Punk band upsets establishment. News at 11.
I don’t man, I don’t consider them punk punk but pop punk, but still doesn’t change your statement.
I’m still surprised punk hasn’t made a come back. We are dying of old age and this is the right environment for punk to flourish.
Not punk but industrial. Though KMFDM has always been political. But there’s a few tracks on the new album that are far less subtle than usual.
Also forgot to point out that punk was a product of its time. And it’s environment. Very much a DIY ethic. Which lent to its sound. DIY today is going to sound a lot different. Unless people are going to ape the sound without any of the influence.
Even many of the iconic punkers got tired of it and moved on when new things became available. As mentioned John Lyden AKA Johnny rotten. Left the pistols for Public Image limited. Last I heard Jell-O was still trying to get into California politics?
TL;Dr: Long, rambling old man shit incoming.
You’re absolutely right. The DIY landscape is so incredibly different. Now you can get an electric guitar with reasonable QC and an amp with modeling and a hundred presets that plugs directly into your computer to record. There’s loads of free lessons online that show people how to play instruments. There are tabs for almost every song put out by any semi-popular artist so you don’t have to try to reverse engineer them anymore. There are backing tracks. We didn’t have any of that shit. We had a solid state amp with two channels, one of which was poorly distorted.
And I’m here for it. It’s not my dad’s punk. It’s not my punk and pop punk. It belongs to new people and I’m excited for them to look back at it the way I look back at the bands that excited me when I was a kid. They’ll have new genres built upon the shoulders of the ones I listened to, which stood on the shoulders of those that came before.
Lyden did some rather deadpan adverts for Country Life a few years back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hzQsvxtLTM
And honestly? I think it was pretty funny.
I grew up in (what I perceive as) the heyday of punk, but mostly ignored it. Lately I’ve been tempted to take a closer look at some of those old punk bands I always heard about back in the day.
Those kids were right. Not so much as adults anymore some of them. John Lydon in particular having become a bit of a disappointment. But it’s still a fun era and easy to listen through. Seeing as it really encompassed about a 5 to 6 year span.
Post Punk/ dance Punk is having a bit of a Resurgence again though. Lots of good new stuff coming out. Though not as much political necessarily.
The day Trump was elected I was excited for a new wave of anti-government human-rights protest music. The best we got was “This Is America”.
Edit: I appreciate the few examples you’ve offered but I was thinking of the movements of the 60s and 80s. It wasn’t just the hippie peace love anti war music or rap music, it was poetry, fiction, movies, documentaries. It was the culture around the people rising up to protest their government. Now any shmoe can tweet at the president.
Dead milkmen made a comeback.
classifying in genres is by definition gatekeeping. somewhere you have to draw a line between punk and everything else, otherwise the term punk loses all meaning.
I’m down with you being all in on the statement but I have a question for you.
What would you consider Punk in 1990 or even 94?
Did these conservatives miss American Idiot, or are they just being reactionary as they so often are?
American Idiot and the what, 3 albums before it and all the following, were all on Reprise Records (Warner). American Idiot specifically had some very strong marketing campaigns. If one really does subscribe to that “selling out” rhetoric, they did so much earlier than that.
Most of them are just peanut brains with the Goldfish attention span who only like the sound but never listen to the lyrics. Hell one of the local grocery stores around here in their mix has a few tracks by the stones in particular give me shelter. It’s an iconic song. But most people have no idea what the lyrics are. It’s sort of surreal to walk through the store listening to the singer scream out rape and murder it’s just a shot away. It’s a fun sort of irony I suppose.
Green Day used to be anti-establishment, now they are the establishment.
American Idiot is almost 20 years old and the message hasn’t changed. Do these people just have zero media literacy?
Remember when Tom Morello had to slap down Paul Ryan? https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tom-morello-paul-ryan-is-the-embodiment-of-the-machine-our-music-rages-against-246033/
Ah, yes. The far away time when “Far Right” just meant ideologically conservative and not the wannabe brownshirts. So long ago, 2012.
A simpler time.
chef’s kiss
Morello is a crazy talented guitarist and overall nice guy but he’s also really intelligent and educated which tees up idiots for easy humiliation. He rocks in all the ways.
Media literacy has never been a thing with conservatives - to this day they don’t understand what the Bruce Springsteen song ‘Born In The USA’ is really about. Reagan famously wanted to use it for his campaign in 1984.
Also somehow conservatives have been so keen on appearing as ‘not the establishment’ that by now they have terminally deluded themselves into believing that they really aren’t part of the establishment. How their voters believe this is anyone’s guess.
And let’s not talk about how the self-proclaimed defenders of free speech constantly take issue with speech they don’t like.
ROFL!! Apparently the folks complaining haven’t actually ever listened to Green Day. Though the severed Trump head at the concert was probably a bit much.
It was a mask, “severed trump head” is an extreme and inaccurate description.
I chuckled heartily earlier today when I saw a post on the front page of the R-word site that was posted to the conservative sub. It was a picture of the band holding up a mask of Trump with idiot written on it and a title along the lines of “After Trump assassination attempt, Green Day holds up head of Donald Trump”.
Literally, it was just a mask of Trump with something like “Idiot” written on it from a band that quite literally is known for criticizing the government (understatement).
They were making it sound like it was an implicit threat to Trump and hateful rhetoric inciting further violence.
I swear there must be some brain damage involved in those types of conclusions.
Meanwhile there were several effigies of Obama with a noose around their necks
