two-column list with GREAT PUNK and SUCKY PUNK or somesuch, but I will give those a shot.
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I essentially only like punk music if someone who is my friend is in the band.
I cannot think of a punk song I liked that did not involve someone I already enjoyed the social company of.
But I tend to enjoy things where the ability to play guitar is taken really fuck*ng seriously, I guess.
Because I have no idea how to operate the device and try to live vicariously through people who are very very good at it?