There is a reason for it to be alive but it has to be taken to a new level. We either lead or we follow. Which do you prefer?

i prefer to let sleeping dogs die

Pwned. I sat up until 3 am last night watching an Expoited doc and Punk is still alive even if it sounds crap at times and has been diluted by the record companies.

Here is some good metal/punk that is pretty new. jackhammer if you havnt heard of Valient Thorr you should check them out, I think it is something you would like alot.

:)

did you ever catch the doc on Amebix?

Punk is alive today and will never die. It always changes and evolves. It may not the sex pistols or black flag, because it grows into something new. If it stayed the same that would be very dull and then it would die.

Yeah about a year ago and loved it. I did post about it way back when! Had to watch it on yt though but got the full doc.

i remember now :0

i drink a lot....thus memories drown :)

I may just sit under this tree, out of the way.

I feel that a lot of musicians in places like The US and UK reflect those who have good ideas or at least a good basis for their music but have that button marked "Career" in their minds. This goes for a lot of music today - there has to be an inner CEO in blue jeans in your mind once you walk out into the music circus. This usually takes a lot of the edge creativity out of your system that's replaced with calculated moves. There are some good bands out there, but you have to seriously go through a lot of half-inspired stuff to get to them.

The Hot Topic era did a lot of damage - it lowered a lot of the alternatives to Kiss level, and possibly made a lot of people think in terms of Markets and Focus Groups - not in the way that a Marketing person would usually do, but close. Thankfully, there was a little room for those who seriously meant it that may have sparked a few ideas in people who were really listening. Mind, a little know-how and spirited promotion is great, but it was like walking in to The Machine which was the focus of a lot of diatribes through the years.

Today, I feel a lot of the music rebellion around will be formed by Electronic music (although the glut of people just pushing buttons on their laptops has weakened things a hell of a lot) or anything that has an experimental edge with emphasis on the mental, but I'm convinced that there will be good Punk bands here and there keeping up the spirit for those who want to hear it like me who's in the occasional mood for some great brain slamming guitars and serious street level attitude.

I hate it when people say there's no good punk bands anymore. Sure, the whole extremist anarchist Suhhumans/Crass kinda concept is KIND OF 'over' (Leftover Crack, His Hero is Gone, Mouth Sewn Shut might beg to differ) but I think at this point that mentality isn't still really taken seriously anymore. It's naive to think that you're gonna completely overthrow an entire massive culture through music. You'll change a lot of people's lives who aren't interested in the latest blockbuster and celebrity scandal, but that's the most you can really hope for and I think that's enough. The people and pervasive mainstream culture that punk aims to usurp is NEVER gonna go anywhere and I feel like it has just as much a right to be here as punks do. I don't like it, I don't understand it, but really it doesn't affect me. It's not a part of my life, of my punk friend's lives, or even some of my not-punk or 'too-old-for-punk' friends. As far as the whole anarchistic-no government or government takeover whatever aspect of it all goes... I really don't think anyone who is into punk music knows how to lead a country any better than whatever ******* happens to be in charge. To me, punk rock is an ever-growing alternate world for people who just want something else to be a part of or a place to express what's meaningful in their lives. It never died and it never will, I think people like OP are just too lazy to get out there and find something exciting or are expecting too much.

No you just hate Lord larehip the OP. This is just another retarded thread/post from his collection of winners.

Bulls-hit. To destroy interest in the latest blockbusters and celebrity scandals all you need are blockbusters and celebrities.

Aww, rez, now, I'm sorry I earned your undying hatred for disagreeing with your sad tea party politics and idiotic gun-nut stance and actually posted stats to back up my position but, hell, how can I know I crossed a line until I cross it?

Probably because hip-hop doesn't self-cannibalize in the same magnitude that punk does.

It has nothing to do with that. It is you as a poster in general. You are like a child trying to use big words he doesnt understand.

He just can't handle the punk today, so he denies it's existence entirely.



But seriously, today's punk is as direct if not more than it's ever been.
Since when does playing punk rock make you punk?

Agreed. There is more inspiration today for it anyways. Rich have gotten richer, big corporations have only gained freedoms and frown larger....etc etc etc...

I listen to quite a few punk bands have the attitude to go with it.

Oh, please. I'm 100% certain my vocabulary is a tad more expansive yours. And let's be honest--you became outwardly hostile to me on the gun control thread and not before. Which was funny because I never insulted you, I just pointed out the fallacies in your stance. Nor did I find it necessary to go on other people's threads to badmouth you as you did to me here. I mean, really. That's low, pal, amusing but low.

Which is exactly the problem. It's already been done. I've heard it before--long before. There has to be something else.

So you admit there's punk today huh?

As someone else said--there's too much of it. It's just a retro act though. It's like watching some old doo-wop group at a reunion. Sure, it's great to hear the old songs and nice to know they are still gigging around but it is just not the same. Even the post-punk era is long gone.

Punk needs a new beginning but the West is a cultural wasteland and it can't happen here. My guess is that the Japanese are doing the most innovative work with punk just as they are with jazz and god knows what else. But stick a fork in us over here. We're just one big Detroit.

You start a thread complaining about how there's no punk today, and are now complaining that there's too much.

Come on.

It doesn't make any difference which one I say--no punk or too much--because it isn't real punk. It looks like it, it sounds like it but the due date has expired. It expired long ago. There can't be any real punk today. If there was a true punk mentality today, they wouldn't be doing this stuff. The ground may be hallowed, if you prefer to see it that way, but nevertheless it has already been trodden on and punk was never a genre to walk endlessly in circles.

I gotta tell ya, that was one of the dumbest things I've ever read. The due date expired? I didn't realize our urge to protest an overbearing system, which has only gotten worse since the old punk days, had spoiled. I didn't realize our strive towards freedom had gone bad. Oh hey guys, go ahead and stop voicing your opinions, stop taking stands, punk has expired.
If there was a true punk mentality, they wouldn't be doing what? Acting on the very basis that punk was born?

That's a pretty conformist-ish thing to say, that punk has a due date.

I'll be playing in basements, handing out flyers and pamphlets, starting protests, marching down the streets, and all that till I die.
I guess you just gotta be a punk to see it all.

that's some br00tal **** right there. i was beginning to think they were some weird experimental noise band and was like what the **** is this guy talking about this ain't punk. I like the part I underlined, in a world full of unappreciative spoiled twats it can at times be hard to discern the people who are there because there's nowhere else for them from the people who just want to run away from the suburbs.

Punk today is now part of what real punk once rebelled against.

I certainly never said that. Did you actually read any of my posts on this thread or just part of the opening sentence before shooting back a reply?

Playing something that's already been done instead of moving it to a new level. I'll give Naked City credit. They've probably done the most to get punk in line with a new zeitgeist but they also have an extensive jazz background--Frisell, Baron, Horvath are all famous jazz musicians. They were able to move punk because they had someplace to move it.

I think it's conformist to play something that had its heyday 30 years ago.

You just have to have not been old enough to remember people doing all of that 30 years before. How do you expect it to end any differently? Look at what they did and try something else or they did it for nothing. And so are you, for that matter.

http://www.contractortalk.com/attach...trollalert.gif
http://www.contractortalk.com/attach...trollalert.gif
http://www.contractortalk.com/attach...trollalert.gif
http://www.contractortalk.com/attach...trollalert.gif

No, no, no, no, no.

I just have to point out that your tirade against Hip hop is fundamentally incorrect, as it is born not only out of a similar culture as Punk but ethos as well (i.e. DIY, can't play instruments, pointing out flawed systems, and so on).

And cite dadaism all you want, I don't think that much original punk was that god damned intelligible. It's kinda supposed to dodge pretensions like that. Nothing against Dadaism, but you don't have to participate in it to be opposed to war or politics.

Also, Detroit is cool, it did kinda give us the Stooges.

What?? You're telling me that grunge didn't blow donkey cock? C'mon! Grunge destroyed music even more than rap did. When grunge appeared on the scene, that was all the young idiots of America wanted to listen to and everything else fell by the wayside. Bands couldn't get hired if they didn't play grunge. Everybody had to sound like Nir-vomit and Hurl Jam and Stone Pimple Toilets.

It was a disgrace. F-uck grunge and f-uck Seattle. Ten times worse than Detroit.

Even if I accept this as true, there ain't room enough in this town for both of
'em so I pick punk.

That's true of hip-hop. Punk was that way from the beginning. Just look at the MC5--by the mid-60s were free jazz fanatics (Rob Tyner took his name from McCoy Tyner) who were avowed anarchists which they preached from the stage and involved in various anarchist and extreme left causes. And those movements all embraced dada if you ever bothered to check--were founded by dadaists. Punk wasn't born from dada, it was continuation of it. There would have been no punk without dada. That not every punk band knew s-hit about dada doesn't prove anything. I know people who hate the Beatles but love all these bands that never would have existed without them.

There was nothing pretentious about dada. They went head on against the Nazis and some ended up in the camps. They had a hell of a lot more guts than a lot of people today who fancy themselves rebellious when their "tude" consists of nothing but zoning out on ecstasy in a f-ucking rave somewhere, who only get mad when the cops interrupt their party.

Again, that doesn't mean anything because the antiwar consciousness was raised by organizations that were either founded by or spun off of organizations founded by dadaists and other surrealists. The guy carrying a placard protesting a war may not be aware that he's doing this because dadaists came up with it but that's just his ignorance. It's not the reality.

And it also gave us the MC5 so there you go.

Pardon me if I beg to differ on this point, but Grunge isn't as bad as you make it to be. At least not the early form of the genre in respects to bands linked closely to music scene in Seattle during the late 80s and early 90s or bands who music was influence by early Grunge. One mistake people often make is to place all Alternative Rock during the 90s under the epithet of Grunge. I'm not sure if you're victim of this misunderstanding, I hope you're not. It just seems you despise Grunge because of the more derivative forms that followed, and hence making your disdain for it retro-active. I think if your somewhat familiar with Rock music and it's many sub-genres that preceded (e.g. Hard Rock, Punk, Heavy Metal etc and bands like The Beatles etc) you could form some small appreciation for Grunge bands like Nirvana, and Pearl Jam.

Fixed.

Nirvana were more just as punk as a any punk band.

Certainly true with the Bleach album, before David Geffin applied his polish to Nevermid.

And Alice In Chains Dirt album is IMO one of the 50 best albums ever made. Has nothing to do with punk, has everything to do with musical expression. And heroin. Just because a topic is unpleasant doesn't mean it can't be brilliantly expressed.

Thank you for your assistance.

It's not grunge I hate so much as the idiotic reaction to it. A-ssholes acted like they'd never heard music in their lives. They couldn't get enough of it and it put a lot of bands out of work that had been doing well. Suddenly, places wouldn't hire you if you couldn't play grunge s-hit. The problem for me was that it wasn't very musical. Punk generally wasn't either but it wasn't trying to be. Punk was conceived as anti-music. Grunge was just plain un-musical. Kurt Cobain was a hack. Couldn't play guitar to save his life and people think he's this great, tortured genius. S-hit, his guitar-playing and singing tortured me. Yet he became a musical hero to a generation who couldn't know decent playing if they heard it because, if they listened to Nirvana, they couldn't have heard it because Cobain blew. I wasn't going to play that junk. That was the end of my band days because you had to play grunge to get a gig and I wasn't having it. Grunge killed more scenes than it could ever have created what it did create was musically untalented.

One of my buddies loves Cobain and learned guitar from listening to him. All he knows are power barre chords--nothing else. Like Cobain, he can't play a lead riff. Listen to Nirvana, there's no leads not because they were against them but because Cobain couldn't play. When they did start putting leads into the songs, it was another guitarist they hired in.

To LL, maybe this will help.

Thurston Moore never ripped any awesome leads, still one of the greatest guitarists of all time. I bet Cobain took a lot of influence from him.

Tommy Niemeyer very seldom played leads either (at least with the Accused) and he's outstanding

Who is Thurston Moore? Cobain liked the Meat Puppets and that's fine--I liked them too. But he was no Curt Kirkwood.


Maybe he is (never heard of him) but does that mean Cobain is by extension?