Punk rock

Punk rock is a rock music genre as well as a culture that emerged in the 1970s in the United Kingdom and the United States before spreading around the world. It came about in reaction to the perceived blandness and commercialism of popular music and indeed popular culture generally in the latter twentieth century. Where popular '70s music genres like disco and soft rock—and later the pop music of the 1980s—emphasized slick studio production and glitzy clothes and hair, punk rock went in the opposite direction, featuring torn clothes, deliberately unfashionable or shocking hairstyles, and abrasive, aggressive music for which talent was often (but not always) optional. All of this was done, however, in the name of authenticity and reclaiming youth music from the deadening effects of major record labels focused on profits rather than raw, gritty art.

Culturally, punk rock shunned the materialism of consumer culture, embracing a do-it-yourself ethic in all aspects of the production of youth culture, from music to t-shirts to print media (or "zines"). Politically, punk rock manifested in a wide array of phenomena, from a nihilistic, get-drunk-and-break-things attitude to well-developed leftist and populist social movements, especially in Europe. Following its birth in the mid- to late 1970s, punk rock thrived as a subculture in the 1980s, diversifying into a profusion of subgenres before eventually being absorbed back into the mainstream in the 1990s and 2000s. At that time, an increasing number of bands found mainstream and major label success—although a DIY punk subculture free of corporate influence endured for those willing to seek it out.

Early History

The first punk bands in the mid-1970s were preceded by a handful of acts who came out of the 1960s with a more aggressive sound and style than that associated with the Summer of Love, such as the Kinks and the Who in the UK and Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5 in the United States. The band most often hailed as the "first" punk band, London's the Sex Pistols, was conceived by music promoter and edgy small businessman Malcolm McLaren. He assembled the band in 1975 from among regular customers of his clothing boutique SEX, which he ran with his girlfriend, the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood; the shop was credited with influencing the early punk style, featuring leather, spikes, and fetish wear, though many early punkers, typically poor, just ripped or painted the clothes they had and wore safety pins through their ears instead of earrings. The Sex Pistols were fronted by nineteen-year-old John Lydon, who adopted the stage name Johnny Rotten, and the band exploded onto London's pub rock scene, their gigs often accompanied by violence and general chaos as they set out to flout the normative rules of live music performance. Despite this, the band was immediately popular among a large enough segment of the public that the major labels could not ignore them, and the band was initially signed by EMI. In 1976, they released their aptly titled first single, "Anarchy in the UK." The following year, bassist Glen Matlock was ejected from the band, reputedly for being too preoccupied with musicianship, and was replaced by John Ritchie, stage name Sid Vicious, who was seen to fit better with the band's image due to his erratic behavior and minimal musical talent. Later in 1977, the Sex Pistols' only studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, was released to much attention and controversy. The year after that, the band broke up amid constant infighting. Lydon went on to form the longer-lived post-punk band Public Image Ltd, while Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose in New York City in 1979. Thus, a legend was born.

A coterie of other bands formed around the Sex Pistols in London's nascent punk scene, including the Damned, Siouxie and the Banshees, the Adverts, and many others. What many of these bands had in common was the inspiration provided by the Sex Pistols, who displayed an unprecedented lack of fear of offending the establishment, despite multiple arrests and being banned from many venues. For their detractors this was a source of moral panic, a sign of cultural decadence and decline, while for their fans it opened the door to many new avenues of personal expression—and many young people walked through it. One of the most successful London punk bands, the Clash, led the way to a more coherent social critique than the sheer chaos on offer by the Pistols and some other bands. Though they released their own sneering and dismissive songs like "I'm So Bored with the USA," the Clash also released albums like 1980's Sandinista! in homage to the leftist rebels fighting in Nicaragua, with songs that critiqued US actions in the Cold War, while blending in new musical elements like reggae.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, the band most often credited with kicking off the punk revolution is the Ramones, who formed in Queens, New York, in 1974 and released their self-titled debut album in 1976 (widely regarded as the watershed year in the formation of punk rock). Unlike many of the British punk bands, the Ramones adopted a plain-spoken uniform of straight hair, ripped jeans, white t-shirts, and leather jackets. Their musical style, also hugely influential, was derived from the pop rock of the 1960s and '70s, but greatly sped up, with short songs that often had silly or nonsensical lyrics; their debut album featured tracks like "I Don't Wanna Go down in the Basement." At their live shows, they played even faster than on their albums, with songs frequently clocking in at under 30 seconds. The Ramones toured prolifically until their final breakup in 1996, following many lineup changes, always with each member adopting a stage name ending in "Ramone." The Ramones participated in a New York City punk scene centered on a small venue in the Lower East Side of Manhattan called CBGB's, where countless influential acts got their start, including Patti Smith, Blondie, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and many others.

Overview

Although all the best-known early punk bands, such as the Sex Pistols, Clash, and Ramones, were on major labels, the genre evolved into a genuine grassroots cultural phenomenon, with major labels mostly shunning the burgeoning number of punk bands in the 1980s, or the bands themselves intentionally shunning major labels as part of an anti-corporate ideology. Instead, many enterprising bands started their own independent record labels, often centered on the scene where they were geographically located. Thus, members of Black Flag started SST Records in the Los Angeles area in 1978; members of the Dead Kennedys started Alternative Tentacles in the Bay Area in 1980; members of Minor Threat started Dischord Records in Washington, DC, in 1980; and members of Bad Religion started Epitaph Records in the LA area in 1980. Some of these small labels, many of which were started in garages and back rooms, grew larger and put out releases by hundreds of bands, some of whom moved on to national and international prominence; for example, Seattle grunge pioneers Soundgarden released their first album on SST Records in 1988 before moving to a major label and worldwide fame in the 1990s. However, many more punk labels and bands never achieved widespread success, nor did they aspire to; the ethic was DIY, art for art's sake, and sometimes, a desire for genuine social change.

Since most of these early independent labels never had anything like a marketing or PR department, the process of creating cover art for records, printing t-shirts and stickers, and setting up tours was often up to the bands. An extensive word-of-mouth network developed, with bands assembling lists of venues willing to host punk shows (they were always called "shows," not "concerts") and sharing them with other bands. Some of these venues were bars and clubs, but others were venues in name only, taking place in basements and back rooms and often being shut down by police (what passes for dancing at punk shows typically involves audience members crashing wildly into one another, a practice known as slam dancing). Show fliers were often hand-drawn and photocopied on standard copy paper and stapled around town on telephone poles. News and record reviews spread through similarly low-budget publications called zines (short for "fanzine" or "magazine") that literally anyone with access to a photocopy machine could start. A few of these zines grew large and influential, the largest in the United States being Maximum Rocknroll, which began publication in 1982 in San Francisco and achieved nationwide circulation before ceasing to publish print editions in 2019, thereafter appearing only online.

Politically, punk rock found fertile ground in the 1980s, with conservative reactions to the excesses of the 1960s taking root in both the United States and United Kingdom in the form of the tenures of US president Ronald Reagan and UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who provided the perfect figures to rebel against. One of the opening salvos came in 1981, when Alternative Tentacles released the landmark punk compilation Let Them Eat Jellybeans!, a reference to Marie Antoinette's alleged dismissive statement "Let them eat cake" in response to lower-class pleas for food in the years prior to the French Revolution—with the phrase altered in reference to Reagan's well-known fondness for jellybeans. The compilation featured tracks by seminal bands such as DOA, Black Flag, Bad Brains, and Dead Kennedys. The following year, Alternative Tentacles expanded on this feat by releasing Not So Quiet on the Western Front, this time a double album centering punk bands from Northern California and including the first-ever print issue of Maximum Rocknroll as the liner notes and lyric sheet.

In the United Kingdom, the political bent of punk was even more pronounced, as multiple openly anarchist bands formed and began campaigning for world peace and denouncing all forms of government and capitalism as inherently oppressive. Perhaps the central band in this anarcho-punk movement was Crass, whose Crass Records label released albums by bands far more radical and politically engaged than most of what was happening in the United States. Many of these bands strongly denounced the Falklands War in which the UK engaged with Argentina in 1982, and they campaigned tirelessly for nuclear disarmament amid the tensions of the Cold War.

As the decade of the 1980s wore on, though, punk became a bigger and bigger tent, with many offshoot genres and subgenres, many of them contradictory. At the start of the decade the first new development was for bands to see just how fast and angrily they could play, in contrast to bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash, who for all of their anger played music at tempos that were not unheard of. The push to play songs at blistering-fast speeds came to be known as hardcore punk, or simply hardcore. Progenitors of this genre included American bands such as Negative Approach, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains; Bad Brains were notable for being an all-Black, Rastafarian hardcore band who played music at absurdly fast speeds with a high degree of technical proficiency—while on some albums mixing it up with tracks of mellow reggae. The members of Minor Threat made the decision that they did not want to have any part of the "drunk punk" stereotype, so they launched a movement within hardcore called straightedge, seeking to normalize abstaining from alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. As with most elements of punk though, the straightedge hardcore scene had its excesses, with bands such as Boston's SSD encouraging their fans to beat up people caught smoking or drinking at their shows. On the whole, though, a subset of hardcore fans were strongly drawn in a nonviolent way to this ethic of clean living and personal empowerment. Later in the decade, some hardcore bands started incorporating elements of heavy metal, which had its own hyperfast subgenre called thrash. Thus, crossover thrash came into being, most notably with the Houston hardcore band DRI (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles) releasing a strongly metal-tinged album called Crossover in 1987.

In the UK, not all bands were political: in the late 1970s, a working-class form of punk called oi! developed. Oi! bands like Cock Sparrer, the Business, and Angelic Upstarts sang about working class discontent but with a distinctively blue-collar tinge that did not mesh well with anarcho-punk. The oi! movement included both punks and skinheads, whose shaven heads could denote any of a variety of political stances, in some cases (but not all) including overt racism. Oi! also evolved into street punk, which is characterized by the definitive look many people associate with punk rock: leather, chains, spikes, and colorful mohawk haircuts.

In tandem with all these developments, some bands that started out as punk began incorporating very different elements like new wave and art rock; they came to be known as post-punk, notably John Lydon's Public Image Ltd but also many more. Bands that went in the opposite direction from hardcore and sought to create lighter, more melodic music but still with an edge came to be known as pop punk, often drawing a major influence from the Ramones.

A watershed moment in punk history came in 1991 when a band from Washington state called Nirvana, who was prominent in the grunge scene of the 1990s but had roots in punk rock, released their album Nevermind on the major label imprint DGC Records. The album's first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," had a distinctly punk sound and an accompanying video showing high school kids slam dancing. Although Nirvana was commonly associated with grunge and alternative rock, Nevermind seemed to open the door to a large audience for a new phenomenon: punk music with high-end production values. In 1994, the Bay Area punk band Green Day, who got their start on the punk label Lookout! Records, signed to Reprise and released the album Dookie, the first of a string of hit records that made them, like Nirvana, a Grammy-winning artist. The punk band Rancid, whose genres included street punk and ska punk, held out until 2003 before switching from Epitaph to Warner Bros., where they too became a top-selling punk band. The opening decades of the twenty-first century thus saw an increasing number of punk bands, from the Offspring to Blink-182 to Sum 41, achieving unheard-of record sales on major labels and filling concert stadiums.

While for some, these developments were evidence that "punk is dead" (a riposte to the title of the 1981 album Punks Not Dead by Scottish street punk band the Exploited), for others it just meant being choosy about where they got their music. In the age of the internet, bands can put out music on a shoestring budget more easily than ever, using websites like SoundCloud and YouTube. And well into the third decade of the twenty-first century, tiny independent punk labels continued to release music by punk and hardcore bands with no hope of or interest in success as conventionally measured, playing shows in basements and small clubs with no divide at all between performer and audience, as envisioned by some of the earliest exponents of the genre.

Bibliography

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