punk vs. new wave

new wave.

reggae

I honestly don't know where to draw the line with these genres

new wave had better clothes, going with that

ABSTAIN

punk, no contest.

at the time, there was a lot of confusion between the terms, but they seem historically to have settled out as distinguishable styles (at least in american pop culture). punk = loud fast rules, working class &/or art school nihilism & aggression, no future, chuck berry riffs, the flaunting of hostility, cynicism or apathy, that which issued from the stooges & sonics, that which became hardcore, etc. some combo of all that. saints, dead boys, pistols & clash, early fall & wire, DKs, germs & flipper, minor threat & black flag.

new wave = the futurist, vaguely punk-inflected pop that came out of the same scene/era. typically dancey, candy colored & (at least superficially) cheerful, in opposition punk's often monochromatic sneering. blondie, devo, the cars, adam ant, bow wow wow, the police, early XTC, the B-52s, etc. new wave leads into technopop & new romanticism, was basically synonymous with MTV's early years, cross pollinates freely w/ post-punk & power pop. pop punk a la the ramones, buzzcocks, weirdos, toy dolls being the obvious point of intersection between the two styles. that or aggro dance stuff like gang of four.

i say punk cuz it's been such an organizing principle in my life. love tons of new wave music though.

going off of contenderizer's (pretty reasonable) distinctions, I'm probably more of a new waver. love tons of punk though.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0000033X5.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

voted for one, in no way defying the other.

I just can't vote enough... just can't vote enough...

one thing you can definitely say in new wave's defense is that it leads & looks out of itself. punk was so reactionary, so into denying anything that wasn't punk. there's a perverse kind of joy that can be taken from radical artistic limitations of that sort, but an unfortunate result was that punk couldn't see or anticipate anything that wasn't at least in part punk. new wave connects with the rest of the world, with music as a whole, with audiences of every sort. it accepts and integrates "alien" sounds & aesthetics where punk would simply sneer and smash.

caveat that punk proper did a damn fine job of accepting and integrating ska/reggae, for whatever reason

and rockabilly. and glam.

and metal, and art rock, and lots of other stuff

punk was so reactionary, so into denying anything that wasn't punk.

unless you're talking about Maximum Rock N Roll - i think you're exaggerating

As ethos, punk is useful.Rumours and Tusk are punk albums to me, despite their pedigree. So are some of Donna Summer's singles.

^^^I have always subscribed to the notion that punk is an ethic, not a genre

lol, wow sarahel beat me to it, nearly verbatim

which one was Van Halen s/t

can totally see "punk = reactionary" being controversial or even challopsy, but i stand by it, with caveats & explanation. punk as an ethos tends to be radical, but punk as a music & culture is often profoundly conservative, purist, boundary protecting. like i said before, it tends to disdain that which isn't punk. this has been a strong tendency in punk since its very earliest days.

exceptions everywhere though, won't deny that. was thinking of the ex as a counter example while typing out that first post.

Rumours and Tusk are punk albums to me, despite their pedigree. So are some of Donna Summer's singles.

i like this as an idea, just for its bracing unconventionality, but i can't understand the conception of punk relative to which it would make sense. if punk is an ethos (and it is), it's strongly tied up with independence from commerce constraints & social boundaries, open hostility towards conventional thinking & doing, intentional transgression that aims to elicit a violent reaction, etc. opposition & defiance, in short, whether political or not. hard for me to map this onto fleetwood mac or donna summer, except in the sense that you could map it onto almost any act of artistic creation.

"commerce constraints" = commercial constraints, yes

Where would The Slits be?

wait nvm new wave != post-punk

punk as a music & culture is often profoundly conservative, purist, boundary protecting.

i think it's difficult to say "a" music and culture - singular.

Greil Marcus and Simon Reynolds are much more eloquent in positing Tusk as part of the punk lineage, so I won't try; but what I hear in that album and Rumours matches what you wrote about punk's "intentional transgression." While it's easier to hear Tusk as a direct response to punk (e.g. Buckingham's well-documented admiration for The Clash and Buzzcocks manifested as a spare yet airy production ethos that sounded like the most expensive "stripped down" recording in the known universe), the variegated approach to relationships in Rumours strikes me as very much of the moment. The songs get considerable help by the decidedly un-punk rhythm section, which is tough and supple in a most un-Californian way. It's totally no surprise that a P&J voter in 1977 might have a hard time choosing between Rumours and Never Mind the Bollocks as the best album of the year.

and rockabilly. and glam.

― fact checking cuz, Monday, October 18, 2010 4:34 PM (57 minutes ago)

and metal, and art rock, and lots of other stuff

― S Beez Wit the Remedy (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, October 18, 2010 4:35 PM (56 minutes ago)

probably splitting hairs, but i'd say that these things/forms were built into punk from the very beginning. all that stuff = punk's DNA, so punk never really had to assimilate or even encounter those things. that's why i talked about punk's repurposing of ska/reggae, things that weren't build into "punk rock" from day 1. new wave seemed better able to to get psyched about and integrate stuff like dance music, other sounds from around the world, mutations in chart pop, etc.

suppose all that depends on where you put bands like the slits and talking heads relative to punk vs. new wave...

xpost stevie d beating me to the slits question

i think it's difficult to say "a" music and culture - singular.

― sarahel, Monday, October 18, 2010 5:36 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, that's totally fair. i'm trying to make things simple, and they just aren't.

and dance music wasn't "built into" new wave from the very beginning?

I generally find new wave more interesting.

i'm trying to make things simple, and they just aren't.

you do this a lot - and it gets you "in trouble" almost every time.

you seem to have a habit of trying to make the facts fit your theories, as opposed to coming up with a theory that makes sense of the facts.

okay, got me. wasn't thinking along that channel. new wave WAS built out of & funk & disco & retro rock & punk from day one. but it seems to me that it lacked punk's defiant and denying qualities. it wasn't looking for things to deride and annihilate. all it looked for were things to enjoy, perhaps in a snarky/winky/bitchy way. this made it omnivorous, mutable and easily able to transmit its joy in things to a broad audience. punk, it seems to me, lacks these qualities. it wants to be narrow, to be sneering in from outside, to be better than and in opposition to.

"New Wave" is a record company-created label though. Tom Petty was "new wave" in '79.

you seem to have a habit of trying to make the facts fit your theories, as opposed to coming up with a theory that makes sense of the facts.

― sarahel, Monday, October 18, 2010 5:48 PM (29 seconds ago) Bookmark

that may be, but it's also more than a little cutting. i try to assemble my ideas from the facts i have at hand, but i'm also often thinking on the fly.

well - "new wave" was even more of an externally-designated arbitrary genre name than "punk" - wasn't it? It seemed to include so many not necessarily connected bands/artists that it was pretty non-descriptive.

xp - Alfred otm

"New Wave" is a record company-created label though. Tom Petty was "new wave" in '79.

― raging hetero lifechill (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, October 18, 2010 5:49 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

in this US, this seems to have been true. not so in the UK, where both terms seem to have evolved organically, as ways to talk about roughly the same thing. and i'm not sure it matter in the long run where the terms came from or what they originally meant. definitions with long-term usefulness sort of settle out over time.

i'm not sure it matter in the long run where the terms came from or what they originally meant. definitions with long-term usefulness sort of settle out over time.

yeah - but you're making the argument that "new wave" was less oppositional and more inclusive, and that's largely because the term was fairly meaningless - like yeah, "new wave" included Tom Petty and Adam and the Ants and Echo & the Bunnymen and who else, Nick Lowe, Cyndi Lauper?

John Covach's article "Pangs of History in Late 1970s New Wave Rock", which you should be able to read here: http://books.google.ca/books?id=A4pdAE0s4w4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Analyzing+popular+music&hl=en&ei=NOy8TLSwLsTangfVjZmKDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

does a pretty good job IMO of discussing aesthetic issues and identifying features of 'new wave' rock as opposed to AOR (and why they don't sound worlds apart now!). But yeah, tbh, I also never understood 100% what 'new wave' was exactly supposed to be, given all the bands that were lumped in under that label.

xposts

Oh crap, part of it is left out of the preview. Still, a great read if you're a geek for both pop musicology and music theory.

thanks - maybe we should just read that article and discuss it

gonna vote punk because I identify with the ethos more. and all the stuff I listened to growing up was mostly 90s pop punk.

also since everybody on here is a contrarian it means you're voting for punk be default amirite

gonna vote punk because I identify with the ethos more. and all the stuff I listened to growing up was mostly 90s pop punk.

wow - i hadn't thought of the generational divide/ilx age range here - i grew up listening to a lot of new wave because it was on the radio, and late 70s British punk + Dead Kennedys.

I eventually found my way to late 70s punk, but it was through stuff like rancid/op ivy/bad religion/pennywise etc

*looks at my millencolin CDs, feels ashamed*

i had to play some of that stuff on the radio - i should maybe feel more ashamed.

thanks - maybe we should just read that article and discuss it

Um, I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here. I wasn't trying to be pedantic or anything. I just really like the article and thought it might interest someone.

no - quite the opposite - i was hoping that it would provide us with some common ground, or a specific focus for discussion - as this subject is something that's been discussed a lot

Cool.

haven't read the article but...

yeah - but you're making the argument that "new wave" was less oppositional and more inclusive, and that's largely because the term was fairly meaningless - like yeah, "new wave" included Tom Petty and Adam and the Ants and Echo & the Bunnymen and who else, Nick Lowe, Cyndi Lauper?

the fact that "new wave" was originally a mushily-defined marketing term doesn't mean that it hasn't settled out into a clear genre both in current use and in retrospect. and i think there IS a clear ethos/aesthetic at work in new wave music that unifies it in meaningful ways - again, regardless of where the term originated.

Slap a skinny tie on Bryan Ferry, Rod Stewart, and Mick Jagger, squeeze'em into leather pants, inject synths or Farfisas into the mix = new wave!

and i think there IS a clear ethos/aesthetic at work in new wave music that unifies it in meaningful ways

which is?

Slap a skinny tie on Bryan Ferry, Rod Stewart, and Mick Jagger, squeeze'em into leather pants, inject synths or Farfisas into the mix = new wave!

yeah, but slap a torn t-shirt and a couple safety pins on any of the above, crank em up on white drugs and have em play chuck berry riffs at at breakneck speed = punk!

they're both pretty simple formulas

and i think there IS a clear ethos/aesthetic at work in new wave music that unifies it in meaningful ways

which is?

― sarahel, Monday, October 18, 2010 6:27 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

well, that society and identity are fundamentally plastic and manipulated by media, and that this is a fun! great! thing. appropriation of the most disposable aspects of pop culture in order to celebrate them while also slyly winking at one's awareness of the artifice and triviality of the whole thing. dancing while rome burns. it's an ironic stance, apolitical and apathetic (except in the hands of folks like devo, where it gets a genuinely subversive edge), but engaged with culture, fashion and style as valid ends in themselves.

also, i'd say that new wave functioned as this plastic smile worn in response to anxiety. lots of paranoia about the surrender of the human to mechanization, atomic holocaust, loss of self creeping in from the margins. sometimes directly addressed, sometimes not.

well, that society and identity are fundamentally plastic and manipulated by media, and that this is a fun! great! thing. appropriation of the most disposable aspects of pop culture in order to celebrate them while also slyly winking at one's awareness of the artifice and triviality of the whole thing. dancing while rome burns.

But does this actually describe, I dunno, the Police or the Cure? Also, it doesn't say anything about what this sounds like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7GefvKKAIY

Do you want New Wave or do you want the truth?

You know that Post Punk would win if it was part of this poll on ILX.

^^

YES

i would still have voted for punk

i would vote for no wave were it an option, but not post-punk

feel like fighting people who vote new wave not because i dont like it just because punk is so fucking great man. coolest thing ever, total lifesaver, love you forever kinda stuff

okay, so i was posting during class, so i had to work fast. and i think there's something to what sarah was saying. i tend to spit out arguments without thinking them all the way through, and that causes debate, which puts me on the defensive, and i become deej or something. i'll try to nail things down a little carefully from here on out...

also, new wave exists in america rather differently than it did in the UK, and i'm primarily talking from an american point of view about an american culture/cultural understanding. so apologies to those across the pond. anyway, with that in mind, it probably IS important to remember that new wave was initially a way for US marketers to attach a quality of youth & hipness to music in order to sell it to an audience hungry for those qualities. but within the very broad outlines of what might have seemed "young & hip" in the 80s, i'd argue that "proper american new wave" had a very specific musical and aesthetic identity.

i described certain aspects of that identity upthread, but there's another quality that, it seems to me, helps define american new wave: a winking fake nostalgia for the simplicity and naivete of 50s/60s modernism. this gives new wave's futurist stance a decidedly retro edge, and i think it, too, relates to the anxieties i described above. an ambivalent post-nuclear era looks back wistfully (and somewhat critically) at its more optimistic predecessor. this fascination with the bygone modern is sometimes used to explicitly criticize the present - think devo and the talking heads - and sometimes just for kitsch value - say, the b-52s, blondie and the go-gos. other important characteristics are new wave's fondness for youthful "pop" simplicity and for novelty: bright primary colors, big loud beats & basslines, easy sing-along choruses, uncomplicated emotions, goofy jokes & sound effects, fancy new synthesizers and drum machines, all delivered with a knowing smirk. this again ties new wave back to the music & ideals of the "modern era," but also allows for interesting contrast between the cartoonish populuxe surfaces and the jittery tensions underneath.

post-punk is an interesting corollary, because it hardly existed in america at the time. we didn't have a post-punk scene. we had hardcore and the ragged ends of punk, which transmogrified into "independent rock music" sometime in the mid-80s. that was our post-punk, and we called it something else. this makes it hard to talk clearly about "american new wave", because so much of what informed and extended american new wave consisted of english and european imports representing different scenes & contexts: post-punk, pub rock, technopop, new romanticism, etc. the fashionable lure of anglo-european is another big part of american new wave's core identity.

and i lie. mission of burma and her descendents clearly = american post-punk. among others. different discussion though.

I would totally vote for post-punk. The Cure, Cocteau Twins, The Chameleons, Bauhaus, Siouxsie, Joy Division, Echo and The Bunnymen, that was my scene. But I love punk and new-wave too. I think they come from the same place, like three different moods of the same era.
Going with new-wave in this poll.

would those be considered post-punk though? Siouxsie & the Banshees was one of the original punk bands, and Joy Division def. began as a punk band.

So were Blondie and Talking Heads but they definitely contributed something different (which became New Wave). I think only The Scream and Warsaw can be considered punk. The rest of their output is much closer in sound and attitude to the other bands I mentioned. Join Hands, Three Imaginary Boys and Unknown Pleasures all came out the same year and In The Flat Fields and Crocodiles only a year later.

the variegated approach to relationships in Rumours strikes me as very much of the moment

Soto, please to elaborate because I'm not getting how a variegated approach to relationships is punk.

this could so, so easily turn into the worst thread on ILM

aside from HELP ME SORT THE "WHEAT" FROM THE "CHAFF" IN THIS CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED GENRE KNOWN AS "CHILLWAVE"

^^ almost thought that was a drunk jjjusten thread, except there were no spelling errors in the thread title

It could also turn into the prettiest thread on ILM.

the choice is yours, ILM

funny. my mind went instantly to The Slits too when I first opened this thread...

the music I listen to most from 79-83 (prolley my favorite period) is stuff like The Fall, The Clean, The Slits/Pop Group, Chrome, Flipper, X, The Dead Kennedys, Devo, the B-52's & the 99 Records stable. Would all of this count as new wave or would it still be punk? Or should it just be labeled as post-punk and kept away from this conversation???

X & the Dead Kennedys are def. punk imo, while B-52's/Devo/The Slits could all be considered new-wave, so maybe, three against two, I'll just vote new wave...

tbh I like it better when 'punk' & 'new wave' are synonymous with each other, so I can refer to a song like Kirsty Maccoll's "They Don't Know" as punk...

mission of burma and her descendents clearly = american post-punk.

Read this as MoB and THE descendents and was like o_O the Descendents aren't fuckin' post punk what are you talking about?

you're covering a lot of ground, and some of that stuff is hard to parse or sui generis. i mean, chrome were pretty much their own thing, though credibly punk and/or new wave depending on your sympathies. suppose the same could be said of the fall? can be described any number of ways, but remain stubbornly themselves. X had a foot in each camp. flipper are canonically punk, west coast version, while the 99 recs stable fits into very different NYC artmusic scene that has as much to do with no wave (by association) as anything under discussion here - US equivalent of funk-influenced slits/pop group style post-punk.

xp

i associate The Pop Group with no wave - even though it's UK

the music I listen to most from 79-83 (prolley my favorite period) is stuff like The Fall, The Clean, The Slits/Pop Group, Chrome, Flipper, X, The Dead Kennedys, Devo, the B-52's & the 99 Records stable. Would all of this count as new wave or would it still be punk? Or should it just be labeled as post-punk and kept away from this conversation???

it gets even harder because a lot of stuff like DEVO, Television, Pere Ubu that might be considered POST punk actually happened before punk.

devo's first shit was recorded in 73 or 74 iirc

both devo and pere ubu were always way too arty to just be called "punk", imo. "prog wave" anyone?
where does Roxy Music fit in? proto-new wave?

Roxy Music = huge influence on Nile Rodgers

Gawd we're dangerously close to 'worst thread ever' territory aren't we?

not anywhere close, tbh

it's hard to talk about "precedent" with this stuff. everything happened at once.

i voted new wave because i am not religious

is Television post-punk? most of what I've heard described pretty much puts it squarely into NY punk, along with Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, etc.? or perhaps all of these bands are new-wave?

Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, etc.?
i mean, they've all been called "punk" but the only one that really seems like punk to me is the ramones.

yeah but this thread kind of makes me think that the Ramones could be new-wave. Like this:

a winking fake nostalgia for the simplicity and naivete of 50s/60s modernism

I don't necessarily think of the Ramones as 'fake', per se, but of the above-mentioned list, the only band who fits this better than the Ramones is Blondie...

xxpost: cbgb's bands were so varied. i agree, tyler. television really don't fit neatly into a category.

it's hard to talk about "precedent" with this stuff. everything happened at once.

xxxpost - mc5 - back in the u.s.a. (1970)

I only voted for New Wave because it's better in every way possible.

I've probably listened to more New Wave in the last 20 years, but I'm voting punk, for blowing my mind harder at the time.

new york dolls and suicide were performing at the mercer arts center between 71 and 73, and the latter were already calling themselves punk music

I don't necessarily think of the Ramones as 'fake', per se, but of the above-mentioned list, the only band who fits this better than the Ramones is Blondie...

yeah, was thinking of the ramones when i typed that bit about 50s/60s nostalgia. and it's true that their nostalgia lacked the sly, self-aware ("fake") quality of a lot of other new wave bands. AFAIC, most anything from that era with enough high energy cartoon pop in it starts to slide into new wave territory, esp if it's got some kind of zany 3-D glasses retro quality, and that def includes the ramones & much of the subsequent pop-punk lineage.

when were rocket from the tombs & neon boys functional, e3?

neon boys single is '73 iirc

contenderizer I love you man, but aren't you not allowed to talk about punk here anymore

but that's what I'm saying contenderizer--nostalgia and simplicity is one of the things that ties punk & new wave together...anything that hearkened back to at least 65-66 if not before that...that's why Petty & Springsteen were considered 'new-wave' back then, along with Adam Ant and Gary Numan...

nostalgia and simplicity is one of the things that ties punk & new wave together.

i feel like they approached nostalgia differently.

^that didn't make any sense--what I'm saying is that you can't use nostalgia for 50s/60s and simplicty to distinguish between punk and new wave, bcz that's their common ground. Maybe you can say that new wave is 'artificial' but even then imo you're on slippery ground...

actually the more I think about it the more I think goole is OTM: it's the zealotry that makes punk.

xxpost: i'm pretty certain Petty's leather jacket (seems ridiculous now, i know) on the s/t cover that confused merchandisers and rendered him to the punk bins back in '79.
springsteen seems like a real stretch, he was already a well known commodity

rocket from the tombs is '74 - '75, electric eels started in '72, devo's 4-track demos from '74 are what? punk? new wave?

yeah, that's the thing - it was a real stretch - which i think was what Jello Biafra was mocking when he intro-ed that song with "we're not a punk rock band, we're a new wave band"

sorry sarahel my arrow is pointing to my previous post not yours

springsteen obv mingling with the punk fringes in the late 70s... "because the night", he's on lou reed's "street hassle"

new wave, so incredibly easily new wave.

springsteen i'm pretty sure in 75-77 was being grouped in by rock critics with patti smith as sort of a return of 'real rock'...didn't he also cover a Suicide song? (Dream Baby Dream?)

well, he covered it in 2006 or something ... but he did always say "state trooper" was suicide inspired.

I asked abt neon boys & rocket e3 bcz I love the idea of a NY/Cleveland axis of bands that just worshipped VU/Stooges, and being the fertile soil from whence American punk sprouted...

speaking of Electric Eels, I bought Eyeball from Hell last Friday off of Amazon, it should be coming in the mail anytime now...

i guess what i meant is that Pere Ubu *sounds* post punk, like if they came out in 79 or 80 they would have been considered post-punk, but they are actually proto-punk or whatever

or if television came out after you could say the same thing.

basically i dislike this whole question for a lot of reasons, the biggest being that no one agrees with what new wave or punk even mean.

but that's what I'm saying contenderizer--nostalgia and simplicity is one of the things that ties punk & new wave together...

― scaruffi kaleidoscope (Drugs A. Money), Tuesday, October 19, 2010 11:19 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i feel like they approached nostalgia differently.

― sarahel, Tuesday, October 19, 2010 11:21 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

this, and sarahel OTM. punk and new wave did approach nostalgia differently. there's a moment in the late 70s where american culture was generally besotted with 50s nostalgia, and that's evident in both early punk and new wave. leather jackets, teen trash & greaser culture for punk; 50s advertising and girl-group-era gender roles for new wave. but punk wasn't as critical or as conflicted about these signifiers as new wave. american punk seemed to retreat to cool, fun, 50s tuff-guy stuff as a defensive position from which contemporary culture could be mocked. given that the people playing punk music in the 70s had actually grown up in the late 50s and early 60s, it makes sense: a retreat to the safety of the unambiguous guy culture they'd grown up with (thus reactionary).

new wave, on the other hand, seemed to borrow the trappings of the 50s & 60s in a deliberately campy, kitschy, and critical way. weird gender and family roles were inhabited, but also deconstructed. retro clothes were worn, but in a way that seemed more knowingly silly than tough or cool. and the present was depicted as a cracked reflection of this fondly remembered yet distinctly creepy past.

and sorry for any offense, edward III. i love the ramones like nobody's business, but can't help how i see them.

but punk wasn't as critical or as conflicted about these signifiers as new wave.

what? you have listened to X-Ray Spex haven't you?

rocket from the tombs is '74 - '75, electric eels started in '72, devo's 4-track demos from '74 are what? punk? new wave?

rocket, ubu, early devo and the eels, strike me as 70s art rock that anticipated and inspired both punk and new wave. don't think you can really make the distinction there. same with suicide.

suicide commandos formed in mpls in 75, def punk if you ask me but don't easily fit in a neat category either

these labels are all ex-post facto, does that matter?

what? you have listened to X-Ray Spex haven't you?

yeah, and again, that's a great point. but i'm primarily talking about american bands & culture. also about a time when punk and new wave had begun to disentangle themselves from one another, in the early 80s. spex predate that, so the distinction is much less clear. there are a great many 70s bands that, it seems to me, comfortably fit both as "real punk" and as new wave, for various reasons: early devo, x-ray spex, weirdos, the ramones, the damned, peter & the test-tube babies, siouxie and the banshees, etc.

like, ubu, television, the ramones, even the pistols... these were bands, not points on a genre chart. nobody set out as a young teenager in 1974 to "be a punk band". maybe in 1984 they did.

nb i'm not really following whatever is being argued here

all exceptions granted, i still think that the qualities i ascribed to punk and new wave more or less define those genres, especially as they moved forward into & through the 80s. american punk became more and more concerned with tough, masculine coding and less attached to retro signifiers as a deconstructive tool. new wave kept making playful pop games out of period, gender & identity.

thread becomes clusterfucky. have a feeling that it's largely due to my attempts to force the terms into boxes, boxes that won't really hold them and which give people something to (sensibly) react against. :(

Here I think Xgau can help us out:

1985-1990: The A List [Mute, 1993]
Those who disdain Wire's second coming don't understand how the Sex Pistols and ABC could have been born of the same impulse. First freeze-drying punk, then rendering neodisco slick into Teflon sausage casing, this band knew. And by now they've recorded more memorable music than the Pistols and ABC put together--while maintaining an aesthetic distance so severe they make Sham 69 and Frankie Goes to Hollywood seem archetypal by comparison. To program this summum they invited supporters to vote on their finest recent moments, then laid the highest finishers end to end until the CD was full. Number 16 does drag. A

Exhibit A: the punk-as-fuck "My Camera Never Lies"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIxM9XtMX44

especially as they moved forward into & through the 80s. american punk became more and more concerned with tough, masculine coding and less attached to retro signifiers as a deconstructive tool.

except all the punk ppl that formed totally different bands and just kept punk as an ethos. which is like almost the entirety of u.s. underground and early indie rock.

the punk-as-ABBA "My Camera Never Lies"

Prog-as-fuck too. New wave encompasses multitudes.

except all the punk ppl that formed totally different bands and just kept punk as an ethos. which is like almost the entirety of u.s. underground and early indie rock.

^ yeah, exactly. to tie it back in, american punk seemed to want to be a boy's club. in the early days, things were mixed, with no clear lines between punk and new wave, and no particular gender identification attached to either. but as punk quickly mutated into hardcore, which was (for the most part) hypermasculine on principle, new wave increasingly came to seem like a space for the feminine. indie rock, in turn, seemed to react against hardcore's rigidity, allowing punk to breathe again. leads into some other thread...

nobody set out as a young teenager in 1974 to "be a punk band".

Suicide called themselves a punk band, but they were kinda old I suppose

nobody set out as a young teenager in 1974 to "be a punk band".
dunno, weren't there a ton of NY Dolls-inspired bands (like the Neon Boys or RFTT, say) who were attracted to that punky vibe ... even if there wasn't a name for it?

^(xp to crut abt Suicide) right, and they were an odd art-rock band who worshipped the Velvets & had way more in common with new-wave/synthpop than they did with Husker Du or NOFX (which I think is my point)

were the NY Dolls influenced by the Velvets? (not that it matters in the least)

suicide was no wave before no wave

agreed. but they were the only no-wave band to inspire Soft Cell.

i think suicide meant punk in the assfucking sense. or the dirty harry sense maybe.

xxpost

yeah, that's the scene relative to which they make the most sense, though they cast a long shadow over all the stuff we're talking about

important not to separate the assfucking punk from the other kind, otherwise things get boring

xp - suicide also inspired Sonic Youth, but does that make them "indie"?

godno

i think suicide meant punk in the assfucking sense. or the dirty harry sense maybe.

vega admits they took it from bangs talking about the stooges

were the NY Dolls influenced by the Velvets? (not that it matters in the least)
probably a bit, weren't they involved in the max's/warhol scene?

the sonic youth that owed the biggest debt to suicide were pretty much a straight-up no wave tribute band anyway

bangs meant it non-musically! otherwise, what meaning would it have in like 1970? "the stooges sounds like one of those bands who sound like the stooges"?

yeah. Sonic Youth came out of no-wave too; they didn't get remotely indie until they jumped on SST at least

just saying it was related to music, not to a dirty harry film

"do you feel lucky, iggy?"

i.e. the stooges are making the kind of sounds a bunch of street punks would make, that's great, I want to do that too

yeah. Sonic Youth came out of no-wave too;

no duh - i just think it's a bad idea to retro-actively categorize a band by the genre classifications of bands they influenced.

were the NY Dolls influenced by the Velvets? (not that it matters in the least)

xxxxxpost - musically, i think Johhnie's buzzsaw is more Stooges than Sterling, but maybe VU had a aesthetic influence. the dolls obviously loved the Shangri-la's, as opposed to Lou's doo-wop love

i think suicide meant punk in the assfucking sense. or the dirty harry sense maybe.

― goole, Tuesday, October 19, 2010 2:21 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

didn't legs mcneil use "punk" (in punk magazine) precisely because of the prison sex connotations?

pretty sure that was the case m@tt

and punk magazine, correct me if i'm wrong, sorta codified using "punk" as a genre term, no?

none of us were there but I'm pretty sure ppl in creem were using the term punk rock, that was the term ppl were using about the cbgbs scene, and that's where punk magazine got its name. the prison sex stuff sounds like bonus shock material.

yeah i think mcneil was prob. the first to really define punk as the "anyone can do it" kinda thing?

yeah but that's like the Ramones stealing their fashion sense from rentboys--stuff was kind of all there from the beginning

xp to e3

was actually just reading this all hopped up and ready to go book about nyc music, and it says mcneil did *not* name Punk Mag after prison sex, "noting defiantly that 'punk' had been around since shakespeare" or something fwiw

the whole point is that all of these bands were working before anyone gave it a name. but there was enough of "something there" in common so that a name had to be made for it pretty quickly.

i thought there was a review of a stooges album where (i forget who) the writer said something about "these punks", and i presume that article was well before cb's had a scene. maybe it was a creem review

wikipedia yo

Dave Marsh was the first music critic to employ the term punk rock: In the May 1971 issue of Creem, he described ? and the Mysterians, one of the most popular 1960s garage rock acts, as giving a "landmark exposition of punk rock".[73] Later in 1971, in his fanzine Who Put the Bomp, Greg Shaw wrote about "what I have chosen to call 'punk rock' bands—white teenage hard rock of '64-66 (Standells, Kingsmen, Shadows of Knight, etc.)".[74] Lenny Kaye used the term "classic garage-punk," in reference to a song recorded in 1966 by The Shadows of Knight, in the liner notes of the anthology album Nuggets, released in 1972.[75] In June 1972, the fanzine Flash included a "Punk Top Ten" of 1960s albums.[76] In February 1973, Terry Atkinson of the Los Angeles Times, reviewing the debut album by a hard rock band, Aerosmith, declared that it "achieves all that punk-rock bands strive for but most miss."[77] Three months later, Billy Altman launched the short-lived punk magazine.[78]

wanna hear shakespearean punk bands

hah! didn't know that about ? and the Mysterians before I started that poll

Suicide vs. ? and the Mysterians

In May 1974, Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn reviewed the second New York Dolls album, Too Much Too Soon. "I told ya the New York Dolls were the real thing", he wrote, describing the album as "perhaps the best example of raw, thumb-your-nose-at-the-world, punk rock since the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street.'"[79] Bassist Jeff Jensen of Boston's Real Kids reports of a show that year, "A reviewer for one of the free entertainment magazines of the time caught the act and gave us a great review, calling us a 'punk band.' ... We all sort of looked at each other and said, 'What's punk?'"[80] By 1975, punk was being used to describe acts as diverse as the Patti Smith Group, the Bay City Rollers, and Bruce Springsteen.[81] As the scene at New York's CBGB club attracted notice, a name was sought for the developing sound. Club owner Hilly Kristal called the movement "street rock"; John Holmstrom credits Aquarian magazine with using punk "to describe what was going on at CBGBs".[82] Holmstrom, McNeil, and Ged Dunn's magazine Punk, which debuted at the end of 1975, was crucial in codifying the term.[83] "It was pretty obvious that the word was getting very popular", Holmstrom later remarked. "We figured we'd take the name before anyone else claimed it. We wanted to get rid of the bullshit, strip it down to rock 'n' roll. We wanted the fun and liveliness back."[81]

The term "New Wave" itself has been a source of much confusion and controversy. It was used in 1976 in the UK by punk fanzines such as Sniffin' Glue, and then by the professional music press.[15] In a November 1976 article in Melody Maker, Caroline Coon used Malcolm McLaren's term "New Wave" to designate music by bands not exactly punk, but related and part of the same musical scene;[16] the term was also used in that sense by music journalist Charles Shaar Murray, while writing about The Boomtown Rats.[17] For a period of time in 1976 and 1977 the two terms were interchangeable.[6][18] By the end of 1977, "New Wave" had replaced "Punk" as the definition for new underground music in the UK.[15]

In the United States, Sire Records needed a term by which it could market its newly signed bands, who had frequently played the club CBGB. Because radio consultants in the United States had advised their clients that punk rock was a fad, they settled on the term "New Wave". Like the filmmakers of the French New Wave movement whom the genre was named after, its new artists, such as the Ramones and Talking Heads, were anti-corporate and experimental. At first most American writers exclusively used the term "New Wave" to describe British punk acts. Starting in December 1976, The New York Rocker, which was suspicious of the term "punk," became the first American journal to enthusiastically use the term starting with British acts, and later appropriating it to acts associated with the CBGB scene.[15]

It was pretty obvious that the word was getting very popular", Holmstrom later remarked. "We figured we'd take the name before anyone else claimed it. We wanted to get rid of the bullshit, strip it down to rock 'n' roll. We wanted the fun and liveliness back in our prison sex connotations."

i just think it's a bad idea to retro-actively categorize a band by the genre classifications of bands they influenced.

― sarahel, Tuesday, October 19, 2010 12:28 PM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, agreed. you can draw interesting connections and associations though, without resorting to definitive categorization. that's why i'm loathe to put bands like suicide, rocket from the tombs, chrome, early devo, etc. in any particular box. they's just doing what they did.

Holmstrom, McNeil, and Ged Dunn's magazine Punk, which debuted at the end of 1975, was crucial in codifying the term.[83] "It was pretty obvious that the word was getting very popular", Holmstrom later remarked. "We figured we'd take the name before anyone else claimed it. We wanted to get rid of the bullshit, strip it down to rock 'n' roll. We wanted the fun and liveliness back."[81]

= the most useful ground zero for "punk" as most people know and use it today. not to exclude suicide or exile on main street, but this seems like the point at which a consensus definition began to emerge. not surprisingly appropriate to textbook punk stuff like the ramones, saints, dammned, etc.

you can draw interesting connections and associations though, without resorting to definitive categorization.

quite true

"punk" is a strange word & reading it again & again I start to doubt myself as an English speaker, like that can't be a word in the English I know

One of my first glimpses of "new wave" was a 1977 Sire Records promo EP called New Wave Rock and Roll: Get Behind It Before It Gets Past You. 2 songs apiece by Dead Boys, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, The Saints and Talking Heads. 3 of those would probably be classified as punk by most of the descriptors being used above.

1977:

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/e6/36/6aed810ae7a00f2964e1c110.L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Lots of overlap, lots of movement from one to the other--Buzzcocks '76 = punk, Buzzcocks '79 = new wave. Broadly speaking, punk for me. I can think of a dozen '70s punk songs that are among my favorite ever; hard-pressed to think of one (that most everyone would agree fits the term) new wave song where I could say the same. And if you skip forward to Husker Du and all the early/mid-'80s American punk, the gap widens.

Funny, a while back someone here posted a link to a bunch of Cylinders, which dated sometime in the 1900s or thereabouts. As I downloaded a bunch, I did think "I wonder if there will be any odd usages of current words such as Punk"...

The very first track I played was (titled something like) "A woodpecker is knocking at my family tree" which mentioned that the trunk was filled with Punk.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

surprising.

not surprising, given this being ilm and all

Next poll = Bolsheviks vs Mensheviks

results as expected

Joe Jackson: happy. That guy from Slaughter & the Dogs (not Slaughter--the other guy): sad.

not surprising, given this being ilm and all

― "I am a fairly respected poster." (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Tuesday, October 26, 2010 7:02 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, but punk is also a lot less shit

not sure i agree with that.

voted new-wave.

hey guys why don't you do grunge vs. alternative next, that should be decisive too

hair metal v. teenpop

dubstep v. string bands.

string bands ftw

oh come on.

rubber bands vs paper clips

brostep vs. incredible string bands

twisted sister v. mister mister.