Was punk essentially a conservative counter-revolution?

more importantly what 'revolution' was punk countering?

also you seem to be saying that 60s counter-culture was an 'outgrowth' of 60s pop culture -- we-ell, you know.

Uh, reggae anyone?

As Miles said, it's more complex than I portrayed, ideologically at least. I don't think that punk was about the betrayal of counterculture ideals, though. It was about turning your back on the counterculture, it was about nihilism and outrage as a raison d'être.

Musically, things are simpler. Three-chord rock songs with guitar, bass and drums simply was retro. As someone pointed out above, what came immediatetly afterwards - postpunk or however you like to term it - started hybridizing forms again. But I wonder how much punk had to do with that except as a negative thing to bounce off? Why did Warsaw turn into Joy Division? Punk gave them a very basic template, but JD became interesting almost in spite of that.

And yes, reggae was a part of punk. You've not actually heard the Clash have you?

As for punk being a revolt against specialisation, that's true. And I think it's also true that there was a conservative, Luddite aspect to that. Punk wasn't about the studio, it wasn't about experimentalism or the avant garde. It framed the Luddite argument in terms of being against the sort of faux-virtuosity of Yes or Pink Floyd. But babies get thrown out with the bathwater. To answer my own question above, one of the things that turned Warsaw into Joy Division was the studio. At the same time as punk, there was a lot of studio-intensive music happening too, in the shape of disco and also experimental stuff of the Germans and Bowie/Eno etc. With hindsight, it looks like the studio-based stuff that was happening in the mid-seventies was the shape of things to come rather than the back-to-basics of punk.

live sex pistols bootlegs sound much rawer, dangerous and uncontained than recorded pistols.

Sorry, got to stop you there.

This is an inaccurate and misleading definition of punk that was imposed by the media after the event (certainly after it had started) and which only ever fitted a relatively small sub-section of the original punk scene. If there was a "straightjacket" it existed in this definition, not in the scene it tried - and failed - to decribe.

There was certainly a "back to basics" ethos about punk but what the media didn't ever seem to (want to?) be able to grasp was that this didn't necessarily relate to the type of music so much as the approach to making it.

Leave your preconceptions at the door and take a look at when all the so-called "new wave" and "post-punk" bands actually appeared and started gigging and I'm sure you'll rapidly discover that; far from coming afterwards as the media would have you believe, a great many of these bands were actually part of the original punk scenes but either didn't fit into this narrow new definition of "punk" that the media were so anxious to impose, or deliberately went out of their way to change so as to to avoid doing so.

Could it possibly be that the media felt that if all these "punk" bands didn't sound the same, it would make them too difficult to market?!?

This is eloquently evidenced by the media's subsequent invention of further meaningless terms with which to describe all the bands from the punk scenes that inconveniently didn't fit within the straightjacket of their new "punk" brand; deliberately chosing misleading terms ("new wave"; "post-punk") in an attempt to conceal their fundamental lack of understanding.

Blondie, Devo, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Television, and in the UK The Banshees, Buzzcocks, Fall, Joy Division, Magazine, Slits, XTC, Wire etc. etc. etc. were all punk bands - but none of them ever fitted this narrow definition.

By 1980 not even the (former) Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned or indeed Richard Hell sounded like the media's idea of "punk" any more

Now, what was the question again?

Alex is absolutely right.

Actually, all of what Stewart said, with Alex on top.

i.e. I wouldn't be starting from where you're standing.

I think it's interesting that you seem to think that the change of name from Warsaw to Joy Division must be evidence of some defining sesimic shift in attitude and approache rather than (as was in fact the case) simply evidence of them getting pissed off with continually being confused with a band from London called Warsaw PAKT.

"Is Berlin-period Bowie punk, for example?"

Obviously not.

It is where Warsaw got their name from 'though.

Miles: "no-one thinks of JD as being a punk band"

I think most people would agree that while new wave is some kind of evolution from punk, it's not actually punk. I don't see why Stewart sees this as a problem and why, despite the fact that they're no specific rupture point between the two, you can't talk about them as distinct things. After all, no form of music floats free, unattached from other previous forms of music. (Anyway, the semantic discussion seems to have killed my point, which I thought might have been an interesting one, that there might have been something inherently conservative about punk, compared with what came before and after.)

The supposedly "pure" punk sound survived, but as a genre it shows some polish by now, which is all well and good if you want that sort of thing. There's something appealing about exploring new sounds and having it be a little ragged.

Yeah, it's weird that in America, it was kind of the other way round: punk evolved into hardcore which was, with a number of exceptions, musically regressive and anti-experimental

Let's try this again one more time.

The things that subsequently came to be known as Punk, New-Wave and Post-Punk were all originally part of the same scene - confusingly enough this was called the punk scene.

Some other people who didn't really understand it came along and split that scene almost randomly into three sections according to different sonic characteristics because it made more sense to them that way, and made up two new terms so that each bit could have it's own name.

They then told everyone else that there were other, far more complicated reasons, for them having to split it like this - and even attempted to create a false chronology to suggest that one bit had evlved from another; but actually that was just a load of self-serving bullshit.

One of those bits - the bit that reflected a "return to the roots of rock'n'roll, in terms of instrumentation, chords, three-minute songs, etc." - they called punk.

So to wonder now why everything that was defined as being punk shared those characteristics, is about as fruitful as wondering why the juice of all of those fruits with the orange-coloured rinds and the sweet edible pulp that everyone calls oranges, mysteriously tastes of orange juice.

xx-post

You're obviously not familiar with the UK's "Oi!" scene; an evolution (if reverting to knuckle-dragging moronity can be described using that expression!) of the UK punk scene - the emergence of which, incidentally is what hastened a large number of punks and punk bands to distance themselves as rapidly as possible from the violent, slobbering, lobotimised monster they'd created.

Correct.

One could question this claim. I don't really see punk as a return to R&B, country, and rockabilly as such, which I would basically consider the roots of rock'n'roll. I don't think it was even a return to Buddy Holly or Chuck Berry or Elvis with, I dunno, R&B chord progressions and session players and songs about cars and girls. (If anything, a band like Aerosmith may have come closer to this, even to the extent that The Clash did have some of these elements. Zeppelin did cover 50s r'n'r songs in concert all the time but I don't think Warsaw or the Banshees did, say.). The often abstract, self-consciously British, and highly oppositional lyrical content as well as its delivery don't see very retrograde or conservative to me. The distorted unaccented eighth-note power chords don't seem to me like a return to the musical roots of rock either. If it was going back to anything, it would seem to be things like 60s garage rock and simpler styles of 70s hard rock, which weren't that retro at that time. (Maybe it was a reaction against Pink Floyd but was it a reaction against Alice Cooper?)

this thread is retarded..

I have friends that were around for the original wave of punk in the States, and they seem to have a pretty broad definition of what punk was....for example my friend has had what's basically a thuggish Oi/street punk band for the last 20 years with multiple lineups, but he's a huge krautrock and Kraftwerk fan....loves the B52s.....I get the sense that the scene, at least for the people I know, was so small in terms of people back then that everyone was basically part of the same boat....dancey new wave, hardcore, wierdo post punk, whatever.....

I'm surprised that no-one has challenged this: even from the other side of the Atlantic it was clear that there was a wild ferment of experimentation around the USHC scene in the 80s, more often than not combined with an uncompromisingly radical political stance.

(I have boxes of yellowing copies of MAXIMUMROCKNROLL I'd be more than happy to drop on the toes of doubters.)

Ultimately pretty much any movement is a mix of old and new elements, I guess.

Yes, on the conservative end, punk can be looked at as a refocusing of rock and roll, purging all sorts of ephemera (straitjacketing as you put it, though I would argue that refocusing is not anywhere near the same thing). But at the same time it's really just wrong to argue that punk didn't significantly expand the idea of who could play rock music, let alone what rock music actually was (not to mention that a significant proportion of UK acts didn't even consider themselves to be playing rock music anymore).

And there's nothing more ridiculous than the argument that punk was musically homogenous - I mean, seriously, just listen to the original NY scene alone and there's really quite a variety in presentation, instrumentation, and sound. Bring in the UK, LA, Cleveland, etc., and the picture gets so colorful it's really amazing. Even hardcore - certainly a far more legitimately straitjacketed strain of punk - flowered creatively by 1984 or so in so many different ways.

As far as punk and new wave go, they were synonymous terms for years, and I believe it was really only Seymour Stein deciding to differentiate the two for marketing purposes that really separated them.

I didn't challenge it cuz I was too lazy to read everything, I was late to the party....

but yeah: Um....Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, NYC noize hustlers, Pere Ubu, No New York, Husker Du, Devo, Talking Heads, Ministry/industrial disco type stuff, Fugazi, Big Black....8 million more examples to refute this could be listed....

Probably because it was such a patently silly statement

As for Pere Ubu, they had the post-punk sound in 1975!

word...Devo predates punk, too - right?

yeah, so limeys:

WE INVENTED THE POST-PUNK REMIX!!!!

I'm gonna fuckin' do it ....

http://myxo.css.msu.edu/danimal/gallery/albums/seniorweek/Mike_goes_nuts_with_the_lighter_fluid_at_Stewart_Park.thumb.jpg

Was punk revolutionary in Britain in '76? Was it still revolutionary in, say, San Francisco in '80? I would tend to say yes. But, if punk started as a rebellion against mid-70's MOR aesthetics and their corporately marketed orthodoxy, pledging mindless allegiance to its form in another age, the present, say, is to fall prey to the conservatism of the beast it supposedly set out to slay. That that form and its narrowly defined aesthetics have survived long enough to be co-opted by racists, be re-discovered by new generations, and be cherished by original fans speaks volumes about the form's (not necessarily the content's) enduring appeal.

How many of those would you class as hardcore bands? I'd say two, maybe three or four (Minutemen and Meat Puppets being moot points after their initial records), and Fugazi weren't part of any pioneering movement. Husker Du were one of the obvious exceptions I'd cite. The early HC bands from New York and Boston were primitive by design though, for example.

WHAT??!?!? that's silly, there's 10,000 bands that sound like them.

not that many, except for early Meat Puppets and Husker Du....or if you say Minor Threat for Fugazi....My point was that US punk turned into a LOT more than just hardcore....

WHAT??!?!? that's silly, there's 10,000 bands that sound like them

OTM x 1000....jesus yeah you must not listen to much US indie/punk stuff....

what does this mean?

Fugazi existed in 1987, I think.

Ralf - It's not revisionist at all. As already explained, Subway Sect, Wire, Buzzcocks/Magazine, Banshees etc were active right at the start, predating the likes of Lurkers / UK Subs and so on.

I'm not sure where the first use of New Wave is, but I first recall it with that red album cover on phonogram, and that had The Ramones and Patti Smith and, erm, The Boomtwon Rats on it. New Wave and Punk were pretty much interchangeable, and only used because 'Punk' bands were banned from playing many venues. I can recall an article in Sounds about the Jam using the term. Only on the margins, say Squeeze, Ian Dury, possibly even The Police or Dire Strates, was it a distinction made.

my point was that hardcore pretty much became the defining name, and defining face, for American punk music

In a populist/media sense (the terms in which Ralf was talking) I think this is true. Quincy was never bussed in to give guidance to hordes of rampaging Swans fans, was he?

take a little issue with this:

Even the classic 1984 records that hardcore made possible--Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade, Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, the Replacements' Let It Be, and the Meat Puppets' Meat Puppets II--have been reclaimed as "indie rock" by anyone who cares enough to remember them.

1. i'm not sure if they were really considered hardcore at the time. were they?

To me, hardcore was nothing more than the new all-ages punk culture: You knew it when you saw it and felt it. It was the difference between Hüskers' "Statues" and "In a Free Land," between the Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia" and "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." It was speed, politics, and creative energy. "Thrash" was just one style; hardcore was the whole outlook.

I was probably never hardcore enough to be an authority on these things, but the idea of hardcore being musically conservative seems laughable. In my town, between '82-'85, the same kids went to see Hüsker, Sonic Youth, the Descendents, Imminent Attack, and other bands at a tiny local community center. Between '83-'86, the same kids went to see Hüsker, D.O.A., Black Flag, the Replacements, the Minutemen, Naked Raygun, at a larger venue (a gymnasium). Over this span of years, the local Minor Threat knockoff band Juvenile Truth rapidly transformed into the industrial noise band Ribfest, which then became the New Age guitar duo Grace (who opened for Henry Rollins's first spoken word appearance). Nobody would argue that they stayed hardcore, but that's what got them going.

The hardcore kids who I remember putting on shows and joining bands were by and large super-creative, questioning, smart, open-minded, and left-leaning people. They were the same kids protesting Apartheid in '84 by building a shantytown in front of the capitol building in Madison. They were often the first teenagers to buy go-go records or hip hop or whatever. The difference being that hardcore was their identity music as well as their identity politics.

Of course, Madison was a small liberal city that very much identified with the revolutionary ideals of '68, so I'm sure this drama played out differently elsewhere...

I don't think punk was essentially conservative, nor was it a counter-revolution, since it seemed set up to counter a total lack of anything "revolutionary" (though maybe "revolutionary" is just a placeholder for "incendiary"). My big gripe with punk, and the reason I can only really get into it at a distance (or via records like Sandinista! and Fear of Music) is that I don't always take a shine to movements that are borne out of reactionary negativism. That whole "destroy the old order" schtick is a bunch of boring bullshit Legs McNeil and Malcolm McLaren like to keep telling themselves, but if the Pistols and the Ramones hadn't "saved" rock in '76, Van Halen and Judas Priest woulda in '78 (compare where the two movements were in '82: punk has either gone college rock underground or transmogrified into synthpop; metal is The Biggest Thing Fuckin' Ever, Dude).

I'd elaborate, but (a) this thread is ugly enough already; (b) The Daily Show comes on in three minutes and (c) I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.

The idea that what we now know as "post-punk" could have existed without the initial burst of what we would now call "punk" is absolutely ludicrous! Why? Because for chrissakes many of those people would not have even bothered to pick up instruments!

I'm being kind of anglocentric here, but that's mostly due to personal experience and bias.

It's likely this will appear on my gravestone.

ROCKET FROM THE TOMBS BITCHES

FCUK THE UK YOU ARE ALL GAY LISTEN TO THE SMITHS MORE DOUCHEBAGS

AND THE HAPPY MONDAYS

Do you have an athletic footware endorsement?

CLEVELAND BITCH.

whats your favorite flavor Jon?

Punk rock history though is especially humorous in that I've noticed a taint of Marxist determinism prevailing when critics talk about it. When most rock critics talk about either 1950s rock and roll or punk rock in the 1970s it is treated as a historical inevitability that was bound to happen and clues of its emergence are found everywhere in pop music's history. Every form of music that goes against the grain and shocks middle-class sensibilities and expectations is proto-punk in a sense. Horrible music is also historically justified, if only because it helped pave the way for punk rock. Similarly, Marx gave almost everything in history a pass because it was thought to be needed for the impending collapse and the emergence of the bottom to the top. What clinches it though is the fact that when the supposed "revolution" of the poor and alienated lower classes finally takes place everybody denounces it as not "really" being in the true spirit of the movement and the "true meanings" of punk rock and socialism are endlessly debated by people with time to kill (like myself).

There is actually quite a big libertarian-left tradition out there. Try Wikipedia for starters.

And some people are just too fixated with ethnicity. Yes, like all the dominant people in the rock scene at the time, and indeed since The Beatles' breakthrough, the punkers were white. But that isn't important.