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

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.