Thinking About Punk Rock

 I remain a fan of The Clash. That band I came to through its first album's American edition in 1978. The Ramones came later. The Sex Pistols were a rumor that did not touch me until years and years after they imploded. What they gave me was a vision of rock that had an energy unlike what was on the radio in 1978, and that defiance of a rotten society fueled that energy.

Reading Pitchfork's review of Generation X, a band I did know of back then and have heard maybe one song, caught my attention with the following:

But in their search for some sort of coherent manifesto or righteous ideology in first-wave British punk, these critics missed the point. John Lydon only called himself an “anarchist” because it (sort of) rhymed with “Antichrist,” and the Damned were striking the same anti-everything pose as Idol on 1977’s “Politics”: “No rules, no laws, no regulations/No fascist friends, no race relations/I just want to run around/I don’t want to settle down.” Punk was an explosive reaction to peace-and-love hippiedom and the bloated rock excess that dominated the mainstream, but that doesn’t mean that it was inventing something new from out of the ether. Year Zero was a lie. Instead, punk was prelapsarian: a return to rock’n’roll’s roots, its immediate impulses, its youthful thrills. Sex Pistols and the Clash formed because they saw the Ramones at Dingwall’s and figured they could do that too; London punk coalesced around kids seeing the Pistols at the 100 Club and thinking the same. “Whenever rock and roll starts getting carried away or diluted, something always yanks it back to where it started. That’s what punk was all about,” Idol told Robin Katz in a 1978 Daily Star interview.

In that context, Generation X is a vital expression of punk’s ethos. The guitars sound metal-plated, Idol’s voice soars and sneers, and the melodies hit like bricks to the forehead. The shouty “Youth Youth Youth” is a manifesto on teenage independence built around soccer chants and power chords (“Don’t wanna spend my life savin’ up for things/I don’t wanna have what a steady job brings”). On “One Hundred Punks,” Idol takes the rush of a subculture taking over the city and distills it down to “a hundred good mates you know you can trust.”

 We need more yanking.

We should not think punk only takes loud guitars. It takes loud emotions.

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