punk rock warlord

The problem with asking me to introduce you to punk and post-punk is that it turns into a massive music party and everyone’s invited.  That is to say, I start shoving anyone I consider the least bit seminal to either movement into a mixtape and suddenly it’s an entire Time-Life collection, and, well.

In this case, there are forty-eight tracks in the punk set and thirty-some in the post-punk.  (It could have been worse!  I’ve done worse.  Much worse.)

You can download it here.

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Yes, I do!  I’ve got a turntable that works well with modern speakers, and I can tell you the things I looked for when I chose it.  You ought to know, though, that I am no expert, and I can only tell you random bits of knowledge that may or may not be of dubious authenticity.  They are hereby placed below the read-more cut!

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Wow, thank you so much!  I’m glad all this nonsense is fun for someone other than me.  (And I don’t blame you for not reading everything; that’d be a lot of music rambling for anyone to take.)

So, first-wave ska!  It’s great that you enjoy it, because it’s a subgenre that often gets a raw deal, especially next to later stuff with a more ‘punk’ sound.  If you like the first wave and similar sounds, there’s a list of artists and producers who might interest you under the cut.

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This is Pulp’s “Common People.”

Pulp are a (mostly) Britpop band from Sheffield and “Common People” was one of their biggest hits.  It’s considered to be a defining moment of the Britpop era, much to the band’s chagrin.

Basically, the song is about a rich girl Jarvis Cocker met at St. Martin’s College, who told him that she wanted to live the way he did, move to Hackney and live as though she were poor.  And he’s going, no, you’ll never be able to do that, because you can leave.  You didn’t grow up this way, you don’t have to live this way, and even if you choose to, you know you can always blink and it’ll vanish.  It’ll never be your prison, he’s saying, at best it’ll be your plaything.

You’ll never live like common people
You’ll never do what common people do
You’ll never fail like common people
You’ll never watch your life slide out of view

Here, have a listen to Jarvis’ own interpretation.

The thing about it, though, is that it plays across so many different barriers.  It’s absolutely true about class division; a lot of people who are very well-off seem to think it’s somehow ‘cool’ not to be.  It’s why there’s such a market for things like torn designer jeans and styles imitating ‘punk’ or ‘ghetto’ clothing.  It’s more than just that, though; it extends to any kind of privilege.  People seem to think that it’s ‘hip’ to be part of a disadvantaged group, and it’s a dangerous line of thought.  It’s also a line of thought that brings people into struggles that aren’t theirs and has them tread on the toes of those who really are struggling.

You will never understand
How it feels to live your life
With no meaning or control
And with nowhere left to go
…
‘cause when you’re laid in bed at night
And watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all

Joe Strummer, I think, had a wonderful thing to say about it when he was describing how he came to write The Clash’s “White Riot.”  He and Paul Simonon ended up embroiled in the riots at Notting Hill Carnival in 1976, which were a rebellion of black, primarily Caribbean, youth against the police and the establishment.  Joe was very clear about saying that he and Paul pitched in (shouted, threw bricks, tried to set a car on fire but they couldn’t get the matches to stay lit), but that it wasn’t their battle.  That is, they could help, but they could never really be a part of it.  I’ve always thought that was a classy statement to make, that they could pitch in and help with someone else’s struggle without ever claiming that it was theirs to fight.

I don’t know – bear in mind, of course, this is all just my nonsense rambling – but I reckon Jarvis is trying to say that you can never truly know what it’s like to be something you’re not, and furthermore, it’s insulting to claim that you can.  If you can afford to treat a disadvantage like a novelty, then you can never know what it’s really like to live it.

Laugh along with the common people
Laugh along even though they’re laughing at you
And the stupid things that you do
Because you think that poor is cool

And if you listen to the extended lyrics, he says even more than that.

’cause everybody hates a tourist
Especially one who thinks it’s all a laugh

It’d be difficult, at this point, to argue that Jarvis Cocker is exactly one of the ‘common people,’ but he didn’t start out where he is now, and most people who start out where he did never end up any higher.  He isn’t singing about being a British pop star here; he’s singing about being a struggling lower-class kid from a single-parent family who worked at a fish market and didn’t know what he wanted to do with his music or his life.  And he’s telling the truth.  You can play at something that’s never been part of your life, you can join in, you can act out the part, but it’ll never be yours, not in the same way as someone whose life has been shaped by it.

Thank you!  This is a great question, because I, er, well.  Might have put that song on there by accident, actually.  Ahem.

“Sh-Boom” is by an American rhythm and blues band from the fifties called The Chords.  Their music is a very early form of a subgenre of R&B called doo-wop that fuses traditional stylings with vocal pop, and it’s pretty cool – sort of right at the very genesis of rock’n’roll.  If you like it, you might want to check out some of these songs and see if they appeal to you:

- The Orioles, “Crying In the Chapel”
- The Cadillacs, “Gloria”
- The Platters, “Only You”
- The Flamingos, “I Only Have Eyes For You”
- The Hilltoppers, “Trying”
- The El Dorados, “Bim Bam Boom”
- The Spaniels, “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight”
- The Ravens, “Count Every Star”
- The Crows, “Gee”
- The Drifters, “Honey Love”
- The Five Keys, “The Glory of Love”
- The Harptones, “A Sunday Kind of Love”
- The Dominoes, “Harbor Lights”
- The Chips, “Rubber Biscuit”
- The Penguins, “Earth Angel”
- The Chantels, “Maybe”
- The Del Vikings, “Come Go With Me”
- The Moonglows, “Sincerely”
- The Skyliners, “Since I Don’t Have You”
- The Crew Cuts, “Sh-Boom”

For what it’s worth, the band that ought to have been on that mixtape are also called The Chords, but they are from the United Kingdom and do a more mod-styled power-pop along the lines of “Maybe Tomorrow.”

“Punk enabled you to say, ‘fuck you,’ but somehow it couldn’t go any further.  It was just a single, venomous, one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger, which was necessary… But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than ‘fuck you.’  Someone was going to want to say, ‘I’m fucked.’”
— Tony Wilson

Though I’m afraid I can’t put it as neatly or as succinctly as Tony Wilson, I can take a shot at explaining those terms for you!  Caveat lector, though, it’s a nebulous division at best and neither genre has a sharply-defined edge.

Punk is basically a subculture that arose from the musical influence of rock (along with other things, mod and ska and early industrial sounds) and the cultural backlash of a generation that had had more than enough of oppression and disadvantage and societal stratification.  A few angry people came along, found the right sort of guidance in the forms of people like Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes, and began making their mark.  They couldn’t necessarily actually play (please see: everyone’s bassists), but the point was that they wanted to say something.  That’s where you got people like Joe Strummer, who picked up a guitar because he wanted to be a musician, and two years later he was the frontman for The Clash.  That’s where you got people like Johnny Rotten, who, let’s face it, was many things, but not exactly melodic.  Paul Simonon, who wanted to be punk, but who didn’t necessarily want to be a punk rocker (and yet).  Sid Vicious, who wanted nothing more than to be a punk rocker, but whose method of learning bass was, shall we say, unorthodox at best.  Punk rock broke down the barriers between the musical elite and the world at large; it made music, it made being a musician, belong to everyone.  It made everything belong to everyone.  The point of all of this is that punk was more about the message than about the music*, and the message of “we’re not going to take it,” “we can see what’s wrong with the world,” “it isn’t our fault, but we know it’s yours,” “we’re going to tear down what you built and put it up again our way,” that’s punk.

* Undeniably, there was a musical style to punk as well, of course – hard and fast, high volumes and tempos, bare-bones bands and basic instrumentals, shouted vocals and short songs with rudimentary musical forms, but that wasn’t what was most important, and later progressions of punk rock often did away with that style.

Post-punk, on the other hand, was what happened when punk rock started to influence the world around it and a slightly different type of person, someone with a different background and a different approach to life, decided, “hey, we can do that, too.”  Post-punk was what happened when the world got the message that punk rock was sending, that all of this belonged to everyone and it was everyone’s job to seize it and do something with it, tear it down, build it up, change it – even punk itself.  Post-punk was what happened when punk rock diverged so far from its origins that it was no longer the same genre; when the sound was different, harsh and atonal, or lighter and gentler, or hollow and spacious, but no longer typical of the greater ‘punk’ movement.  Post-punk was complex, was introspective, was more about people than politics.  It was experimental, synthesizers and machines and new playing techniques and new production techniques.  It was avant-garde, borrowing liberally from other musical genres (not in the same way as punk rock; post-punk adopted elements of everything from gothic and German rock to funk and disco, electronic and dub).  It was made by people who had no idea what they were doing, only what they wanted to do (and from there, you had the genesis of bands like Joy Division, who wanted to be punk and never made it, or A Certain Ratio, who wanted to be funk and almost sort of pulled it off).  Post-punk was what happened when people saw punk rockers baring their souls about the world around them and turned that gaze inward; tore down the walls and bared their own souls about the worlds inside them as well as the outside.

… my apologies for the slightly romanticized rambling about punk and post-punk.  If you wanted me to talk more about musical stylings, please do ask, though that’s practically impossible to define with regard to post-punk.  Otherwise, I hope that’s at least the beginning of an explanation, but if not please feel free to make me clarify!

I hope when you said “smother,” you meant it, because I appear to have made you a triple album, which you can download here (tracklist here).  Seventy-two tracks.  I daren’t even check the total playing time, lest it turn out to be something like nineteen actual discs.

(Random fact: did you know that a standard 12” LP plays for exactly twenty-two minutes on each side?  CDs fit eighty minutes, which is probably a good thing given the way I put together mixtapes, but on the other hand, there’s something beautiful about the succinct elegance of having exactly forty-four minutes and no longer to construct your message.  I think I’m going to try putting together forty-four-minute mixtapes sometimes.)

Anyway, back to Britpop.  I went with seventy-two tracks (all different artists) here because there is just so much of it and I am not very good at prioritizing.  Many of them you’ll have heard before; some of them I very much hope you won’t have.  I hope you like it.

Oh, wow, thank you so much!  I didn’t know anyone but me even cared about those posts, so it’s fantastic to know that someone else out there is interested.

Really, there isn’t a lot of text on this sort of thing.  I’ve got to be honest, I’ve picked up most of what I know through extensive random Googling, picking through books and articles and interviews and whatever obscure paperwork is publicly available, scattered remnants of things I learnt in philosophy classes, and spending far too much time thinking about this sort of nonsense.

If you Google for it, you’ll find plenty of information, but it tends to be the same information over and over, and some of it is questionable or mis-interpreted.  It’s still a good way to start, though, and although I ought to be roundly told off for this from an academic perspective, I’d honestly recommend reading the related Wikipedia articles as a good jumping-off point.

If you want to read more about the Situationist movement, that’s easy; the Internet has all sorts of great resources for it.  And if, once you’ve had a look around, you want something more in-depth, I recommend The Society of the Spectacle, which is the book wherein Guy Debord sets out the basic tenets of his idea of what it means to be Situationist (though he’s admittedly one of the stricter Situationists).  It’s not too difficult a read because it’s divided into loads of really short sections, and it is the original text.  Also good is the “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” by Ivan Chtcheglov, which is where Tony Wilson’s the hacienda must be built quote comes from.  (And here is an archive of short Situationist texts, in case you want to just click around and read things.)

There is a really cool book by Stewart Home called Cranked Up Really High: genre theory and punk rock, which is available for free online here (you can buy a hard copy, too, but it’s out of print).  Since writing it, Stewart Home has rather turned his back on punk rock and the whole thing makes him quite snarky now, but the book is good; I’ve used it many times.

Also good to look into: some of Malcolm McLaren’s philosophy (he was the original punk rock Situationist, manager of the Sex Pistols and general artist of the moment), some of Joe Strummer’s and Bernie Rhodes’ philosophies (particularly later in life), everything Tony Wilson ever had to say about the Situationist movement (although he mis-interpreted some things, he embodied the spirit of it better than anyone), and, actually, Vini Reilly of The Durutti Column, who’s fascinated by it and knows a hell of a lot.

There’s a book out there called Let Fury Have the Hour: Joe Strummer, Punk, and the Movement That Shook the World, and it’s got some really great essays in it (though beware; there are a number of factual inaccuracies).  Most of the essays aren’t specifically Situationist, but if you sort of know your way around the general ideas, you can pick it out in a lot of the content.  And at any rate, it’s just a really cool read.  There’s also a biography of Tony Wilson called You’re Entitled To an Opinion… that’s pretty decent, though I haven’t managed to get a copy of my own yet, so I’ve only read it about halfway through.  England’s Dreaming and The England’s Dreaming Tapes have some great stuff about Malcolm McLaren (classically Situationist, probably moreso than anyone else on the punk, as opposed to post-punk, scene) and the early punk movement; Jon Savage is really sharp and knows his stuff backwards and forwards.  I love books a lot and there are some great ones about this stuff, so feel free to ask for more recommendations!

Unfortunately, the bulk of what I know about Situationist ideals in relation to the post-punk era is accumulated from years of random articles and interviews here and there; anything by or about Tony Wilson will have something to be gleaned.  He throws little bits in most of the time (there’s a bit about praxis in the New Order “Play at Home” video and a bunch of little things in the 24 Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You book, the one Tony Wilson annotated, but it’s not in large, easily-referenced chunks anywhere), and a lot of this is just piecing together little things and having bits of information in your head (which happens, the more you read). I just happen to have a truly tragic amount of this information kicking about.

Thanks so much for asking about this; it’s so cool that you’re interested!  Also, you (or anyone else who’d like) can always message me about it; I’m always game to talk about this stuff.  It isn’t often I get the chance!