Right of course about Nina Hagen et al. Though the argument about an age cohort still works (& in fact could be extended to include the German industrial rock bands & their artier (& much funnier) US followers from Akron (*) But then I could argue that a lot of British punk rock from 1976/7 actually sounded very, very different from the continental & North American precursors. A lot less sophisticated, less art-school (although a lot of the practitioners were at art schools!), less pills & more beer, and they actually used English accents and working-class south-of-England accents at that. In fact that summed up a lot of the impact of the Clash, the Damned, the Sex Pistols & all the hundreds of less-well-remembered bands - they sounded working-class, which in those days just Wasn't Done if you came from within a hundred miles of London. And I could also argue that the musical roots of that kind of British "punk" didn't include those guys so much as the noisy, thrashy, stomping heavy bands of the early 1970s (people like Sweet & Slade who never got to the US I guess), Reggae (especially in its early Ska mode), football chants, oddities like Screaming Lord Sutch (his "L-O-N-D-O-N London!" from the late 60s isn't punk but it sounds like punk) and of course Hawkwind (honestly, just listen to the basslines). If there is a transatlantic component other than R&B (which is always there of course) back in the mid-1970s it was more likely to be Patti Smith or their older brother's Velvet's records. And of course you could quite truthfully remind me that a significant number of those famous punks were in fact middle-class university-educated fine-arts types who did just as many of the wrong sort of pills as their windy stadium rock predecessors (talking of which, how come you Americans still pay money to listen to that stuff ? :-) Ken Brown (*) and for that matter some of the kind of people who listened to Bruce Springsteen in his more depressing moments... before the Republican's irony module was unplugged & they started to think "Born in the USA" was some sort of anthem. Or the kind of people who listened to various noisy southern rock bands. Jim Choate wrote:
On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Ken Brown wrote:
Kids born in years between large bumps end up caught on the edge - perpetually too old for the ones behind, too young to ever be accepted in the society born before them.
That more or less happens these days - there is a sort of lost generation born between the late 1950s & about 1970 who managed to be the first age cohort in 200 years who were poorer than their parents, at least in Britain (where else did punk rock come from?)
Actually punk rock came from Germany, look up Klaus Nomi and Nina Hagen, and Canada, P. Orridge and Throbbing Gristle. Klaus is also the first 'famous' person to die from AIDS. Then it moved to NY & Cali. (The Germs fuckin' rule!). It didn't get to Britian until it had already been established a couple of years.
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