History of the punk subculture
The history of the punk subculture involves the history of punk rock, the history of various punk ideologies, punk fashion, punk visual art, punk literature, dance, and punk film. Since emerging in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia in the mid-1970s, the punk subculture has spread around the globe and evolved into a number of different forms. The history of punk plays an important part in the history of subcultures in the 20th century.
Antecedents and influences
Several precursors have had varying degrees of influence on the punk subculture.Art and philosophy
A number of philosophical and artistic movements were influences on and precursors to the punk movement. The most overt is anarchism, especially its artistic inceptions. The cultural critique and strategies for revolutionary action offered by the Situationist International in the 1950s and 1960s were an influence on the vanguard of the British punk movement, particularly the Sex Pistols. Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren consciously embraced situationist ideas, which are also reflected in the clothing designed for the band by Vivienne Westwood and the visual artwork of the Situationist-affiliated Jamie Reid, who designed many of the band's graphics. Nihilism also had a hand in the development of punk's careless, humorous, and sometimes bleak character.Several strains of modern art anticipated and influenced punk. The relationship between punk rock and popular music has a clear parallel with the irreverence Dadaism held for the project of high art. If not a direct influence, futurism, with its interests in speed, conflict, and raw power foreshadowed punk culture in a number of ways. Minimalism furnished punk with its simple, stripped-down, and straightforward style. Another source of punk's inception was pop art. Andy Warhol and his Factory studio played a major role in setting up what would become the New York punk scene. Pop art also influenced the look of punk visual art. In more recent times, postmodernism has made headway into the punk scene.
Literature and film
Various writers, books, and literary movements were important to the formation of the punk subculture. Poet Arthur Rimbaud provided the basis for Richard Hell's attitude, fashion, and hairstyle. Charles Dickens' working class politics and unromantic depictions of disenfranchised street youth influenced British punk in a number of ways. Malcolm McLaren described the Sex Pistols as Dickensian.Punk was influenced by the Beat generation, especially Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. Kerouac's On the Road gave Jim Carroll the impetus to write The Basketball Diaries, perhaps the first example of punk literature. George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four might have inspired much of punk's distrust for the government. In his autobiography No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish!, John Lydon remembers the influence that film version of A Clockwork Orange had on his own style. John Waters' 1972 underground classic, Pink Flamingos, is considered an important precursor of punk culture.
Music
One of the earliest known precursors of the punk subculture in music is that of Woody Guthrie who often wrote songs about anti-fascism and the conditions faced by working-class people. Beginning in the 1930s and becoming popular in the 1940s, Guthrie is often known as one of the first punks.Punk rock has a variety of origins. Garage rock was the first form of music called "punk", and indeed that style influenced much of punk rock. Punk rock was also a reaction against tendencies that had overtaken popular music in the 1970s, including what the punks saw as "bombastic" forms of heavy metal, progressive rock and "arena rock" as well as "superficial" disco music The British punk movement also found a precedent in the "do-it-yourself" attitude of the Skiffle craze that emerged amid the post-World War II austerity of 1950s Britain.
In addition to the inspiration of those "garage bands" of the 1960s, the roots of punk rock draw on the snotty attitude, on-stage and off-stage violence, and aggressive instrumentation of the Who, the Kinks, the Sonics, the early Rolling Stones, and rockers of the late 1950s rockers such as Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent; the abrasive, dissonant mental breakdown style of the Velvet Underground; the sexuality, political confrontation, and on-stage violence of Detroit bands Alice Cooper, the Stooges and MC5; the English pub rock scene and political UK underground bands such as Mick Farren and the Deviants; the New York Dolls; and some British "glam rock" or "art rock" acts of the early 1970s, including T.Rex, David Bowie, Gary Glitter and Roxy Music. Influence from other musical genres, including reggae, funk, and rockabilly can also be detected in early punk rock.
Earlier subcultures
Previous youth subcultures influenced various aspects of the punk subculture. The punk movement rejected the remnants of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s while at the same time preserving its distaste for the mainstream. Punk fashion rejected the loose clothes, and bell-bottomed appearances of hippie fashion. At the same time, punks rejected the long hair adopted by hippies in favor of short, choppy haircuts, especially in the Britain as a follow on from the precursor Mod, Skinhead and the late sixties/early 70s Bootboy hairstyle fashions. The hippie crash pad found a new inception as punk houses. The jeans, T-shirts, chains, and leather jackets common in punk fashion can be traced back to the bikers, rockers and greasers of earlier decades. The all-black attire and moral laxity of some Beatniks influenced the punk movement. Other subcultures that influenced the punk subculture, in terms of fashion, music attitude or other factors include: Teddy Boys, Mods, skinheads and glam rockers. In 1991, Observer journalist John Windsor wrote a story about artist Frankie Stein – Precursor to Punk, observing that she was wearing a safety pin as earring some years before her friends in SexPistols picked it up and experimented in tandem with Sassoon artistic director Flint Whincop with hairstyles copied by people in her circle such as Toya, Steve Strange and what became The Sex Pistols.Origins
The phrase "punk rock", was originally applied to the untutored guitar-and-vocals-based rock and roll of United States bands of the mid-1960s such as The Standells, The Sonics, and the Seeds, bands that now are more often categorized as "garage rock". The earliest known example of a rock journalist using the term was Greg Shaw who used it to describe music of The Guess Who in the April 1971 issue of Rolling Stone, which he refers to as "good, not too imaginative, punk rock and roll". Dave Marsh also used the term in the May 1971 issue of Creem in reference to music by ?? and the Mysterians. The term was mainly used by rock music journalists in the early 1970s to describe 60s garage bands and more contemporary acts influenced by them.In the liner notes of the 1972 anthology album Nuggets, critic and guitarist Lenny Kaye uses the term "punk-rock" to refer to the mid-60s garage rock groups, as well as some of the darker and more primitive practitioners of 1960s psychedelic rock.
The next step in punk's early development, retroactively named protopunk, arose in the north-eastern United States in cities such as Detroit, Boston, and New York. Bands such as the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, MC5, and the Dictators, coupled with shock rock acts like Alice Cooper, laid the foundation for punk in the US. The drag queen community of New York inspired the New York Dolls, who led the charge as glam punk developed out of the wider glam rock movement. The drug subculture of Manhattan, especially heroin users, formed the fetal stage of the New York punk scene. Art punk, exemplified by Television, grew out of the New York underworld of drug addicts and artists shortly after the emergence of glam punk.
Shortly after the time of those notes, Lenny Kaye formed a band with avant-garde poet Patti Smith. Smith's group, and her first album, Horses, released in 1975, directly inspired many of the mid-1970s punk rockers, so this suggests one path by which the term migrated to the music we now know as punk. There's a bit of controversy which isn't mentioned. The term punk was used to define the emerging movement was when posters saying "PUNK IS COMING! WATCH OUT!" were posted around New York City. Also, Punk Magazine would use the term and help popularize it. From this point on, punk would emerge as a separate and distinct subculture with its own identity, ideology, and sense of style.
Economic recession, including a garbage strike, instilled much dissatisfaction with life among the youth of industrial Britain. Punk rock in Britain coincided with the end of the era of post-war consensus politics that preceded the rise of Thatcherism, and nearly all British punk bands expressed an attitude of angry social alienation. Los Angeles was also facing economic hard times. A collection of art school students and a thriving drug underground caused Los Angeles to develop one of the earliest punk scenes.
The original punk subculture was made up of a loose affiliation of several groups that emerged at separate times under different circumstances. There was significant cross-pollination between these subcultures, and some were derivative of others. Most of these subcultures are still extant, while others have since gone extinct. These subcultures interacted in various ways to form the original mainline punk subculture, which varied greatly from region to region.
New York
The first ongoing music scene that was assigned the "punk" label appeared in New York in 1974–1976 centered around bands that played regularly at the clubs Max's Kansas City and CBGB. This had been preceded by a mini underground rock scene at the Mercer Arts Center, picking up from the demise of the Velvet Underground, starting in 1971 and featuring the New York Dolls and Suicide, which helped to pave the way, but came to an abrupt end in 1973 when the building collapsed. The CBGB and Max's scene included the Ramones, Television, Blondie, Patti Smith, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Talking Heads. The "punk" title was applied to these groups by early 1976, when Punk Magazine first appeared, featuring these bands alongside articles on some of the immediate role models for the new groups, such as Lou Reed, who was on the cover of the first issue of Punk, and Patti Smith, cover subject on the second issue.At the same time, a less celebrated, but nonetheless highly influential, scene had appeared in Ohio, including the Electric Eels, Devo and Rocket from the Tombs, who in 1975 split into Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys. Malcolm McLaren, then manager of the New York Dolls, spotted Richard Hell and decided to bring Hell's look back to Britain.