Punk, Politics and the 1980s

[Joe Hillshoist]

Yeah, cheers skunkboy.

Hu here likes husker dho?



The drop circles are for Phil, a centuar that used to post here.

[justdrew]

play it too loud:






if I had to name one best husker du song...

[kelley]

re: punk, zep, pub-rock, the british invasion etc . . . it was jimmy page, in his studio role prior to joining the yardbirds, who devised the riffs for 'you really got me' and 'i can't explain', respectively. the key missing link between punk and glam isn't bowie, as widely mythologized, but the working-class mott the hoople, with mick ronson and ian hunter; ronson signed on after 'ziggy' imploded. john lydon is dismissive of bowie's influence here :

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/john ... radio_1977

the listen is a fascinating one. i don't think anybody was smarter about or more aware of the left/right dialectics of pop culture than lydon. the records he spins on this radio show are basically a template for PiL, and his comments on dub, or 'sound' in general, are really insightful, especially in regards to the lockdown the reactionary wing of punk sought to impose on the form of pop music. and btw, i see quite a bit of marky ramone in bonzo's drumming on the eddie cochran covers. ramone is more mechanical where bonham is furious, but with each their comportment behind their kits is very close, especially when comparing the thrash on 'something else' to this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vsocjHxN04

[Hammer of Los]

...

Johnny Rotten will get a gong one day, just like Macca.

All the young dudes!

...

[barracuda]

Hardcore was an enema, it was a flushing away of the detritus that killed first wave punk.

Hardcore was an enema alright, a lead pipe right up the ass. And yeah, it flushed away what killed first wave punk: the homemade creativity, the looseness and scope of the scene, the re-examination of the old tropes through the ashes of our disgust and shock at our own alienation, the unquantifiable and uncommodifiable experimentation, diversity of forms, and renewal that punk promised in it's finest hours, the surprise - all of which had largely been beyond the ability of the radio to spin into a palatable widget-seller. I realize now that there was a definite generational gap between first wave and hardcore (even as small as five years or so in age but sometimes more) that made the difference in what eventually happened. At the time I couldn't fathom a situation in which a uniform - the ubiquitous hardcore uniform - was required to participate. Within the first wave in SF there was always more or less a search for an individual statement, there was a noticeable lack of homogeneity that was gradually subsumed into the swamp of the pits.

Take a look at the pictures in Knowles blog post. There's something missing there, can you see what it is?

There's not a single, solitary female in any of them. This is no anomaly of these particular photos. Maybe the shit-kicking skank fight of a mosh pit just isn't a great environment for women to be in. Or maybe the hypermasculinized white boy environment of hardcore turned out to simply be the most misogynist, homophobic, hellspot imaginable. The joys of loosened teeth aren't for everybody. Yes, the lyrics and the t-shirts were rife with political statements, but the the reality of the scene (at least where I was) embodied all the political consciousness of a bad frat party with none of the attendant decorum.

Ultimately I guess it was a simple matter of taste. I had many friends who wound up deep within the hardcore scene all the way down to the soles of their boosted Doc Martens, and they obviously derived a very real, and very important place in the world from it. Many times that place happened to be behind bars, but at least for them it contained a sense of belonging.

Pound for pound The Plasmatics were better and were doing hardcore first, but they were too cartoonish and accessible. Unserious. Not truly hardcore.

Wendy had it all: she was smart, fast, loud, political, and radically transgressive. But she was a woman. And apparently didn't meet the requirements of the orthodoxy: seriousness. That's when I knew it was all over but the shouting, at least for me. That was why we abandoned the stadium rockers in the first place. They were soooooo fucking serious about themselves. And a dance floor devoid of women wasn't really a place I wanted to seek out.

[MacCruiskeen]

From Ian McDonald's "Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade”, the introductory essay to his great book, Revolution in the Head; The Beatles' Records and the Sixties:

The hippie outlook, if so heterogeneous a group can be said to have cleaved to one position, was by no means flippant. Theirs was a kaleidoscopically inventive culture, actively devoted to the acquisition of self-knowledge and the promotion of fundamental social change. In rejecting the hippies, the punks of 1976-7 discarded only a caricature, coming nowhere near an adequate grasp of what they imagined they were rebelling against.

- quoted here, in a very thoughtful and throught-provoking review by John Carvill.

More:

[...] A more bitter irony is that the Punks of the late 70s, and indeed the Thatcherites and Reaganites who dominated the zeitgeist of the 1980s, had a lot more in common with the real spirit of the decade they so despised than they could ever bring themselves to realise:

The irony of modern right-wing antipathy to the ‘60s is that this much-misunderstood decade was, in all but the most superficial senses, the creation of the very people who voted for Thatcher and Reagan in the Eighties. It is, to put it mildly, curious to hear Thatcherites condemn a decade in which ordinary folk for the first time aspired to individual self-determination and a life of material security within an economy of high employment and low inflation. The social fragmentation of the Nineties which rightly alarms conservatives was created neither by the hippies (who wanted us to ‘be together’) nor by the New Left radicals (all of whom were socialists of some description).

So far as anything in the ‘60s can be blamed for the demise of the compound entity of society it was the natural desire of the ‘masses’ to lead easier, pleasanter lives, own their own homes, follow their own fancies and, as far as possible, move out of the communal collective completely. The truth is that, once the obsolete Christian compact of the Fifties had broken down, there was nothing - apart from, in the last resort, money - holding Western civilisation together. Indeed, the very labour-saving domestic appliances launched onto the market by the ‘60s’ consumer boom speeded the melt-down of communality by allowing people to function in a private world, segregated from each other by TVs, telephones, hi-fi systems, washing-machines and home cookers. (The popularity in the Eighties of the answering machine - the phone-call you don’t have to reply to - is another sign of ongoing desocialisation by gadgetry.)

It’s a persuasive view, though perhaps not one to win MacDonald any new friends on either side of the ideological divide. [...]

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/tools/full/115775

[semper occultus]

... the key missing link between punk and glam isn't bowie, as widely mythologized, but the working-class mott the hoople, with mick ronson and ian hunter; ronson signed on after 'ziggy' imploded. john lydon is dismissive of bowie's influence here :

...funnily enough Marc Bolan embraced Punk with some enthusiasm & booked the Damned as support for 1977 tour, & wanted to produce the Banshees I beleive .....& his enthusiasm certainly wasn't unreciprocated by those acts....cynics may think he was trying to rub up against a bit of cred to cover the fading glitter but in 1977 "Punk" was still the tabloid press / evening news moral panic of choice & no obvious route to court easy popularity.

[compared2what?]

Hardcore was an enema, it was a flushing away of the detritus that killed first wave punk.

The Sex Pistols tour of the United States killed the part of first wave American punk that hadn't already been killed by heroin addiction. It didn't have a definitive date-of-death in the UK. And it wasn't born elsewhere in the country until later.

As it still might be, I guess and hope. I mean, that stuff was up to me once. But it's really for the kids to say now. I wouldn't want to be one of the grousing people I used to scorn, after all. Swore I wouldn't be. Haven't forgotten.

[8bitagent]

I cant stand hardcore. I do like some first wave NYC and British punk, just due to the wackyness of it all. BUT to me it's ALL ABOUT post punk. Good lord Manchester circa 79 musta been depressing as fuck, but hot damn
I love the melancholy music from that period. I was always a bit of a goth though

[Joe Hillshoist]

[Project Willow]

Am I wrong in remembering that skinheads invaded the early 80's ska scene as well? My friends and I loved skanking and slam dancing. The term mosh pit came somewhat later, after my time really.

Anyway, my partner of 17 years was a punk rock musician, so I'm getting a kick out of this thread. Inspired by The Stranglers, The Damned, and SLF, he made political, angry, melodic punk, and still is, AFAIK. He named one of his bands August Spies (after the legendary labor activist). The highest he ever climbed in the music world was when he hit #8 on Japan's indie charts, with his band called Stink, and did two tours there. It was far more difficult at home, as by the time we landed in Seattle in the early 90's, punk was relegated to a very small niche, not that this was ever a regional hotspot. It's unfortunate I can't post a video of his here, I don't know if one exists.

[Project Willow]

Oh, and hugs to you, Stinky K., wherever you are.

[8bitagent]

Pussy Riot is the first time I've seen news about punk and unrest in some time...

[Joe Hillshoist]

[gnosticheresy_2]

From Ian McDonald's "Fabled Foursome, Disappearing Decade”, the introductory essay to his great book, Revolution in the Head; The Beatles' Records and the Sixties:

The hippie outlook, if so heterogeneous a group can be said to have cleaved to one position, was by no means flippant. Theirs was a kaleidoscopically inventive culture, actively devoted to the acquisition of self-knowledge and the promotion of fundamental social change. In rejecting the hippies, the punks of 1976-7 discarded only a caricature, coming nowhere near an adequate grasp of what they imagined they were rebelling against.

- quoted here, in a very thoughtful and throught-provoking review by John Carvill.

Ironically the "punks reject hippies" narrative can also be seen as a caricature. Exhibit A for the defence:



That Lydon chap was a fan http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jk6v1

When "the hippies" ran into a brick wall of establishment opposition in the late sixties not all of them cut their hair and got mortgages. Lydon might have had a point when he has a go at a certain type of up-their-own-arse hippy squatter that he encountered in the 70s, but then again he was also flogging those same people acid at Hawkwind shows. The cultural innovations of the sixties fed into punk in all sorts of interesting ways, maybe in the most interesting ways. As is usual with these things I suspect, whilst official narrative is full of "clean breaks" and "generational divides" the reality was more messy and chaotic.