It's funny that as I typ[e this I'm actually listening to Arthur Honegger's 2nd symphony.  

 

Funny how I like a punk-influenced genre like black metal so much.... atmospheres, vocals, themes, many things create that difference...

 

 

 

 

 

i agree - John Lydon's material has matured a great deal by this point (PiL), surrounding himself with top notch musicians and even a few good songs and melodies, though the avant-garde leanings and sense of rebellion is still there, a very entertaining and solid album.

 

NMTB on the other hand is not about music, it is a reactive fashion statement, a right wing protest movement against the establishment, an antithesis not to Prog in particular but the whole misunderstood image of the  directionless decadent music scene of 1977.

 

Though many have an affection for many of the bands during this period, i feel Punk Rock became an inevitable stain on our music history page - against the  complacent moguls of the music world, things have hardly changed today in some areas, though many movers and shakers within the music world play very safe these days, sticking to clone acts who have a PA department to vet their activities when dealing with the press (boy band, girl band, girl with guitar, boy with guitar, all very safe and stuff you could listen to with granny around). 

 

Even Rap has become a sanitised neatly packaged establishment institution ,  it is also about fashion statements not music, though its decadent anti-establishment overtones are all very tongue-in-cheek, and should only influence or offend the foolish .

With the lack of anything new appearing these days, music will to continue to safely go round in circles for many years to come.

 

Even Rap has become a sanitised neatly packaged establishment institution

Dalek, El-P, Wale, Binary Star, Cannibal Ox, Clipse, Deltron 3030, Edan, Madvillain, King Geedorah, Viktor Vaughn, Quasimoto, The Roots, etc, hardly qualify as part of a "sanitized neatly packaged establishment institution."

Even more mainstream artists like Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West don't fit that bill.

it is also about fashion statements not music, though its decadent anti-establishment overtones are all very tongue-in-cheek, and should only influence or offend the foolish .

Are bands like Joy Division, Talking Heads, Sonic Youth, Pavement, Pixies, etc foolish for being influenced by it?

With the lack of anything new appearing these days, music will to continue to safely go round in circles for many years to come.

You're presupposing a lack of anything new.  It seems to me that it's more a case of everyone having the resources to realize their own vision, so they don't have to latch onto someone else's.

 

I liked Megadeth's version of Anarchy in the UK though.

 

 

Not really the answer but.... Alan Freeman co-author of the Krautrock book Crack in The Cosmic Egg, tells me Lyden auditioned for Can at one time and their lead vocalist position.

 

At the risk of repeating myself, check out Minutemen for one of the best punk bands of the old days. 

 

Funny that a singer called FISH would lead the eventual renaissance , no!

I was 19 in 1976 and I was a Punk (all be it a fat Punk in full employment and a sizable Prog collection that I still played, all of which is an anachronism, but there you go), so I can only speak of my personal recollections from the time based on the UK scene (yeah, we listened to The Ramones, but they weren't as big over here as they like to think they were). Every kid who wanted to be a Punk praised The Pistols and The Clash, most of them without ever hearing a single note of their music, because you couldn't hear their music - you weren't allowed to - when they played my home-town I missed them because they had to sneak in under an assumed name (The Tax Exiles) because the local council had banned them as did The Dammed (who played as either The Banned or The Doomed or something similar) - those kids (myself included) would have bought it regardless of how "good" it was.

 

In some respects NMTBHTSP was too perfect, too well produced, (by then we got the joke - we actually didn't need MacLaren to spell it out for us in The Great Rock'n' Roll Swindle), in some respects it goes against the whole Do It Yourself idea of Punk in how manufactured and heavily produced it is. The Buzzcock's Spiral Scratch EP was more visceral and much less perfectly put together.

 

I don't think NMTBHTSP was so influential at the time - the Pistols undoubtably were, but the album was not - and I don't know whether it really is that influential now - I can think of far more influential albums from that time - bands like The Buzzcocks, Joy Division, The Fall, Siouxsie & The Banshees who were inspired by the Pistols were actually formed before its release and share none of it's musical style.

 

[The watered-down Punk I refer to were bands like the Adverts, Tenpole Tudor, The Lurkers, X-Ray Specs, Generation-X, The Cockney Rejects and to some extent Sham 69 - and I think those bands were a musical dead-end. The real inspirational pioneers of what we call New Wave and Post Punk (Wire, Banshees, Penetration, Gloria Mundi, Television, The Fall, The Pop Group, Magazine, Gang Of Four etc) were almost a parallel development that owed their formation to the Punk ideal, but not the music.]

I love Victims Family! they had such an out of control rhythm section, their first 2 albums are some of  my all time favorites, and of course NoMeansNo are absolute legends!

 

It was perceived as a protest movement of the so-called young no-future generation (now bankers and stockbrokers). I believe that it started spontaneously and just two weeks later it was purely Product (capital 'P'), with the cleverest marketing you're likely to see, and practically everyone was fooled by it. Malcolm McLaren anyone?

 

Pure lifestyle fashion, no substance. Mainly middle class kids playing at being poor.

You could probably take it further back to the MC5's Kick Out The Jams, and even the name Punk was of American derivation. Most London Punk bands came out of the Pub Rock scene.