Punk Music : The Pursuit Of Love In Punk Rock

Punk rock music has been used for decades to express dissatisfaction with society, government, or any idea common in mainstream media. Yet punk rock is not simply a tangent of the mainstream, it is a dynamic and fluid genre with many distinct songs. Don Letts, a mainstay in the London punk scene during the 70’s and 80’s, went as far to say that hip-hop was essentially “black” punk. While punk and hip-hop music are stylistically different, the fundamental tone of the two genres is the same. Even throughout the decades, hip-hop has sang the same issues as punk, including the plight of the lower class, police brutality, and gang violence.

Punk rock was especially popular in Britain and many people began to become punks because of unemployment and started to form bands then started to sing mostly about political, economic, or social events happening during the cold war. Punk rock stayed popular from 1976 - late 90’s then it started to die down and not many people were forming bands anymore or producing many albums (5). Before the cold war though swing, blues, country, and the big band was very popular. Popular vocalists during this period include Frank Sinatra who sang jazz music, Bing Crosby who sang pop and jazz music, Doris Day who was a big band singer, and Ella Fitzgerald who sang swing, pop, jazz and blues (6). During the 1940’s was when these genes and singers/songwriters became very popular.

In “What Pop Lyrics Say to Us Today” writer Robert Palmer analyzes pop lyrics over the recent decades and concludes pop music sends dominant messages that are influential to young people. Pop has always thoroughly responded to current events, and today’s pop music continues to reflect that culture. To begin with, pop can change attitudes toward love. Palmer first refers to stars such as Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones who endorse sex to urge social change and revolution. Their music was a voice and reminder to older generations that they possessed influential power. True romantic notions tend to be viewed with some suspicion. Palmer also discusses how in comparison to music of the 60’s, idealisms have changed since current times. The Beatles

The attitude common in the subculture is the resistance to selling out, which means abandoning one’s values and changing in musical style toward pop to embrace anything that’s mainstream capitalist culture in the exchange for money, status, or power. Punk rocks’ common thinking wasn’t only anti-authoritarism, and not selling out but also non-conformity, direct action, and a DIY ethic. The DIY attitude was pointed towards stepping forward and speaking without any restraint. To fight with warrior qualities to achieve what you were striving for. The kind of thinking and motives for punk rock subjects was to not settle for what society made acceptable and standard but to think and work outside of the box that was holding them in.

Music, in the past, has often spelled bad news to society at large. It can challenge norms and invoke a sense of hype in places that modern culture may be uncomfortable with, such as sex, sexuality, and drugs. Personally, when I think of punk music, I see a genre that stands to be individualistic, aggressive, and rebellious. Phrases such as ‘anti-establishment’ also come up. This notion comes from many aspects of punk subculture, including dress, music, performance, and my interpretations.

Nevertheless, punk shouldn’t be held to such high standards of influence. It’s influential; it’s something that made misfits feel as though they had a place, but not something to be held to the unattainably high standards. All things considered, it did do something positive, it provided a home and inclusive environment for those who were frustrated and just plain angry.

     Anti-conformity has always been a prominent thread running through punk. The unofficial creed has always been that to truly define yourself you can’t be like your parents or your friends. You have to be yourself and to cut yourself out of stone. Each punk band you ever encounter will be slightly different from all the others. Some bands are lyrically different for their song lyrics, some for their guitar chords, and some for the theme of their music. But whatever the music is about, you can always be assured that it will be high energy, raw, and honest. The

     The punk subculture is often seen as a rebellious group of misguided youngsters who often come from lower class dwellings and haven’t gotten the attention that they needed so they dye their hair, dress differently, and act differently. In Facing The Music edited by Simon Frith, Mary Harron reduced the meaning of punk to “the spectacle of middle-class children dressing up in a fantasy of proletarian aggression and lying desperately about their backgrounds” (History). The flipside to that is that maybe these youths are expressing their individualism and choose to stray away from

In the early 1950s when Rock and Roll was born, it was so new and so different than anything heard before that by the time the above song was released more than 25 years later, it seemed like nothing had existed before it. Punk Rock had a similar effect on the

Our world is full of propaganda and unique activities of every sort. There are countless methods of entertainment pushed towards us in an effort to capture our undivided attention. These forms of entertainment are available through the freedoms Americans have - the freedoms derived from our Constitution. Americans enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” more than arguably every other country; moreover, they will be the first to say so. Americans have little restrictions on expressions and, therefore, many groups feel the need to do just that – express themselves. However, these expressions by such a plethora of actors also is the very reason none of them succeed in holding one’s attention for great lengths. When analyzing “punk” rock as an expression or propaganda, it actually is one of the few which has been able to capture the attention and live through the people for a long period of time – over 30 years.

Punk has always been about more than just the sound of the music people were making during that era, although the sound was a huge factor and played an interwoven part of the entire ordeal. Punk split itself from the traditional rock of its time, sonically, by deciding that clean guitar riffs, processed vocals, and any sound product that didn’t come straight out of the instrument/artist wasn’t “real enough”. Hanner stated in “Unpopular Culture…”: “Musically, punk and hardcore are characterized by short, strident, up-tempo songs performed with consistent, straightforward instrumentation, meaning a lack of synthesizers, guitar effects, or post-production audio modification.“ As a result Punk became the gritty, noisy, dirty and unique sound that everyone can instantly recognize. Punk was also an ideology. It was something people lived by and something that had a very blatant and in your face message of being anti-government, anti-establishment, and basically anti-authority all together. This exact sentiment is described in the same article by Nathan Hanner in “Unpopular Culture…”:

“We are tired of your abuse / Try to stop us, it's no use” Black Flag, ‘Rise Above’

One of the major underlying conventions of punk music is that it tends to reject an association with the mainstream. Punk rock is an all-encompassing out of the ordinary form of music. It goes against mainstream ideals in every possible way, from its grungy sound to the off-putting lyrics and influential ethos. Anti-Flag’s lyrics, message and political/social influences are a perfect example of what the 21st century punk ethos is and means.

Punk is one of the most written and talked about music and political movements of the twentieth century. What perhaps makes punk special is the way a generation incorporated the attitudes and practices of the music into an entire subculture. In her book Punks: A Guide to an American Subculture, author Sharon M .Hannon argues that "there is no universally accepted definition for punk ."To some, punk mean rebellions against conformity or against parents, school, work, and society at large"(2).Punk means different things to different people depending on whom you ask. One thing that everyone can agree on is that the punk subculture was not just about the music, it was a way of self-expression and undoubtedly a way of life. Punks used their bodies as a way of self-expression. They shaved and styled their hair in unnatural ways. Clothing was often ripped and many used patches of their favorite bands to adorn it. Most were also tattooed and had various facial piercings. Perhaps one of the most significant things in the punk subculture was punk rock, which mostly consisted of loud instruments, hard vocals, and political lyrics.

I am The Puss Punk I have no real real name except for my hosts old one, Ben Dover. I’ll get to the fact that I get to the fact I control a host rather than me just obtaining my powers in human form like a normal superhero, but for now I’ll start from the beginning. I was a puss moth caterpillar at a research facility in the U.S. The scientists there were studying me to try and attempt to get humans to spit poison as a defence mechanism for a space travel to the planet Eden where there was believed to be life. After seventeen years of research on my ancestors I was the caterpillar whose adapted dna was fit to be injected into the human genome. The human test subjects would be people set for death row. Bye the time my dna was ready only