Oi! To The World

This weekend I got in a small phone argument (which is strange cause I never get in arguments with anyone… especially about music) about the importance of “punk”

The basic theoretical standpoints

Me: “Punk Changed Everything”

Him: “Punk changed nothing. It will be a foot note. The Sex Pistols were never on the same level as Pink Floyd”

Just to establish some background I was hardly a “punk” kid growing up. I didn’t own an Anarchy shirt, or have a “god save the queen” patch safety-pinned to my backpack. If we were to jump back to my high school days you would have found me in a daily haze humming Brian & Robert to myself (though you could say that PHiSH worked because the dead heads met the gutter-punks and created a new country composed entirely of parking lots and Golden Gate Park).

So I wasn’t one of those kids. But I did understand the appeal. I’m not a very good musician so any movement that actively embraced and ignored a working musical skill set was alright with me

But the comment “ A Band like the sex pistols were never on the same level as Pink Floyd” is interesting to me

First, this was coming from a person who often cites Animals as their favorite Pink Floyd album, an album which wears it's punk influence on it's sleeve

Second, how and who gets to define the popular? Yes, the Sex Pistols never sold as many records as Pink Floyd. But is defining “popular” something that has to be so tightly tied to economics?

To put this in some sort of perspective thirty-five years after the Release of Electric Ladyland( I choose this album because it contains “All Along The Watch Tower” which again, if we are talking popular as economic Watchtower is Hendrix’s only “hit”) the album sold 2 million copies. Nirvana’s Nevermind sold that amount within a year of its release. It’s currently estimated Nevermind has sold around 8 million copies . Of course there are some agency/structure issues at comparing these two, but this is simply an example to begin a dialog

I don’t believe it’s an elitist or utopian belief to say “popular” is not based strictly on a “units sold” mindset

I would argue if punk had not come along and rattled the cages of popular music the industry would have been shaped entirely by the likes of James Taylor and Peter Frampton. I a firm believer that punk is embedded in much of the music we consume. The Edge has no problem admitting he’s not very good at guitar but he had something to say and he set out to say it (layered in reverb and phaser)

I think an even bigger disruption of the popular was Hip-hop. There is no denying we live in a Hip-hop world (yes, I just created an advertisement, but if you can locate and retrieve my copy I’ll happily lend it to you and you can skip the whole amazon.com thing. I think Joel had it last) even if it appears in some strange hybrids

Punk’s symbolic death occurs in 79’ with the Thatcher/Regan elections. I’m not sure hip-hop has such a distinctive tipping point ( ?uestlove used to suggest Illmatic represented a certain sea-change, not so much a death as the creation of a predictable formula)

But this is how culture, particularly the “popular” kind works.

The conversation this weekend mimics that which I’ve had with so many musicians. Few seem to really give a shit about these clusters of disruption and because of that we're missing our chance to engage in a bigger musical conversation