Never Mind The 25th Anniversary 474
jonerik writes "Considering that much of the controversy surrounding the Sex Pistols was centered around Queen Elizabeth II's silver jubilee, it's somewhat ironic that the band is now celebrating their own: The group's seminal album, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols" was released 25 years ago today, according to this article from Reuters. Interestingly, although the album was hugely influential (and remains so), like most punk albums of the time, it wasn't a huge success in the U.S. at the time, taking until 1987 to be certified gold and another five years to be certified platinum. God save the Sex Pistols - we mean it maaaaaaaaan." Yeah, so it's not precisely topical - but still, whata band.
She was a girl from birmingham (Score:2, Funny)
I'm not an animal!.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: She don't want a baby that looks like that.
Haha, what timing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Haha, what timing (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Haha, what timing (Score:2)
Phil Collins (Score:4, Funny)
Whoa, sorry, didn't mean to get all American Psycho there.
Re:Phil Collins (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Phil Collins (Score:3, Funny)
Reuters. Reuters. Reuters. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Reuters. Reuters. Reuters. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Reuters. Reuters. Reuters. (Score:2, Informative)
Huh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Huh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Punk and metal are both subcultures which consider themselves to be outsiders but have both developed fairly rigid (and sometimes contradictory) musical and sociological codes, with artists and fans judged to some extent on how much they stay within the codes.
Metallica, for instance, is reviled for being perceived as having broken the metal code (some portions of which they revised and extended in the 80's) with the Loads.
Re:Huh. (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Starting their rise to fame on the power of bootlegs passing between fans, but slamming Napster once they were famous.
2) Jason Newstead leaving the group, for various reasons. (What, you think I listened to Metallica for Lars' drumming?)
Kierthos
Re:Huh. (Score:3, Informative)
The following people have been members of Metallica at one time or another (I'm not including people who played with the band for only a few concerts as guests, or James' guitar tech who played his parts after the Montreal incident):
Jason Newsted didn't contribute much to the music; in about half the songs recorded in his tenure, the bass is virtually inaudible, and most of the remaining songs simpl feature Jason doubling James' riff. Jason, however, being a fan of Metallica became the member who was the most into hanging out with the fans. After every concert, you could hang out with Jason. In concert, he was the energy on stage. "Creeping Death" will never be the same without Jason's "DIE DIE DIE DIE FUCKER!" chant during the "Die by my hand..." section.
The only member that Metallica couldn't survive without, imho, is James Hetfield; his lyrics, voice, and riffs are probably the soul of the band. Lars' drumming is nothing to write home about, though he generally gets into a good groove with James (who is basically the creative center of the band). Kirk's solos are written half the time by James and embellished by Kirk.
Re:Huh. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Huh. (Score:2)
Re:Huh. (Score:2)
damn good flick, tho. fun characters, fun movie.
Re:Huh. (rent another flick) (Score:4, Interesting)
What is Punk Rock? (Score:2, Interesting)
-Shon
Never... (Score:2)
Two words (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the purpose of punk
The 'You' being either conservative british government, or Fleetwood Mac, depending on who you ask....
Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:3, Insightful)
What exactly is there to celebrate about a band that was all hype and zero substance?
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:5, Insightful)
McLaren was self-referentially, critiqueing the packaging and marketing of popular culture - by packaging and marketing something repellent and contrary to that culture. He demonstrated the obvious - blind greed is the paramount value of culture as industry.
God help me! I sound like fscking Julie Burchill!
Cash from Chaos
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:5, Insightful)
McLaren was a force in the cutting edge of 1970s music and culture, from managing the New York Dolls, to coining the term "punk rock" (though his forays into rap in the 80s are a disgrace...Buffalo Girls? Puh-lease). Malcolm McLaren sowed the fertile and largely underexplored ground of pop-proletarian art. Note the Da-daist artwork on the cover of "Never Mind the Bollocks" harkening back to the art radicalism and anti-modernism of the early 20th century.
In many ways McLaren's role with the Sex Pistols is no different than Andy Warhol's role with the Velvet Underground. McLaren got together 4 musicians (and I refer to the original line-up since Sid hardly qualifies for the M word), gave them a look, an attitude, and a subject line. Where Warhol gave VU the topic of S&M, McLaren gave the Pistols the topic of nihilism. Mind you, I'm not calling McLaren the greatest innovator in the history of music--since in fact he borrowed his turn of the century proletarian radicalism from Richard Hell and Lydia Lunch (who invented the ripped clothing and safety pin look copying the turn of the century Bohemians and whose writings borrow heavily from the turn of the century radical art and poetry).
But listen to how "Never Mind the Bollocks" brings it all together: the musical minimalism, the snarling proletarian, vaudvillian lyrics, the Dadaist artwork. It's a true classic in the history of Rock.
I could name a handful of other, more important artists and albums from within a 5 year period (Television, The Clash,The Ramones,The Birthday Party, Gang of Four, etc., etc.) but that doesn't mean that Mclaren, the Pistols, and "Never Mind the Bollocks" aren't legit.
Oh yeah, and the album rocks.
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:2)
Sorry!
I wasn't being dismissive of the 'Pistols. Just responding to the previous comment. I agree with you. And the record is great. Cook, Matlock and Jones were (and are) very underrated for this stuff.
When I contrast this with the L.A. "hardcore" stuff in the years that followed, it's clear that the Sex Pistols were punk ROCK. Emphasis on the second word here.
I got my grubby teen hands on this in the U.S. about winter of '78. Made my own 8-Track copy off of a friend's vinyl - on a Realistic combo-deck from RadioShack!
This was the beginning of finding out about the New York Dolls and The Stooges for me... And opened my doors for the Buzzcocks, The Undertones, etc.
Never mind the farce, here come the Pistols (Score:4, Informative)
I highly recommend Greil Marcus' outstanding book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century to anybody trying to understand the Pistols or punk rock. And I forget the author but The Wicked World of Malcolm McLaren is a great book illuminating McLaren's background and experiences.
here's a chord now go away and form a band!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hehe but that's the point, maaaan! You're there worrying about postmodernist intrepretations of popular cultural music, and _Sid_couldn't_play_ and _we_didn't_give_a_fuck!
What a breath of fresh air punk was. We all knew it was a laugh and it was taking the piss and if were in their boots we'd take the money and run! Skool kids wearing safety pins and singing "Frigging in the Rigging" in the school playground, punks on telly swearing at boring old middle aged presenters, bands that couldn't play a note and didn't care any more than their fans, the Metropolitan Police trying to ban the Never Mind the Bollocks album cover for obscenity and losing. Total breath of fresh air after the analytic self -infatuated prog rock triple album scene we'd had in the UK. Kicked against an incredibly conservative society and culture.
Wot a laugh! I think that's something a lot of these (mainly US) punk bands nowadays forget, they all take themselves terribly seriously..IT WAS A LAUGH! :-))
By the way, on your list of 'important artists' I think you missed the seminal band The Snivelling Shits.
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, John Lyndon will say it was all about introducing something interesting in to people's boring lives... and he was probably right. We're sitting here talking about it today, aren't we?
Re:Sex Pistols as packaged commodity (Score:2, Interesting)
The Sex Pistols didn't begin as a packaged commodity. With their original bass player, Glen Matlock, they were an authentic band. It was only at the very end of their short career, when the musically competent Matlock was sacked and replaced with Sid Vicious, that they were successfully commoditised and sold as "punk" to naive teenagers.
Most Americans are only familiar with this stage of the Pistols, because it was during this stage that the Pistols toured America.
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:2)
It just shows what pretentious, misguided idiots all these "dirty street punks" from the suburbs really are.
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:2)
You may not know this, but the rest of the DK's have been suing Jello Biafra (the very outspoken singer of DK) because he refused to let them sell one of their songs to be used in a comercial.
The Dead Kennedys were on an independant label run by the band. Major labels told them they'd have complete artistic freedom if they only would change their name. They, of course, refused.
A lot of those late 70's/early 80's bands did manage to have some integrity: Crass, Black Flag, Subhumans, Rudimentary Peni...
The Sex Pistols suck, sure. "Plastic Surgery Disasters" by the Dead Kennedys doesn't.
(btw, have you seen the footage of Fred Durst in the early 90s dressed and acting like Vanilla Ice? Some credibility there.)
.
zero substance (Score:2)
In the immortal words of Flipper:
Mike, are you on drugs?
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:2)
They were created to prove that with the right marketing and promotion (and a bit of controversy) you could dish up absolute tripe and turn it into a cultural phenomenon. Hence the movie "The Great Rock & Roll Swindle."
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I seem to recall the Clash's integrity last time I saw that Jaguar commercial with London Calling in it.
I said "semblance" of integrity. Tough to name any bands from the 75-78 period that didn't sell out, unless they broke up.
Maybe Mick's finally getting his teeth fixed.
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:2)
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:5, Funny)
Bullocks don't HAVE bollocks!
Re:Sex Pistols were a farce (Score:2)
Well, I started a band because of Richard Hell [richardhell.com].
We can thank him for the whole punk look (spiky hair, torn clothes, safety pins) as well.
irony==fun (Score:5, Funny)
Gold and platinum certifications... (Score:4, Insightful)
ps. don't mod me down, cuz' there's nothign to be said actually on topic. I like the sp's
Clash story (Score:5, Informative)
A true tribute from one great band to another
Re:Clash story (Score:2, Informative)
Secondly, they were not beginners (Joe Strummer was with pub-rock band the 101ers and got his nickname from busking on the underground - hardly someone who couldn't play his instrument)
Jeez!
God I feel old .... (Score:2)
The 'baby boom' actually had to peaks - roughly the hippies and the punks... Actually we had to invent punk because disco followed the hippy stuff and we were going insane ....
They were all my friends... (Score:2)
Sex Pistols == Punk Backstreet Boys (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty Vacant for damn sure. But still I like Bullocks, it had a beat and you could puke to it.
Re:Sex Pistols == Punk Backstreet Boys (Score:2, Informative)
Senseless... (Score:2)
Sid Vicious was a drug-addled sod who gave his last vestiges of self-respect and coherence to a meaningless pursuit of oblivion. He is an aesthetic saint and barely qualified to pick his own nose.
Johnny Rotten (Score:2, Funny)
1987? (Score:2, Interesting)
I once saw an interview with John Lydon. He said they had the option of touring the northern states. To him (or so he claims now) that was preaching to the converted. So instead they went south and got a lot of grief for their efforts. Who knows, if they had toured the north, their album might have done better.
Re:1987? (Score:2)
Punk was not a sound or a mode of costume; it was an attitude singularly unimpressed with quality or anything else for that matter. A perfect and vigorous nihilism; a generation of cutters. Kurt's depression and suicide exceeds punk in that it is full of significance and tragedy.
No one gave a shit about Sid except for the slow motion train wreck of his demise.
Good to see a story like this on /. (Score:5, Insightful)
artistic achievement (Score:2)
Re:Good to see a story like this on /. (Score:3, Insightful)
Then again, a lot of nerds listen to tripe because they actually like it, not just because they're fed it by the media. Makes no sense, but nerds often love awful music.
Guess what... (Score:2)
Re:Good to see a story like this on /. (Score:3, Insightful)
Truly classic music is that which stands the test of time. Apart from a few exceptions (e.g. Garbage), the bulk of my music collection is over ten years old. The Sex Pistols aren't everyone's cup of tea, but they are a classic; Britney will be lucky to be remembered 25 months from now.
(To stay on topic, Unix is your classic OS; Windows is Britney - nice to look at, but soon forgotten.)
Ironic? (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless you they were speaking out against 25 year anniversaries or something?! (It's debatable whether they were really speaking out about anything, but it was a pretty effective way to sell records.)
Amusing anecdote about the Pistols -- they were originally signed to EMI, but were dropped after they said some naughty words on British TV. A&M gave them a deal but cancelled it a week later, after a couple of little incindents (one of which left a TV engineer needing stiches). A&M paid them £7000 to leave the label, which I think is about twice what my parents paid for our house, around that time.
Nice work if you can get it.
Re:Ironic? (Score:2, Informative)
Heh. that is pretty common too. And that doesn't compare with what happened to wilco. Forced off label, picked up by another label owned by the same company. Which means the same company paid for it twice. What company? AOL. (in case you didn't know.). Which doesn't compare with Mariah. 20M to leave her label was it?
Re:Ironic? (Score:2)
A history of punk (Score:2)
Does anyone have a good quick timeline of punk in the USA vs Brit Punk ??
For some reason everyone had it in their heads that Bad Religion started punk in the USA
Re:A history of punk (Score:2)
- MC5
- New York Dolls*
- Ramones
- Patti Smith
- Iggy and the Stooges
- Television
* I know, they're a glam band, but David Johannson is a total punk and there is the Maclaren connection.Brit punk takes off at this point.
East coast wing (CBGBs) brings us Blondie and Talking Heads and the dawn of a *New Wave*. God I hated the Talking Heads for that, back when I cared.
West coast scene (whiskey a go-go) takes off after the British invasion: Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Minutemen, Suicidal Tendencies, and a cast of thousands.
The MC5 were a funky, quasi-religious, freak show out of Detroit. Their live album *Kick out the Jams* is the missing link between the American garage scene in the sixties and the NY thing going on under the dusty nose of disco. That sixties garage era gives rise to a lot of the local flavors of American punk. The Northwest had some manky thing, Texas had a scene, Minneapolis, etc but mostly it goes NY - London - LA. Of course, it all leads to the cynosure of punk, the pinnacle of achievement in the punk ethos, the ne plus ultra: G G Allin. Let the flames commence.
then and now (Score:2)
Once upon a time a "novice" said "I like boybands". He was hit on the head by the guru with floyd Pulse. the novice was enlightened.
Now:
Hemos said "I posted Sex Pistols Story on slashdot." He was hit on the head with 30 moderator points from brak. Hemos was *temporarily* enlightened.
"Whata band" (Score:3, Troll)
Wha? Are we talking about the same Sex Pistols here? The shallow exercise in media manipulation masquerading as YOOF KULCHA? The shamelessly-pimped whores invented by publicist Malcolm McLaren who staggered from one carefully-planned media event to another?
Sorry to sound so pissed, but... they were a band only in the sense that the Spice Girls and N'Sync are bands.
Another victim... (Score:2)
Re:"Whata band" (Score:3, Insightful)
It's kinda like 'imagine if the Spice Girls had turned out to be really fuckin cool _despite_ being slapped together in a boutique'. The Pistols never should have sold records cuz we liked the songs. They were supposed to sell records cuz they looked cool and thus sell clothes. But.. damn if 'Never Mind...' didn't kick serious ass. It still gets me going to this day.
Maybe we could split the difference with: "Steve Jones, whata band".
Yes, the Pistols sucked. But they sucked so fucking well.
An old Punk who's showing her age...
--
I was more into The Clash, myself... (Score:2, Insightful)
In any case, anyone claiming to be punk today is only demonstrating all to clearly that they haven't got a fscking clue what punk was all about.
It was about broken glass, gloom and hope. Yeah, I know that doesn't make sense, but then again we're talking about punk here, OK? You had to be there, the early Thatcher years, the early Reagan years, the mainstream world hurling ass-backwards back to the values of 50s while unemployment was skyrocketing and mainstream rock and pop was more toothless than ever before in recorded history. On top of that both sides of the cold war had their fingers on the button 24/7.
The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Ramones and the rest set us free, free from all the BS going on around us.
yes, some relevance to Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
I say current, since we're pretty far away from 1976. And I'm not saying all punks (or free-software types!) live up to those values, but they those are commonly expressed values.
There's also a more intellectual connection via those who consider the Pistols to be the all-time Situationist art piece linked to anarchism linked to certain anarcho-trends on Slashdot.
Anyway, even if you dismiss the Sex Pistols as hype (true enough), you've got to hand it to them:
Sex Pistols eh? (Score:2)
The Carpenters, Badfinger, Duke Ellington, Roy Clark, Yes, Tracy Ullman, The Moody Blues, Hanson, John Denver, Tony Douglas & The Shrimpers, The Oneders, Wierd Al Yankovic, The Cowsills, Don Williams, Stillwater, Ray Charles, Johnny Horton...
Re:Sex Pistols eh? (Score:2)
Punk's not dead... (Score:5, Interesting)
What people forget is that this is not punk. The whole idea of a punk 'uniform' is in itself against everything that punk ever was - or is. Punk is about rebelling about what one does not like, and doing it how one wants - sticking your middle finger up at the world, in a sense. It's not about mohawks and leather jackets - or about self-destruction, a la Sid Vicious. In that sense, as other /.ers have pointed out, the Sex Pistols were a Spice Girls band in nature, having been created by Malcolm McLaren, who failed in his previous attempt with the New York Dolls; however, having said that, the original motivation for bands such as the Ramones, the Clash and so forth is more about what punk is.
Punk music is just that - a variety of music, nothing more. Like it or love it, whilst it has come to represent, along with the Sex Pistols at the forefront the ideals of a generation of disaffected British youths, it is not punk. Hell, punk rock (to give the music a name) is not even English in origin - it's American...
25 years on, yes, there are still punk bands out there - by this I do not mean punk rock bands such as the Sex Pistols, I mean bands who have the punk attitude. And they don't even have to play punk rock to be punk. Bands such as Die Toten Hosen [www.dth.de], to name one, is a good example. Whilst they may have a punk rock background, they are not punk rockers now - but they are still punk in attitude. Blink 182, the Offspring - ha, don't make me laugh. They are not 'punk'.
Therefore, in a sense, Linux users can even be considered punk - sticking their middle fingers up at Microsoft :)
Re:Punk's not dead... (Score:3, Informative)
IMO, and strictly IMO (but I doubt I am alone here), they have more of the ethos of punk than most other people ever will. Yes, sure, they have songs about drinking; yes, they sing songs about Bayen Munich; however, knowing the guys personally, I believe that they do possess your three criteria (creativity, originality and intellect), but unlike some with an idea, they don't ram it in your face - you have to pay closer attention than I suspect you probably have (not that this is a flame - if you don't like the music, then why should you?)
In any case, I like their music, but above all else, I like the Hosen as people. :)
Cultural Revolution (Score:5, Informative)
The pop charts were rigged especially to keep God Save The Queen off the number one spot, and the record was banned from airplay.
Retailers were actually threatened with arrest and imprisonment should they have the "Never Mind The Bollocks" album on display in their stores.
So while they may not have been the best punk band, they had a major impact on our culture, as what was banned 25 years ago is now perfectly acceptable.
Of course, a lot of the stuff that passes for punk on MTV these days is just bollocks.
Punk Karma-Whoring (Score:2)
Stiff Little Fingers
U.K. Subs
The Clash
English Beat
Madness
The Specials
The Damned
Sex Pistols
Selector
I have. A LOT. In fact, I've been to so many Damned shows, Cpt. Sensible uses me as his smoke machine (as in, "hey Jim, can I bum a smoke?")
The list could go on and on. Growing up in L.A. in the late 70's was pretty fun. Hollywood was crazy, and we would go on jaunts to S.F. for some shows.
OK, I'm dating myself. Midlife crisis. I just turned 40, and so did all these guys, and most are older than me, BUT.... These bands (with the exception of some of the cheesier ones) are the ones than spawned the same music most people listen to today.
-jim
The day punk died.... (Score:3, Funny)
"I am the antichrist, I am Sporty Spice..."
Oh, the pain.
My mallcore music beat up your punk music (Score:3, Insightful)
I know this post is kind of geared more towards music in general than to the Sex Pistols, but the attitude on Slashdot seems to lean towards "My x music is more closely represents the genre than yours" or "Band X is cool until they sell out, then they're just commercialized pop." I can understand having a beef with a video card cause it gets texture flickering in the latest Quake-engined game... That's something you can back up with actual facts. Music is meant to be entertainment.
I can respect that your music tastes are different than mine. Arguing that your artists or genres are better is like arguing chocolate is better than vanilla. Do I enjoy any music The Sex Pistols have released? No. Am I going to point out artists that I think are better than the Sex Pistols? No - the Sex Pistols created their own catalog of unique songs and comparing them to other artists' different songs would be comparing apples to oranges.
Re:My mallcore music beat up your punk music (Score:3, Insightful)
Sit down, my friend, while I tell you a tale. (with apologies to Peter Sellers)
There's this musician. A guitarist. He put out an indie album (on Aware Records, the indie side of Colombia), coffee-house recordings. 10 Tracks or so. real rough cuts. Real heartbreaking. Lyrics were kinda juvenile, but in a waspy, nostalgic sorta way.
Someone higher up hear this guy and said: "Hey. He's good, but not mainstream enough. Throw some money at the problem. Get him a band and some studio time. Have him rerecord his songs. See what happens."
So he does. Goes into the studio with a drummer who knows one beat and only one beat (DUM-dum-CHICK-dum-dum-dum-CHICK), and Dave Matthews' producer (who has the uncanny ability to make everyone he produces sound like Dave Matthews, regardless of what they sounded like before.) They rerecord his heartbreaking coffeehouse songs, and as if with a scalpel, remove the emotion, the edge, the cute mistakes, the personality and the vibrancy. The remove the profanity. They clean up the solos.
And lo and behold this completely transformed pop-star starts getting gigs at Irving Plaza in New York City and airtime on LITE-FM. People walk around singing his pointless renditions of once-beautiful songs.
HE SOLD OUT. That in and of itself isn't too bad, they gotta make a living. The problem is he changed from being honest to being a shill for Colombia.
The only thing I had over people was "Guys, I know he's vapid now, but LISTEN TO THIS: It's his first album. Completely raw. Try it. It's really really good, and it's out of print. You'll see what he used to be like."
And you know what those bastards did to me? They rereleased his first album like it was some kind of 'discovery'. They used ad slogans like "Before his success," and "Work from his younger days." (HE'S NOT EVEN 30 FOR CHRIST'S SAKE). But he's played on LITE-FM. He's on the Barnes & Noble Compilations (they're subsidised for the music they play in the stores.) He's gone.
So yes. To me, selling out is a horrible, horrible thing - once the sheeple like something, any substance that was ever there, any FUCKING ART that there ever was hsd been do diluted for mass consumption, so stripped of emotion that there's no point any more.
Ever. Wow. I'm crying. damn.
Triv
This explains something (Score:3, Interesting)
Now I understand why my (US) gf surprised my (EU) sensibilities. She said she was really in to punk music when she was younger. I thought 7 was a bit too young!
Pistols were THE band,..we need it again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
2. They hated you
3. They made one stellar, brilliant album
4. They broke up
Now THAT is a rock band! Too many bands continue after the "plane crash album", sad really.
The hottest thing on the charts when the Pistols came was Hotel California. The trend would later continue when Nirvana decimated (and I don't mean grouping into ten) glam metal.
Sigh. It's time for someone to come along and decimate today's cock rock in the same manner.
Warning: Flamebait (Score:3, Insightful)
English music is like a funhouse mirror of American music. While occasionally there are interesting results (The Beatles, Black Sabbath), it's mostly only a pale imitation with little "soul". The Sex Pistols don't hold a candle to American punk bands that came before them like The Ramones or The Stooges. No bands from England have ever quite had the visceral punch of, say, The Doors, Janis Joplin, MC5, Black Flag, The Pixies, Jane's Addiction, Nirvana...
Anytime English bands get popular in the States it's only because they're superficially exciting in an over-the-top kind of way.
Of course, American music is itself only a reflection of African-American music. I know that there are lots of black people in England, but they tend to be very... well... British. The black American has a very special creole culture that constantly innovates musically. You might think that punk rock is purely a white-boy phenomenon, but consider that the Ramones' sound is a simplified and aggressive form of 50's rock'n'roll ala Elvis and Buddy Holly... and Elvis' sound was merely a countrified R&B (country music itself was already heavily influenced by blues and swing at this time).
African-American music is always evolving in it's own direction while the white boys jump on a tangent and run with it or take ideas from their current sound (note the influence that hip-hop currently has in rock music). Occasionally someone will step into the white man's game (Hendrix, Bad Brains) and prove that they can still do it better.
Remember, rock'n'roll is just African-American slang for sex.
Suprise Bollocks (Score:3, Interesting)
Nobody thought they would ever get their shit together to actually put together an album. And when they did, it looked like it would never be released. And when it was, it looked like it would never be distributed.
But the big suprise was that the album was incredible. Pure distilled venom with a beat. People would recoil when they heard it. It was shocking to a degree hard to imagine today.
The amazing thing was that this "punk version of NSync" went off like an atomic bomb. And the music business looked like Hiroshima afterwards. Don't kid yourself, they changed everything.
Re:They saved music (Score:2, Insightful)
"Real Punk" = lazy white kids (Score:2, Interesting)
Politics and music should be kept entirely separate -- idolizing someone like Jello Biafra or, on the other end, Ian Stuart can lead to some blind political choices.
The DIY ethic, distrust of corporations, and the "scene" are just anarchistic (which doesn't mean punk) ideals. Punk itself is long dead and still lingers in forms of trendies, poseurs, emofags, Blink 182, and Straight Edge Earth Crisis idiots.
Mallcore is where all the music is at -- real underground, pure enlightenment.
Re:"Real Punk" = lazy white kids (Score:2, Funny)
Real punk ethics are for lazy white kids too pampered and drug addled to get a job, the kind of people who go from the suburbs to the homeless shelters.
True. I love to hear middle class kids complaining about how horrible their lives are. I'm especially amused when I see "punk rockers" here at college, which is most likely an endeavor financed by their "oppressive" horrible capitalist parents. Yeah. And all this anti-capitalism stuff that the kids buy into? Isn't somebody making a whole lot of money from the propaganda t-shirts the kids are buying? Hardly seems like "anarchy" or whatever they promote, to me!
Re:"Real Punk" = lazy white kids (Score:2)
Re:"Real Punk" = lazy white kids (Score:5, Interesting)
from the very beginning punk rock has been about these diy and independent ideals. minor threat, dead kennedys, etc. continuing on into today. and there are very good reasons for this. it's not just anarchist ideals put to music. it's bands wanting to focus on the music and the show rather than the business, the package, the marketing, and all the sleaze involved in trying to "make it". most punk bands are just out there doing all the things that matter -- playing shows, writing music, putting out CDs or records -- and none of the things that don't -- paying off DJ's, shmoozing, marketing, advertising, trying to cater to the lowest common denominator, etc.
we distrust corporations because they have earned our distrust. good friends of mine, a band called Violent Society, is currently owed over $40,000 by their record label. i've watched other friends' bands get screwed over in similar ways. plus there's the whole RIAA, who want only to insure the profits of the executives at the major labels. true story: i have a friend, she used to work for a major label. her JOB was to call up DJ's and say "hey, i've got two trips to disneyland i'd like to give you, for you to give to your listeners in a contest. in exchange, i want to hear the new Limp Bizkit single 40 times a week. and, if you keep one of those trips for yourself, i'm sure we won't notice." she quit because she couldn't face herself anymore. if you don't actively oppose this system, then you are only reinforcing it. music shouldn't be this slimy. and it's the money that did it. punk bands operate outside of that greed. we take ourselves out of that game.
Politics and music should be kept entirely separate -- idolizing someone like Jello Biafra or, on the other end, Ian Stuart can lead to some blind political choices.
there's nothing wrong with music being about something. frankly songs about girls or how cool the singer is or nothing at all bore the fuck out of me. to each his own, man, don't act like your opinion is fact. i enjoy listening to music whose lyrics actually make me think or even educate or enlighten me. propagandhi in particular is a band whose lyrics are at the same time both political and personal, deeply accurate and informed as well as emotional. they also tell you up front that you shouldn't make opinions based on theirs, or take what they say as fact. they want you to read the papers and make your own decisions.
Punk itself is long dead and still lingers in forms of trendies, poseurs, emofags, Blink 182, and Straight Edge Earth Crisis idiots.
you couldn't be more wrong. the underground punk scene is alive and well, has been that way since its birth in, what, the mid 70's, and will still be here once all this nu-metal crap has gone the way of that swing craze a few years ago. my band plays hardcore punk rock, like minor threat or the dead kennedys, and we play literally about 100 shows a year. and there are bands in every major city right now with gobs of integrity and heart, pounding out punk shows, doing it just like we do. i guess you won't know they're there if you don't go out and look for these shows. you won't hear em on the radio and you won't see them on mtv, cuz they don't have that kind of funding, but i guarantee their shows are more fun than 20 metallica concerts. we're not the "latest thing" but we'll still be here when the latest thing is dead and buried.
Re:Ian Stuart is awesome (Score:2)
Oh I see, after posting total misinformation about the dead kennedys elsewhere in this topic, you come out of the closet as a nazi sympathizer and racist.
Well, then...
"NAZI PUNK FUCK OFF"
Re:They saved music (Score:2)
Re:They saved music (Score:2)
Re:They saved music (Score:3, Informative)
You listen to a very narrow band.
All the technical flourishes you praise are current in my listening vocabulary of "popular" music. From recent retros like Groove Collective, Air, Corduroy, Mother Earth James Taylor Quartet- to chillers like Morcheeba or Groove Armada. Even the waxies I still listen to from the late 70's and early 80's were big on improv solos and apeggia. I'm thinking of Squeeze and Madness, etc. here. Regular products of a post-punk explosion.
Re:They saved music (Score:2)
Nothing annoys me more than listening to some self-important "rock icon" play something I can dance or groove to, and that, my friend, is the important part.
Your attitude is reminiscent of most "linux guru's" that I know. while you get off on hearing the most technical boring shit that no one on the earth gives a fuck about, the rest of us want to listen to music and enjoy it. (analogy for you: Most people don't give a fuck about open source. They just want their email to work.)
Re:They saved music (Score:2)
Re:They saved music (Score:4, Interesting)
Rock music is not the same dominating force in music over here, pop, disco, r'n'b, even rap have much more mainstream success. The 'rock' bands that were successful before 1977 over here were in the middle of the excesses of 'prog-rock', where 3 disc concept albums roamed the earth like dinosaurs.
Effectively, we had such lame music scene that it was possible for an insightful person to step totally outside the types of music that were avaialable, pull influences from the punk scene (let's not forget that the Pistols were just the successful packaging of what The Damned and others were already doing), assemble the most objectionable people he could get, and capitalise on the disillusionment of the record buying public so successfully that we are still talking about it to this day.
The closest thing the US had to this was Nirvana - not such a big jump in musical style, but still a band that no-one in the record industry thought would sell.
btw, I'd disagree that the Pistols were talentless, they had a LOT of memorable songs (even if it was Tenpole Tudor that played some of them for them!), and as for guitarists, have a listen to Richard Thompson and tell me there are no amazing ones left!
Re:They saved music (Score:2)
that was the point! music doesn't have to be acrobatic to be fun to listen to. listen to the ramones. those are some damn catchy tunes, and none of them could really play. punk was basically about doing the opposite of what everyone else did, and although some punks got insular and turned into elitist jackassas, many (like me) are still around trying to poke holes in convention, expectation, the music industry, "rock stardom", etc etc.
my band plays literally about 100 shows a year, we don't make shit for money, but we have a fucking blast playing the hardest punk you ever heard. i dunno, it's fun. and it's not for money and it's not an egho trip and it's not exploiting stupid people.
Re:They saved music (Score:2)
Shhh, the RIAA doesn't want people to know that musicians don't actualy have to make multi millions of dollars to play/write/perform music. You'll ruin their defense if you let this out.
Re:They saved music from The Great Kat (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh god, spare us the guitar-weenie pomposity already. Punk rock came in and washed away a pile of doodly-doodly-doodly "solos and exotic scales" and frankly, a bunch of tuneless *wankery*. And if grunge finished off the job, that's a good thing.
Playing music that resonates requires talent. Knowing theory and memorizing scales doesn't, and the former is not dependent on the latter. But you can't teach "memorability" in the latest issue of "GuitarYanker" magazine, so....here's how to play doodly-doodly-doodly in Mixolydian, dooooodes......
Steve Vai, Slash, or Ritchie Sambora
[sarcasm]Yeah, and the state of guitar art is so much poorer for losing the talents of Slash and Richie Sambora, innovators who have been unjustly passed over.[/sarcasm]
I mean, where's the mention of quarter-tone guitarists like you'll hear in ambient music? By the criteria you seem to be going by, exotic tone systems are a step beyond knowing which pentatonic scale D Phrygian maps out to, right? Christ, if you'd at least mentioned Fripp, I might have thought you even knew what you were talking about...
No solos, no exotic scales, nothing.
See above. This is a Good Thing.
Go forward from grunge and you have the mallcore bands -- my favorite genre -- such as KoRn, Limp Bizkit, Taproot, Adema, POD, Disturbed, and so forth, of which none know anything when it comes to scales, arpeggios, solos, etc; in many song, one string is played or bent. It's all about detuning and creating the proper timbre, not showing off knowledge of Lydian modes or doing sweep picking and so forth.
But by the same overgeneralization: Go backward from grunge and you have the heavy metal crowd, almost none of whom know anything about riffs, melodies, or songwriting; in many songs, 10 to 15 different riff changes are yoked together for no apparent reason except to present a facade of "complexity." It's all about showing off chops, like knowledge of Lydian modes or doing sweep picking, or copping riffs from classical composers instead of actual songwriting or experimenting with textures, timbres, dynamics.
I'm sorry, but the guitarists worth looking up to today (or yesterday, or 30 years ago) don't put such a cartoonish overemphasis on "exotic" scales or hyperfast arpeggios -- and the power metal bands you've named are weak throwbacks to a style that died out somewhere in the mid-80s. Ditto "progressive" metal; it's just hilarious, IMO, that so much "progressive" rock & metal, by placing so much emphasis on chops and theory, ends up trying to pretend that Yes and ELP and __(fill in your fave Shrapnel Records act here)__ is on the same level as 400-year-old Baroque music, even if none of these guys could write a memorable three-part fugue to save their lives. We've seen where that kind of "progression" leads: The Great Kat. [greatkat.com]
Re:They saved music (Score:2)
True, I had forgotten that little detail... still, most metal guitar is either power chord or minor key based.
/me smacks head...
Re:They saved music (Score:2)
Can someone mark this guy down -1 Irrelevant?
By the way, you do know Murray Head is the older brother of Anthony Head of Buffy fame, right?
Mark me down as irrelevant too, I suppose...!
Re:poseurs.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think of Hardcore as the most comparative of the American punk offerings to british punk (ie. Politically Relavant subject matter), but sonicaly Pistols-like it is not.
Oh and if you haven't seen "The Filth and the Fury" (the 2001 version) check it out it's a good documentary on the pistols.
Re:Punkers don't do opensource (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who cares? (Score:2)
-Sean
Re:WFT is this...!!!! :) (Score:2)
The Pistols were never for nerds...
In my experience, 'punk' or 'goth' is a way for school-age nerds to be 'cool'. What baffles me is it seems to be timeless - there's gimpy goth kids running round my local school now...