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

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

one important thing re: punk is that ROCK ITSELF was still young, really -- only ten years since sgt pepper, just over 20 since elvis

and this was the first ever "youth-culture revolt against youth-culture goes mainstream", at least in so many words (obv mods vs rockers etc in times gone by, or skinheadism as a pocket of dissent in the late 60s)

rock's revolt against pop culture -- in elvis days or in beatles days -- was maybe a revolt against dad-pop (sinatra) or teenypop (paul anka etc), and had a very conflcted sense of itself as BCZ WE'RE YOUNG (YET WE KNOW THE SCORE = we are TRUE SECRET ADULTS) (something like that)

punk was playing off the bad present against the good past at the same time as claiming to be a year-zero renewal -- i love the pistols bcz rotten's persona and lydon's personality were just revelations to me, as a quiet middleclass country kid, i wz really uttterly in love with him (and i still kind of am, he'd really have to do something very nastily criminal indeed b4 i didn;t rep for him)

a second element which is hard today to recollect is that this was stuff you had to go out and find, and stuff from even the recent past had absolutely vanished: it didn't pour in on you through every spigot!

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

mmmm, hot and cold running lydon...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes, this prompted the qn in a sense. Because of when I started listening to pop the pre-punk period seems like a huge geological era and then the gap between punk and me is a short prehistory and then things get going, but my active listening life is now LONGER than Elvis-to-UKPunk. And the oddness of that fact (to me) is what got me thinking about how people who started listening much more recently can possibly think about or relate to these events, if they do at all.