Posts Tagged ‘Punk’
“It’s really hard to imagine there ever being the kind of impact there was when punk rock happened in the late 70’s”*…
The late 1970s pulsated with an electric energy. Conceptual art and interdisciplinary art replaced Minimal Art. Rock musicians and artists alike were graduating from art schools. Painters were making films. Writers were doing performance art. Sculptors were doing installations. Artists were acting in films, making music and collaborating with each other.
It was in this milieu that I taught photography at Queens College and NYU by day and went out every night to hear music at CBGB’s, Max’s and the Mudd Club, which was also a venue for various artistic events, film showings, readings and theme parties. Guilty at spending so much time in clubs, I convinced myself that my photographic forays into the night, were my art. After taking candid pictures backstage or in dressing rooms at clubs, I would often invite people to my studio for photo sessions where atmosphere could be generated, lighting could be manipulated and props could be employed. My work with the Soho Weekly News, New York Magazine and other periodicals gave me access to photograph people who were well known in the popular culture…
Photographer Marcia Resnick recalls her career, and explains the story behind her new book:
More bad boys (and girls) on Resnick’s site.
* “It’s really hard to imagine there ever being the kind of impact there was when punk rock happened in the late 70’s. I wish there would be one big change like that again, but I don’t know if that’ll ever happen.” – Penelope Spheeris
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As we strike a pose, we might send tuneful birthday greetings to Barry Mann; he was born on this date in 1939. With his wife, Cynthia Weil, Mann wrote scores of hit songs including “On Broadway” for the Drifters, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” and “(You’re My) Soul And Inspiration” for the Righteous Brothers, “Kicks” and “Hungry” for Paul Revere & the Raiders, “We’ve Gotta’ Get Out Of This Place” for the Animals, “Walkin’ In The Rain” for the Ronettes, and “Blame It On The Bossa Nova” for Eydie Gorme, Mann and Weil are members of both the Songwriters and the Rock and Roll Halls of Fame.
Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, and fellow-tunesmith Carole King (whose birthday is also today)
“We got the beat”*…
The drum machine is one of the most effective musical inventions of our time. It’s affordable, easy to use, and ruthless in its precision, able to do exactly what it’s been told for as long as required (so long as you’ve got an AC adaptor). Of course, not everybody warms to the drum machine’s big plastic buttons and bright LED screen…
Starting from the Italian Futurists, “A Brief History of the Drum Machine in Rock Music.”
* The Go-Gos
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As we lay in the loop, we might recall that it was on this date in 1990 that NARAS stripped Milli Vanilli of the Grammy that they had won earlier that year. One of the most popular pop acts in the late 1980s, their album debut album Girl You Know It’s True achieved international success and earned them the Grammy for Best New Artist. But when it was revealed that neither of the duo (Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus) had actually sung lead vocals on the albums songs, the award was withdrawn. The group recorded a comeback album, Back and in Attack, in 1998, but Rob Pilatus died before the album was released.
Milli Vanilli at the 1990 Grammys
“Questioning anything and everything”*…
Ryan Richardson, one of the United States’ foremost collectors, archivists, and dealers of punk rock records and ephemera has given us a most welcomed gift. Richardson has uploaded the entire print run of the classic L.A. punk magazine, Slash, to his website Circulationzero.com…
The importance of Slash to the L.A. punk scene, and really to the worldwide punk scene in general, cannot be overstated. The writing of Claude “Kickboy Face” Bessy,Jeffrey Lee Pierce, and Chris D. helped to define the attitude and outlook of the nascent subculture, while the imagery of illustrators Gary Panter and Mark Vallen established punk as an art movement working outside of—but in conjunction with—the music scene. Photographers like Ed Colver and Jenny Lens provided essential documentation of the era, making names for themselves producing some of the most important rock photography ever captured…
More at “The Entire Run of Classic Punk Slash Magazine is Now Online.” [TotH to Richard Kadrey]
* “Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.” – Henry Rollins
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As we ponder the pogo, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that that Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”reached number one on the Billboard charts– the first rock and roll record to ascend to the pinnacle.
Exactly one year later, Dick Clark began one of television’s longest-running stints as a host when he debuted Bandstand on WFIL, a Philadelphia TV station. The show was eventually picked up by ABC-TV and changed its name to American Bandstand.
“Don’t hate the media; become the media”*…
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“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
Johnny Rotten aka John Lydon’s closing words at the last Sex Pistols gig (watch it online) seemed apt this week when Virgin Bank announced their current line of credit cards would feature the band’s signature artwork. That Jamie Reid’s famous cut-n-paste zine-cum-Situationalist aesthetic has turned into a bit of capitalist plastic for your wallet is an irony that the Sex Pistols might never have seen coming back in 1976, when they played the “gig that changed the world.”
Recreated above in a clip from Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, the June 4, 1976 gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall spawned the British punk movement and the post-punk movement that was soon to follow in a scant two years. For in the audience were future members of the Buzzcocks Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley (who organized the gig and opened for the Pistols); a nascent version of Joy Division; the two founders of Factory Records Martin Hannet and Tony Wilson; Mark E. Smith of The Fall, Mick Hucknall of Frantic Elevators and much later Simply Red; and a one Steven Patrick Morrissey, who would form The Smiths. (That’s Steve Coogan playing Tony Wilson in the clip, by the way.)…
More on that extraordinary evening– with audio clips of the Pistols’ performance– at “The Sex Pistols’ 1976 Manchester “Gig That Changed the World,” and the Day the Punk Era Began.”
* Jello Biafra
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As we politely pogo, we might recall that it was on this ate in 2002 that Queen Elizabeth II issued her annual Honours List, on which she tapped 60-year-old Mick Jagger for a Knighthood.
Sir Mick Jagger, his two daughters, and his then-92-year-old father at the Investiture
“Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today’s employer is seeking”*…
Justine Kurland, Rebuilt Engine, 2013
The second floor of Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery currently greets patrons with an empty conveyor belt moving through, and back around, a giant mirror.
“Contemporary capitalism trades in nonexistence,” Agnieszka Kurant, the artist behind the piece, told ArtForum in 2013. “Seventy percent of money in this world is phantom—it exists virtually, on computers—but still produces physical consequences.” Much the same tone is at play in Kurant’s contribution to Overtime: The Art of Work, a new collection of artwork that examines the struggles of laborers across nations and eras.
From paintings of child workers in 18th century England to 3-D printed limbs of contract workers in 21st century America, the show is relentlessly engaging…
Learn more about– and see more of– the exhibit at “Art That Understands What It’s Like to Work.”
* John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
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As we whistle, we might send radically provocative birthday greetings to Kathy Acker; she was born on this date in 1947. An experimental novelist, punk poet, playwright, performance artist, essayist, postmodernist, and feminist writer, she was a prolific creator who was formative influence on dozens of younger writers, and on Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Kim Gordon, co-founder of Sonic Youth.
In 1996, Acker was diagnosed with breast cancer, and underwent a double mastectomy. The surgery was unsuccessful, and following year, she undertook a series of alternative therapies. She died, in November of 1997, in an alternative cancer clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. She died in Room 101, to which her friend Alan Moore quipped, “There’s nothing that woman can’t turn into a literary reference.”
Reason is always in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base, where the concepts and actings of order impose themselves. Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.
– Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless (1988)
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