guess i'll update twice
so this is an english research paper i just finished.
here goes. hope you like it. please feel free to comment.
Punk. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1980s, peaking in 1977 with the release of pivotal albums by the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Misfits, the Ramones, the Clash, the Dead Kennedys, and others, a new class appeared on the scene. They could be found lurking at places like Max’s Kansas City or CBGB’s in New York City, Bowery and the Lower East Side in Manhattan, and the Roxy in England. The world in which punks lived created them. While the American punks simply were in love with rock and roll music and wanted to breathe new life into it, the British punks took the feelings to an extreme because of the severe and destitute socio-economic atmosphere in England at the time. Johnny Rotten, vocalist for the wildly influential (and British) Sex Pistols, eloquently states that, “We were just pissed off about the music scene, pissed off about the political scene, pissed off about the economy, pissed off about everything else in between… basically we were just [expletive deleted] pissed off” (The Filth and the Fury). The movement called PUNK was a superior art form, and it holds a vital place in society’s history. Punk rock is not just a misunderstood bastard son of the music world - its influences on music and the sociology of its subculture are still felt today.
In the seventies, punk slowly developed a recognizable face. This face held up a mirror to society and almost exaggerated the conditions in which it lived. Punks were often seen exaggerating their poverty, dressing themselves up in outfits consisting of torn shirts, tight, ripped pants, and lots of studs, spikes and leather. Malcolm McLaren, who put the British punk forerunners, the Sex Pistols, together and managed the group, also owned the store which was the hub of the London scene (“SEX,” specializing in leather and fetish clothing), which was more than just a store, but was actually a common ground for punks to hang out and discuss life. Punk rock was more than just a genre of music; it was a way of life, which helped to make it superior to other art forms. This was vitally important to punk rock as a movement because punk was more than just a group of disgruntled youths hanging out. By decking out the Sex Pistols in his shop’s specialty clothing, he gave the movement a fashion. Punk had “. . . a unique, distinguishing feature: a refined ability to shock. Anyone observing a group of punks moving through Leicester Square on a Friday night would steer well clear: these guys looked seriously strange . . . The mohawks, leathers and safety pins were a radical departure from the glamour rock of the previous decade. When situated beside the staid British working class and grannies with their push carts, the punks of London created an immediate sensation” (Chamberlain, par. 7). This mob could be seen with vertical and dyed haircuts, safety pins through their ears and noses, and they did a lot of boozing and drugs. These degenerates, though they all looked odd and singular, were the same on the inside: disillusioned with the corporate, emotionless stadium rock bands, disgusted with a political system that did not include them and found them not as people but as numbers, and bored and tired of life in general. This gathering could not be predicted to look the way it did, nor make the same sounds, but the fire was growing since the yippies of the Vietnam Era and the garage bands of the early 1960s.
Before anything is further detailed, it must be pointed out that the punk subculture of the seventies and eighties was not simply one type of people performing one very specific type of music. Punk rock went deeper than the music itself; a punk did not have to be a musician in order to “fit in.” However, among the musicians, they ranged far and wide. They were not all talent-lacking degenerates off of the streets (though many were). To briefly illustrate here, the Velvet Underground was made up of highly talented musicians, the Shangri-Las and the Runaways (the latter a name which goes hand-in-hand with Joan Jett and Pat Benatar) were poppy girl groups that expressed profound angst and disillusionment, Iggy Pop and the Stooges and the MC5 were both from Detroit and under the heavy influence of its Motown soul, Blondie was a pop-aspiring group under the starry-eyed Debbie Harry, and the Damned and the Misfits both used their love for horror movies and the macabre as the basis for their music and styles. This allowed for plenty of freedom within the punk circuit; anyone and everyone was accepted as long as the common disgust for society and desire for change was felt. Whether it was New Wave, glam, Oi!, punk, or anything else in between, the youth of the day found something they could relate to, and formed lifestyles of their own.
“Punk rock has been around for the greater part of the last 40 years” (McCain/McNeil, preface). The beat generation of the 1940s was a group of youth-obsessed artistic and literary idealists, “beatniks” who claimed to be outside of culture’s accepted norms, and in fact strove to ensure that they were. If each individual were analyzed one would find that, for the most part, they were actually products of a middle-class heritage which influenced their works. According to Jessamin Swearingen, these beatniks also influenced later generations of subcultures among youth. The punk movement emulated beat poetry and lifestyle, forming a new genre of rock'n'roll music, punks who borrowed heavily from both the beatniks and French romantic poets to emerge as distinct from the musicians at the time (http://www.inch.com/~jessamin/blank.html, par. 3). Much like these beatniks, the punk subculture was made up almost exclusively of middle-class youths who were disillusioned and disenfranchised. However, not only were the punks fed up with all the garbage being fed to them by general society, they were also fed up with the musical scene surrounding them, the politics which ignored the bourgeois society that they lived in, and the restrictions that they felt were everywhere, smothering them and forcing them to fit a set mold.
The punk movement sought to break this mold, much like the pop artists and expressionists of the same time in both London and New York. Pop Art and Expressionism both took a look at the societies which surrounded them, recoiled in disgust, and distorted and ripped it apart, using a new medium which they created for themselves and thusly a new reality in which they could tolerate life as they knew it. As mentioned before, punk rock held up a mirror to society and almost exaggerated the conditions surrounding it. Punks needed a way to release, and they did so without all the glamour and glitter of the commercialized, soul-lacking “stadium rock” bands of the time. They felt, very rightly, that bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin weren’t writing music that mirrored their lives; these bands weren’t writing anything that anyone besides glamorous rock stars could empathize with or connect to. An outlet was necessary for the punks. Writing things down releases one’s inner feelings, in at least a metaphysical way, from one’s soul into the paper upon which they is written. Punk rock musicians incorporated this vitally important idea into their music and lyrics, and they wrote songs that were direct and without confusing imagery or metaphors. This was key to punk rock’s unrelenting and blunt style, a quality which helped to make it a superior art form. Pop Art and Expressionism did the same things, only through different media. According to Andrea Mulder-Slater, an artist, educator and art history specialist:
These objects are often distorted, enlarged, simplified and decorated using strange colors. Pop Art is a western cultural phenomenon, having been born in New York and London and it's initial aim was to break down the barriers between art and life. Commercial materials and techniques such as silk screening are used to produce the art. In the 1960s, Pop Art mirrored contemporary reality and reflected upon the cultural changes of the time including the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the idealism of the Kennedy era, the reality of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the outbreak of the Vietnam war in 1964 (http://arthistory.about.com/library/bl101_popart.htm).
According to the internet website http://www.warhol.org, Andy Warhol is considered by many to be the godfather of Pop Art; in fact, he invented the moniker. Andy Warhol is also considered pivotal by some in relation to the early New York punk scene. According to this internet source, “In 1967 he produced the first record of the rock band "Velvet Underground" and between 1966 and 1968 made several films with them” (http://arthistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fi.muni.cz%2F%7Etoms%2FPopArt%2Findex.html). In fact, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Blondie, David Bowie and the New York Dolls all clustered around Andy Warhol’s factory studio space in the late 1960s, gleaning much of the androgyny, glamour and abstract expressionism from Warhol and his pop-art fellows and using it for themselves, creating glittery images (the New York Dolls), blunt lyrical expressionism that was heavily laden with sensuality (Lou Reed), and self-absorbed poetry (Patti Smith) and inspiring many bored middle-class youths to leave their homes and join the punk movement in New York City. Swearingen notes that “The Dolls' image was that of bored teenagers and high school delinquents rather than that of the calm and controlled fashion of more established rock or pop acts,” and that “Punk as a philosophy, in the case of the New York Dolls, lived up to the term ‘punk,’ as in hoodlum slang” (http://www.inch.com/~jessamin/glam.html, par. 12 and 19). Further proving the point that punk rock was a new and superior art form which did not distance itself from its fans like “stadium rock” bands did, Jon Savage notes that the New York Dolls' leader David JoHansen claimed his band was merely a reflection of its audience (qtd. in Swearingen, /manhattan.html, par. 5).
It must be noted that punk rock, as a rebellious force, was nothing new. Teenagers have always sought to rebel and fit themselves outside of cultural norms - Elvis was the definitive “punk rocker” of his day, lewd and new and completely unacceptable to upper society. The yippies were rebels in their day with their anti-fascist propaganda and refusal to be fed lies from the government. The punk subculture is considered to be a direct branch from the yippie counterculture movement of the 1960s, and can definitely be traced back to the rock-and-rollers of the 1950s. The energy lost in the transition from the rock’n’roll of the 1950s to the corporate brainlessness of the seventies was something punks wanted back - as mentioned previously, they felt that the energy was gone from rock’n’roll, and that someone was going to have to step in and make a change. This energizing, rock-revitalizing something came in the form of punk rock. Joey Ramone once put it this way:
We decided to start out own group because we were bored with everything we heard. In 1974, there was nothing to listen to anymore. Everything was tenth- generation Led Zeppelin, tenth-generation Elton John, or overproduced, or just junk. Everything was long jams, long guitar solos. We missed music like it used to be before it got ‘progressive.’ We missed hearing songs that were short, and exciting and…good! We wanted to bring the energy back to rock & roll. (CD booklet from Ramones Mania).
One of the most important ideals to punks was bringing music back to its raw, short and emotional foundations, stripping it of the clinical detachment of the stadium rock bands like Pink Floyd, Cream, and others. Punk rock sought to revive the feelings in music, and bands like the Ramones wrote songs with lyrics like, "Do you remember rock'n'roll radio/We need change and we need it fast/before we're just part of the past/ 'cause lately it all sounds the same to me" (Do You Remember Rock‘n‘Roll Radio?, 1979). Arguably, punk rock was not full of the greatest musicians, but its intent was absolutely pure and its message was clear - that things were getting a little too boring - and this is another reason why punk rock still holds a valid place in the creation of today’s music world and society’s subcultures.
In his critical writing essay “The Quintessential Punk,” Bryn Chamberlain summed it up this way:
A question still remains: why all the fuss? Primarily, it was because the punk movement grew at an alarming rate, as if the flood gates had opened to release an army of anxious, eager and angry youths. However, it was reaction from the mainstream society that was even more unsettling. Punk had caused the British public to take a long overdue look at themselves through their youth. Clearly, they did not like what they saw. The bourgeois reaction ranged from rejection to denial and the youth responce was support or confrontation. Whatever the reaction, the British public were witnessing a sociological change and it was perceived that punks were indifferently leading the parade. It was this misconception which made the punk a valid, yet undesirable, member of society.
Punk rock’s listening appeal can be debated. Its tastefulness can be argued, and its methods as a way of life can be alternately condemned or praised, depending upon what side of the proverbial fence one stands. One may or may not appreciate punk rock as a musical form and whether or not it is art can be criticized - a music critic‘s 1979 review of a concert featuring the Ramones declared that “The music, if you can call it that, physically assaults anyone dumb enough to listen” (recording dubbed into the Casualties’ “Made in N.Y.C.,” 2001). However the one point that remains irrefutable is that punk rock was a societal influence (and, according to some, a plague) in the seventies and eighties in both Britain and the United States, and its effects on music and the sociology of its subculture are still felt today.
here goes. hope you like it. please feel free to comment.
Punk. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1980s, peaking in 1977 with the release of pivotal albums by the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Misfits, the Ramones, the Clash, the Dead Kennedys, and others, a new class appeared on the scene. They could be found lurking at places like Max’s Kansas City or CBGB’s in New York City, Bowery and the Lower East Side in Manhattan, and the Roxy in England. The world in which punks lived created them. While the American punks simply were in love with rock and roll music and wanted to breathe new life into it, the British punks took the feelings to an extreme because of the severe and destitute socio-economic atmosphere in England at the time. Johnny Rotten, vocalist for the wildly influential (and British) Sex Pistols, eloquently states that, “We were just pissed off about the music scene, pissed off about the political scene, pissed off about the economy, pissed off about everything else in between… basically we were just [expletive deleted] pissed off” (The Filth and the Fury). The movement called PUNK was a superior art form, and it holds a vital place in society’s history. Punk rock is not just a misunderstood bastard son of the music world - its influences on music and the sociology of its subculture are still felt today.
In the seventies, punk slowly developed a recognizable face. This face held up a mirror to society and almost exaggerated the conditions in which it lived. Punks were often seen exaggerating their poverty, dressing themselves up in outfits consisting of torn shirts, tight, ripped pants, and lots of studs, spikes and leather. Malcolm McLaren, who put the British punk forerunners, the Sex Pistols, together and managed the group, also owned the store which was the hub of the London scene (“SEX,” specializing in leather and fetish clothing), which was more than just a store, but was actually a common ground for punks to hang out and discuss life. Punk rock was more than just a genre of music; it was a way of life, which helped to make it superior to other art forms. This was vitally important to punk rock as a movement because punk was more than just a group of disgruntled youths hanging out. By decking out the Sex Pistols in his shop’s specialty clothing, he gave the movement a fashion. Punk had “. . . a unique, distinguishing feature: a refined ability to shock. Anyone observing a group of punks moving through Leicester Square on a Friday night would steer well clear: these guys looked seriously strange . . . The mohawks, leathers and safety pins were a radical departure from the glamour rock of the previous decade. When situated beside the staid British working class and grannies with their push carts, the punks of London created an immediate sensation” (Chamberlain, par. 7). This mob could be seen with vertical and dyed haircuts, safety pins through their ears and noses, and they did a lot of boozing and drugs. These degenerates, though they all looked odd and singular, were the same on the inside: disillusioned with the corporate, emotionless stadium rock bands, disgusted with a political system that did not include them and found them not as people but as numbers, and bored and tired of life in general. This gathering could not be predicted to look the way it did, nor make the same sounds, but the fire was growing since the yippies of the Vietnam Era and the garage bands of the early 1960s.
Before anything is further detailed, it must be pointed out that the punk subculture of the seventies and eighties was not simply one type of people performing one very specific type of music. Punk rock went deeper than the music itself; a punk did not have to be a musician in order to “fit in.” However, among the musicians, they ranged far and wide. They were not all talent-lacking degenerates off of the streets (though many were). To briefly illustrate here, the Velvet Underground was made up of highly talented musicians, the Shangri-Las and the Runaways (the latter a name which goes hand-in-hand with Joan Jett and Pat Benatar) were poppy girl groups that expressed profound angst and disillusionment, Iggy Pop and the Stooges and the MC5 were both from Detroit and under the heavy influence of its Motown soul, Blondie was a pop-aspiring group under the starry-eyed Debbie Harry, and the Damned and the Misfits both used their love for horror movies and the macabre as the basis for their music and styles. This allowed for plenty of freedom within the punk circuit; anyone and everyone was accepted as long as the common disgust for society and desire for change was felt. Whether it was New Wave, glam, Oi!, punk, or anything else in between, the youth of the day found something they could relate to, and formed lifestyles of their own.
“Punk rock has been around for the greater part of the last 40 years” (McCain/McNeil, preface). The beat generation of the 1940s was a group of youth-obsessed artistic and literary idealists, “beatniks” who claimed to be outside of culture’s accepted norms, and in fact strove to ensure that they were. If each individual were analyzed one would find that, for the most part, they were actually products of a middle-class heritage which influenced their works. According to Jessamin Swearingen, these beatniks also influenced later generations of subcultures among youth. The punk movement emulated beat poetry and lifestyle, forming a new genre of rock'n'roll music, punks who borrowed heavily from both the beatniks and French romantic poets to emerge as distinct from the musicians at the time (http://www.inch.com/~jessamin/blank.html, par. 3). Much like these beatniks, the punk subculture was made up almost exclusively of middle-class youths who were disillusioned and disenfranchised. However, not only were the punks fed up with all the garbage being fed to them by general society, they were also fed up with the musical scene surrounding them, the politics which ignored the bourgeois society that they lived in, and the restrictions that they felt were everywhere, smothering them and forcing them to fit a set mold.
The punk movement sought to break this mold, much like the pop artists and expressionists of the same time in both London and New York. Pop Art and Expressionism both took a look at the societies which surrounded them, recoiled in disgust, and distorted and ripped it apart, using a new medium which they created for themselves and thusly a new reality in which they could tolerate life as they knew it. As mentioned before, punk rock held up a mirror to society and almost exaggerated the conditions surrounding it. Punks needed a way to release, and they did so without all the glamour and glitter of the commercialized, soul-lacking “stadium rock” bands of the time. They felt, very rightly, that bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin weren’t writing music that mirrored their lives; these bands weren’t writing anything that anyone besides glamorous rock stars could empathize with or connect to. An outlet was necessary for the punks. Writing things down releases one’s inner feelings, in at least a metaphysical way, from one’s soul into the paper upon which they is written. Punk rock musicians incorporated this vitally important idea into their music and lyrics, and they wrote songs that were direct and without confusing imagery or metaphors. This was key to punk rock’s unrelenting and blunt style, a quality which helped to make it a superior art form. Pop Art and Expressionism did the same things, only through different media. According to Andrea Mulder-Slater, an artist, educator and art history specialist:
These objects are often distorted, enlarged, simplified and decorated using strange colors. Pop Art is a western cultural phenomenon, having been born in New York and London and it's initial aim was to break down the barriers between art and life. Commercial materials and techniques such as silk screening are used to produce the art. In the 1960s, Pop Art mirrored contemporary reality and reflected upon the cultural changes of the time including the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the idealism of the Kennedy era, the reality of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the outbreak of the Vietnam war in 1964 (http://arthistory.about.com/library/bl101_popart.htm).
According to the internet website http://www.warhol.org, Andy Warhol is considered by many to be the godfather of Pop Art; in fact, he invented the moniker. Andy Warhol is also considered pivotal by some in relation to the early New York punk scene. According to this internet source, “In 1967 he produced the first record of the rock band "Velvet Underground" and between 1966 and 1968 made several films with them” (http://arthistory.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fi.muni.cz%2F%7Etoms%2FPopArt%2Findex.html). In fact, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Blondie, David Bowie and the New York Dolls all clustered around Andy Warhol’s factory studio space in the late 1960s, gleaning much of the androgyny, glamour and abstract expressionism from Warhol and his pop-art fellows and using it for themselves, creating glittery images (the New York Dolls), blunt lyrical expressionism that was heavily laden with sensuality (Lou Reed), and self-absorbed poetry (Patti Smith) and inspiring many bored middle-class youths to leave their homes and join the punk movement in New York City. Swearingen notes that “The Dolls' image was that of bored teenagers and high school delinquents rather than that of the calm and controlled fashion of more established rock or pop acts,” and that “Punk as a philosophy, in the case of the New York Dolls, lived up to the term ‘punk,’ as in hoodlum slang” (http://www.inch.com/~jessamin/glam.html, par. 12 and 19). Further proving the point that punk rock was a new and superior art form which did not distance itself from its fans like “stadium rock” bands did, Jon Savage notes that the New York Dolls' leader David JoHansen claimed his band was merely a reflection of its audience (qtd. in Swearingen, /manhattan.html, par. 5).
It must be noted that punk rock, as a rebellious force, was nothing new. Teenagers have always sought to rebel and fit themselves outside of cultural norms - Elvis was the definitive “punk rocker” of his day, lewd and new and completely unacceptable to upper society. The yippies were rebels in their day with their anti-fascist propaganda and refusal to be fed lies from the government. The punk subculture is considered to be a direct branch from the yippie counterculture movement of the 1960s, and can definitely be traced back to the rock-and-rollers of the 1950s. The energy lost in the transition from the rock’n’roll of the 1950s to the corporate brainlessness of the seventies was something punks wanted back - as mentioned previously, they felt that the energy was gone from rock’n’roll, and that someone was going to have to step in and make a change. This energizing, rock-revitalizing something came in the form of punk rock. Joey Ramone once put it this way:
We decided to start out own group because we were bored with everything we heard. In 1974, there was nothing to listen to anymore. Everything was tenth- generation Led Zeppelin, tenth-generation Elton John, or overproduced, or just junk. Everything was long jams, long guitar solos. We missed music like it used to be before it got ‘progressive.’ We missed hearing songs that were short, and exciting and…good! We wanted to bring the energy back to rock & roll. (CD booklet from Ramones Mania).
One of the most important ideals to punks was bringing music back to its raw, short and emotional foundations, stripping it of the clinical detachment of the stadium rock bands like Pink Floyd, Cream, and others. Punk rock sought to revive the feelings in music, and bands like the Ramones wrote songs with lyrics like, "Do you remember rock'n'roll radio/We need change and we need it fast/before we're just part of the past/ 'cause lately it all sounds the same to me" (Do You Remember Rock‘n‘Roll Radio?, 1979). Arguably, punk rock was not full of the greatest musicians, but its intent was absolutely pure and its message was clear - that things were getting a little too boring - and this is another reason why punk rock still holds a valid place in the creation of today’s music world and society’s subcultures.
In his critical writing essay “The Quintessential Punk,” Bryn Chamberlain summed it up this way:
A question still remains: why all the fuss? Primarily, it was because the punk movement grew at an alarming rate, as if the flood gates had opened to release an army of anxious, eager and angry youths. However, it was reaction from the mainstream society that was even more unsettling. Punk had caused the British public to take a long overdue look at themselves through their youth. Clearly, they did not like what they saw. The bourgeois reaction ranged from rejection to denial and the youth responce was support or confrontation. Whatever the reaction, the British public were witnessing a sociological change and it was perceived that punks were indifferently leading the parade. It was this misconception which made the punk a valid, yet undesirable, member of society.
Punk rock’s listening appeal can be debated. Its tastefulness can be argued, and its methods as a way of life can be alternately condemned or praised, depending upon what side of the proverbial fence one stands. One may or may not appreciate punk rock as a musical form and whether or not it is art can be criticized - a music critic‘s 1979 review of a concert featuring the Ramones declared that “The music, if you can call it that, physically assaults anyone dumb enough to listen” (recording dubbed into the Casualties’ “Made in N.Y.C.,” 2001). However the one point that remains irrefutable is that punk rock was a societal influence (and, according to some, a plague) in the seventies and eighties in both Britain and the United States, and its effects on music and the sociology of its subculture are still felt today.