Posts Tagged ‘Punk’
“‘Scenius’ stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”*…
Zachary Hastings Hooper on Mark Wilkerson‘s Pub Rock, an appreciation of a now largely forgotten legacy…
The history of popular music is one of continual evolution, with one generation inspired by and then replaced by the next. Think the Beatles and Rolling Stones usurping their idols Buddy Holly and Muddy Waters. In the U.K., conventional wisdom holds that the pretension and precision of early 1970s prog rock acts like Yes and Genesis were smashed by the intentional amateurism and outrage of later-decade punk rockers such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash. This is perhaps best represented by the image of Johnny Rotten’s “I Hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt.
Pub Rock (Bloomsbury), a new book by Mark Wilkerson, biographer of Pete Townshend and Thunderclap Newman, shines some light on the overlooked genre of pub rock that catalyzed the shift from prog to punk. Wilkerson traces the genre’s birth in London pubs in the early seventies and its gestation of the world-shattering punk and New Wave scenes that followed.
I’m the audience for this book. As a teenager honing his musical tastes in the late eighties, I was introduced, by MTV and college radio, to the sounds of angry young men like Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and Graham Parker. Digging into their back catalogs, I discovered that Lowe especially was deeply intertwined with something called pub rock; his old band, Brinsley Schwarz, had been a major player in that scene. At the same time, I realized that Stiff Records—home to Lowe, Costello, and Parker, as well as the Damned and Madness—was run by two pub rock managers [see here]. In a sense, I’ve been waiting for this book for decades. And now that it’s here, I’m happy to dust off some old records while cueing up some new (to me) selections.
Wilkerson characterizes pub rock as “simply music that was played in pubs. A diverse mix was represented there: Roots rock, country, R&B, soul and rock’n’roll—both the good-time variety and the harder-edged stuff.” Unlike the sounds dominating airwaves and filling stadiums, pub rock was unadorned and earnest. It was neither glam nor grandiose.
While sonically similar to more mainstream rock and roll, pub rock had a slyly subversive allure. These seemingly square guys (yes, they are all guys) were about to birth punk. Every budding music snob tries to earn their bona fides with obscure knowledge. So learning that the dude behind “Cruel to Be Kind” had a previous professional life and that “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace Love and Understanding” was a cover gave me an undeserved sense of superiority.
Pub Rock is part of the 33 ⅓ Genre series of primers on musical subgenres. It hews to the imprint’s mission, offering a quick, accessible entry point to a genre with little or no knowledge required, just curiosity. Like any good synopsis of a genre or musical scene, it sends the reader off to their favorite streamer or record store in search of a new listen or three.
In the age of the algorithm, we’re accustomed to being told, “If you like X, you’ll like Y.” However, snapshots like Wilkerson’s go beyond the “what” to tell you why you should add Dr. Feelgood or Brinsley Schwarz to your playlist.
As the book’s title indicates, the scene grew around a series of pubs in London. Groups like the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Band strongly influenced the nascent pub rock bands, but as Wilkerson notes, pub rock arose as big-name British acts were increasingly focused on selling out stadiums in America, and economic pressures were closing the venues that sustained the sixties scenes. Pubs, which had historically featured jazz acts, gave new bands opportunities to hone their skills and build followings. Wilkerson posits that intimate venues forced bands to up their game: proximity to Carlsberg-swilling audiences meant that you had to play your instruments and entertain the crowd without hiding behind light shows and heavy amplification.
The pub rock movement yielded a couple of minor hits, notably Ace’s “How Long,” now a staple of yacht rock radio. But many of its key figures became leaders in the punk and New Wave era. Ian Dury from Kilburn and the High Roads became the iconic leader of the Blockheads, while John Mellor from the 101ers became the even more iconic Joe Strummer of the Clash. Ace’s Paul Carrack had chart-topping success with both Squeeze and Mike + the Mechanics. The aforementioned Lowe went on to chart success as a solo artist, producer, and songwriter. Parker and Dave Edmunds enjoyed long careers. And pub rock’s DIY ethos—finding new places to play, hauling your own gear, building audiences from scratch—directly inspired the punk and New Wave scenes that followed.
It’s been said the Velvet Underground and the Ramones only sold a few copies of their debut albums but everyone who bought them started a band. It could be suggested that, similarly, everyone who encountered Eggs Over Easy or Brinsley Schwarz at the Tally Ho did the same. Artists as diverse as the Sex Pistols, Costello, Madness, and the Stranglers trace their roots to pub rock shows…
“Punk’s Pub Crawl,” from @ctrrelpol-washu.bsky.social.
For more, and videos of exemplary pub rock performances, see “Raising the bar: the chaotic story of pub rock.”
And for more listening suggestions, see “A beginner’s guide to pub rock in five essential albums.”
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As we give credit where credit is due, we might recall that it was on this date in 1976 the one of the core pub rock bands, Dr. Feelgood, scored their only No.1 UK album when their live LP Stupidity went to the top of the charts– the first ever live album to go to No.1 in the UK chart in its first week of release.
Hear it here.
“Do you have the time to listen to me whine?”*…
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Green Day‘s Dookie. The band is marking the occasion with a collaboration with the design studio Brain. For your weekend listening pleasure…
When an album hits a big milestone like its 30th anniversary, it gets the usual remasters on the usual formats. But Dookie isn’t a usual album.
Instead of smoothing out its edges and tweaking its dynamic ranges, this version of Dookie has been meticulously mangled to fit on formats with uncompromisingly low fidelity, from wax cylinders to answering machines to toothbrushes. The listening experience is unparalleled, sacrificing not only sonic quality, but also convenience, and occasionally entire verses.
The result is Dookie Demastered: the album that exploded the format of punk rock, re-exploded onto 15 obscure, obsolete, and otherwise inconvenient formats, the way it was never meant to be heard…
Enjoy: “Dookie, Demastered” @GreenDay
* Billie Joe Armstrong / Frank Edwin Wright Iii / Mike Ryan Pritchard, “Basket Case” (on Dookie)
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As we have a blast, we might recall that it was on this date in 2023 that Green Day, still going strong, premiered (at a concert in Las Vegas) “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” which became the first single from their upcoming album Saviors.
“Life is like a sewer – you get out of it what you put into it”*…
Frances Beckett on the mystery of the great Tom Lehrer: in the 1950s and 60s, his songs stunned and delighted listeners with their irreverence, wit, and nihilism. Then he gave it all up to teach mathematics.
Beckett begins by recounting his own introduction to Lehrer, in 1959, at the “snobbish [British] Jesuit boarding school” to which his parents had sent him…
… Tom Lehrer’s songs burst upon my consciousness like a clown in a cathedral. Days there began with mass, and ended with an uplifting homily in the chapel from an elderly and skeletal priest, generally about death. “Your best friends will desert you leaving you nothing but a winding sheet,” was one of his more cheerful messages. Between the two there was catechism, rugby, occasional bullying and fairly frequent beatings.
But we had the “playroom”, where we could relax and listen to records, and one day an American boy called Ed Monaghan turned up clutching a Lehrer LP. It was a medicinal dose of the irreverence, nihilism and rebellion that I craved. To this day, I am word perfect in many of the songs I first heard then. There was Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, all about the joys of spring, and as darkly funny as its title suggests. There was the American football song Fight Fiercely, Harvard, which seemed to make cruel mock of those cold, dreary afternoons I was forced to spend watching my school play rugby. It was all done with such bouncing musicality that I doubt whether the Jesuits ever realised the subversive nature of what we were listening to.
Lehrer made my life bearable. I have never been able to tell him so, and it might not please him, for he has been quoted as saying: “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worthwhile.”
I didn’t know then that Lehrer had started out, six years earlier, by paying to have his own record cut because the record companies were shocked by his songs, and selling the LP to fellow students at Harvard. This early samizdat recording was the underground success of the decade with almost no publicity effort from Lehrer – “My songs spread slowly, like herpes, rather than Ebola,” he later recalled.
At that time, Lehrer’s principal accomplishment was that he was a mathematics prodigy who had entered Harvard aged 15, in 1943, taken a first class degree aged 18 and a master’s a year later. Born into a New York Jewish family in 1928, Lehrer had, he has said, every advantage: piano lessons, an expensive school that could get him into Harvard, and “the Broadway of Danny Kaye and Cole Porter.
In the next year or two, Ed Monaghan introduced me to other comedians who were turning the complacent world of American comedy on its head: Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce. “What these so-called ‘sickniks’ dispense,” wrote Time magazine in July 1959, “is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a Charles Addams kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world.”
But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing, although he briefly re-emerged in 1965 to write new songs for the US version of the satirical British show That Was the Week That Was. The new songs were made into a live LP, and it was even more wonderful than the old one. They included The Vatican Rag – a Catholic hymn set in ragtime: “There the guy who’s got religion’ll / Tell you if your sin’s original.” Although I was by then a confirmed atheist, I probably still thought that making fun of the Catholic church would release a thunderbolt from heaven, and The Vatican Rag cured me.
The album also included three songs condemning nuclear weapons. “There’ll be no more pain and misery / When the world is our rotisserie …” They were so much better than those whiny folk songs of the era, which Lehrer rather despised. “You had to admire these folk singers,” he says on the live LP. “It takes courage to get up in a coffee house or a student auditorium and come out in favour of the things everyone else is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood, and so on.”
In this far more political new record, he satirised the Americans teaming up with West Germany against the USSR (“Once all the Germans were warlike and mean / But that couldn’t happen again / We taught them a lesson in 1918 / And they’ve hardly bothered us since then”), and was horrified that Hitler’s chief rocket scientist was now working for Washington, singing: “‘When the rockets go up who cares where they come down? / That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”
And then he gave it up again, and he has spent the rest of his life as an obscure mathematics lecturer. He lives in the house he has occupied for decades, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was 96 last month…
The quest to understand: “‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?” from @francisbeckett in @guardian.
A reminder: in 2020, Lehrer his lyrics, and free streaming and downloadable versions of all of his albums– a satirical gold mine: “Songs and Lyrics by Tom Lehrer.”
* Tom Lehrer
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As we appreciate art, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972, amid Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebrations, that the Sex Pistols threw a party aboard a boat called The Queen Elizabeth, inviting friends, journalists, and a film crew to sail along London’s River Thames– a promotion for the band’s new single, “God Save the Queen.” As the sun went down and the boat floated near the Houses of Parliament, the band lit up their amps and performed “Anarchy in the UK,” followed by “God Save the Queen,” “No Feelings,” and “Pretty Vacant.” Upon docking, the band and their fellow partygoers were met by police.
“The function of small corner shops in maintaining cities as viable social institutions does not appear in the Washington consensus. The possibility that corner shops may do better at safeguarding social cohesion than mass imprisonment is considered outlandish – if it is considered at all.”*…
For decades, globalist neoliberalism (and here) has driven the policies and practices and political, commercial, and financial leaders and institutions across the developed– and given development policy, the developing– world. Rana Foroohar argues that its time may be up; geography is retaking the upper hand…
For most of the last 40 years, U.S. policymakers acted as if the world were flat. Steeped in the dominant strain of neoliberal economic thinking, they assumed that capital, goods, and people would go wherever they would be the most productive for everyone. If companies created jobs overseas, where it was cheapest to do so, domestic employment losses would be outweighed by consumer benefits. And if governments lowered trade barriers and deregulated capital markets, money would flow where it was needed most. Policymakers didn’t have to take geography into account, since the invisible hand was at work everywhere. Place, in other words, didn’t matter.
U.S. administrations from both parties have until quite recently pursued policies based on these broad assumptions—deregulating global finance, striking trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, welcoming China into the World Trade Organization (WTO), and not only allowing but encouraging American manufacturers to move much of their production overseas. Free-market globalism was of course pushed in large part by the powerful multinational companies best positioned to exploit it (companies that, of course, donated equally to politicians from both major U.S. parties to ensure that they would see the virtues of neoliberalism). It became a kind of crusade to spread this new American creed around the globe, delivering the thrill of fast fashion and ever-cheaper electronic gadgets to consumers everywhere. American goods, in effect, would represent American goodness. They would advertise American philosophical values, the liberalism tucked inside neoliberalism. The idea was that other countries, delighted by the fruits of American-style capitalism, would be moved to become “free” like the United States.
By some measures, the results of these policies were tremendously beneficial: American consumers in particular enjoyed the fruits of cheap foreign manufacturing while billions of people were lifted out of poverty, especially in developing countries. As emerging markets joined the free-market system, global inequality declined, and a new global middle class was born. How free it was politically, of course, depended on the country.
But neoliberal policies also created immense inequalities within countries and led to sometimes destabilizing capital flows between them. Money can move much faster than goods or people, which invites risky financial speculation. (The number of financial crises has grown substantially since the 1980s.) What is more, neoliberal policies caused the global economy to become dangerously untethered from national politics. Through much of the 1990s, these tectonic shifts were partly obscured in the United States by falling prices, increased consumer debt, and low interest rates. By the year 2000, however, the regional inequalities wrought by neoliberalism had become impossible to ignore. While coastal U.S. cities prospered, many parts of the Midwest, the Northeast, and the South were experiencing catastrophic job losses. Average incomes among U.S. states began to diverge, having converged throughout the 1990s…
Since the beginning of the neoliberal era, a handful of economists had pushed back against the received wisdom of the field. Karl Polanyi, an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, critiqued classical economic views as early as 1944, arguing that totally free markets were a utopian myth. Scholars of the postwar period, including Joseph Stiglitz, Dani Rodrik, Raghuram Rajan, Simon Johnson, and Daron Acemoglu, also understood that place mattered. As Stiglitz, who grew up in the Rust Belt, once told me, “It was obvious if you were raised in a place like Gary, Indiana, that markets aren’t always efficient.”
This view, that location plays a role in determining economic outcomes, is only just beginning to land in policy circles, but a growing body of research supports it. From the work of Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman to that of Raj Chetty and Thomas Philippon, there is now a consensus among scholars that geographically specific factors such as the quality of public health, education, and drinking water have important economic implications. That might seem intuitive or even obvious to most people, but it has only recently gained broad acceptance among mainstream economists. As Peter Orszag, who served as President Barack Obama’s budget director, told me, “If you ask a normal human being, ‘Does it matter where you are?’ they would start from the presumption that ‘Yes, where you live and where you work and who you’re surrounded by matters a ton.’ It’s like Econ 101 has just gone off the path for the last 40 to 50 years, and we’re all little islands atomized into perfectly rational calculating machines. And policy has just drifted along with this thinking.” He added, “The Economics 101 approach, which is place-agnostic, has clearly failed.”
The importance of place has become even more evident since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic decoupling of the United States and China, and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Globalization has crested and begun to recede. In its place, a more regionalized and even localized world is taking shape. Faced with rising political discontent at home and geopolitical tensions abroad, governments and businesses alike are increasingly focused on resilience in addition to efficiency. In the coming post-neoliberal world, production and consumption will be more closely connected within countries and regions, labor will gain power relative to capital, and politics will have a greater impact on economic outcomes than it has for half a century. If all politics is local, the same could soon be true for economics…
All economics is local: “After Neoliberalism,” from @RanaForoohar in @ForeignAffairs. Eminently worth reading in full (and contemplating the consequences of this all-too-plausible shift for addressing global issues like change change and the migration it is sure to drive).
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As we re-scope, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that prescient objectors, the Sex Pistols, made their live debut at St Martin’s School Of Art in central London, supporting a band called Bazooka Joe, which included Stuart Goddard (the future Adam Ant). The Pistols’ performance lasted 10 minutes.
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple”*…
Putting it as simply as possible…
Try explaining something difficult or complex using only the most common thousand—sorry, ten hundred—words [the list is here]. The Up-Goer Five Text Editor isn’t a new idea (here’s a MacOS app from 2016) but now it’s on the web…
Boing Boing
Here’s your correspondent’s shot at explaining “Manichaeism”:
“Explain something with the thousand most used words in English,” via @BoingBoing.
* Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
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As we streamline, we might send tuneful birthday greetings to an avatar of a different kind of plain speaking, Steve Jones; he was born on this date in 1955. A musician and songwriter who has recorded and performed solo, in the short-lived supergroup Neurotic Outsiders with members of Guns N’ Roses and Duran Duran, and with the likes of Johnny Thunders, Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, and Thin Lizzy, he is best remembered as the founding guitarist of The Sex Pistols (whose songs he co-wrote with John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon and drummer Paul Cook). He ranks in Rolling Stone‘s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.”
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