GuD

I'm hoping it's not a waste of my time to put as much effort into this as I have and am about to continue to. At this point in an argument, under different circumstances, this normally would've been the time where I'd start feeling tempted to break something over the side of your ****ing head. LL, I'm gonna try and summarize the points you've brought up one by one and offer a rebuttal. If I misinterpret any of your arguments, let me know and I'll adjust my response accordingly. I've already made a couple responses earlier in this thread and am going to end up repeating myself (and others, really) a bit, I hope you take the time to actually read (I'm assuming you didn't) and respond to the points I make this time.

__________________________________________________ _____________________________________________

Punk music nowadays isn't real punk it's classic rock. Punk music nowadays is nostalgia and disingenuous- it's a "retro-act".

I don't entirely disagree with the first sentence- you could accurately call the Ramones "classic" punk in that they're long gone now but because of their contributions to the music world they are (generally) considered noteworthy or "classic" artists who manage to still sound good to the right pair of ears today, as does Zeppelin or Queen.

The second part, though, is absurd. If by "retro-act" you're likening modern punk bands to, say, a 50s themed diner, you are sorely mistaken. There are PLENTY of new punk bands today who write songs about things that are happening today and, in some cases sound completely different from punk bands from the "past", in some cases they do not (so what, art doesn't have to be completely innovative to be good), or they are somewhere between the two. You can refer to my previous post with the song videos if you need proof. I'm gonna paraphrase something I said in another post:

Part of artistic growth is recycling- looking back while pushing forward. That's not building what's already built. That's building on top of what's already built. It's turning a one floor single family home into a sky scraper.

Grunge sucked, was unmusical, and hardcore bands couldn't get gigs because of it.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because it's a mostly subjective statement and because I wasn't a hardcore kid in Detroit circa 90s. As far as it being unmusical, well again that's subjective but if by that you mean it didn't value "musicianship" then you are clearly ignorant. Proof below:



Rap music only cares about money while punk bands originally wanted to "destroy music" to create something new. Rap music cannot tell a story. Thus, the two have nothing in common with each other.

A lot of commercial rap does indeed care a lot about money but there's still an element of craft to it's production. And there is a lot of underground rap that has more to say than 'yo yo yo bitches n hoes, shoot cops and sell drugs, nigganigganigga'. Rap can't tell a story? Bull****. Refer to the below videos if you need proof. Punk Music wanted to "destroy" all other music? Maybe some of them did when starting out, some of them were just doing what they could do without any pretense- see: The Ramones. Musically speaking, no, rap and punk don't have much if anything in common. However, they are both genres of music that spoke and continue to speak to the disenfranchised of society.





Dada is integral to all of 'real' punk rock, there is no real punk anymore without Dadaist influence. Punk Rock was meant to destroy the concept of hit records and glamor in music.

Dada undeniably did influence SOME punk bands from the 70s and punk bands today, namely Minutemen and Bauhaus. However, there were plenty of other punk bands without any "artsy-intellectual" pretensions- see: The Ramones, Descendents, Sham 69, EATER. I'm sure the same could be said of these bands in regards to "destroying" Rock and Roll and replacing it with something "new". Obviously these bands knew of each other and may have even discussed ideas -Descendents and Minutemen were both on the same label for a while- but they each made a name for themselves by sticking to what they started off doing.

Punk rock has a "reason to be alive", "needs to be taken to a new level", we need to either "Lead or follow"

Punk has a reason to be alive and that's why it is alive. It is being taken to a new level, that's called growth. What's funny is you also claimed bands who take punk to different and new levels aren't punk because they supposedly aren't "dada". You're talking about music as if it and other arts are the chiefs in command in a battlefield against The Man. If you really want to change the world, become a politician. If anything at all, artists would be lucky to be fodder in such a battle. We're that fat guy in Full Metal Jacket.

Punk rock has "...already been done. I've heard it before--long before. There has to be something else."

Punk Rock had also in a way been done before it was even called Punk Rock. Again, part of musical growth is looking back while pushing forward. If you're the type of person who needs their music to always be of-the-minute and are constantly looking for something completely new perhaps your listening habits are better suited to Top 40 or Pitchfork Media.

"Punk needs a new beginning but the West is a cultural wasteland and it can't happen here."

New York and London were cultural wastelands when Punk first blew up. Punk owes everything it is to the fact that it comes from cultural wastelands. In the age of Miley Cyrus' ass making international headlines, Jersey Shore, and the Tea Party... I think Punk is doing just fine. You're just out of touch.

__________________
I spit bullets in my feet
Every time I speak
So I write instead
And still people want me dead
~msc

Surell

I was highlighting the fact that you believed that your learning was somehow superior to mine, or that mine was irrelevant. I don't believe what you're saying is irrelevant, I just don't agree with it.



I was actually talking about George, though it may be pretty loose, but he picked "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" out of a random page of a book, essentially, if I remember a part of Living in the Material World correctly.

__________________

Neapolitan

__________________

Mondo Bungle

Andre Bretoncore.

__________________

BarkinDog

a lot of wot u posted sounded like death metal or sumin??
Musical taste's a subjective thing, influenced by the environment you're brought up in (both socially and musically).
There's prolly a number of different forms o punk, but how do you really categorize the genre as a whole?
btw I dont much dig Green Day cos of the fronter's voice and they also seem a bit too nice.

Lord Larehip

Rap is mainstream. It hauls in BILLIONS of dollars a year. Guys like Jay Z and Li'l Wayne are so rich they have to portray themselves as pimps and drug dealers to justify their bank accounts and mansions so that their fans won't think they lost touch with the streets.

Rap and hip-hop have their own categories in the Grammys. When was the last time punk was honored at the Grammys? Jay Z has 17 Grammys from what I just read. Last I heard, Kanye West had 14. Disenfranchised, my ass. Carole King, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, only has four. Laura Nyro has written some of the greatest songs of the 20th century that made the careers of bands as Blood, Sweat & Tears, Three Dog Night and the 5th Dimension. She never won a Grammy or a Gold record. Never even released an album that cracked the Top 40. So what's so disenfranchised about rap or hip-hop? Nothing. It's music for sell-outs and posers. You've been duped. Time to wise up.

Dada gave birth to ALL those bands--all of them. Whether they or you realize it or not. Dada wasn't just about paintings--dada affected literature, graphic design, theatre, performance art, music, politics, philosophy. The earliest dada wasn't in 1916, those artists simply came up with the name. Dada really started no later than 1897 when the Grand Guignol theater opened in Paris. They put on plays depicting everything from rape to dismemberment to cannibalism to mutilation to gross deformity to incest. Gallons of fake blood were shed on the stage. Audience members often fainted because it looked real. They were the first splatter movies. They provided the bizarre, perverted sexual writings on Anais Nin.

These plays had an influence on Luis Bunuel. I'm sure you've seen this before:


Luis Buñuel: Un Chien andalou (1928) - YouTube

Bunuel made that with Dali who was, of course, a surrealist painter with close ties to the dadaists (like Magritte also was). Such movies inspired David Lynch to create "Eraserhead" in 1977 which was madly embraced by punk rockers the world over. You can't even call yourself a punk if you haven't seen it.



There was already a dadaist movement going on in New York by 1915. So by the time that Cabaret Voltaire appeared on the scene in Zurich in 1916, dada was already well underway. When surrealists as Max Ernst, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp ended up in New York fleeing the Nazis, the dada just came full circle because it was already in New York. That led to the downtown music scene which was actually started by Yoko Ono years before she met John. She converted her apartment to a place for the artists to play experimental music. It was located in a kind of slummy area of downtown New York while the upscale places like the Lincoln and Julliard were uptown, so they dubbed their music downtown music.

Artists and avant-garde musicians flocked to Ono's place to perform and talk. One of them was Andy Warhol who was so close to the Velvet Underground that he was a virtual member. And I think even you can agree that the Velvet Underground were a gigantic influence on punk. John Cale WAS an avant-garde musician--that's what he was. Sonic Youth was an outgrowth of Downtown Music with Lee Renaldo doing all kinds of experimental music. Laurie Anderson was another of the downtown artists and she was a great admirer of Beefheart and eventually befriended him. Beefheart was also an artist who displayed his work at galleries. If Beefheart's work isn't dada, it CERTAINLY has parallels:



The entire antiwar movement was dada influenced. The first people to take to the streets and tell their govt to go to hell, that they weren't going to fight their wars for them were dadaists. Cabaret Voltaire was born out of dadaist disgust over World War I (which Ernst fought in and it changed his whole outlook on life and his art).

While dada didn't invent nihilism, it embraced it and made its own contributions to it. That nihilism became a hallmark of punk whether it's the Sex Pistols chanting "No Future" over and over again or Fear's "No More Nothin'" or "After Death (You Rot in the Mud)" by (surprise) the Nihilistics.

Dada created the milieu that served as the soil from punk sprouted. No dada, no punk.

Mondo Bungle

Yves Tanguycore

__________________

Lord Larehip

What I posted was hardcore, son, pure hardcore.

Because it SOUNDS like punk. Jazz has the same dilemma. What makes jazz be jazz? People said that jazz swings but a lot of jazz, especially free jazz, does not swing and yet it is still jazz. So what makes it jazz? Because it SOUNDS like jazz. Punk is punk because it sounds that way. I'm talking purely from a musical standpoint. From a philosophical standpoint, punk is dead and has not been revitalized. It doesn't make sense to continue to play punk when we've already had a post-punk genre (Swans, PIL, etc).

Who the hell DOES like Green Day?

Mondo Bungle

I like Green Day, but I'm still more hardcore than you

__________________

GuD

I'm sorry, did I miss a memo? Grammys actually matter and aren't just a big media hype? Yes, rap started off underground but made it big. Some artists wanted to make it big and did, good for them. Some saw that as a corruption of the craft and decided to float on the underground waves and continue to do that today. Immortal Technique is pretty big now but is more or less who he was from the beginning. Cannibal Ox aren't very prolific but have released numerous great albums in side projects (as did producer El-P) despite the fact that they don't receive a lot of press. Some rappers are in it for the money, some aren't. The same goes for punk bands of the 70s and now. Did you listen to the lyrics for the Cannibal Ox song? Does it sound like they're trying to make millions of dollars to you? They expressed a lot about what it's like to live in poverty, to be disadvantaged and discriminated against, and did so in a very creative way. They're from Harlem, a city that's been plagued with crime since the 50s. Maybe you missed that, you strike me as the type who never really had to suffer through a lot and maybe that's why.

Dadaists were the first to protest the government for going to war? I'm not a history buff but I can't believe that statement without proof. I can see what you mean in that dada influenced the groundwork for maybe even a lot of punk, but the Ramones and likeminded bands? I just don't see the connection and you haven't explicitly proved it. The Ramones are one of my favorite bands, I've seen every documentary about them I've ever been aware of, countless interviews on youtube, read the books. I can't remember them once acknowledging dada (or the Velvet Underground), and the same can be said for a lot of other bands I've informed myself of. Obviously that doesn't explicitly prove that they weren't influenced by dada, but it doesn't bode well for what I interpret your claim to be that it was vital to punk bands everywhere in the 70s and 40 years later has been lossed along the way. There are plenty of bands who protest the government and other issues in the world today. Again, did you not watch the video? Dillinger Four might not take themselves very seriously but they have a lot to say and have written some of the best punk songs of the last 15 years. This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, Johnny Hobo, La Dispute, countless others have a lot to say to. Are you saying they're just singing songs about oppression and corruption for the **** of it? I honestly don't know because you haven't said a word about any new punk bands besides Green Day who were never exclusively political motivated in the first place. They were a bunch of stoners from the slums of Oakland who liked The Jam.

Nihilism was obviously a part of a lot of punk bands' attitudes. It's obviously a part of a lot of other completely categorically different bands' attitudes. A lot of people may have nihilistic or existentialist feelings without even being aware of those philosophies in any way. You don't have to know who Camus is to wonder if suicide is better or worse than a cup of coffee. Artists and philosophers are people who have those thoughts and create something with them, some of those creations get sucked up into academia or pop culture, either way the thoughts and feelings that inspired them to create don't exclusively belong to them and the fact that they may or may not have been the first to create with those thoughts and feelings in mind doesn't mean that they're the ones who invented them. It's not a case of chicken or egg.

I think what's going on here is you're trying to overintellectualize and overanalyze a genre of music that, for the most part, is by and for the everyman. I think punk has more in common with the blues than it does dada. The philosophy isn't dead, it's far from dead, the art that ties into it has just changed. The fact that people here are arguing with you and are out their playing in bands and doing what they can to make a difference in the world is all the proof you need. Change is a gradual process, it doesn't happen overnight.

__________________
I spit bullets in my feet
Every time I speak
So I write instead
And still people want me dead
~msc