Punk was Rubbish!
Published November 14, 2002
I posted a link to this article by Nigel Williamson months ago on Where Worlds Collide, when I first started blogging, but at the time I didn't make any further comments. But Eric's recent Bohemian Rhapsody rant reminded me of it.
You can read the whole article here
A cold and cheerless Saturday night in December 1975. Spend the rest of Saturday evening getting pointlessly drunk in Henekey's Wine Bar in Bromley High Street, London, or go the short distance to Ravensbourne College of Art to see an unknown band called the Sex Pistols? We opt for the latter and hand over our 50p at the door. Within minutes we wish we'd stayed in the pub, for there is more future in getting mindlessly obliterated on Newcastle Brown than in listening to this racket.The Sex Pistols can barely play their instruments. Each tuneless thrash that passes for a song sounds the same as the one before. And while the spotty, under-nourished front man knows how to sneer, he certainly doesn't know how to sing. After retrieving our Afghan coats from the cloakroom, we shuffle off into the night, back to our squat to skin up a spliff and listen to the new Little Feat album.
Some months later, we set off to see an R&B band called Roogalator at the 100 Club. They have cancelled and the replacement is the Jam, playing one of their first London gigs. They are almost worse than the Sex Pistols and we ask for our money back.
Yes, I admit I never got punk. I was 22 years old in 1976, and by rights I should have loved it. But I hated its lack of imagination, its absence of musicality and its empty nihilism. Yet today, as we face a nostalgic jubilee around the 25th anniversary of the Pistols' God Save the Queen, it has become heretical to point out that punk actually wasn't very good.
He's probably exaggerating things just a bit, but the article does nail three big myths about the 70s punk explosion in Britain. Those three myths being:
Punk was invented in England
Which completely ignores earlier American bands such as the New York Dolls etc.
Punk was the pivotal moment in the whole of music history. A generation of music journalists that grew up at that time have perpertuated this one - it's the eternal hubris of generationism; that the important thing in their lives is the most important thing ever.
The music scene immediately before punk was uniquely awful. To me, an unrepentant prog-rock fan, this is the most damaging of all the myths. Were the mid-70s really worse than the late-80s? Or the last couple of boy-band dominated years? If punk really was a revolution against bland corporate stadium rock, then corporate blandness was back with a vengeance ten years later, only far blander and far more corporate. Surely 70s Led Zeppelin were better than 80s Bon Jovi? 70s Genesis better than er, 80s Phil Collins?
- Punk was Rubbish!
- Published: November 14, 2002
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- Section: Music
- Filed Under: Music: Rock
- Writer: Tim Hall
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Tim, I am not unsympathetic to prog rock, but you simply cannot compare it to punk - two entirely different sets of aesthetics. Prog is about precision, musicality, sophistication, punk is about power, simplicity, rebellion: it was a return to the rock 'n' roll aesthetic. Prog is art music.
No one thinks Brits invented punk, BUT it is where punk became culturally important first.
As far as the sound of punk, it wasn't "invented" at all. There is a pretty much unbroken line of raw, loud garage rock bands stretching al the way back to at least the early '60s - what was different in the '70s was a specific attitude and worldview to go along with the sound.
Eric, I know we're coming at this from the same viewpoint almost and I'm just nitpicking, but where do you get the idea that "Prog is art music" from?
Prog is only art if you're talking about chocolate box art, the stilted concept of art as something purposely florid, complicated and aloof, an adolescent's view of art that is about 100 years behind the times and where technique is mistaken for inspiration, bombast for passion, excess for ambition. If prog is art music then it's the sort of art you get on the cover of a bad fantasy novel.
Now punk really was art rock -- half the original London punk scene came out of London art schools. Punk was dada with a splash of abstract expressionism and a big slice of half-understood situationism dropped into the mix. It soon degenerated into mere paint-by-numbers of course, but for a brief burning moment punk was pure art, achieving the transcendental intensity that all real art should aspire to -- it made you feel more alive....
Yes, punk had a completely different aesthetic from prog rock; punk was agressive and cathartic, while prog rock was complex, subtle and appealed to a different set of emotions.
I don't care whether something's 'art' or not, as far as I'm concerned it's all music.
What I do care about is the way commentators ritually dismiss all progressive rock as worthless, and claim that punk had rendered it obselete. That attitude is just musical Stalinism.
Punk was rubbish!
I should know, it finished my career as a broadcaster and the public never recovered from the shock of my departure.
Anyway, that poseur McLaren didn't invent anything he destroyed it by commercialising and turning what had untill then been a small but vibrant American underground scene into a circus act parody - who knows what the early 1970's American punk scene would have thrown up if sharks like him hadn't been on the scene agitating the public to relieve them of their money.
McLaren we can thank for those 6 inch high plastic dolls made in China with safety pins, chains and multi-coloured mohicans the stallholders sell outside Windsor Castle to tourists - those dolls are the image most people have of what punks were.
As far as punks go today, they're just a bunch of Hot-Topic Heroes compared to the dangerous animals that put a premature end to my broardcasting career.
Bill Grundy.
I think most are missing the point. Was any of the music actually good?
Go listen to the Buzzcocks or even Squeeze - which certainly started as a punk band - and tell me their lyrics aren't among the best written and most poetic of the rock and roll era.
Dave
I think that the best punk is brought out at the presence of depression and desperation, thats why the skate punk from the 1970's+ is the best because they try hard to play their best. Mainly because its all they got, and hey, its great. All of bands from that subculture, are actually good at instruments, many can play trumpets and really hard quitar riffs, while the music has meaning and sounds good.
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Some dodgy reasoning here. Just because punk wasn't a uniquely British phenomena doesn't disqualify it or mean anything -- in my book punk was invented in Germany by a bunch of American GIs called the Monks in the mid-60s, but that's by the by. I don't think anyone has ever claimed that punk was the "pivotal moment in the whole of music history". It may have seemed like it at the time to the people involved but pretty soon afterwards they were probably the most cynical about punk's purpose and achievements.
The music scene immediately before punk was uniquely awful -- well, yes it sure seemed that way at the time. The fact that it's almost as bad now and nothing really revolutionary is happening makes some of us look back on punk with even more of a nostalgic fondness.
Oh yeah -- if punk stopped one susceptible young person in 1976 from buying Tales from the Topographic Ocean or Brain Salad Surgery then it was all worth it, kids.