What is...

Punk.. Or the Rock movement that became punk.. Punk was strangely enough largely ignored by me when I was of the age when it first started, which is odd because upon listening to it some nearly twenty years after it started I liked what I was hearing.. Rolling Stone magazine has released a top 40 punk rock albums list and most of it was beyond me, mostly because it was noise with an erratic beat and others were the "greatest talent in the world" and yet to this day still qualifies as horrible  not very good in my books, just a lot of excessive loud and just noise for noise sake.. Is it my age that prevents me from liking these others??  I don't think so, I tried being open minded..  The list includes Nirvana.. Maybe they were punk in the first album, but never mind was it's own movement towards the grunge movement, the Seattle sound with Sound Garden and Pearl Jam... What I thought was strange was that a great group that was extremely inspirational wasn't on the list.. The Motor City 5  (MC5) were not on the list at all... That seemed extremely odd and yet Television was.. I have the first two (the only two) albums by Television, and I thought of them as that shoe gaze rock, more than punk, for the main reason that there isn't a frantic pace to their music.. Not all punk music has that two minutes and a cloud of dust feel to it, but it seems like that is the main focus of the groups like the Ramones over all being is to put the disc on the platter crank it up and ten minutes later you heard twenty songs and the police are still looking for your house number..   When I first got into the Ramones it was by a fluke.. The group Skid Row had a short EP called besides ourselves and they had a song by the Ramones and so just as a fluke I thought I'd try their music, getting a live album first then best ofs next.. The frantic pacing was a little hard to get used to, seeing as I was into Pink Floyd and frantic pacing is not in their vocabulary..

I would get into other "Punk"  groups mostly by accident, some I knew were classified as punk and others I wasn't sure of until later on.. The Sex Pistols, yeah I knew about them.. Wasn't sure how good they were, or weren't but still you gotta listen to them.. The Clash..  The Jam, the jam were punk but the one and only album I have is a concert and I really liked that album.. The New York Dolls, another great group but short lived.. I only got a best of that combined the best tracks from their three albums or whatever it was they had released before imploding.. Green Day was more of a modern day punk rock movement and although I was set to buy their entire catalog in one go of it, I decided against it.. For some reason.. Other groups I got snip its from a box set of the record company box set (Stiff Records box set)..  that the company went tits up..


Badge Henry