Punk

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This is a question for people who didn't experience punk firsthand (sorry o wise eldersaurs!)

How did the ideas/legacy/presence of punk affect your listening to and thinking about music?

(I didn't say it was a small question)

And do you still feel it as a presence within pop music and culture? Does it affect current music? Does it affect how you approach the music that came before it?

I'm interested in 'my' generation of listeners (30somethings) but also especially in 20somethings and younger - and in British people especially.

Comments

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

By the time I got to punk, it had been affected by grunge and other horror and there was the distant glint of Aiden coming over the horizon. Despite this, it is my favourite musical genre 4 lyfe and I know its aesthetics shape my thoughts about other songs quite heavily.

I like the frustration that powers punk... actually, no, obviously I don't like it but I relate to it and it's the widdling time-wasting pissing about slapping itself on the back of other music that makes me furious. Which is why I don't think much of the Sex Pistols.

Punk, to me, in a 'contemporary to myself' sense (and no previous punk music is punk to latter generations, IMO) was Skunk Anansie, The Offspring and Rancid. They were all only just about contemporary to me but still, I can remember them happening. I never realised they were punk at the time I listened to them a lot, though- I'd assumed that was a genre only found in strange places to which I had never been, like Manchester or other Angry Northern metropolitan areas; punk, in my head, was something you did because Thatcher had shut the mines down and this never corrected itself in my head until I realised, aged fourteen, that it was in fact QUITE, QUITE MAD.

The odd thing is that the attitude dubdobdee mentioned, regarding all the older generation's music being bollocks according to punk is strangely dead now, as I suspect punk to be except in isolated pockets; musicians seem to want to earnestly proclaim their debts to and love for previous masters and the grovelling of artists to proclaim themselves heirs to [insert punk artist being plagiarised by band here] is just embarassingly shit. 'Hi everybody, we're punk because we smoked our first cigarettes aged seven to a Sonic Youth record. That is totally what all this is about- check out my Che Guevara shirt. Of course I think The Ramones are god and no modern music can ever really compare; I fall beneath the genius of my forebears because [ageing rockist journo/broadcaster of choice] is RIGHT and TRUE and they tell me what to think. Yeah, punk!' Actually this is making me really angry.

Essentially; I currently feel there is a return to the restrictive social attitudes, albeit in a very different format, that created the roaring fury of punk. I don't know if this was even remotely relevant to the question you asked and I'm not sure how I got here.

Is this all with any reference to the attempt by NME to get God Save The Queen to number one?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

AKSHULLY, that para re: punk contemporaneous to myself is bullshit. Those were punk bands which I love but the fact remains that my punk rock is Girls Aloud.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

No, it's Pitchfork Column what-am-I-going-to-write time again!

The NME thing is a good example of something though - I read yr comment on that BBC blog thing. I just don't know what they think it would achieve even if they managed it (which they very obviously won't) - a) the Pistols tried to do it themselves for the Jubilee 5 yrs ago and nobody cared, b) the band NOT getting to #1 (or GETTING to #1 and being STOPPED from doing so) is surely too perfect to mess about with!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Presumably people using 'punk' as a self-label now are doing so (partly) to point up their difference to right-now music, which deserves destruction - but the thing with punk was the belief that reacting against current music might involve also reacting against everything that had led to current music, even the good bits.

(Or if not believing that, at least pretending that they did, or being willing to act as if they did.)

(But maybe I've way overestimated the apocalyptic tone of punk)

[(Anonymous)]

You can never overestimate the apocalyptic tone of anything from the 1970s – that we were on the brink of disaster was the belief of folk as varied as the NF, Lord Hailsham and Hughie Green on the right, Oliver Postgate and Margaret Drabble in the liberal centre – while plenty on the far left thought that the system was one last shove from crumbling. Statistically (crime, economic growth, the unemployment that seemed terrible but in retrospect was only bad compared to the near-full employment of the 60s and tiny by 80s standards, and much less unequal than England today), it looks like a country in decent shape. (Reading Popular has produced far too much thinking about this subject...)
mcarratala

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

cosine ^^^

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I think punk is by nature inherently apocalyptic, in the sense of 'an end to what has gone before' sort of apocalypse, rather than 'whoa, shit, ragnarok.'

I think people using 'punk' as a self-label now are just using it to be snotty. I know "punk" kids and they're all 'whoa whoa whoa I'm so traumatised by this modern world, let's go to Topshop and get eating disorders' and it's really quite distressing. Whether the original punks were like that or not, it's not the way I feel things should be on a, like, emotional level.