Is Punk Dead?

[Buzzrock 14936]

I've made a conscious effort to stop (or at least slow) my hyping of this band, and you might not consider it "punk", but it sure seems like a packed roomful of kids in fucking Louisville KY dig it.  I think music is more diverse now than ever, and young people like a wider cross section than ever.  A kid can dig Jason Isbell and Kendrick Lamar and Royal Blood and The Beatles and nobody gives a shit.  When I was a teenager, there were clear cliques and you were definitely judged if your tastes were too broad.
Plus, Pat Smear and Jack White and Keith Morris and Donita Sparks and Kathy Valentine and Amy Taylor are big fans, so there's some punk credibility.
 

Sounds like rock and roll to me

[Guest]

Doing ABC News Breakfast says a lot about today's punk scene. Lol.

[Braff Zacklin 13650]

Punk isn't dead. It's just on Smoko.

 

[Born to Run 6569]

I honestly think Nirvana was as much a pop band as a punk band.  Their melodic and harmonic structure was WAY more sophisticated than the average grunge band.

With disco drumming.

[locodos 5390]

7 hours ago, FirstTimeCaller said:

Doing ABC News Breakfast says a lot about today's punk scene. Lol.

Well, Jello Biafra went on Oprah

[ajax 2620]

If you think punk rock is dead, the folks at Subaru would like to have a word with you

 

 

[Guest]

16 hours ago, Braff Zacklin said:

Punk isn't dead. It's just on Smoko.

 

Never heard this song. Holy shit I love it.

[Braff Zacklin 13650]

Just now, FirstTimeCaller said:

Never heard this song. Holy shit I love it.

Same. Someone posted it unironically in another thread about a year ago and I've been a fan ever since. Hilarious.

[G650 14273]

Queensland never fails

[Guest]

Happy to report that my kid loves Smoko. So does his dad. Just waiting that call from his teacher today. "Little FTC won't do his work. Keeps telling me he's on smoko, but I don't know what that means."

[Celery Man 20996]

34 celsius, fuckin pussy

[Al_4_ISU 12477]

I don't know how you don't find punk rock in the DNA of this shit.

 

[G650 14273]

Pearl Jam fans are just the worst. (Not you AL, you're cool).

 

Quote

 Kurt Cobain was no phoney — but he wasn’t so sure the kids could spot one. ‘I do feel a duty to warn the kids of false music that’s claiming to be underground or alternative,’ he told Michael Azerrad.2 Cobain wasn’t speaking in the abstract here — he had one band in particular in mind — Pearl Jam, the Seattle-based five-piece whose debut album, Ten, had been released just one month before Nevermind. Krist Novoselic agreed. ‘Those guys are not an alternative band! They’re a hard rock band.’

 

 

[Celery Man 20996]

I'd love to read a.... smart person discussing Kurt Cobain's comments (like the above, or famously how he felt about Nevermind and Butch Vig's production, etc), his actual music, and his ethos and identity. How those things played together, because from my not very studied and very much armchair perspective I think that Cobain had some weird cognitive dissonance between who he was and who he wanted to be. Or at least, who he felt like he was and how the actual music he made reflected on that.

I can't find the original article in a ten second google but from here referring to some interview about the 10 albums that changed his life where Cobain compares The Clash and The Sex Pistols - 

Quote

There is one big statement left to be made, however, as Cobain selected the Sex Pistols album Nevermind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols. While the selection isn’t surprising, his assertion is that it’s “a million times more important than The Clash.”

“How do I explain that? Hmm, Both were the original punk bands, but The Clash were always a bad imitation of The Rolling Stones, in love with America. But at least they took their girlfriends on tour with them (The Slits). Their music was terrible, though,” Cobain said, before adding: “The Pistols album has the best production of any rock record I’ve ever heard. It’s totally in-your-face and compressed. All the hype The Sex Pistols had was totally deserved … they deserved everything that they got. Johnny Rotten was the one I identified with, he was the sensitive one.”

I was thinking about that quote because of what Jimmy correctly said about the fact that Nirvana was a pop band (of course you could correctly apply that label to a great many bands across different genres of rock). I remember that quote because I so strongly disagree with Cobain's top line assertion (The Clash do not suck and in fact are the best, and the Sex Pistols are important but not good) and also because... again without having thought about it too hard, if you sat a head trauma victim who has forgotten everything down with the discographies of the Sex Pistols and The Clash and had him draw a line from Nirvana to one, I think it would go to The Clash. Again, haven't actually thought about that too far, but broadly I think a lot of what Cobain had to say about bands who made music that was accessible is him turning his feelings about himself outward.

 

also I'm so fucking glad we don't have Kurt Cobain's twitter

also I can't remember if he got specifically into what I'm saying, but Chuck Klosterman may have actually done just that in his recent book on the 90s

Edited August 29, 2023 by Celery Man

[G650 14273]

27 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

Cobain had some weird cognitive dissonance between who he was and who he wanted to be.

 

Is it really that weird though? I think most of us have it in some capacity. His biggest imo was reconciling music he liked with the genesis of that music. He was a massive fan of very poppy stuff that was the product of the machine, and had no emotional mechanism to reconcile that.

 

On his music I don't think he was nearly as conflicted. He was pretty alienated by the fame, but he also craved the fame terribly. He could not reconcile those feelings whatsoever.

 

Klosterman really didn't talk much about it in that book that I recall, and frankly he has almost no frame of reference to talk about it, but some of the best things I feel you can read are Greg Prato's oral history Grunge is Dead and Mark Yarm's Everybody Loves Our Town. There is as much first hand accounts of Kurt as you will find, and they shed a lot more light than any of his biographies by far in my opinion.

 

27 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

also I'm so fucking glad we don't have Kurt Cobain's twitter

 

Sheeeeit. That shit would be fucking hilarious man. But I'm pretty sure Cobain would never had been able to figure out how to tweet.

Also, Kurt was dead on about Johnny Rotten. I am definitely a Clash fan way more, but Lyndon is absolutely a sensitive soul, almost a doppleganger of Kurt.

[Celery Man 20996]

yeah, def not weird to have the tension over who you are and who you want to be, but maybe weird in how it manifested with kurt

 

also that's reminding me of one of the hardest lyrics of all time - 

you can throw me in the colbert county jailhouse
you can throw me off the wilson dam
but there ain't much difference 'tween the man I want to be
and the man that i really am

[locodos 5390]

5 minutes ago, G650 said:

Also, Kurt was dead on about Johnny Rotten. I am definitely a Clash fan way more, but Lyndon is absolutely a sensitive soul, almost a doppleganger of Kurt.

Gonna be in Edinburgh on the 21st.  Thought about going to see PIL.   I just don't think I want to.  

I think I'll just have a nice meal and try and find a non corporate Pub 

[G650 14273]

5 minutes ago, Celery Man said:

yeah, def not weird to have the tension over who you are and who you want to be, but maybe weird in how it manifested with kurt

 

also that's reminding me of one of the hardest lyrics of all time - 

you can throw me in the colbert county jailhouse
you can throw me off the wilson dam
but there ain't much difference 'tween the man I want to be
and the man that i really am

 

Yeah I mean he was a weird guy, so there's that. I mostly think he was just really, really sensitive.

 

Just now, locodos said:

 

 

I think I'll just have a nice meal and try and find a non corporate Pub 

Godspeed. I'm a little jelly, not gonna lie.

[AnotherUTFan 9771]

Randomly I just came across this show bill with Pinko playing at Chess Club this Saturday night for those in Austin. I saw them when they were here in SF a year or so back. Punk as fuck. I bought their record. Check them out. I think they're from San Antonio.

[jimmyjazz 46091]

17 minutes ago, G650 said:

Godspeed. I'm a little jelly, not gonna lie.

Yep.  I'm no big time world traveler, but I've visited most of western Europe.  Edinburgh is my favorite city, by far.

[yoladu 4094]

On 8/24/2023 at 4:12 PM, Rudiger said:

Fat Mike is 56, so punk rock probably has two or three years left at least. 

when him and Wattie from The Exploited die.. its over. (ha, Punks not Dead indeed)

 

but seriously.. what is punk? Are we talking the musical style? attitude? DYI? Kids are always going to be making really interesting music on the fringes -  Maybe not aggressive or snotty, per se, but still punk.

[yoladu 4094]

On 8/26/2023 at 1:29 PM, ajax said:

Agreed. 

Rick Beato has a video called the Y2K Curse, where he talks about bands that were popular in the late 90s that kind of faded away after Y2K. The post-grunge era of music got super mellow. Bands like 3rd Eye Blind, Hootie and the Blowfish, Creed, Big Head Todd, etc. They still put out music after Y2K but faded in significance. They probably strayed too far from punk and hardcore roots. Beato talked about how rock got decidedly harder and heavier after that. Mainly was talking about nu metal, but if you look at the current Spotify rock list, you see a lot of bands that have hardcore roots.

Basically any "blank"-core band has roots in punk - deathcore, metalcore, mathcore, etc

from Bruce Springsteen's SXSW keynote address in 2012:

 

“There are so many sub–genres and fashions, two–tone, acid rock, alternative dance, alternative metal, alternative rock, art punk, art rock, avant garde metal, black metal, black and death metal, Christian metal, heavy metal, funk metal, bland metal, medieval metal, indie metal, melodic death metal, melodic black metal, metal core, hard core, electronic hard core, folk punk, folk rock, pop punk, Brit pop, grunge, sad core, surf music,  psychedelic rock,  punk rock, hip hop, rap rock, rap metal, Nintendo core, huh?

I just want to know what a Nintendo core is, myself. But rock noir, shock rock, skate punk, noise core, noise pop, noise rock, pagan rock, paisley underground, indy pop, indy rock, heartland rock, roots rock, samba rock, screamo–emo, shoegazing stoner rock, swamp pop, synth pop, rock against communism, garage rock, blues rock, death and roll, lo–fi, jangle pop, folk music. Just add neo– and post– to everything I said, and mention them all again. Yeah, and rock & roll”

 

Word.

[G650 14273]

In timely things, I was just scanning through Sirius XM, and saw Pearl Jams Animal, and was like oh I dig that song. Immediately after was Kurt saying “I just don't agree with the old punk rock ethos, of like, you have to starve to be an artist,” he said. “It's bullshit." Lol.

[Celery Man 20996]

my favorite micro genre I learned about recently is "orgcore", which is used to describe mostly melodic punk bands that...I still don't know the parameters but "I've had two semesters of college and now I listen to Hot Water Music instead of NOFX". I think "org" in the name refers to online music sites that like bands of that style/ilk. Someone described The Swellers like that, which is how I came across it.

[trza-hawk 269]

Its hard for any age cohort group to come to terms with the cultural artifacts from their time becoming dated, meaningless, out of style. Society moves from one thing to another, it happens in waves and cycles. You don't want to turn into one of the older people who insist everything was better back in the day. Things weren't better back then. The music industry was less open, there were fewer avenues of distribution, the gatekeepers whether in print or electronic media, even venue ownership, were more powerful and in decades past they would be almost entirely white and male. If you lived through the time period you have be just a little bit critical of these things.

[AnotherUTFan 9771]

Reminds me of a band a saw recently.

Female singer starts by talking about how old punks suck, "always trying to say how tough it was back the day, blah blah, and I say [hard fast music starts - screaming vox] fuck you you old fucker, I don't give a shit,.... etc, etc." By the end she was on the other side of the mosh pit yelling, "you know they're back here. They're always hiding in the back."

As probably the oldest guy in the room, guilty. I was back there, cause shit hurts more than it used to.

That what this thread is like. A bunch of old guys discussing what is and isn't punk rock and comparing bands from 30 years ago is literally the least punk rock thing on the internet.

If you wanna know if punk is still alive, ask a punk.

[Celery Man 20996]

16 minutes ago, trza-hawk said:

Its hard for any age cohort group to come to terms with the cultural artifacts from their time becoming dated, meaningless, out of style. Society moves from one thing to another, it happens in waves and cycles. You don't want to turn into one of the older people who insist everything was better back in the day. Things weren't better back then. The music industry was less open, there were fewer avenues of distribution, the gatekeepers whether in print or electronic media, even venue ownership, were more powerful and in decades past they would be almost entirely white and male. If you lived through the time period you have be just a little bit critical of these things.

this doesn't have it but there were some pretty racist candids from Decline of Western Civilization, which is worth a watch

also lol pat smear

 

[G650 14273]

10 minutes ago, AnotherUTFan said:

literally the least punk rock thing on the internet.

 

I take it you have never browsed TexAgs.

 

But seriously, it seems to me almost everyone in here is saying punk is alive and well, kids are making noise and having bad attitudes as always, so I'm not sure who you are responding to. I for one don't make any claims on being remotely punk rock anymore, I'm old and lame and full embrace that.

[AnotherUTFan 9771]

I'm not hating on anyone here, just a commentary. More responding to the post above mine, which reminded me if that act.

[G650 14273]

Just now, AnotherUTFan said:

I'm not hating on anyone here, just a commentary. More responding to the post above mine, which reminded me if that act.

 

Yeah, that was a damn good post. It's something I remind myself of pretty regularly, but I'm pretty fortunate in that I'm not super prone to looking backward by nature. It's one thing that has always befuddled me about the American character, the desperate clinging to youth. The plastic surgery, the drugs, emotional immaturity. It also manifests in the whole things were better back in my day but I also walked uphill both ways to school in the snow nonsense. I guess its self importance, I dunno. I prefer to embrace where I am at any given moment/age than pine away for a past I am misremembering anyway.

 

When G'nR hit the scene in the 80's, it was awesome. Their entire being was basically just waving two middle fingers to anyone possible. Was a pretty solid fan up through the early 00's. Then this whole cash grab "reunion" happened. Bloated old nonsense profiting of peoples nostalgia, with absolutely nothing new to say. Dude who once sang yesterdays got nothing for me, well buddy, it has a back catalog you can restock your empty bank account with. Nauseating.

[AnotherUTFan 9771]

I was with you on G-n-R but jumped off when they released 2 albums on the same day. I saw that as a cash grab / sell out.

[G650 14273]

Just now, AnotherUTFan said:

I was with you on G-n-R but jumped off when they released 2 albums on the same day. I saw that as a cash grab / sell out.

 

Yeah totally get that, I just happen to think there are some damn good songs on there, specifically Izzy's stuff. You could see the wheels falling off though.

I mostly disappointed in Slash and Duff. I mean if they wanted to get back and jam out it's totally their right, it just ruins their legacy in my mind. Being one of these nostalgia acts, which his 100% what this is, is antithetical to their purpose. Young and out of control was their raison d'etre.

[jimmyjazz 46091]

49 minutes ago, AnotherUTFan said:

That what this thread is like. A bunch of old guys discussing what is and isn't punk rock and comparing bands from 30 years ago is literally the least punk rock thing on the internet.

If you wanna know if punk is still alive, ask a punk.

It's perfectly fine for someone like me, who was never and never will be a punk to discuss the genre.  As a minor nit, not every band being discussed is decades old, either.  Get off my lawn.

[G650 14273]

lol

[Guest]

I don't really care anything about Pearl Jam. I don't quite get why they were popular.

I love Nirvana. Always have, always will. Although I did read the biography of Kurt. My main takeaway was that dude was a loser. I think whether he got famous and changed music or stayed in Olympia playing in underground bands, the outcome would have been the same.

[locodos 5390]

g-n-r talk not going away, That's me in the middle, that's me losing my religion sanity

 

[AnotherUTFan 9771]

It's perfectly fine for someone like me, who was never and never will be a punk to discuss the genre.  As a minor nit, not every band being discussed is decades old, either.  Get off my lawn.

I finally bought my tickets to see your daughter's band this past weekend. I wasn't sure I'd be in town in October.

[jimmyjazz 46091]

Honestly, I kinda like The Spaghetti Incident.  GnR obviously wasn't a punk band, but they clearly listened.

[G650 14273]

3 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Honestly, I kinda like The Spaghetti Incident.  GnR obviously wasn't a punk band, but they clearly listened.

Duff was a legit guy out of the Seattle hardcore scene. Steve Adler was also into it. The rest not so much.

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, G650 said:

Duff was a legit guy out of the Seattle hardcore scene. Steve Adler was also into it. The rest not so much.

This is punk?

[yoladu 4094]

1 hour ago, G650 said:

Duff was a legit guy out of the Seattle hardcore scene. Steve Adler was also into it. The rest not so much.

if memory serves Duff was in one early incarnation of the Fastbacks. (drummer)

 

*ha.. google machine works..

Edited August 29, 2023 by yoladu

[AnotherUTFan 9771]

I saw Duff playing with Iggy Pop a couple months ago. That was a great show.

[G650 14273]

13 minutes ago, yoladu said:

if memory serves Duff was in one early incarnation of the Fastbacks. (drummer)

 

*ha.. google machine works..

Indeed he was, for like two gigs or something.

[Celery Man 20996]

14 minutes ago, yoladu said:

if memory serves Duff was in one early incarnation of the Fastbacks. (drummer)

 

*ha.. google machine works..

[DoobieWah 1454]

Even if punk is still alive, it will never be the Big Boys at Raul's.  

Much like "my Austin", punk died in the 80s. 

[creeper 98]

1 hour ago, G650 said:

Indeed he was, for like two gigs or something.

He played on their first 7".

[G650 14273]

3 minutes ago, creeper said:

He played on their first 7".

User avatar checks out.

 

Did he? I definitely believe you, I just recall it was a brief tenure.

[jimmyjazz 46091]

37 minutes ago, DoobieWah said:

Much like "my Austin", punk died in the 80s. 

For you, maybe.

[creeper 98]

24 minutes ago, G650 said:

User avatar checks out.

 

Did he? I definitely believe you, I just recall it was a brief tenure.

Yeah, I'm not sure if he was a real contributor to the band or just happened to be around and available, but he played on a couple of early releases on "No Threes," including the Vains 7" and maybe the Silly Killers 45, in addition to Fastbacks 7".

[G650 14273]

28 minutes ago, creeper said:

Yeah, I'm not sure if he was a real contributor to the band or just happened to be around and available, but he played on a couple of early releases on "No Threes," including the Vains 7" and maybe the Silly Killers 45, in addition to Fastbacks 7".

Yeah I definitely remember him with the Vains. No idea on Silly Killers though