In addition to disagreeing with y’all, I agree with you both.
There were a lot of bands that all started at the same time and played the same venues, thus they were (at least nominally) part of the “scene”. In NYC you had Blondie, Television, Ramones, Talking Heads, etc. that were all a part of the NYC scene, and for sure the atmosphere of experimentation (on the part of the artists) and willingness (on the part of the audiences) was key to their success and growth, both artistically and commercially.
The same is true of the London scene.
I’m just saying that neither their location nor their era should have anything at all to do with how we define their sound, genre-wise. I mean, Klaus Nomi also performed at CBGB at the same time, and no one anywhere is ever gonna make the claim that Klaus Nomi made punk rock music, ya know what I’m sayin’? Oh sure, I’ll agree that Klaus himself was punk as fuck, but his music was not punk rock music.
Of course, this line of argumentation will mostly collapse in a heap once I finally finish my epic essay on how most of what we call punk rock is really jazz, but that’s still a work in progress.
Unless the name is more a signifier of time and place, than a sound. Some people may not care to segment electric guitar rock like that.
What do you have under punk in your MP3 collection? I know I have music from 1976-1980 basically. I am so not going to categorize all my music according to a sound analysis or philosophic principle. When I do I keep it as simple as possible. Admittedly I think of Blondie as New Wave for my purposes. But I have a Punk/New Wave folder.
Punk in my collection ranges from the '70’s to the current day. Ramones ,The Bronx, Refused, Gay For Johnny Depp, Fear, Minutemen, Germs, Integrity, Jello Biafra & The Guantanamo School of Medicine, N.C.M., Naked Raygun, OFF!.. all punk.
I also draw a distinction between different San Francisco bands from the mid-late 1960s, for instance. They weren’t all making the same kind of music; they just happened to all be in the same place at the same time. To me, there’s a world of difference between the music of Blue Cheer and, oh, Moby Grape and IMO it’s not really useful to refer to them both as “San Francisco Sound” bands any more than it was useful to lump bands under the “Seattle” label.
ETA: YMMV, of course.
EATA: I agree that it can be useful when tracing the development of music to know where people were and who they knew/listened to/collaborated with, etc. Contemporaneous influences have always been a huge part of our popular music culture and development.
The best Christmas song ever is pretty damn punk: The Kinks’ Father Christmas works that ethic. As garage rockers, they were punk before people really knew what to call it.
But as pointed out earlier, you didn’t have to play guitar to be punk. Suicide/Alan Vega was punk as hell, without a guitar. Ghost Rider is one hell of a punk song.
See, what is “punk” is something that I’ve wondered since I was a young musician. I’d been interested in loud rock since I knew how to tune an instrument, but some of the bands we played with were…different. They usually weren’t any less skilled, and were often nowhere near as loud, but their goals seemed different. Rather than follow any fashion, they wanted to try to make some sort of unique show that they might be interested in. What the audience expected was to be damned and subverted. At one point any band doing any form of irreverent county rock was playing the punk clubs. Heck, if it’s new Rockabilly in the last 40 years of any flavor, it’s been performed at a punk club.
At its core, that’s kind of like the hippies in their purest form. But there’s less fooling yourself and others into believing that we can all just get along if we do some such or another ritual, and no-one’s going to talk to me about crystals. Sort of like the difference between porno and art, I can only really tell the difference between some of them when I look at them closely. When you look really closely at some of them, sound or era be damned, they’re neither!
I still think New Wave is generally an offshoot of Punk that got started before Punk really had a name. I’d like to disown a lot of both bands that fit either label from the family tree. But like your fans, you don’t get to pick your family. Plus, your musical family will get all inbred and crossed over in the future, so there’s no point in getting really worked up about it.
Yeah, super unsatisfying answer. But it’s how I see it.
I love suicide, and I didn’t mean to leave them out of anything. I saw them open for the cars once. They got booed offstage and I’ve felt guilty about it and really sorry I didn’t see a whole set ever since.
