Punk - musically significant or not?

[Guest oZZma]

46 minutes ago, spectoremg said:

I knew it wouldn't be long before a couple of people who swallowed the 'prog is bad' mantra of the time hook line and sinker came along. FWIW Genesis and Yes made some of their finest music in that period, and not a guitar solo to be heard. 

IMO it was actually more about the "arena rock" (the dumb son of prog ) grandiosity.

Edited January 29, 2019 by oZZma

[Barking Spiders]

3 minutes ago, oZZma said:

IMO it was actually more about the "arena rock" (the dumb son of prog ) grandiosity.

Indeed though I think the US got the worst of that rather than the UK. Do you mean Boston, Journey, Heart and all the  other glossy 'corporate' stuff?

[chris_b]

1 minute ago, Barking Spiders said:

Point taken but I was only giving my  POV  . . .

If Punk was the starting point on your musical journey, that's all good. I'm in favour of anything that turns people into a fan, that inspires someone to play an instrument, join bands or just enjoy listening to music.

Rock and Roll probably made a bigger impact on the music business than Punk, but only because there was more to change and the entrenched attitudes were harder to shift. In some ways Punk was a breath of fresh air but in many others it was just a new way to make money for a small bunch of people.

[Guest oZZma]

10 minutes ago, Barking Spiders said:

Indeed though I think the US got the worst of that rather than the UK. Do you mean Boston, Journey, Heart and all the  other glossy 'corporate' stuff?

yeah, that kind of crap.

Edited January 29, 2019 by oZZma

[PaulWarning]

4 minutes ago, oZZma said:

IMO it was actually more about the "arena rock" (the dumb son of prog ) grandiosity.

If punk did anything at all it took music back to grass roots, it had all got too elitist and pompous, no wonder Whispering Bob Harris hated it

[operative451]

I was a small child when Proper Punk tm kicked off... But it definitely stirred up the pop music i would listen to in the 80s - I totally agree that it brought in the idea of 'you don't have to start playing at 12 and spend 10 years in your bedroom learning stairway'.

Like for instance, i think synth pop wouldn't have happened as synths were only 'proper' instruments if you dressed up as a wizard while playing them. Guns n Roses considered themselves punk. Punk meant that if Blondie felt like doing disco they could. Punk filtered down to  the Jesus and Mary chain saying 'a guitar is like a chisel' which got me playing, when everyone else who 'knew about proper music' told me not to bother because i'd previously broken all the fingers on my left hand, so i'd never be able to play like Eddie Van Halen.

Grunge was punk. Acid house was punk. Arguable skiffle was punk, even Glenn Miller was punk...

[Deanol]

In the late 70's Abba were shifting millions of albums, dwarfing the number sold by the Sex Pistols! Disco shifted more records than punk ever did, and probably had a longer and deeper impact on subsequent music, and still influences dance music today.

It wasn't ever an either/or situation, but rather both/and.

I bought albums by Abba, Queen, Blondie, Eric Clapton, Ian Dury, The Clash, The Ramones, Meatloaf and Stevie-Ray Vaughan, to name a few, in the late 70's and early 80's.

I'm currently reading Spike Milligan's wartime memoirs. In those he makes the point that in the 20's through to the 50's, jazz was the counter-culture music, banned by the Nazi's and despised by the middle-of-the-road public who preferred Joseph Locke and Gracie Fields to Duke Ellington.

To paraphrase Frank Zappa - Shut Up and Listen To Loads of Stuff. There's good stuff in everything, in spite of the snobishness that pervades music. It's so ironic that punk garners its own snobs, who look down on, for example, Meatloaf, when Bat Out of Hell was objectively a fantastic album.

The danger of such snobbishness is of course, that those snobs who sneer at Meatloaf whilst claiming that The Sex Pistols were better because they were more "real" or whatever, are in danger of being sneered at themselves by an even more select group who will claim that most Pistols fans are johnny-come-lately's, and that they did their best work before they were famous! There's always a bigger fish (or rather a smaller, more select group).

[mikel]

I love some of the punk stuff, same as I like some songs from most genres. Musically it was not new, it was a re hash of 50s rock and roll and as already stated, most of of it was shoyt.

[bazzbass]

there is a reason why punk had to happen.......

and that reason is the live version of Dazed and Confused

 

PS and Moby D i c k 

Edited January 29, 2019 by bazzbass

[Lozz196]

I already loved music and knew I wanted to be a musician, punk gave me my direction.

[Osiris]

I think that Punk was and is still musically significant, at least as much so as any other genre. I still like a lot of punk music that has been made over the past 40 years as well as much that has been influenced by it. 

But I do think a more pertinent question is whether Danny Baker is significant or not?

He certainly isn't from where I'm looking, the cockney gobshyte. And what's with his hair? 

[spectoremg]

8 minutes ago, bazzbass said:

there is a reason why punk had to happen.......

and that reason is the live version of Dazed and Confused

 

PS and Moby D i c k 

Yes, Led Zep,  guilty as charged. 

[PaulWarning]

17 minutes ago, bazzbass said:

there is a reason why punk had to happen.......

and that reason is the live version of Dazed and Confused

 

PS and Moby D i c k 

not to mention 20 minute drum solo's, God I hate drum solo's

[mikel]

11 minutes ago, spectoremg said:

Yes, Led Zep,  guilty as charged. 

True, nowt worse than being revered as one of the finest live acts of all time. And I also hate drum solos.

Edited January 29, 2019 by mikel
Adition

[PaulWarning]

Why do bands extend songs live? another thing punk put a stop too (to start with anyway) if you can't say what you want to say in 3 minutes you're saying too much

[chris_b]

Filling dozens of 90,000 + seat stadiums puts all the silly anti Led Zep comments into perspective.

Punk didn't replace anything. It temporarily displaced some stuff and then joined the mainstream. After that it was business as usual.

[spectoremg]

Now available, the very best of punk.

Side B is blank. 

[upside downer]

3 hours ago, BigRedX said:

I formed my first band in 1975. Our instrumentation was 2 acoustic guitars fitted with pickups, a homemade solid electric balalaika all going into a 10 watt practice amp via a couple of practical electronics fuzz boxes, a bon tempi-style wind powered chord organ, and a home-made "drum kit" composed of tambourines and cans and anything that sounded good when hit, all held together with clamps acquired from the school chemistry lab.

There was no way that we could have preformed in public with these instruments, so we contented ourselves with recording at home, almost entirely for our own enjoyment. When punk came along, we realised that there might actually be other people who would enjoy the recordings that we were making, so we started putting out albums free on anyone who sent us a C60 cassette and an SAE, which we would return recorded complete with a photocopied A4 sheet as the cover.

Fill the B side with this then spectoremg, I wanna hear that electric balalaika!

Edited January 29, 2019 by upside downer

[Deanol]

32 minutes ago, PaulWarning said:

Why do bands extend songs live? another thing punk put a stop too (to start with anyway) if you can't say what you want to say in 3 minutes you're saying too much

Sorry but this is simply wrong.

1) Punk didn't stop extended live songs. They just didn't play them themselves. They didn't stop long solos in other genres.

2) The 3 minute song wasn't invented by punk! Pop songs in the 50's and 60's all had 3 minute limits due to radio airplay demanding 3 minute songs as that was the amount of time a listener would stick with a song they didn't like before switching to another station!

Punk was fine, a good genre, but let's not pretend it was anything except another genre. It didn't have magical superpowers to influence any other genres. Any influence it did have was simply because the bands in the other genres liked punk and wanted to incorporate some of its elements in their own music. It wasn't forced at all.

[Guest oZZma]

32 minutes ago, chris_b said:

Filling dozens of 90,000 + seat stadiums puts all the silly anti Led Zep comments into perspective.

.

From your "perspective" Take That are one of the greatest bands ever. 

 

[chris_b]

Just now, oZZma said:

From your "perspective" Take That are one of the greatest bands ever.

??

[Deanol]

Just now, oZZma said:

From your "perspective" Take That are one of the greatest bands ever. 

 

Arguably they are! They have brought pleasure and happiness to millions of people around the world. What definition of "greatest" are you using?

[leftybassman392]

43 minutes ago, PaulWarning said:

if you can't say what you want to say in 3 minutes you're saying too much

All due respect Paul but that just doesn't make any sense. Are you really saying that anything musically worth saying can be said in less than 3 minutes?

I'm not partisan in this discussion because although I think Punk has made a worthwhile contribution to popular music that doesn't need any help from old farts like me, I also think this 'sweeping away all the pointless, self-indulgent, po-faced sh!t that went before it' line is misplaced, not to say trying to rewrite history. Fake news 70's-style.

There's more to popular music than 3-minute slabs of pith and bile. More to the point, the world would be an altogether poorer place if there weren't.

ETA: As a by-the-by to some other posters, the reason that Stadium Rock bands like Whitesnake, Springsteen and others flourished is that they needed venues that size to accommodate the numbers of people that wanted to see them play. It didn't need to have anything to do with the quality of the music, but these bands had huge followings. Were the audiences just stupid or brainwashed? Of course not!

Everybody's entitled to their views of course, but let's please not get silly about this.

Edited January 29, 2019 by leftybassman392

[Guest oZZma]

10 minutes ago, chris_b said:

??

records or tickets one has sold says NOTHING about quality. I won't start listing the utterly stupid stuff that polluted the top of charts, in ANY decade. Poor argument.

 

10 minutes ago, Deanol said:

Arguably they are! They have brought pleasure and happiness to millions of people around the world.

ok, I yield.

 

Edited January 29, 2019 by oZZma

[PaulWarning]

2 minutes ago, leftybassman392 said:

All due respect Paul but that just doesn't make any sense. Are you really saying that anything musically worth saying can be said in less than 3 minutes?

I'm not partisan in this discussion because although I think Punk has made a worthwhile contribution to popular music that doesn't need any help from old farts like me, I also think this 'sweeping away all the pointless, self-indulgent, po-faced sh!t that went before it' line is misplaced, not to say trying to rewrite history. Fake news 70's-style.

There's more to popular music than 3-minute slabs of pith and bile. More to the point, the world would be an altogether poorer place if there weren't.

I think I'm being taken a bit to literally here, what I was saying is by extending the songs as they were recorded (and some of them are far too long, Hey Jude for example) they weren't/aren't adding to them, it might be fun for those playing long solo's but not for those listening IMO, bit like jam sessions, and after punk it was far less prevalent than before.

Some songs are better longer, but not many that I like anyway, YMMV