Ah, OK, interesting ‘fact’
Music from and for the skunk generation
I was into Steely Dan early doors aged 18 - An older guy I worked was in a pub band and covered mostly American stuff - I lost interest after the first three LP’s - I did enjoy the odd track from the later stuff. Too much over slick stuff all together - Kid Charlemagne and Haitian divorce the highlights from older stuff they would make it into my top 25 list of rock songs of all time - Two against nature Nope.
That entire album is fantastically addictive
Whenever the modern music drugs topic comes up I refer to the great Bill Hicks - “The Beatles were so fucking high they even let Ringo sing a few”
And here we have the reason why I can’t stand punk. For some reason, music that is performed with real skill is criticised, but deliberately playing badly is admired
I like some punk, mostly US. Musicianship seems quite better with American punk, some of the UK bands I find shockingly bad players
The slits were by far the worst band I’ve ever seen,yet absolutely love Cut.
Being in the opposite camp (long hair & leather) at the time I never really got punk, but the more I listened to it the more I appreciated the “tight but loose” rhythmic style of the genre.
These days I would much rather listen to punk of its age than the likes of Saxon and their contemporaries.
Impressionist painting is also A Thing, for example. Hated in its day for much the same sort of reasons.
Not that your point is invalid - all art is subjective, but those who innovate tend to be remembered and celebrated, even if their innovations were reductive.
And, of course, punk was a direct reply to the navel gazing, self-indulgent, elitist “Admire how clever we are!” trends of the middle class, public school educated white boy AOR of the day.
Prog was hugely alienating to working-class kids of the day who were being told they had ‘no future’, no hope of better education, that the nukes would drop any day, that saw mountains of rubbish filling the streets, jobs disappearing, and the same old Oxbridge snobs taking EVERYTHING. Those same kids were getting blamed for their own plight: of course they wanted to destroy the system, to rock-out to mindless noise, get laid, get high, get drunk and wait for the canned sunshine to arrive…
Nothing ever really changes…
Music that is played well and music that is worth playing can be two different things.
It was a LONG time ago that punk was new, now it’s a word so overused that it’s completely meaningless, but while the US innovated and named it, Brits took it somewhere else - somewhere consciously and deliberately reductive. Punk was meant to be for absolutely everyone - everyone could do it, everyone could be in a band, you literally couldn’t do it wrong because everything was valid, and the whole POINT was to annoy as many people as possible, play as badly as you like, make a statement - even if that statement was only an incoherent scream of “FUCK YOU!”. It was music for an angry, disenfranchised and hopeless generation who’d spent their whole short lives being told they were completely worthless.
That aspect of it was very British, very socialist, VERY un-American. Punk was always meant to be ephemeral, throw-away disposable, to flare brightly and leave only ashes. The moment anyone started to take it seriously, to play properly, make a statement, to start sacking band members because they were incompetent or permanently intoxicated - that was the day punk died.
And to this day, still hardly anycunt gets it. FWLVLIW it’s why I’ve not listened in years and cringe at punk rock albums being released on audiophile vinyl - it really is hard to miss the point any harder than that…
Punk goes back to 60s Merica to me, term was used dismissively at first for bands with a DIY/garage approach. I’d even include successful acts like The Stooges, and MC5 as “punk”
The music industry is littered with brilliant musicians that will never make anything money wise,or even command a big audience.
The pistols were never the best musicians,but even after nearly 50 years,they still spark something inside me when played on the radio.
Same when I hear Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, Devo . . . that they also knew which end of an instrument to hold adds to my enjoyment
Love Devo. Amazing live!
Me too
There’s a cool video of Mark Mothersbaugh showing a bunch of really weird instruments and sound making toys he’s collected and used on recordings. The guitar with effects pedals glued all over it for the solo in Too Much Paranoias
One of my favourite genres. Messages of the times, spat out, in genuine anger, at a rotten elite establishment.
Perfect times for a resurgence methinks.
Cue: teenagers posting nasty memes on their phones