ye olde punk nostalgia

Punk happened when I was 15, and I jumped on board right away. To some extent I'm still on-board,ideologically at least. (well, not on board maybe, but I still have a ticket) . I viewed punk from around 250 miles north of the 100 club, so I can't say that I was at the epicentre, but the shock waves were strong enough to change everything for me.

Good things - the avalanche of music which suddenly became available. To begin with it didn't matter if it was good, bad, bogus or stoopid. It was punk, and I accepted it all.

Bad things - it took me nearly 10 years to get over the '1976 is year zero' mentality which we've discussed in other threads. Narrow minded..

The music - a lot of the early bands weren't so great in retrospect - more like revved up pub rock. But my musical touchstones are what came next - Magazine, JoyDiv and Factory, PIL, Cabs, Josef K, Raincoats, Slits, Fall...... I can't think of a band which I loved then that I don't love now.

Yes, it's nostalgia to some extent, but what the hell... I've moved on but looking back to '77 from time to time feels great.

Interesting question (surprising lack of responeses though). Anyway my take...Nostalgia for punk is non-existent since at the time my life centred around Scooby Doo and playing footie. That said as a cultural phenomena I suppose it was necessary at the time a counter- movement to Prog & pub rock. Although one wonders if disco wasn't a better anti-thesis?

The music: I've wondered about this recently, the fact that I really don't like that much pure punk. Never Mind the Bollocks (of course), Dead Kennedy's, early Black Flag and that may be it. Punk for me is somewhat sonically retarded, which is one of the reasons punk for me gor interesting when it started to mix with psychedelia/prog again. Lydon himself started this with P.I.L., and I'll take the blissed-out punk of Huskur Du, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Meat Puppets and Butthole Surfers, 'XTRMNTR', Boredomes any day over all your earnest political sound punk rock that Greil Marcus always goes on about.

Punk is of course deader-than-dead, one could say that Frankie Goes to Hollywood were the Last Punk Band and rave/aciied killed it all off (yes the revenge of disco). All attempts of reviving the punk spirit in the 90s have been miserable failures. So i wouldn't be surprised that for a certain generation it's time to get nostalgic. Nothing really wrong with that.

'punk' may be dead, the nihilism replaced by hedonism and apathy, but the 'undead' lives on in other sub-genres and scenes. Sure, it's not essentially 'punk' but reprises the urgency of '77 through different genres, but i only know about the West Coast, (did they not have a punk band in the 70s?) - Operation Ivy who put the Specials through a punk filter, Kid 606 and other Tigerbeat artists. Marginalized because it doesn't inspire the same social disruption today, the dumb/genius nihilism becomes a redundant rage, that speaks of their ineffectuality or regret at not having been there in the first place. I wasn't there either, but I got the message. Nostalgia for punk sounds kinda self-defeating.

NME published their "10th Anniversary of Punk Special" in 1986. In other words, good-old-days "punk nostalgia" fogeyism was FIRMLY ENTRENCHED at least 15 years ago. It's all rose-tinting; history textbooks for those who want/enjoy them. (And not much different from King Arthur academics/fetishists contemplating what it woulda been like to've sat at the Round Table.)

Omar: one could say Frankie Goes to Hollywood were the last punk band but what would one be saying? Please explain. (Frankie struck me as new romantics except, y'know, "with an edge," albeit a blunt one). I'd presume more "punk" bands existed in Green Day's wake than the Sex Pistols' (presumption based on Green Day selling more records, spawning more wannabes). Though that of course hinges on definition of "punk".

Re: punk's "sonic retardation", yes, and brings to mind Martin Popoff's assertion, "There is such a thing as intelligent punk, it's called heavy metal." Ka'ching!!

Mmm AP good question, I think one would be saying that FGTH repeated the whole Sex Pistols dymanic *without* guitars ;) (svengali's, members who don't play, getting single banned, single makes it to nr.1 anyway, pop with pseudo nihilistic-marxist agenda, short influence ons street-fashion, band implodes).

I wasn't there, so wanted to ask: was the punk 70s as good as everyone says it was?

As someone who was 'there' I can say that it was incredibly intense and moving to me (and I would love to board a time machine just to wander the streets again). But it was, in retrospect, very limited musically (which it needed to be as a stylistic call-to-arms, and to offend prog-fans etc.).

At the time the music press was full of this punk vs hippy philosophical opposition, which of course looks absurd now - but that's Youth Culture for you.

But that didn't stop the music press from reviving Punk vs. Hippy as a piece of rhetoric circa 1992 to set the Manics against the Orb ...

(though the definition of musical divides in, by then, 15-year-old terms shows, in retrospect, how the inkies were already losing the plot in the early 90s.)