Like Punk never happened

Take some Rough Trade artists of say, late 1979 (I'm taking the compilation "Wanna Buy a Bridge? as a template). Cabaret Voltaire, The Slits, The Pop Group, The Swell Maps, Scritti Politti, Liliput, Essential Logic, Delta 5, Young Marble Giants, Raincoats, Televison Personalities...

None of these artists would have made a record (IMHO), or maybe even written a song, if not for Punk. The fact that they did has to be good - look how many women, for example, were involved in these bands. Also look at the influences - funk,noise,kraut,reggae - all in there somewhere.

Was there a reciprocal influence BACK from say, some of The Rough Trade bands I listed above to reggae, for example? If the question is "Did Reggae begin to SOUND different to the way it would have sounded without punk?", then I'd guess the answer is no, not much initially. However, did other British youths form reggae groups who wouldn't have done? YES! Did reggae get listened to by a wider, different audience? YES! Did reggae get more coverage in the music press? YES! (I read about Matumbi, Aswad, Culture, U-Roy etc alongside Joy Division and The Swell Maps in Sounds and The NME). Hence punk's influence spread far wider than giving speed-fuelled oiks with cheap guitars a platform.

The way that popular music SEEMS to have progressed (and, mind you, this is a progression that's been established by historians & scholars, and is open to re-interpretation) would make me believe that "punk", in a sense, was inevitable. It has as much to do with the availability of the technology & the progress of the world as it does with a bunch of pissed-off art-school vagrants going blah blah blah to an E chord. If the Pistols or the Stooges or the Sonics or the Beatles or Elvis or Robert Johnson didn't happen, something ELSE would have happened that would be comparable to the supposed impact these folks had. The details would be changed, but the impact would be about the same, I think. But, of course, there's no way to actually say this unequivocally.

Maybe I'm taking the question too literally, instead of using it as a fun li'l intellectual exercise. I can say, without a doubt, that the personal impact of a non-punk world would've been tremendous. I'd probably be a bit more miserable, but have a LOT more $$$$. And less fun stuff to read.

I agree with whoever said Disco had the larger influence. It was Disco that *physically* displaced all the lumpen drudgery from the charts; that cleared the decks with a new sound. Disco was massive. It was bought by the working class, blacks and young people, and it's these people who would show Disco's influence on a wide range of music in the years to come.

Punk only managed to displace all the Genesis, Yes and Pink Floyd albums from the 6th Form common room record player. These students would use what they heard in the (traditional) Punk records to form the wall-of-noise guitar sound that would make up the 80's Indie bands. And thats it.

Disco begat Rap, Hip-Hop, Electro and Dance and the many off-shoots including today's general Chart-Pop sound

>>> It was Disco that *physically* displaced all the lumpen drudgery from the charts; that cleared the decks with a new sound.

This seems to imply a) that pre-disco there was a load of lumpen drudgery in the charts, and b) post-disco there wasn't.

I don't think I'm convinced. Especially when this is followed by the claim that

>>> Disco begat Rap, Hip-Hop, Electro and Dance and the many off- shoots including today's general Chart-Pop sound.

Again, if you say so, I believe you. But to me, that music is... lumpen drudgery. Maybe one lump of drudgery has replaced another.

Ever had a good look at what the US charts were like around, say, 1982 ? Nothing was displaced, believe me.

I was at an exhibition of Hipgnosis album sleeves in the Parco Gallery, Shibuya. Now, in this room punk really didn't happen. Storm Thorgerson's Daliesque images evolved slowly through the late 60s, the 70s, the 80s and 90s. The conceits got bigger and slicker -- a tethered pig at Battersea becomes a million beds on a beach. Dave Mason in a doorway becomes a man with bulbs all over his suit. The punk explosion is a muffled one, somewhere far offstage. (That's another show. Check the Visionaire Gallery.)

I looked at one rather elegant poster for the 1975 Knebworth Festival. A very Kraftwerky motorik image of a highway, scattered with drawings of odd little mechanical parts, and down below, on the sea, a castle. Artists advertised included Captain Beefheart. It was so 1975, so poignant, because I knew what was in store. That castle was for the chop, for starters. Germanic themes would be banished by punk, not returning until 1980 and New Order. (Five years hard labour for German motorik! Five years of council estate cliches! They sentenced me to twenty years of 'Boredom, boredom!') The castle theme wouldn't return until Ten Pole Tudor's 'Swords of a Thousand Men'.

The next day, I was in a cafe with Hitoshi Okamoto, the editor of a Japanese magazine called Relax. We were talking about the differences between western magazines and Japanese ones. 'In Relax you don't use stylists?' I asked. Okamoto said he didn't like stylists. 'In Shinto we say there is a god in everything,' he told me, 'so everything and everyone has a style you should respect. No need for stylists, who all think they're God!'

I told him his magazine had a much friendlier tone than a western magazine. Instead of cowing the reader into submission with images of aspirational opulence, Relax just presents cool things, photographed simply and freshly, and says 'Check it out!'

Why is that relaxed tone of friendliness less common in London style mags like The Face, Dazed, Sleaze Nation? Maybe it's because of punk. Flip through i-D and you'll see the real legacy of punk in the snotty attitude and sneery poses of the models. And, ironically, you'll see the real legacy of i-D (real people on the street, wearing what they've chosen themselves) in Japanese magazines, where they do just that: photograph people on the street.

The rot set in when punk's emphasis on amateurism got taken over by professionals. When bands who could play had to pretend they couldn't, just to be on the right side of punk. When that famous starey sneer got co-opted as just another meaningless rock and roll gesture (hello, Billy Idol!) rather than a way to stay sharp, aware and cynical.

Wanna know about punk? Just ask a stylist.

...left right left right...

second, punk's contribution has nothing to do with music, it is all about the business and promotional model it left behind. This is why punk is important, and why marginal western music was never the same after it. Punk mattered because it brought about the ability to put out your own records on your own terms, through indie labels with specialized distro, advertised in fanzines. That is why punk matters, because without the network it created and the ideas it generated, indie and what grew out of it would not exist in the same way.

The other thing that was not brought up was how the punk disaspora helps open the doors for indie electronic music. In 78-80 alot of material sneaked through the cracks of punk rock that is utterly influential today. Stuff like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, The Normal/mute records et al, Suicide, The Screamers, Kraftwerk anything covered by nu musick. All of that stuff saw the light of day because punk provided some kind of context and media outlet.

You cannot ignore what grew out of the space that punk created. The ideas that came out of that period utterly defined the future out music in general. Nick Momus would be a concervative, sexually repressed public school master in the real world if it were not for Stiff Records. :)

Consider this possibility: punk never breaks out in the seventies, and instead of a huge explosion, people just get tired of the mainstream music of the era and a gradual turnover occurred. Maybe the record industry would have gone through a contraction, and talented and musically-inclined young folk might have revitalized the pop music of the day instead of being wildly nihilistic and trying to tear the world apart. Chart pop today might not be so hideously shallow, and indie music might not be so insular and self-indulgent. I love punk and its antecedents, but sometimes I wonder if I would better enjoy this music if it didn't feel it *HAD* to be so anti- chart-pop. And I'm sure someone will make the argument that lots of punk/indie incorporates elements of chart pop, but it's not exactly free trade if you know what I mean.

On the question about indie labels, I just can't accept your claim, Mike, that punk put them on the map. As someone pointed out in another thread, at the time the Pistols signed to them both A&M and Virgin were independent labels. Virgin was an indie born out of hippy, krautrock and prog (Gong, Faust, Mike Oldfield).

We shouldn't underestimate Chris Blackwell's contribution with Island, an indie focused on reggae. There were plenty of little indie labels before punk. Punk bands like the Pistols mostly ignored them and tried to sign to majors, to get their 'cash from chaos'. It was the squatty hippy bands like PragVec, Here And Now and Scritti Politti, anarchists who made the transition from pre-punk to post-punk, who signed to labels like Rough Trade, derided by the punks for its 'brown rice' politics.

These were the labels who pioneered the 'alternative' business structure. Thank Richard Branson!

I hate her because she is bold I despise her because she is bold

etc . . . except this is my own stupid example, his were much better . . . I kept his answers for a while but then I stopped because I thought I better not. But what I was thinking is, isn't it good that there's no recognition of illiterate writing? It's still secret. Except oops, I'm talking about it. Just keep this between us, ok.

I did, but I interrupted some obsequies she was levelling at a photographer. Then she had to call the bookers to get some 'girls'. Then she had to call a publicist to see if it was okay to borrow the clothes.

Stylists are like those girls in school who always dissed the weird kids, their music, their clothes, everything...until they latched onto some guy who exhibited some of those same tastes and flourishes. Then, miraculously, all these things were acceptable to them. They're the main beneficiaries of the fash-economy boom precisely because they are compliant, even within a certain fashionable edginess, and will always do what the boss says.

These are not really creative people. These are swivelheads looking for a line to toe.

Too many things in the run-up to punk made it sure to happen: good omens like Bowie, Stonewall and the Situationists or bad atmospheres provided by Vietnam, Cold War, the energy crisis, Conservative politics, yada yada. If it had never happened I don't think we'd be necessarily listening to 30-minute guitar solos or great big space operas. If it had never happened, quite a few of my friends would be doomed to life as worker bees in small towns, elitists in larger ones or patients in sanatoriums. They would not be artists or musicians or writers.

Me, I'd probably be in a house in Primrose Hill writing my tenth play for my lover and muse to star in, procrastinating to the chagrin of an agent my work subsidised, ordering around architects, not really concerned with trying to make the world a more egalitarian place to live in, chuckling over those I'd left behind the moment I published my first book at 16. I'd probably be one of those Queen Bee women used to having my intellectual pick of the men at the expense of their mousy little wives, a former scapegoat whose idea of victory in life would lie in becoming the bully. I'd probably be more successful, but I'd be an utter shit.

Anyone else have any idea where they would be, and does it fill them with as much ambivalence as it does me?

To contradict myself, I must say that of course many of our oldest books were "written" by illiterates--the prolific Anonymous, Homer, and anyone else who was rich or lucky enough to have a scribe write it down for them eventually. Jesus never wrote a single word that we know of, and I'm not sure about Buddha. The tradition for thousands of years was of course oral. And aural--just like punk.

There has been a sort of underground tradition of "outsider" writers, many who were artists or musicians as well. Their work might just as well have been scrawled on prison walls as in bloodied notebooks. Paul Childs, whose work was available in View magazine in the 1940's, is one of my favorites. He writes the way Teenage Jesus And The Jerks sounded. Wolfi and Darger were others. An anthology begs to be compiled. Someone out there, please!

Theories on punk:

a) Punk never happened. Certainly most people I went to high school with couldn't name any punk bands; college classmates might come up with one or two. This is not a put-down; it's just that most people weren't looking that way and haven't looked back. Many people around my age would consider Sting a punk rocker. The closest punk has come to them is perhaps a little more leather than there used to be in the fall collection and a fear that their children might want that new Blink 182 album, whatever they are.

b) Punk is always happening. Every time I see a 13-year-old with a mohawk, I smile but also think, "Surely they can do better than that!" (But then people of my age imitated our hippie older siblings and grew quite easily into that wasted Allman or Doobie Brothers look.) Punk happens every time someone discovers a Germs album in the fifty-cent bin, takes it home, and contemplates if Kim Darby's suicide was more aesthetically fitting than Ian Curtis's or Kurt Cobain's. Punk is happening not so much in Britain as in Bhutan, where television is brand-new and kids are wearing World Wrestling Federation T-shirts under their saffron robes. Punk in its guise as anarchy may have happened in Nepal, where a government official described the recent combination regi-/fratri-/matri-/patri-/sorori- /dei-/sui- cide as "Like those mass killings that happen all the time in American high schools." ("Titus Andronicus" therefore being no more or less newsworthy than Columbine.)

c) Punk happened a long time ago. See Greil Marcus, "Lipstick Kisses." Hundreds of years before Joey Ramone was born. Tour the Paris riots of '68. Lunch with the Diggers. Go back in time and stop the Situationists before they invent Malcolm McLaren. Punk is history, therefore it doesn't matter, does it?

d) Punk happened the wrong way. I mean, yet more electric guitars? Wouldn't it have been easier to program a synthesizer and wear Star Trek unitards instead of designer bondage wear? Weren't the Silver Apples more truly punk than The Seeds? Isn't the sound of a Moog short-circuiting more exciting than a Fender crashing into an amp? Is rage better expressed through satire than simple sarcasm? Aren't we ever going to get to the future?

e) Punk is yet to happen. Some day something will come along to truly change us all. It wasn't electronica, but it will probably be electronic. It ain't hip-hop, but it won't deny that influence. Maybe Elvis will arise from the grave. Anything is possible...

Not in the late 70's. Even quite basic synthesisers were relatively expensive in those days. And the average guitar-toting punk thought them effete. Gary Numan, the Human League and other synth-pop pioneers were on the receiving end of quite conservative criticism from the punk scene along the lines of 'it's not real music is it'.

Rule of thumb: any music form termed 'effete' is automatically at least 10 times more interesting, complex and stylish than anything produced by its critics!

(uncanny. I read David's post while listening to and being frustrated with some Peter Howell demos for Doctor Who in 1980: the *exact* moment when chartpop overtook the Radiophonic Workshop in innovation terms.)

Suzy, glad you pointed out (one of) the origins of "punk"--that's always been in the back of my mind, too. Although I must profess I claimed to hate disco in 1978. (This was before "Funkytown," of course.)

All right, I'll try to shut up and let the rest of you speak...

If classic rock were actually epitomized by "Rocket Queen" & "Welcome to the Jungle", the world would be a much better place. (Though it's plain to see that the agressiveness that typified _Appetite..._ was a one-off deal. I blame Matt Sorum.)

Erm, excuse me. I don't intend this to be my *official* reply to my own thread.

It wasn't anti-pop, though. The impression that I get is that many of the early punk bands sincerely thought they were gonna be the next big thing, and certainly weren't hoping for mere cult status. And once it became clear that they would never have a shot at mainstream success (at least in the US), THEN it became anti-pop and turned into hardcore and indie-rock and whatever else. I personally like to blame Bob Seger, Foreigner and their listeners for this.

THIS is where my official response begins. But no time NOW for full-on exploration.

Promises promises.

I still try to oppose all rock 'n' roll, but sometimes I've failed.

That would make them about as radical as, hmmm, Rod Stewart !

um, were those real strings on smiths records then?

Tho de-inventing the Monks wd have made near-zero diff, I suspect: NOT because they're not grate (if they are grate), but because their presence has been ultra-slow burn low-key, to say the least.

A defn of punk which predates Elvis is of course OK: question wasw, How wd things be difft [the thing] had not occurred?

nothing else. no stylistic limits, no specific genre, no particular class of person or amount of musicianship.

NO RULES.

you do what feels good to you.

thats punk.

and people would be doing it whether or not john lydon had sneered "god save the queen" onto vinyl or not.

The Pistols seemed to set the agenda, although clearly, the social political climate was ripe for just such discontent and antipathy, but without them, specifically without Lydon's vision, would a.n.other have attempted such brash and withering political attacks? Perhaps yes, perhaps no, whatthefuck? But looking at history, there are plenty of examples of individuals and groups who have deliberately set out to assault the superstructure of society and express vitriolic disgust at its apparatus. The Berlin Dadaists are prime examples, and punks of the finest order to boot. This could be taken to suggest that there is no shortage of people to queuing up to have a go. I mean there are always alternatives, but when the times are high, they seem to be less visible. And back in the late 70's, things was arguably pretty shit.

So deinventing the Pistols might not have neutered punk quite so acutely as one might first imagine, although the accomplishment with which they and McLaren played the media's need to give the swirling distaste and disatisfaction a face might have been sorely missed. I'm wondering who else could have played the game at that time quite so effectively or so articulately?

Also, remember that punk begot post-punk which begot a LOT of modern day electronic music; Id say more-so then Disco.

To close, someone mentioned Kraftwerk, and Id like to add: no matter how hard I try, I still cannot take them seriously.

sex pistols' sound was a slight variant on rock blueprint. that menat that it didn't leave room for bands to do things that were wildly different anyway.

''Also, remember that punk begot post-punk which begot a LOT of modern day electronic music; Id say more-so then Disco.''

really?!

But that isn't true. Nobody wanted to sound like the Sex Pistols. I remember listening to 'Anarchy In The UK' when it was released and my friend and I couldn't make head or tail of it - it just sounded like mid tempo rock. The Damned, Clash and Buzzcocks were more what the next wave wanted to sound like - hence people like the Lurkers who thought the way to go was to make the Clash sound laid-back.

Obviously there are all sorts of interconnections along those lines, but in my view what happened, broadly, is that Disco led directly to House which in turn led to most of the dance music that came later; but paradoxically a lot of the people that were turned onto House and later dance musics did come from a post-punk, disco-hating background. People like that often still have difficulty with the Disco->House progression because it happened invisibly and underground so it appeared that House was something completely new when it surfaced. I think that murky transition period (early to mid '80s) is still not very well documented.

(Apropos of nothing, as Mr. Matos and I have long agreed on, Like Punk Never Happened by Dave Rimmer is an essential book.)