The Conservative Impulse of Punk

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You're dealing with a jumble of myths here anyway...if you're mentioning straightedge punk and glue-sniffers like the Ramones in the same sentence then "punk" is probably more inclusive than you think.

I would argue that hip-hop is *way* more reactionary than punk ever was...even the "conscious" strains so favored by liberal writers tend to espouse a "let's get back to God, family, and strong black men" ideology. But for all I know there are tons of underground hip-hop groups like the Coup (whose "Wear Clean Draws" is the one explicitly radical feminist hip-hop song I've heard.)

Anway, there is no necessary relationship between content and form in music or anything else. There's nazi punk and there's anarchist punk, and I'm sure you'd find the same thing in free jazz or whatever.

Punk was a reaction to the overly technical, glossy music that dominated rock, where no one released singles and every number had to have long solos - but that's largely a Brit's perspective, because I don't think it makes too much sense to talk of Television and Talking Heads that way. And there was as much '60s stuff that punk liked as '50s - Iggy was a way more revered figure than Eddie Cochran, obviously, but in both cases we are only talking about liking a couple of things. Dislike was much more what punk centred on.

Also, doesn't part of the Townsend-goes-cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs story that inspired "Who Are You" involve Pete running into a couple of the Sex Pistols at a pub (Steve and Paul, I think), telling them the Who were breaking up and then freaking when the Pistol members lamented "But we love the Who!" (Then again maybe he made that up to make himself look more "hep" and "with it".)

What I was trying to get at was that there was an element of conservatism in SOME of it, and moreso in how the story of punk gets retold ("rock n roll had lost its way and needed to be brought back to its roots").

OK - I really want to make it clear that I was never trying to make an inclusive generalization about ALL punk - I admit IT WAS A MIX.
It cannot be done. Punk is not a single genre or style, or even a mix of genres or styles. It is a rebellious spirit that all musicians feel when they are still young, brash and naive. Every new musical act has a little bit of punk in them. Hell, I'm sure even Michael Bolton has some c30s he recorded at age 14 that would be quite amusing (especially when we see how he turned out.)

Hardcore, though--that was definitely conservative in the beginning. At least to an old turd like me.

I saw the movie Downtown '81 a few months ago, and the funniest thing about it was just how uncool it was to be a mere punk rocker at that time. The laughing stocks of the movie are the fake punk rockers the Felons (basically Blondie) rehearsing in Bradly Field's basement. Everyone rolls their eyes whenever they're mentioned.

How does that match with your disdain for Oi! then? Is the moralist/vegan/anarchist form of punk more in line with the "art school" heritage of punk and thus more acceptable? How did such paradigms form?
This is actually a very good question. I admit a bias toward the "art school" sub-sub-sub-style, but thats not why Oi! annoys me. Its that at least half of it is been absorbed by some strain of Naziism. I've never met a smart Nazi, nor have I ever met one who wasn't a total drag. Granted extremely "leftist" and extremely "artsy-fartsy" musicians are just as boring and irritating. The Nazis just seem to be more likely to be fatally violent for no reason.

ppl who have a 'rebellious' spirit make remarkably similar music (even if the instrumentation is slightly different from band A to band B) and so you can identify, (by listening to the sound) what punk is, what it sounds like. The opinions of ppl in punk bands is already so boringly similar too.

''it's this idea that rock music had somehow been polluted by foreign influences like classical, jazz, folk, country & hippies in general and needed to be purified & returned to its basic, pure elements that strikes me as conservative (and I don't think its entirely untrue either)'' and ''later the all work no play ethic espoused by the sst & dischord crowds''

I honestly don't think you can lump SST in with the punk crowd strictly because it sounds to me that a lot fo the bands just ddin't swallow the 'punk' goespel and let it be. Some of those bands had open ears to jazz, reggae and so on.

I don't hate anybody...I'm a good person in the end but I just don't like being told that 'Funhouse' is one of the great rock alb of all time or guff like its a great distillation of free jazz and rock.

heh...julie. Thanks marky!

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Our own correspondent is sorry to tell
Of an uneasy time that all is not well

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On the borders there's movement
In the hills there is trouble
Food is short, crime is double

Prices have risen since the government fell
Casualties increase as the enemy shell
The climate's unhealthy, flies and rats thrive
And sooner or later the end will arrive

This is your correspondent, running out of tape
Gunfire's increasing, looting, burning, rape

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looks like you've got time on yr hands mark. Finished the article or is it that you can't stay away?

anyway, must go...work continues for me tomorrow.

I've lost track of the chronology of this. When did they decide that the Clash weren't offering the right political analysis? Because Parsons was very keen on them up to mid '77, what with the fawning interview that came out on that bonus EP with the first album. Were they actually SWP members? (I know the book was published by Pluto press but..)

I think this worked on several levels. Firstly there was a general '50s revivalism in the 1970s, ranging from the re-contextualisation of things like Roxy Music through to straight revivalism eg Mud and Showaddywaddy and then later 'Grease' etc.
(And McClaren/Westwood were part of this mood with the 'Let It Rock'
shop they had).

So a fascination with the '50s was in the air anyway, plus Punk found a connection with the simplicity and rawness of the music. People heavily into Pink Floyd or Mahavishnu tended not to be big Gene Vincent or Eddie Cochran fans at that time.

I think this actually happened. Townshend was drunk at the Speakeasy club (fading London club popular with old guard rock stars) and got talking to a bemused Paul Cook who was having a quiet drink.

I believe Patti Smith was a working class bohemian art student in the beatnik tradition. You've heard "Piss Factory", right?

So was Alan Vega. Television were a bunch of juvenile deliquents and mental patients.

The bohemian culture has always had many more members of the working class than people realize. My husband, for example, who grew up in poverty as the child of a dirt farmer in North Carolina and drifted into the Miami hippie culture when his family disintergrated.

I also remember hardcore punk (in the eighties, at least) as being very working class.

Hey, don't forget your actual girlfriend, Mark!

http://www.velvetcds.com.br/zine/galeria/caricaturas/joan.jpg

By the way, I give up on making my point coherent on this thread. I'm still not sure what I was trying to say. Can anybody please tell me what it was I meant?

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.

Tracer I don't agree - the look is more negative than just jealousy. I read it as a bit of jealousy, a bit of fear, a bit of disappointment. I think punk - like most 'scenes' - must have been a crushing disappointment for a lot of scared or shy kids who wanted a place where they could 'fit in' and 'be themselves' and discovered that it *was* themselves who made them unable to fit in, not the square straight world (or whatever).

I'm reminded of the Venn Diagram Mark S reprints in his 'Concrete' essay - here are the punks and here are the non-punks and here are the people who don't fit into either. The reading is that those people are sympathetic but I think they can be sympathetic and also frightened and miserable and disappointed.

i suppose this is hardly earth-shaking news but it just goes to show: when is jello biafra going to get a propah job, eh? (i haf still not forgiven him for "too drunk to fuck", i paid GOOD MONEY FOR THAT you laYMoR)