© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 22
Picture this. It’s the mid-Seventies. The sincere ideals of peace and love are getting shot up in Vietnam. Music is controlled by marketing men. You have a choice of any music, as long as it’s progressive rock, stadium rock, glam rock, Motown or newly emerging disco. Regardless of your taste in music, spangled shirts, four inch collars, glitzy sunglasses and platform shoes are in.
All of a sudden, a new type of music blasts its way onto the scene. It sounds as if the lead guitarist knows two chords and the bass guitarist, one. The drummer can’t keep time and the lead singer sounds like one of those late night cat fights that happen just outside your bedroom window. The marketing men start muttering about ‘punks’, but their comments fall on deaf ears. Everyone rushes to get hold of the discord. It doesn’t sound great at all, but there’s an emotional honesty unlike anything else. It’s undeniable: even if you can’t stand the noise, at least it doesn’t wear platform shoes.
There are a number of contenders for history’s list of most significant cultural moments. The birth of punk won’t be up there but, as far as I am concerned, it should be.
The word ‘culture’ has quite a few connotations. The most common is that it lives in the homes of people who have a deep appreciation of music and fine art, the sort who are comfortable in bow ties and cummerbunds. Actually, culture lives on the street, in bars and nightclubs. It seldom dresses well. It’s the sort of spontaneous phenomenon that knocks on your door late at night and drags you off for a drink or two without the consent of your significant other.
For every reaction, there is an equal and an opposite reaction. Think of punk as a catastrophic collision between two enriched uranium atoms. Punk built itself on the anger and despair of a generation that saw little or no future for itself, and collided with the bland, controllable products and plans of marketing departments and political figures. Boom! Meltdown! Unhappy kids who picked up guitars or hammered away at drum kits were singing the dismal songs of their own culture: an abysmal, unemployed day-to-day reality, not the jet-set, cocaine-binge lifestyle of yet another super group.
Yet in that moment of rage, a new culture was born. The initial ethos of the movement was to pin success on singles, not over-bloated albums. In the do-it-yourself spirit that this approach spawned, a vast number of musical styles flourished, many of which are still with us today. The frenetic speed of the noise also transferred itself into future generations of musical styles. Listen to the radio for proof.
Vivienne Westwood’s approach to fashion is still evident. Black is no longer entirely the province of mourners, though you may want to draw the line at the black fishnet vest. If that doesn’t satisfy you, at least you don’t wear platform shoes as a part of the standard corporate apparel. And then, there is the phenomenon of Richard Branson’s signing of the Sex Pistols to the early Virgin label. I’m sure it was some kind of a start, if only of sorts.
But culture is far more than art, music and clothing. It reflects in how we behave and respond. The Fifties brought rock & roll as the great liberating, self-defining experience. The Sixties gave us peace, love and well-meaning protest. Punk was about revolt. Those of us who tuned in to the phenomenon seem to have developed certain traits: a healthy disregard for the ‘norm’, in some cases a willingness to knuckle down and build our own futures, and a tendency to be slightly deaf to those around us, literally and figuratively.
Aside from the somewhat vacuous rises of hip-hop and grunge in the Eighties and Nineties, marketing’s star has been on the ascendant. It seems as if bland jazz is back in fashion, an easy sell. It’s probably time for the next wave of rebellion.
My daughter is just old enough to turn on the radio. I wonder what she will make of tomorrow’s music, and on what strange roads it will lead her.
Back to the archive • Previous • Next • Home
