Post Punk

[saltymonkey]

A little more obscure ... Agitpop, one of my favorites, who apparently left behind little to no decent live footage.

Wow Agitpop I saw them 5 or 6 times always great, a unique band. I still break out Back At The Plain Of Jars a couple times a year for a listen. And yes there seems to be absolutely no decent footage of them. A post punk thread! Now you're speaking my language. Post Punk although subjectively defined probably makes up more than half of my record collection. Most of the bands I played in were of this time and genre. I saw so many of these bands. Sonic Youth, more than ten times. Swans close to ten. I saw the Flaming Lips play twice in a bar. They were unknowns. Bands like Scratch Acid which later became The Jesus Lizard. Dinosaur Jr. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. The list is endless. My early to mid? adult years were spent amongst the post punks. My formative years. In the 80s through about 95 or 96. I worked 10-15 days a month on TV commercials (I'm a grip), played in bands and went to shows. Good, no great times. Salad days.

[uwe]

This thread made me listen to Televion's Marquee Moon again in ages and hearing it I thought that The Strokes should be paying royalties to Tom Verlaine until the end of time!

Are The Strokes post-punk then?

[nofi]

when i hear the word punk i think of hardcore. everyone else is a rock band. i like the first wave of garage bands. some people call them punk.

[uwe]

1. What about the Mott/Aerosmith/NYD gig, we want vivid recollections!

2. For me, Punk is very much identified with that "Summer of 77" and bands like The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Stranglers, The Jam, The Adverts, Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, The Clash, Television, early Blondie, The Dictators, Richard Hell, Wayne County - did I miss anyone (of course not all these bands were/stayed actually Punk)? While there are American (New York) acts in that list, I thought it was a quintessentially British thing at the time. The whole West Coast Punk thing in the US escaped me totally, no doubt for largely geographical reasons. For me, Punk was dead by 1979, wasn't that when Johnny Rotten left the Sex Pistols? I then thought that it only lived an afterlife with diehard fans of, say, The Exploited. California sun and Punk didn't go together with me, for me it was firmly identified with English dole queues. And the New Musical Express of course (which I was an avid reader of back then, I tended to check out whatever they either hailed - like The Dictators - or what they utterly condemned - like Judas Priest!). Which probably explains why I loaded the hard disk player in my office today with both Television's Marquee Moon and Foghat's Fool for the City. I'm schizoid.

[nofi]

how about some hazy old man memories. the dolls were lame but when i saw them in a club later on they tore the place down! i hate aerosmith so i must have blocked that memory. mott was great, just as you would expect. at shows end mott brought out all the roadies, sound men,and anyone else with the band and lined them up across the front of the stage. so this pack of about twenty guys, plus band shook hands and signed autographs for a good while. i very nice touch i thought.

[nofi]

[nofi]

[westen44]

According to Wikipedia, this is considered punk, and influenced the Sex Pistols and Ramones.  I always thought of this as just straightforward garage rock.  (Dirty Water by the Standells in case the video is blocked for anyone.)

[uwe]

That's indeed a stretch.  I hear more Beach Boys or Archies in The Ramones than these guys. This Standells track sounds like a blues tune, I thought both The Ramones and The Sex Pistols relatively unbluesy for rock bands. In essence, the Ramones were a stripped down, bones laid bare power pop band and I don't mean that negatively. Joey had a nice tuneful pop voice.

[Dave W]

There was a lot of bluesless power pop in the Ramones' music.

I have a big soft spot for 60s garage rock and some of it certainly influenced punk, but it's historical revisionism to call it punk rock. Nobody even heard of the term back then. FWIW, the first known actual mention of "punk rock music" was in a 1971 Creem article by Dave Marsh about ? and the Mysterians.

[Granny Gremlin]

more pistols than purple fans? not in your wetest punk rock dreams.

It's a matter of demographics - You can't count the dead ones no more  .  DP isn't really getting any more new fans while The Pistols have the echoboomers getting in to them for the last few years.

It might be close or not quite there yet, which is why I originally included a caveat when I said that. 

I've always dug these guys more then Dino Jr (who could also go in this thread), but out of all Lou Barlow related projects, I was most into Folk Implosion:



High school sophomore me was head blown over the entire Kids Soundtrack really.

Another thing from that time was that post David Byrne Talking Heads album (The Heads - No Talking Just Head) with all sorts of people you know collaborating on vox (Michael Hutchence , Richard Hell, Debbie Harry, the dudes from Live and The Violet Femmes etc). This was the single, but there were better (less teen angsty) songs, though obviously, given my age at the time, this one drew me in:



And speaking of the Femmes, they should be here too

[uwe]

more pistols than purple fans? not in your wettest punk rock dreams.

I must come to my friend Nofi's defense here!!! Purple sold more than a 100 million units worldwide in their career, I guess that answers all questions and separates the men from the, errm, punks. 

But of course that is not the point. The Sex Pistols were much more a cultural impact than Purple, Purple's cultural impact was zilch, they were just another long-haired stadium band that played a littler longer (and a little better) solos than others. Or to put it differently: I'm sure that both Sex Pistols and Ramones T-shirt sales have - each - eclipsed those of DP.

Dave's 5.1 argument has a point, but it can't overcome the fact that The Sex Pistols by the very virtue of their huge cultural impact have not really created music for posterity (that was never their plan either, granted, they never wanted to become boring old farts). You take away the spitting, the scandal on TV, the EMI worker's strike refusing to print the single, Sid and Nancy's deaths, and there is not so much that remains of God Save the Queen (the single and song) other than that those arcane questioners of the US capitalist life style and urban guerillas of Mötley Crüe covered it, thus elevating it to truly political and socio-critical heights (DP never had to bear the insult of a a Mötley Crüe cover!  ). The music just accompanied what the Pistols attempted to do, it was not their - marketing speech - "unique selling point".

That holds true for a lot of punk, the music has not left the same indelible musical stamp rock music from other periods has, punk classics which rule the airwaves are few and far between. I don't think that that has to do with the evil media and establishment still trying to keep punk down, punk influences have entered all sorts of cultural niches, be it fashion or art, were even embraced there. "God Save the Queen" is no longer an insult, much less a threat (if it ever was) to the system. The music hasn't aged well or is devoid of substance if you take away everything else. But that is maybe how Johnny Rotten wanted it, be current and dominating for a comparatively short time and then disappear while your image is left intact. Andy Warhol would have no doubt approved.

I don't believe that any of the 1977 NME scribes that hailed punk as thankfully doing away with dinosaur rock for good would have believed that a band like YES can in 2013 sell tours on cruise liners in the Carribean where the devoted pay a lot of money to hear their battle-hardened heroes play not once, but multiple times during one week. While Johnny Rotten does dairy commercials and reality shows, but sings relatively rarely (a new PIL came out, I heard that it's good, is it?) So there is a certain longevity to pre-punk craze music that punk has not musically matched. I stress "musically", not culturally where punk's influence is vast. As I write, I'm hearing a song by SIXX AM  that coincidentally name-checks "Sex Pistols playing on the radio". But it is randomly (I have about 700 CDs on shuffle on my office stereo, Mike Oldfield follows Boy George follows Bob Dylan follows The Ramones follows Johnny Cash follows Giuffria, hey, I'm eclectic!) followed by Jethro Tull's Aqualung ...   Of course the Steve Wilson 2011 remix and remaster, what did you think?

[chromium]

Here are a few bands that I like, and hadn't seen mention of yet...

Killing Joke


Cocteau Twins


Tubeway Army


Split Enz

[clankenstein]

these guys got called post punk - video says 1984 but i think the tune is from 1979 -

[uwe]

Darn - and I always thought Split Enz were off-the-wall prog! Crowded House must then be post-Post Punk! My outlook on life has just caved in. But then Sex Pistols guitarero Steve Jones liked to play the Smoke on the Water riff ... nothing can be trusted anymore.

Just goes to show how musical boundaries and borders - perceived ones and real ones - can be a tricky thing. And actually that is good. Especially Split Enz would have approved that boxing them as a certain genre is self-defeating. Thanks for posting a vid of them, they are mentioned far too seldom here.