Punk rock

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Punk rock arrived in the mid-1970s as a deliberate act of refusal. Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone put it plainly: by 1973, he knew that what was needed was "some pure, stripped down, no nonsense rock 'n' roll". The endless guitar solos, the corporate arenas, the polished studio productions, the fact that acts like Billy Joel and Simon and Garfunkel were being filed under rock and roll by some, had driven a generation to the edge of contempt. What erupted instead was something with a completely different contract between musicians and audience. Short songs. Fast tempos. Rough vocals. Stripped instrumentation. A do-it-yourself ethos that ran all the way from the garage to the record sleeve. The phrase "punk rock" itself predates the movement, drifting through early American rock criticism before it attached to a new wave of bands on two continents. By late 1976, it had become a major cultural phenomenon in the United Kingdom, and by 1977 the influence had spread worldwide. What questions does that raise? How did a musical stance rooted in 1950s rock and roll become a global counterculture? Who were the architects? What happened when punk started winning commercially? And did the movement survive its own contradictions?

• 2. Before the Word Fit the Music

  ›

  The first known use of the phrase "punk rock" in print appeared in the Chicago Tribune on the 22nd of March 1970, when Ed Sanders, co-founder of New York's anarcho-prankster band the Fugs, described his first solo album as "punk rock - redneck sentimentality". That same year, critic Dave Marsh used the term to describe garage rock group Question Mark and the Mysterians, who had scored a major hit with "96 Tears" in 1966. By the December 1970 issue of Creem, Lester Bangs was using it ironically to mock Iggy Pop as "that Stooge punk". Alan Vega of Suicide credits that usage with inspiring his duo to bill its gigs as "punk music" for the next couple of years. Greg Shaw scattered the term through his early 1970s criticism in Creem and Rolling Stone, applying it to the Shadows of Knight, the Guess Who, and garage bands generally. Lenny Kaye, later a member of the Patti Smith Group, used "punk rock" in the liner notes of the 1972 anthology LP Nuggets to describe 1960s garage bands. John Holmstrom, Legs McNeil, and Ged Dunn's magazine Punk, which debuted at the end of 1975, was crucial in fixing the term to a specific emerging scene. Holmstrom later recalled: "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." Before that happened, though, the music had been forming in garages and lofts for years, waiting for a name to crystallize around it.

• 3. The Roots in Detroit and New York

  ›

  The MC5, known as the "Motor City Five", formed in Lincoln Park, Michigan in 1963, beginning as an R&B and garage rock band. Their 1968 single "Borderline" backed with "Looking at You" sold out thousands of copies on A-Square records, without the knowledge of that label's owner Jeep Holland. In February 1969, the band released their debut album Kick Out the Jams, later considered an important forerunner to punk. In August 1969, the Stooges, from Ann Arbor, debuted with a self-titled album produced by John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground. Their subsequent records Fun House and Raw Power helped establish what critics later described as "a blueprint for punk rock". Stooges vocalist Iggy Pop would go on to earn the informal title "the Godfather of Punk" for his confrontational stage presence. In 1974, Detroit band Death, formed by three African American brothers, recorded what critics later called "scorching blasts of feral ur-punk". Unable to secure a record deal due to their name, they released the single "Politicians in My Eyes" backed with "Keep On Knockin" in 1976 and then disbanded, only to be rediscovered decades later. New York's punk origins ran through a different geography. In early 1974, a new scene began developing around the CBGB club in Lower Manhattan. Television's bassist and singer Richard Hell created the visual template: cropped, ragged hair, ripped T-shirts, and black leather jackets. On June 5 of that year, Patti Smith recorded the single "Hey Joe"/"Piss Factory", featuring Television guitarist Tom Verlaine, released on her own Mer Records label. It has often been cited as the first punk rock record. In Forest Hills, Queens, the Ramones played their first show at CBGB in August 1974. By the end of that year, the band had performed seventy-four shows, each running about seventeen minutes.

• 4. The British Ignition

  ›

  Malcolm McLaren returned to London in May 1975 after a brief period managing the New York Dolls, carrying impressions of what he had witnessed at CBGB. His King's Road clothing store, recently renamed Sex, was already building a reputation with its outrageous anti-fashion aesthetic. In August, a band called the Strand was looking for a new singer. Johnny Rotten, a regular at the shop, auditioned and won the job. The group played its first gig as the Sex Pistols on the 6th of November 1975, at Saint Martin's School of Art. On the 4th of June 1976, the Sex Pistols performed at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall to an audience estimated at approximately thirty to forty people. Among them were Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley, who had already formed the Buzzcocks after seeing the Pistols in February, and audience members who would go on to form Joy Division, the Fall, and the Smiths. The show also inspired the formation of independent record labels Factory and Creation Records. On the 1st of December 1976, the Sex Pistols and several members of the Bromley Contingent including Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin appeared on the Thames Television evening show Today, hosted by Bill Grundy, who was reportedly drunk on air. Guitarist Steve Jones proceeded to call Grundy a "dirty bastard", a "dirty fucker", and a "fucking rotter", triggering a media storm. The episode made punk a household name in twenty-four hours. The following month, on the 4th of January 1977, the Evening News of London ran a front-page story on how the Sex Pistols had "vomited and spat their way to an Amsterdam flight". The Buzzcocks' self-released EP Spiral Scratch became a benchmark for the DIY ethic. The Clash's self-titled debut reached number twelve on the UK charts. In May 1977, "God Save the Queen" reached number two on the singles chart despite being banned by the BBC.

• 5. Fashion, Identity, and the Poseur Problem

  ›

  Richard Hell's androgynous, ragamuffin look at CBGB, and his reputed invention of the safety-pin aesthetic, had a direct influence on Malcolm McLaren and, through him, on British punk style. John D Morton of Cleveland's Electric Eels may have been the first rock musician to wear a safety-pin-covered jacket. McLaren's partner, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, credits Johnny Rotten as the first British punk musician to rip his shirt and Sid Vicious as the first to use safety pins. Few followers could afford the designs McLaren and Westwood sold, so they made their own, diversifying the look with variations built on those foundations. Young women in punk demolished what the source describes as the typical female types in rock: "coy sex kittens or wronged blues belters". Early female punk musicians displayed styles ranging from Siouxsie Sioux's bondage gear to Patti Smith's "straight-from-the-gutter androgyny". Over time, tattoos, piercings, and metal-studded accessories became common elements of punk fashion, described as "a style of adornment calculated to disturb and outrage". The classic male American punk look traced back to the T-shirt, motorcycle jacket, and jeans ensemble of 1950s greasers associated with the rockabilly scene. The typical male punk haircut was originally short and choppy; the mohawk emerged later as a characteristic style. In December 1976, the English fanzine Sideburns published a now-famous illustration of three chords, captioned "This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band". Authenticity, though, was always contested. Scholar Daniel S. Traber observes that as the punk scene matured, "everyone got called a poseur". The pejorative term remained the harshest available insult in the subculture's internal vocabulary.

• 6. Hardcore, Oi!, and the Great Schism

  ›

  By 1979, a distinctive style characterized by superfast, aggressive beats, screaming vocals, and politically aware lyrics was emerging in Southern California. According to author Steven Blush, "Hardcore comes from the bleak suburbs of America. Parents moved their kids out of the cities to these horrible suburbs to save them from the 'reality' of the cities and what they ended up with was this new breed of monster". Among the earliest hardcore bands regarded as having made the first recordings in the style were Southern California's Middle Class and Black Flag. Bad Brains, all of whom were Black, a rarity in punk of any era, launched the D.C. scene with their rapid-paced single "Pay to Cum" in 1980. In 1981, hardcore punk reached mainstream television audiences when Fear performed live on Saturday Night Live, prompting a live-broadcast riot that included future scene figures Ian MacKaye, Harley Flanagan, Tesco Vee, and John Brannon. That same year, Beastie Boys, who would later become famous as a hip-hop group, debuted as a hardcore band. In February 1979, former Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose in New York. For many, his death signified that the original punk promise had been doomed from the start. The Clash album London Calling, released in December 1979, combined punk with reggae, ska, R&B, and rockabilly, and went on to be acclaimed as one of the best rock records ever made. On one side of what some called "the Great Schism" were new wave and post-punk artists; on the other, hardcore punk, Oi!, and anarcho-punk bands linked tightly to underground cultures. Crass, from Essex, merged straight-ahead punk with a committed anarchist mission. Sham 69 and the Angelic Upstarts from South Shields combined stripped-down sound with populist lyrics, a style that became known as street punk.

• 7. Mainstream Arrival and the Sellout Debate

  ›

  In 1991, Nirvana emerged from Washington State's underground, DIY grunge scene. Their first album, Bleach, was recorded in 1989 for about $600. Their second album, Nevermind, achieved huge and unexpected commercial success. Frontman Kurt Cobain wrote: "Punk is musical freedom. It's saying, doing, and playing what you want." Nirvana's success opened the door to wider audiences for acts like Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers and fueled the alternative rock boom of the early and mid-1990s. In 1993, California's Green Day and Bad Religion were both signed to major labels. The following year, Green Day released Dookie, which sold nine million copies in the United States in just over two years. That June, "Longview" reached number one on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart, arguably the first American punk song to achieve top-forty airplay. Just one month later, the Offspring's "Come Out and Play" followed. In 1994, the independent label Epitaph, run by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz, released Let's Go by Rancid, Punk in Drublic by NOFX, and Smash by the Offspring, each eventually certified gold or better. A bootleg MP3 of the Offspring's 1998 single "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)" was downloaded a record twenty-two million times illegally. The following year, Blink-182's Enema of the State sold four million copies in under twelve months. On the 19th of February 2000, its second single, "All the Small Things", peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot 100. Such controversies were not new: the Clash had been widely accused of selling out for signing with CBS Records back in 1977. A 1993 ad campaign for the Subaru Impreza claimed the car was "like punk rock", a signal of how thoroughly the genre's imagery had been absorbed by commercial culture.

• 8. Riot Grrrl, Queercore, and Punk's Expanding Margins

  ›

  In 1991, a concert of female-led bands at the International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, Washington, heralded the riot grrrl movement. Billed as "Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now", the lineup included Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, L7, and Mecca Normal. The riot grrrl movement grounded feminist concerns and progressive politics in the DIY ethic and fanzines that punk had always emphasized. Tammy Rae Carbutt of Mr. Lady Records stated that without riot grrrl bands, women "would have all starved to death culturally". Singer-guitarists Corin Tucker of Heavens to Betsy and Carrie Brownstein of Excuse 17 cofounded Sleater-Kinney in 1994. Bikini Kill's lead singer, Kathleen Hanna, the iconic figure of riot grrrl, moved on to form the art punk group Le Tigre in 1998. In the 1990s, the queercore movement developed around punk bands with gay, lesbian, bisexual, or genderqueer members such as God Is My Co-Pilot, Pansy Division, Team Dresch, and Sister George. Inspired by openly gay punk musicians of an earlier generation like Jayne County, Phranc, and Randy Turner, queercore embraces a variety of punk and alternative music styles and treats themes of prejudice, sexual identity, and individual rights. The movement has continued into the 21st century, supported by festivals such as Queeruption. In the early 2000s, attention within punk circles was also drawn to the Afro-punk movement and the contributions of people of African descent to punk music, with much of that attention derived from the eponymous documentary released in 2003. Punk had always harbored internal contradictions, between nihilism and utopianism, between the Ramones' apparent guilelessness and Richard Hell's conscious craft. These margins turned out to be where many of its most durable ideas lived.