Punk Rock Is A Unique And Changing Musical Genre

While these white punks were able to return to their middle-class, financially stable lives, many minorities had no choice but to live in the cheap apartments they were offered at the time. Although the intention of the white punks may have been to unify all races under the label of ‘punk’, they actually reinforced clear differences between the two groups. The lifestyle became a desired object to white privileged punks into which they launched themselves head-on. The white punks desired to internalize the struggle rather than be contradictory by singing about it and not actually living it. White punks believed that by doing this, they were not only eliminating race within the punk subculture, but they were also furthering their own participation within the subculture by creating a “self-imposed minority”2 and an “appropriation of Otherness”2.

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.

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.

McFarland 2003 argues that the origin of Misogyny in music, not only in hip hop is the society and culture it has for so long endeared. Normally, people in America have valued the boy child, to endowing men as adults (McFarland, 102). At the same time, they have considered women as subjects to men who should show total submission. This argument has found many backups, with scholars and authors arguing that the American culture is the force

     The time was in the mid-seventies, there was a void in the music industry that needed to be filled. This need for a new sound was aptly filled by punk rock, a new type of sound that had evolved from mostly rock and a little pop music. The focus of this paper is on punk rock and it’s ample beginnings, early pioneers of the new sound, punk rock listener’s cultural background and their ideas as a whole, bands influenced by the punk rock movement, and the state of punk rock today.

Most of the original rebellion was directed towards the British class structure. They wanted to express their disapproval of the structure that governed their country. In The Jam’s “Eton Rifles”, the band sarcastically attacks the upper class, calling them arrogant and preaching to them that rugby is the only thing making them strong (Punk 68). The Sex Pistols’ album “God Save The Queen” portrays the Queen of England with a safety pin through her nose on their cover. The reaction to this outburst of shocking rebellion from the mainstream society was a strong, displeased one. American writer Greil Marcus defined punk as, “…refusing the future society has planned for you.” Thousands of social misfits attempted just that. Through the many causes for this rebellious political expression: communism, anarchy, feminism, etc., the punks of England had a focus and a reason. It was this that made the “punk” a valid, yet undesired member of society, and the British public got to see this sociological change first hand (Chamberlain par.8). Although this movement was short lived, its impact was a phenomenon, and its effects were long- lasting, which distinguished this group from previous generations.

The Sex Pistols are a very important topic to bring to attention because they were such an influential band. Even though they only lasted two years, they “never really faded away.” (Dougan 413) According to Dougan, they are always present “when the words punk-rock are uttered” (413). The Sex Pistols not only instilled a love of punk rock, but also imagined a world where “a crud could become a king.” (Dougan 414-415). Hence, the Sex Pistols advocated for the English working class, and had a revolutionary impact against the norms

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.

In order to understand the topic that is to be discussed in this essay, one must first understand two seemingly unrelated topics. Those topics are feminism and punk rock. These two social movements spawned the love child that has come to be known as the riot grrrl movement. The history of the riot grrrl movement is deep and intensely intertwined with themes of monumental social change, musical evolution, and the previously unseen all-encompassing nature that is unique to third wave feminism.

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…”:

As a teenager growing up in 1970s Washington D.C. one might rise out of bed in the morning, squeeze into their bell bottoms and skin-tight t-shirts, not expecting that that would be the day they ran into a group of kids dawned in black with clothes pins in their shirts, who called themselves punks and were looking to make a change in DC music history. In a time where the country was divided by political beliefs, a raging war, and racial tensions, smack dab in the center of Washington D.C. came the punk scene. It was said that the hippie scene majorly influenced the punk scene, some would say that the hippies were “the real punks”(Punk: Attitude, 3:12). The punk scene consisted of kids who opposed hippies, so in retrospect the hippies are what

Their battlecry was, "the personal is political," they gave people two choices: to perpetuate the system or to challenge it. Folk music and folk rock, anti-authoritarian by tradition and anti-commercial by default, became the soundtrack of a generation and a voice for many burgeoning feminists, fighting (without a blueprint) for visibility and empowerment: Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Grace Slick, and Janis Joplin. Later on, around the time when punk rock came around, it wasn't just what you sang that was political, but how you sang it. Just having a prominent artist be female is not enough to break down gender roles and stereotypes; the Spice Girls may say "Girl Power!" but in the meantime they're reinforcing every popular stereotype and narrowly defined beauty standard the mass media have ever come up with. Styles where women can un-self-consciously express themselves are sparse; if you cross certain lines your novelty status as a woman will suddenly attract more attention than the content of what you're doing. "It's okay to be a nappy-headed Tracy Chapman or a hairy-legged Michelle Shocked, as long as you're a gentle folkie singing about moral integrity in a reassuringly feminine voice. No raspy Janis Joplinisms or Patti Smith surrealism allowed, and God forbid that Chapman's tell-it-like-it-is lyrics might actually make reference to her sexual orientation." (Mifflin 77) Women systematically explored and challenged social

The first of these, punk rock, is the one that is most often discussed by music critic, but this connection is rarely explored beyond a paragraph or two at the most. This is unfortunate, given that these two musical traditions share much in common, with perhaps the biggest similarity being that both are defined by a raw and unpolished sound, as well as do-it-yourself (DIY) work ethic. Punk rock has its origin in the garage rock groups of the 1960s, whose members were often from white, middle-class, suburban families. Garage rock was raw and unpolished, reflecting the relative amateurism of the musicians, and it was often stylistically simple, making use of only a handful of distorted bar chords (i.e. power chords). By 1971, music critic Dave Marsh had developed the term “punk rock” to better describe a number of these groups—many of whom were beginning to espouse rebellious philosophies in their lyrics.

After stating how he’d flown to England to see the world’s most notorious rock band, Young remarks about the working class kids bashing into each other outside a club. The punk show he sees is dirty, industrial, and violent with kids hopping up and down, running into each other, and beating each other up in the name of fun. The punk movement is more in your face in England than it is in America, and the music is simply a vessel for the message. The kids at the club as well as the Sex Pistols have disdain towards the media and how the movement is portrayed. Journalism resulted in a notion that punks were more violent that they are. The Pistols are stated to have set punk off in Britain, and were receiving vast amounts of backlash only after three singles. They like the music they make more than they like kids sticking safety pins in their faces. They hated the industry of rock singers from the decade before. Despite their popularity, they did not want to become the “next big thing” because they thought it would suck out their integrity. The Sex Pistols are explicit, gritty, energetic, spiteful, and