Punks Not Dead

Punk rock
Punk rock is an anti-establishment rock music genre and movement that emerged in the mid-1970s. Preceded by a variety of protopunk music of the 1960s and early 1970s, punk rock developed between 1974 and 1977 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, where groups such as the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and The Clash were recognized as the vanguard of a new musical movement.

Punk rock bands, eschewing the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock, created fast, hard music, typically with short songs, stripped-down instrumentation and often political or nihilistic lyrics. The associated punk subculture expresses youthful rebellion and is characterized by distinctive clothing styles, a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies, and a DIY (do it yourself) attitude.

Punk rock became a major phenomenon in the United Kingdom during the late 1970s; its popularity elsewhere was more limited. During the 1980s, forms of punk rock emerged in small scenes around the world, often rejecting commercial success and association with mainstream culture. By the turn of the century, punk rock's legacy had led to the development of the alternative rock movement, and new punk rock bands popularized the genre decades after its first heyday.

Punk Diversifies
As the early media attention surrounding punk rock ebbed in the late 1970s, the movement fragmented into a variety of derivative forms. In music critic Jon Savage's description, the early unity between arty, middle-class bohemians and working-class punk rockers began to fracture.[92] On one side rose New Wave and post-punk artists; some adopted more accessible musical styles and gained broad popularity, while some turned in an experimental direction.

On the other side, hardcore punk, Oi!, and anarcho-punk bands—many with an explicit political agenda—became closely linked with underground cultures and spun off an array of subgenres.Somewhere in between, pop punk groups created blends like that of the ideal record, as defined by Mekons cofounder Kevin Lycett: "a cross between Abba and the Sex Pistols".[94] A wide variety of other styles emerged, many of them fusions with long-established genres. Exemplifying the punk rock movement's increasing range was The Clash's album London Calling, released in December 1979. Combining punk rock with reggae, ska, R&B, and rockabilly, it went on to be acclaimed as one of the best rock records of all time.

New Wave
New Wave and its attendant subculture arose along with the earliest punk rock groups; indeed, "punk" and "New Wave" were initially interchangeable. Over time, however, the terms began to acquire different meanings: bands such as Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo, and The Police that were broadening their instrumental palette, incorporating dance-oriented rhythms, and working with more polished production were called "New Wave" rather than "punk". Combining elements of early punk rock music and fashion with a far more pop-oriented and less "dangerous" style, New Wave artists such as The Cars and Elvis Costello became very popular on both sides of the Atlantic. New Wave became a catch-all term for mainstream punk-inspired music, encompassing disparate styles such as 2 Tone ska, the mod revival based around The Jam, the New Romantic phenomenon typified by Duran Duran, and synthpop groups like Depeche Mode. New Wave became a pop culture sensation with the debut of the cable television network MTV in 1981, which put many New Wave videos into regular rotation. However, the music was often derided at the time as being silly and disposable.

Post-Punk
In the UK, a wide variety of post-punk bands emerged, including The Fall, Joy Division, Gang of Four, and Public Image Ltd. Some bands classified as post-punk, such as Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, had been active before the punk rock scene itself had coalesced; others, such as The Slits and Siouxsie & The Banshees, transitioned from punk rock into post-punk. The music was often experimental, like that of the New Wave bands; defining them as "post-punk" was a sound that tended to be less pop and more dark and abrasive—sometimes verging on the atonal, as with Wire and Subway Sect. Drawing inspiration from such art rock sources as Captain Beefheart, David Bowie, and Krautrock, post-punk also explored new lyrical approaches: The Fall's Mark E. Smith wrote "oblique observations of Northern underclass grotesquerie".

Post-punk brought together a new fraternity of musicians, journalists, managers, and entrepreneurs; the latter, notably Geoff Travis of Rough Trade and Tony Wilson of Factory, helped to develop the production and distribution infrastructure of the indie music scene that blossomed in the mid-1980s. Smoothing the edges of their style in the direction of New Wave, a number of post-punk bands such as New Order (descended from Joy Division) and U2 crossed over to a mainstream U.S. audience. Others, like Gang of Four, The Raincoats and Throbbing Gristle, who had little more than cult followings at the time, are seen in retrospect as significant influences on modern popular culture.

A number of U.S. artists were retrospectively defined as post-punk; Television's debut record Marquee Moon, released in 1977, is frequently cited as a seminal album in the field. The No Wave movement that developed in New York in the late 1970s, with artists like Lydia Lunch, is often treated as the phenomenon's U.S. parallel. The later work of Ohio protopunk pioneers Pere Ubu is also commonly described as post-punk. One of the most influential American post-punk bands was Boston's Mission of Burma, who brought abrupt rhythmic shifts derived from hardcore into a highly experimental musical context. In 1980, Australia's Boys Next Door moved to London and changed their name to The Birthday Party, which would evolve into Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. King Snake Roost and other Australian bands would further explore the possibilities of post-punk. Later art punk and alternative rock musicians would find diverse inspiration among these predecessors, New Wave and post-punk alike.

Hardcore
Hardcore punk, characterized by fast, aggressive beats and often politically aware lyrics, developed in the United States in the late 1970s. According to author Steven Blush, "Hardcore comes from the bleak suburbs of America. Parents moved their kids out of the cities to these horrible suburbs to save them from the 'reality' of the cities and what they ended up with was this new breed of monster". Hardcore was the American punk rock standard for much of the 1980s.

Described by critic Jon Savage as "a rush of claustrophobic nihilism", hardcore emerged in the southern California punk rock scene in 1978–79, followed shortly in Washington, D.C., and then spreading throughout North America and internationally. Among the earliest hardcore bands, regarded as having made the first recordings in the style, were California's Black Flag and Middle Class. Bad Brains and Teen Idles launched the D.C. scene. They were soon joined by such bands as the Minutemen, The Descendents, Circle Jerks, The Adolescents, and TSOL in southern California, and D.C.'s Minor Threat and State of Alert. Some second wave punk rock bands, such as San Francisco's Dead Kennedys, redefined themselves as hardcore. A substantial New York hardcore scene emerged around 1981, led by bands such as Agnostic Front, The Cro-Mags, Murphy's Law and Sick Of It All. Other major hardcore bands included Minneapolis's Hüsker Dü and Vancouver's D.O.A. By 1981, hardcore was the dominant punk rock style in California and much of the rest of North America.

The lyrical content of hardcore songs, typified by Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia", is often critical of commercial culture and middle-class values. Straight edge bands like Minor Threat, Boston's SS Decontrol, and Reno, Nevada's 7 Seconds rejected the self-destructive lifestyles of many of their peers, and built a movement based on positivity and abstinence from cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs. In the early 1980s, bands from the American southwest and California such as JFA, Agent Orange, and The Faction helped create a rhythmically distinctive style of hardcore known as skate punk. Skate punk innovators also pointed in other directions: Austin, Texas's Big Boys helped establish funkcore, while Venice, California's Suicidal Tendencies had a formative effect on the metal-influenced crossover thrash style. Toward the end of the decade, crossover thrash spawned the metalcore fusion style and the superfast thrashcore subgenre developed in multiple locations.

Oi!
Following the lead of such first-wave British punk bands as Cock Sparrer and Sham 69, in the late 1970s second-wave units like Cockney Rejects, Angelic Upstarts, The Exploited, and The 4-Skins sought to realign punk rock with a working class, street-level following. Their style was originally called real punk rock or streetpunk; Sounds journalist Garry Bushell is credited with labelling the genre Oi! in 1980. The name is partly derived from the Cockney Rejects' habit of shouting "Oi! Oi! Oi!" before each song, instead of the time-honored "1,2,3,4!" Oi! bands' lyrics sought to reflect the harsh realities of living in Margaret Thatcher's Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A subgroup of Oi! bands dubbed "punk pathetique"—including Splodgenessabounds, Peter and the Test Tube Babies, and Toy Dolls—had a more humorous and absurdist bent.

The Oi! movement was fueled by a sense that many participants in the early punk rock scene were, in the words of The Business guitarist Steve Kent, "trendy university people using long words, trying to be artistic...and losing touch". The Oi! credo held that the music needed to remain unpretentious and accessible. According to Bushell, "Punk was meant to be of the voice of the dole queue, and in reality most of them were not. But Oi was the reality of the punk mythology. In the places where [these bands] came from, it was harder and more aggressive and it produced just as much quality music."

Although most Oi! bands in the initial wave were apolitical or left wing, many of them began to attract a white power skinhead following.Racist skinheads sometimes disrupted Oi! concerts by shouting fascist slogans and starting fights, but some Oi! bands were reluctant to endorse criticism of their fans from what they perceived as the "middle-class establishment". In the popular imagination, the movement thus became associated with the far right. On July 3, 1981, a concert at Hamborough Tavern in Southall featuring The Business, The 4-Skins, and The Last Resort was firebombed by local Asian youths who mistakenly believed that the event was a neo-Nazi gathering. Following the Southall riot, press coverage increasingly associated Oi! with the extreme right, and the movement soon began to lose momentum.


Anarcho-Punk
Crass were the originators of anarcho-punk. Their all-black militaristic dress became a staple of the genre.

Anarcho-punk developed alongside the Oi! and American hardcore movements. With a primitive, stripped-down musical style and ranting, shouted vocals, British bands such as Crass, Subhumans, Flux of Pink Indians, Conflict, Poison Girls, and The Apostles attempted to transform the punk rock scene into a full-blown anarchist movement. As with straight edge, anarcho-punk is based around a set of principles, including prohibitions on wearing leather, and promoting a vegetarian or vegan diet.

The movement spun off several subgenres of a similar political bent. Discharge, founded back in 1977, established D-beat in the early 1980s. Other groups in the movement, led by Amebix and Antisect, developed the extreme style known as crust punk. Several of these bands rooted in anarcho-punk such as The Varukers, Discharge, and Amebix, along with former Oi! groups such as The Exploited and bands from father afield like Birmingham's Charged GBH, became the leading figures in the UK 82 hardcore movement. The anarcho-punk scene also spawned bands such as Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror that in the mid-1980s defined the heavily distorted grindcore style, a close relative of the early death metal sound. Led by Dead Kennedys, a U.S. anarcho-punk scene developed around such bands as Austin's MDC and southern California's Another Destructive System.


Pop Punk
With their love of the Beach Boys and late 1960s bubblegum pop, the Ramones paved the way to what would become known as pop punk. In the late 1970s, UK bands such as Buzzcocks and The Undertones (the latter strongly influenced by glam rock) combined pop-style tunes and lyrical themes with punk's speed and chaotic edge. In the early 1980s, some of the leading bands in southern California's hardcore punk rock scene emphasized a more melodic approach than was typical of their peers. According to music journalist Ben Myers, Bad Religion "layered their pissed off, politicized sound with the smoothest of harmonies"; Descendents "wrote almost surfy, Beach Boys–inspired songs about girls and food and being young(ish)." Epitaph Records, founded by Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion, was the base for many future pop punk bands, including NOFX, with their third wave ska–influenced skate punk rhythms. Bands that fused punk with light-hearted pop melodies, such as The Queers and Screeching Weasel, began appearing around the country, in turn influencing bands like Green Day, who brought pop punk to the mainstream. Bands such as The Vandals and Guttermouth developed a style blending pop melodies with humorous and offensive lyrics. The mainstream pop punk of latter-day bands such as blink-182 is criticized by many punk rock devotees; in critic Christine Di Bella's words, "It's punk taken to its most accessible point, a point where it barely reflects its lineage at all, except in the three-chord song structures."


Other fusions and directions
From 1977 forward, punk rock crossed lines with many other popular music genres. Los Angeles punk rock bands laid the groundwork for a wide variety of styles: The Flesh Eaters with deathrock; The Plugz with Chicano punk; and Gun Club with punk blues. The Meteors, from South London, and The Cramps, from New York by way of Cleveland, were innovators in the psychobilly fusion style. Social Distortion, from southern California, helped spark the related punkabilly form. Milwaukee's Violent Femmes jumpstarted the American folk punk scene, while The Pogues did the same on the other side of the Atlantic, influencing many Celtic punk bands. The Mekons, from Leeds, combined their punk rock ethos with country music, greatly influencing the later alt-country movement. In the United States, varieties of cowpunk played by bands such as Nashville's Jason & the Scorchers and Arizona's Meat Puppets had a similar effect.

Other bands pointed punk rock toward future rock styles or its own foundations. New York's Suicide, who had played with the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center, and L.A.'s The Screamers and Nervous Gender were pioneers of synthpunk. Chicago's Big Black was a major influence on noise rock, math rock, and industrial rock. Garage punk bands from all over—such as Medway's Thee Mighty Caesars, Chicago's Dwarves, and Adelaide's Exploding White Mice—pursued a version of punk rock that was close to its roots in 1960s garage rock. Seattle's Mudhoney, one of the central bands in the development of grunge, has been described as "garage punk".

Legacy And Later Developments
The underground punk rock movement produced countless bands that either evolved from a punk rock sound or applied its spirit and DIY ethics to very different kinds of music. During the early 1980s, British bands like New Order and The Cure developed new musical styles based in post-punk and New Wave. American bands such as Hüsker Dü and their protégés The Replacements bridged the gap between punk rock genres like hardcore and the more expansive sound of what was called "college rock" at the time.

Sonic Youth performing in Stockholm in 2005

A 1985 Rolling Stone feature on the likes of Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Minutemen, and The Replacements declared, "Primal punk is passé. The best of the American punk rockers have moved on. They have learned how to play their instruments. They have discovered melody, guitar solos and lyrics that are more than shouted political slogans. Some of them have even discovered the Grateful Dead." By the end of the 1980s, these bands, who had largely eclipsed their punk rock forebears in popularity, were classified broadly as alternative rock. Alternative rock encompasses a diverse set of styles—including indie rock, gothic rock, and grunge, among others—unified by their debt to punk rock and their origins outside of the musical mainstream.

As alternative bands like Sonic Youth, who had grown out of the No Wave scene, and Boston's Pixies started to gain larger audiences, major labels sought to capitalize on a market that had been building underground for the past ten years. In 1991, Nirvana emerged out of Washington State's grunge music scene, achieving huge commercial success with their second album, Nevermind. The band cited punk rock as a key influence on their style. "Punk is musical freedom," wrote singer Kurt Cobain. "It’s saying, doing, and playing what you want." Nirvana's success fueled the alternative rock boom that had been underway since the late 1980s and helped define that segment of 1990s popular music. The resulting shift in popular taste is chronicled in the film 1991: The Year Punk Broke, which features Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr, and Sonic Youth.

Queercore and riot grrrl
In the 1990s, the queercore movement developed around a number of punk bands with gay and lesbian members such as Fifth Column, God Is My Co-Pilot, Pansy Division, Team Dresch, and Sister George. Inspired by openly gay punk musicians of an earlier generation, queercore embraces a variety of punk and other alternative music styles. Queercore lyrics often treat the themes of prejudice, sexual identity, gender identity, and individual rights. The movement has continued to expand in the twenty-first century, supported by festivals such as Queeruption.

In 1991, a concert of female-led bands at the International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, Washington heralded the emerging riot grrrl phenomenon. Billed as "Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now," the concert's lineup included Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, L7, and Mecca Normal. Bikini Kill's lead singer Kathleen Hanna, the iconic figure of riot grrrl, moved on to the art punk band Le Tigre. Singer-guitarists Corin Tucker of Heavens to Betsy and Carrie Brownstein of Excuse 17, bands active in both the queercore and riot grrrl scenes, later cofounded the celebrated indie/punk band Sleater-Kinney.

Emo
In its original, mid-1980s incarnation, emo was a less musically restrictive style of punk developed by participants in the Washington, D.C. area hardcore scene. It was originally referred to as "emocore", an abbreviation of "emotional hardcore". Notable early emo bands included Rites of Spring, Embrace, and One Last Wish. The term derived from the tendency of some of these bands' members to become strongly emotional during performances. In the mid-1990s, Fugazi, formed out of the dissolution of Embrace, inspired a second, much broader based wave of emo bands. Groups like Antioch Arrow generated new, more intense subgenres like screamo, while others developed a more melodic style closer to indie rock. Bands such as Seattle's Sunny Day Real Estate and Mesa, Arizona's Jimmy Eat World broke out of the underground, attracting national attention. By the turn of the century, emo had arguably surpassed hardcore, its parent genre, as the roots-level standard for U.S. punk, though some music fans claim that typical latter-day emo bands barely qualify as punk at all.

The punk revival
Along with Nirvana, many of the leading alternative rock artists of the early 1990s acknowledged earlier punk rock acts as influences. Nirvana's success is seen as crucial in leading the major record companies to once again see punk bands as potentially profitable. In 1993, Green Day and Bad Religion were both signed to major labels. The next year, Green Day released Dookie, which became a huge success, going ten times platinum. Bad Religion's Stranger Than Fiction was certified gold. Other California punk bands on indie label Epitaph, run by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz, also began garnering mainstream success. In 1994, Epitaph put out Let's Go by Rancid, Punk In Drublic by NOFX, and Smash by The Offspring, each certified gold or platinum. Smash went on to sell over eleven million copies, becoming the best-selling independent-label album of all time. MTV and radio stations such as LA's KROQ-FM played a major role in these bands' crossover success, though NOFX refused to let MTV air its videos. Green Day and The Offspring's enormous sales paved the way for bankable pop punk bands such as Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, and Sum 41 over the following decade. The Vans Warped Tour and the mall chain store Hot Topic brought punk even further into the U.S. mainstream.

The Offspring in concert in 2001

Following the lead of Boston's Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Long Beach, California's Sublime, ska punk and ska-core became widely popular in the late 1990s. The original 2 Tone bands had emerged amid punk rock's second wave, but their music was much closer to its Jamaican roots—"ska at 78 rpm". Ska punk bands in the third wave of ska created a true musical fusion with punk and hardcore. The success of Rancid's 1995 album ...And Out Come the Wolves helped fuel this ska revival, and ska punk bands such as Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake continued to attract fans into the twenty-first century. Other bands with roots in hardcore, such as AFI, also had chart-topping records in the new millennium. Celtic punk, with bands such as Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys merging the sound of Oi! and The Pogues, reached broad audiences. The Australian punk rock tradition continued with groups such as Frenzal Rhomb, The Living End, and Bodyjar.

With punk's renewed visibility came concerns among some in the punk community that the music was being co-opted by the mainstream. These people argued that by signing to major labels and appearing on MTV, punk bands like Green Day were buying into a system that punk was created to challenge. Many punk fans "'despise corporate punk rock', typified by bands such as Sum 41 and Blink 182". Such controversies have been part of the punk culture since 1977, when The Clash was widely accused of "selling out" for signing with CBS Records. By the 1990s, punk rock was so sufficiently ingrained in Western culture that punk trappings were often used to market highly commercial bands as "rebels". Marketers capitalized on the style and hipness of punk rock to such an extent that a 1993 ad campaign for an automobile, the Subaru Impreza, claimed that the car was "like punk rock". Although the commercial mainstream has exploited many elements of punk, numerous underground punk scenes still exist around the world.