On Punk Rock

Wikipedia doesn't have the full story on punk or even a close account.

Punk rock did not start out as "anti-establishment" music any more than doo-wop did, it just said things more directly than the contemporary mainstream, and the truth often hurts, whether that truth is a teenage crush or that venting your fustrations makes you feel better.

There's no real date you can put on the birth of punk rock, it happened simultaniously in many places and often there were multiple births such as in the USA you had the Ramones (obviously influenced by the frantic style of fellow New Yorkers Sha Na Na), creating fast edgy pop songs, and within a few short years Black Flag, equally as "punk" was heavier and more sinister sounding than even Black Sabbath.

That fork in the road has lead to the two major types of punk rock that have persisted ever since. Pop punk, such as radio favorites Green Day and punk that will never get on corporate radio but persists despite an almost total lack of funding such as (the late great) GG Allin.

Punk rock took the remains of the socially concious 1960's and applied it to a society suffering and trying to avoid thinking about the ecconomic depression caused by the aftermath of the Viet Nam war. 

No amount of Happy Days spin offs or singer/songwriter ballads could molify the generation growing up feeling that the western world had a very ugly streak and while we weren't quite as bad as Hitler or Stalin, we were hardly the 'good guys' anymore.

The Sex Pistols did manage to make some mighty fine and influencial music even if their manager basically set them up to fail while taking most of the money generated for himself.

Two of the finest books chronicaling the punk rock experience in my opinion are No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, the auto biography of (Sex Pistols) John Lydon and 'Get In the Van' the tour diary of Henry Rollins from the Black Flag days.

But punk rock's most enduring legacy is all the non-punk rock goodness that came in it's wake. In many ways punk is a loose framework rather than a ridged set of musical rules like disco, Jazz or the blues.

Many of the top musicians of the past twenty years were at one time punk rockers, Billy Idol, The Police, The Cure, The Beatie Boys even Adam Ant was a 'real' punk rocker for a long time before he became a cartoon character on MTV.

I've read many interviews with 'old school' hip hop guys who were there at the beginning, a beginning a little easier to pin down than that of punk, and they claim The Clash as an influence, the Clash, of course, claim reggae as an influence.

I think the best example of what what punk rock is all about, if condensed down into one person, is the mighty Shane MacGowan.

http://www.shanemacgowan.de/Pogues_Story/pogues_story.html

You might be saying, but isn't he that guy from the Irish folk band The Pogues? How is that punk rock? Well Shane was in the punk scene at first but more importantly, punk rock allowed him to have the courage to make the music he wanted to and because he saw that talent was optional but integrity and guts were not, he stopped being so fustrated with society and changed it for the better.