the history of punk

While knowing the history of punk is vital, knowing how history works on punk is equally important. It is not the same as for other types of music.

metal develops:
heavy psychedelic rock-->1st wave BHM--> NWOBHM-->thrash metal-->death/black/doom metal
Reggae develops:
ska-->reggae-->dancehall/ragga
Jazz:
dixieland-->big bands/swing-->bebop-->free jazz and/or fusion
Rock:
rhythm and blue-->rockabilly-->Elvis-->The Beatles (early)-->The Beatles (late)

Now, please not the admittedly retarded nature of these statements. For one, dialectically speaking, things don't move in straight lines like this, but require digressions, crises, etc. So, to move from one point to another, there is an infinitely complex, ramifying set of influences and more or less successful alternatives-- paths taken for a while, and abandoned, or continued upon until perhaps separating completely.

Caveats aside, though, I think these are both useful and true. Jazz to this day is STILL very much "post-Davis/Coltrane" to the extent that anyone even cares about nowadays jazz-- Wynton Marsalis being proof that people only care about nowadays jazz to the extent that it is concerned with the canon. Rock has barely moved beyond the Beatles, with the exceptions of punk, no wave, kraut rock, etc. As far as I know, Reggae in its most well-known (1970s) form is no longer popularly produced, and is given over to electronics and ragga. But mostly, the point is not to worry about whether any of this is technically the case, but that very generally, these musics have either left their development behind and moved into new phases, or gotten stuck.

The enduring popularity of the Beatles/Rolling Stones/ Bob Dylan/ Woodstock can surely be traced to it being one of the last moments that rock really was concerned with innovation within a pop context. If the Beatles were innovators, it was as the most popular band in the world. Psychedelia and funk are important developments, and also extremely popular. Sure, there are cult bands from this era, and dialectical divergences, but please keep in mind I am trying to make a point, and not writing a history of the 1960s here.

So, after the Beatles, so the story goes, rock music addresses itself less to a unified audience, and in the terms of its greatest success, has not moved on. See here for a retarded but self-consistent view of the history of rock music from the viewpoint of the 1960s.

Please notice that the above reviewer is INCAPABLE of making sense of Pink Floyd. Arguably the definitive group of the 1970s, from the viewpoint of a Beatles Fan, they potentially make no sense over their career. Moreover, here the Velvet Underground become an interesting sidenote and Black Sabbath are a kind of Led Zeppelin, Jr. Point being, the history of Rock music at this moment is kind of like Thucidydes' History of the Peloponnesian War: since we don't know how it ends, our judgments rarely make sense and usually establish a teleogy that slights some true complexity.

Which brings me to my point: punk doesn't work like this. (And, to create some discussion, I don't think, in 2006, in NYC or among heads in the know, much does--- everything is "back" and everything is new, all at once: girl group revival, early 80s rap, neo-no-wave, etc. But these things are hardly as important as punk, which is going on 30 years. ) There have been attempts, certainly, to make punk work like jazz, and just be a concept or epistemology, instead of a defined style/genre, which have led to many rewarding developments, (most of which I am a late-comer to), but I think the innate charm of punk *as* a style have persisted in keeping punk from going the way of jazz samba or some of the short-lived off-shoots of rock. Perhaps because punk is already post-modern and non-teleological, its importance far outweighing the stature of all but a few of its artists (this being the opposite of hard rock, for instance, where the stature of the most well-known artists accounts for 99% of the genre's presence). Punk is paradoxically a "reaction" (against double-live glam "excess") and a wild new paradigm, definitively "excessive".

Anyways, punk is incredible in that Disclose and His Hero is Gone could share a stage-- one band definitively exploring already-trod territory, and the other being relatively on their own. And this happens *without* feeling that one band is further along in a movement than the other, as would happen if you put a New Wave of British Heavy Metal band alongside a death metal band. Well, now I'm going to go listen to Black Oak Arkansas and think about whether any of this is remotely true.