The Conservative Impulse of Punk

Speaking of horseshit, I suppose skinheads beating up Pakistani shop owners was strictly class-based violence?

i guess it depends on your perspective and what you observe someone clashing against. sure, several music styles of the "punk" scene got their locked groove which seems pretty conformist and conservative, but when pitched versus the backdrop of "normal" society, their behavior, and the way they were perceived makes them pretty nonconformist.

ex: sure, black flag was playing black sabbath and stooges sorts of things, but they still got the cops in riot gear to come out.

ex: sure, dischord's crowd of straight-edge, vegetarian/vegan, politically dogmatic, anti-corporate, rule happy nature is pretty static (in a liberal way), but all of those rules are anti-rules to the accepted norm.

of course, both of those examples seem to pale to all the 70's crowd. regardless of locale, there was definitely something a little more daring and subterranean about the drugs, prostitution, and general abandon of the earlier types. the portrait painted by a lot of the crap i've read, which is my only basis for any of this, is that you didn't trust lou reed with shit. he was a theif, a punk, and a junky and he was not to be trusted.

i dunno.... the more i think about it, it's a complicated question with a stupid ass long answer, which means, there is no answer.

theory: the longer the answer, the less chance it has of actually answering the question.

??
m.

If they did I'm very surprised. Burchill was very pro Russia and the big USP of the SWP was its declaration that Russian was 'state capitalism' (i.e. v. v. bad). Coming from a small cluster of villages which produced street names like 'Yuri Gagarin Way' you become atuned to these things.

I also think there was and is quite a lot of Tory values in Punk. Certainly the Thatcherite small business version. I was always most suspicious of the Crass type crustie / hippie anarchist for undelying Tory values.

If somebody started a thread saying "Reggae was a huge influence on Punk", I wouldn't feel it neccessary to pipe up, "Wrong! The Ramones weren't influenced by Reggae! Neither were the Misfits!" over & over.

I know the thread question was a little vague and messy, so apologies for that but you can't say "this question is meaningless because punk was too varied to be shoe-horned etc." and simultaneously say, "and there was NO conservative impulse in punk, you are wrong". If it was varied, then perhaps it contained some impulses that you don't like.

(PS - the pre-beatles ideals of some strains of punk have been lasting, especially in the way its recorded, and you're way off the mark about reggae)

"How carefully staged-managed and blurred is this item of punkoid taste orthodoxy: ProgRock as the gumby decadence of 60s anti-formal improv expansion-exploration?..."

"OK, so peg awake your eyelids while we yet again fete the Pistols, punk as noise-at-war-with-polite-society, noise as the re-establishment of difference, noise as constraining order for Prog’s self-indulgence. It’s our duty to suck up forever to these legendary radical dragon-slaying heroes, you know? Because they slew so much more than they knew: they divided pop off away from free. Inadvertently (or tellingly?) Hendrix offed himself, but what the hell shrivelled the rest of the 60s improv noise-vanguard back into mannered bonsai nubbin, if not the removal of its vast lumbering benign idiot-cousin bodyguard of pretentious gumby stupidity? A readable message has a fundamental condition of possibility, that figure be distinguishable from ground: if the ground be (genuinely) dispersed, whither the refuge of a violence w/o political whatnot? Without a Context of Abundance, a large enough space that you knew there was no point merely awaiting what you’d been told to expect — would it be smart? would it be dim? could you even tell? — the line between noise and signal is suddenly policed by all-too supportive and abuse-me cliquey approval, the avant-garde audience a self-consciously closed feedback world who reserve their hostility for culture they’re not even slightly open to or mobile in. Where "noise" is never "noise for us", where the violence of a separated world, the violence that polices the borders, is re-coded back into harmony: harmony now as hipster-speak for "noise which upsets lame squares".

"Anyway besides whatevah, for Bangs, punk didn’t violate rock’n’roll, it rescued it. No Wave wasn’t the anti-Elvis, but the Return of the King in his revenant obnoxious essence. To the Bangs generation, true disruption — music without redeeming aspect — wasn’t Pigfuck, or Metal, it was Disco. So couldn’t this just mean that value aka irredeemability simply to switch over to Disco — but to many weaned on the year-zero myth of inadvertent Stalinist erasure, genuine disruption might actually have come from decent history, from the unspoken facts revealed by painstaking academic examination, instead of the instinctual reaction of convenient legend. Who brings the noise to the noisebringer? What is the prophecy of prophecy? A joke explained is a joke debangsed: "One step above the sublime, makes the ridiculous," wrote Live Skull pigfucker Tom Paine, in The Age of Reason (1795), "and one step above the ridiculous, makes the sublime again…" Yeah yeah honour the flipflop bizbiz buzbuz — but if Hendrix is rocknoise AND punk is rocknoise, then you need to be a quiet noiseboy AND a wild-style academic to determine exactly how is it that ragtime and swing and soul and disco are ALL subsumed into the machine-stage of repetition, and still seem to have usable borderlines between them, to be called on and conjured with. Decent history disrupts bad legend. As Danny Baker — former disco-boy, failed chatshow host, ex-sleb face of Daz washing powder — points out, in Sniffin’ Glue: the Essential Punk Accessory, saying the unsayable, by (correctly) rereading the overstated punky prog-hatred: "Plainly Mick Jones and Joe Strummer had ELP albums and were having fun with it back then — we all loved rock music."

it's true that i probably conveniently rationalise those kinds of reactionary spasms as antipunk (or "punkoid") not punk, but that's kinda why i advised foax didn't press me on MY definition, for it is to take yr finger out the Morass of Turbid Contradictions dyke and no mistake => more to the point, none of those passages announce the Mark S Defn of Punk, they're either "if... then..." or explorations of other ppl's ideas abt punk and/or noise, insofar as these are co-terminous (which they ain't).

The legend of Punk contains as part of it's central mythos a deeply conservative (not Republican or Tory, just small-c conservative) view of music. This is: Real Rock N Roll existed between '57 and '67. The Beatles ruined Rock N Roll with Sgt. Pepper and Jimi Hendrix & Clapton ruined it with Virtuosity. Rockers begin to see themselves as Important Artists and Adults and everything was downhill from there: concept albums, seriousness, solos, no teenage kicks. It was Punk's job to return Rock N Roll to its Golden (Teen)Age. You can see it especially in The Ramones's minimalism, but it's also there in The Cramps, The Misfits, Blondie's early Brill Buildingisms, The Undertones, The B-52's, The Rezillos, etc. Even art rockers like Television said that they wanted to dress like old men - they wanted to absent themselves from the sixties associations of flares and pot and love power. BUT it wasn't a straight back-to-the-50's movement - they camped it up and made fun of it even as they embraced it - they weren't dumb.

In a related, but sorta seperate way, there was also a social conservatism to some punk, especially in the USA. A lot of Machismo and tough guyism. And out of this (when a lot of folks had fled punk's sinking ship for more experimental and open scenes) sprung hardcore, which while liberal in its politics, was conservative in its social structure: there were hierarchies and rules - lots of rules - about how one should behave to be a "real" punk.

Now, my real point is that this is myth-making, in fact IT WAS A MIX. There was so much else going on other than that conservative impulse - it just seems to me that the shorthand story of punk you get in documentaries & books is often the one outlined above ("Punk brought Rock back to its roots") & this is a gross oversimplification.

the good = being good and spending 145679458710923479027830596 hours downloading into the world everything i haf learnt ovah 25-odd yrs about this Sicilian Thing (Which Must END)

the true =

http://www.usatoday.com/life/gallery/mtv-awards/pink.jpg

1. Some of you seem to be conflating "conservatism" with "contrarianism" and "shocking the audience." The Talking Heads, by wearing suits when the rest of the NYC scene was in leather and mohawks, were probably being contrarian, and the early punks who displayed swastikas and other Nazi signifiers have all claimed that they were just trying to piss off the politically correct.

2. The Maximum Rocknroll school of thought defines punk music, politics, and culture in terms of very specific parameters that appear to trace back to the Clash. This adherence to formula could be called conservative (or fundamentalist or doctrinaire), but would have to be distinguished from all known political uses of the term.

3. If 1976-77 punk is interpreted as a rejection of the disco, prog, and hippie cultures (a very big if), that does not in itself mean an endorsement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Some music writers have equated the emergence of punk with the cultural shifts associated with the rise of Elvis Presley and/or the Beatles, but this interpretation doesn't necessarily reflect the experience or interpretation of the experience of every music listener of the time.

Custos: "The very non-conservative influence of Reggae had a much more lasting and relevant effect"
Mark S.: this sentence would be (ridiculous|paradoxical) even in a argument NOT about punk
Custos: (sigh.) Admit it, Mark S....Reggae has had more long-term impact on Punk than rockabilly/50's rock ever did. There's maybe three or four Punk bands with noticable rockabilly flava (X, Misfits, Cramps) whereas theres two different sub-genres: Ska and 2-Tone that grew out of reggae-tinged Punk. All the current Neo-Punkers (Mighty Mighty Boss Tones, No Doubt, everything on the Epitaph) all have very clearly audible reggae influence.
Mark S.: No it isn't.
Custos: Yes it is.
Mark S.: No it isn't.
Custos: Look, I don't want to argue about that.
Mark S.: Yes you do.
Custos: This isn't argument...this is just contradiction.
Mark S.: No it isn't.
Custos: Oh, this is futile...
Mark S.: No it isn't...

Lord Custos: "When Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake it was the most original novel of its day!! So now when I copy it word for word that will make me the most original novelist now living!!"

Also, Fritz: clarify what you mean by "conservative", I know you don't mean politically or aesthetically, but that word seems to be what keeps tripping me up.

Lord Custos: "When Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake it was the most original novel of its day!! So now when I copy it word for word that will make me the most original novelist now living!!"
You're wandering off, again, Mark. Focus on what I'm saying, not on what you think you suspect you seem to feel that I might possibly be implying...

custos! this is ALL WRONG! Like flat-out NOT TRUE.

the clash for one had rockabilly AND reggae influences (since you addressed that post to mark s., allow me to pipe in on his behalf: the clash R not punk and there R no influences) and k-zillion other punk bands with 50's rockabilly/roots/country in 'em or rockabilly/country/roots bands with punk in 'em.

besides which 2-Tone and Ska are the same thing not two different subgenres (oh ok you could argue that 2-tone was a subset of ska but who cares)! and SKA predates REGGAE let alone PUNK let alone reggae-tinged punk!

and if i could clarify what I meant by conservative I would but I've tried, man, I've really tried.

it may have been contrary to the mainstream culture, but the "back to basics" attitude of Ramones et al was about affirming the intended audience's beliefs that the culture had lost its way which = conservatism

The point is that these elements weren't usually used in a conservative manner. Reusing the past isn't always conservative. In the case of Punk it was commonly not a major point (maybe Whirlwind or something).

I reject the notion of 57-67. There was plenty Bowie, Kraftwerk, and T Rex there. There was plenty of hard rock. There was plenty of Disco there too. Man Machine, Silver Machine, Silver Convention.

"Ska grew out of punk" No it didn't.

"maybe three or four Punk bands with noticable rockabilly flava" Suicide, Generation X, The Birthday Party, The Clash, The Rezillos, B52s, Adam and the Ants. (and expand Rockabilly to cover all pre-Beatles American pop and its hard to find a band that isn't)

Fritz: the clash for one had rockabilly AND reggae influences..[..]
the clash for one had rockabilly AND reggae influences..[..]the clash R not punk and there R no influences
Uh....this is a contradiction...
a. the clash for one had rockabilly AND reggae influences..
b. the clash R not punk and there R no influences...
a. rockabilly AND reggae influences..
b. there R no influences...
a. influences...
b. no influences...

Fritz: and k-zillion other punk bands with 50's rockabilly/roots/country in 'em or rockabilly/country/roots bands with punk in 'em.
I guess I'm using an artificially narrow definition of Punk.

Fritz: and SKA predates REGGAE let alone PUNK let alone reggae-tinged punk!
When I say Ska(2) I'm referring to the white-people made version from the late 70s, not Ska(1) the original pre-Rockstready proto-Reggae dance music from 1950s Jamaica.

Fritz: and if i could clarify what I meant by conservative I would but I've tried, man, I've really tried.
Okay. Fair enough. What word should we use instead then, so we all stop bickering like partisans? Is this all about a "status-quo enforcing" impulse in Punk? A "return to the roots" impulse in Punk? A "fear of the different" impulse?

It's dialectical.

and please note that this is based on "Alley-Oop" not real facts

Roots reggae always had a conservative slant

and hell yeah to that! I still don't understand why the emperor-worshipping back-to-the-land anti-gay anti-woman pro-Bible religious elements of reggae get such a free pass to groovytown just because they smoke pot (take out the emperor and bible and you got the MC5 too)

Lord C. - what are the differences between ska(1) and ska(2)?

have I got an ILE thread for you ;)