A Brief History of Punk

The Foundations of Punk Rock

The beginnings of punk rock are often furiously debated. This is partially because everyone has different definition of punk rock, and partially because its foundation stones are found in several places.

"Punk Rock" was originally used to describe the garage musicians of the '60's. Bands like the Sonics were starting up and playing out with no musical or vocal instruction, and often limited skill. Because they didn't know the rules of music, they were able to break the rules.

The mid to late '60s saw the appearance of the Stooges and the MC5 in Detroit. They were raw, crude and often political. Their concerts were often violent affairs, and they were opening the eyes of the music world.

The Velvet Underground is the next piece in the puzzle.

The Velvet Underground, managed by Andy Warhol, were producing music that often bordered on noise. They were expanding the definitions of music without even realizing it.

The final primary influence is found in the foundations of Glam Rock. Artists like David Bowie and the New York Dolls were dressing outrageously, living extravagantly and producing loud trashy rock and roll. Glam would end up splitting up its influence, doling out portions to hard rock, "hair metal" and punk rock.

New York: The First Punk Rock Scene

The first concrete punk rock scene appeared in the mid '70s in New York. Bands like The Ramones, Wayne County, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, Blondie and the Talking Heads were playing regularly in the Bowery District, most notably at CBGB.

The bands were unified by their location, camaraderie, and shared musical influences. They would all go on to develop their own styles and many would shift away from punk rock.

While the New York scene was reaching its heyday, punk was undergoing a separate creation story in London.

Meanwhile, Across the Pond

England's punk scene had political and economic roots. The economy in the United Kingdom was in poor shape, and unemployment rates were at an all-time high. England's youth were angry, rebellious and out of work. They had strong opinions and a lot of free time.

This is where the beginnings of punk fashion as we know it emerged, and they centered out of one shop. The shop was simply called SEX, and it was owned by Malcolm McClaren.

Malcolm McClaren had recently returned to London from the U.S., where he had unsuccessfully tried to reinvent the New York Dolls to sell his clothing. He was determined to do it again, but this time looked to the youths who worked and hung out in his shop to be his next project. This project would become the Sex Pistols, and they would develop a large following very quickly.

Enter The Bromley Contingent

Among the fans of the Sex Pistols was an outrageous bunch of young punks known as the Bromley Contingent. Named after the neighborhood they all came from, they were at the first Sex Pistols shows, and quickly realized they could do it themselves.

Within a year, the Bromleys had formed a large portion of the London Punk scene, including including The Clash, The Slits, Siouxsie & the Banshees and Generation X (fronted by a young Billy Idol) and X-Ray Spex. The British punk scene was now in full swing.

The Punk Rock Explosion

By the late '70s, punk had finished its beginning and had emerged as a solid musical force. With its rise in popularity, punk began to split into numerous sub-genres. New musicians embraced the DIY movement and began to create their own individual scenes with specific sounds.

In order to better see the evolution of punk, check out all of the subgenres that punk split off into. It's a list that's constantly evolving, and it's only a matter of time before more categories appear.

Above retrieved from, http://punkmusic.about.com/od/punk101/a/punkhistory2.htm

Viper1

and really why the hell do people still wonder about that? it doesn't matter who started it. Just be glad.

Another Answer

Punk rock began in the mid-to-late sixties with the Velvet Underground, The Stooges, and the MC5. It progressed into the seventies in New York City, with bands like the New York Dolls, the Dead Boys, the Ramones, the Patti Smith Group, the Heartbreakers, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Talking Heads, Blondie, etc., who mainly played two East Village clubs, CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. At the time, rock music had become very stale; it was all about long solos and using 12 different guitars. It was extravagant and pretentious. And the culture surrounding it -- the hippie ideals like peace and love and everybody being nice to everybody else -- seemed trite, unrealistic, namby-pamby, and doomed to failure. Punk rock was a rebellion against all that. It was a return to simple 3-minute pop tunes, like the songs Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddly, etc. did in the '50s, but really loud and hard and fast.

In the early seventies, Malcolm McLaren, the eventual manager and mastermind behind the Sex Pistols, came to New York and started spending a lot of time watching these bands at CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. He started managing the New York Dolls, and did such a bad job that the band ended up breaking up. He tried to inject politics into the music, by giving the Dolls a communist twist, and dressing them up all in red. This didn't work because New York punk never had anything to do with politics: with him in charge, the band lost their identity.

So McLaren returned to England and put together the Sex Pistols. Since there was already a punk scene there, brought on by bands like the New York Dolls and the Ramones touring England in the last few years, they were met with pretty much instant success. English punk bands like the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Clash, the Cockney Rejects, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc., were -- generally speaking -- much more political; English punk had a strong element of class warfare to it, along with an inherent desire to be shocking and offensive. However sincere the Sex Pistols themselves were, many felt that Malcolm McLaren was just deliberately creating a lot of hype and publicity for himself, and that the whole thing was just a con on his part.

On New Year's Day, 1978, the Sex Pistols began their American tour, touching down in Atlanta, Georgia, and making their way across the country. The tour only lasted 14 days, but there was no shortage of media coverage, and the public eagerly and incessantly waited for the next shocking news bulletin about the Pistols. Kids all across America were dressing themselves up in ripped T-shirts and dog collars, with spiked, brightly-colored hair and safety pins through their ears and noses: punk had suddenly gone from an underground music scene to a full-blown mass movement.

The band, however, progressively deteriorated as the tour went on. Sid Vicious was an out-of-control drug addict and Johnny Rotten was becoming increasingly disillusioned about McLaren and about the band in general. The Sex Pistols broke up after their San Francisco concert at the Winterland, on January 14, 1978. Before walking offstage at the end, Johnny Rotten famously said to the audience, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" presumably referring to how he felt manipulated and cheated by McLaren.

The end of the Sex Pistols marked the beginning of the decline of the punk rock era, and by the early eighties, punk was on its last legs. As the 1980s progressed, punk rock mutated into two very different kinds of music, hardcore punk like Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys, and New Wave bands like Depeche Mode and the Cure.

There is an excellent, excellent book on the subject, called Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. The entire book consists of nothing but direct quotations from the people who were actually there, so it's as accurate as is humanly possible.

Answer

In the 90's Green day had started a punk revival which made bands such as blink-182 and The Offspring big hits.

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