[massive thread rot tangent thingy]
Rizla:
"For what it's worth, as much as I love them, I don't really think of Patti Smith, PiL, The Fall, Television etc. as being punk rock.."
Yeah, I would call Patti Smith rock and the rest of 'em post-punk. That said, the first Fall album, Live at the Witch Trials is mostly very punk (and has just been re-released in an excellent, cheap, properly-remastered-from-the-original-tapes-edition with loads of extra tracks. As has Dragnet).
"in my own idiosyncratic genre classification system, punk is fun, noisy, simple music made by crazy angry kids.."
Spot on. It's got to have rock'n'roll at it's heart. To distinguish it from straight-forward rock'n'roll I'd go with a definition of punk as: "moronic rock'n'roll", for the fun stuff, and maybe "bright kids playing moronic rock'n'roll" for the angry or didactic stuff. Garage is also moronic r'n'r, but with added sex. Together, punk and garage are the noisiest, simplest ways to express the four basic human emotions: "Yay!", "Raaargh!", "Ha ha!" and "Woof!"
The stuff I find hardest to classify is all the post hardcore stuff - hardcore being strictly very very fast moronic r'n'r - like Big Black and Jesus Lizard and Nomeansno and that. Has anyone ever come up with a better term than post-hardcore? (And yeah, I know everyone gets exasperated by this labelling business, but I get a perverse kick out of it myself). And don't say grunge. |
