CRANKED UP REALLY HIGH: GENRE THEORY & PUNK ROCK by Stewart Home

CHAPTER III: NO MORE ROCK 'N' ROLL
PUNK ROCK discussed as a genre and an examination of the Louie Louie debate

PUNK ROCK is continually splitting in two, the cause of this bifurcation being swings between a desire for novelty and a desire for 'authenticity'. In the late seventies, bands like the Clash were able to make a career on the back of pretending to be somehow more 'authentic' than acts such as the Sex Pistols who'd been heavily hyped. While the Clash were anything but 'real' (meaning 'unmediated' in a naive rather than a philosophical sense), this didn't prevent them from projecting a street level image. Indeed, the fact that Joe Strummer had been to a fee-paying English public school was probably of great assistance when it came to creating a guttersnipe image for his group. Strummer's lack of contact with the working class meant that he felt no embarrassment about reinventing himself as a caricature of a 'yob'. This resulted in a brilliant debut album marred only by the inclusion of an awful cover of Junior Murvin's Police And Thieves. Unfortunately, the record was ruined by its corporate sponsor when it finally achieved American release, with a considerably softened track listing.

One of the major contributing factors to making the first Clash album such a great record was the fact that the band weren't afraid to offend by ranting about 'kebab Greeks' in Hate And War, or being 'a raving idiot just got off the boat' in Deny. Song lyrics of this type were crucial to the elaboration of a Punk Rock ideology that had an utterly predictable development. First of all, there were plenty of people ready and willing to take the rhetoric about class seriously, rather than treating it as the piece of theatre that it so obviously had to be coming from an individual like Strummer. Ultimately, the reductive strategies of the bands that saw working class 'street credibility' as a formula for musical success led to a few idiots upping the level of pseudo-intransigence by going the whole hog with absurd rhetoric about race, thereby transforming the theatrics of the early Clash into a bestial pantomime. I will deal with this later.

There is a record dealer I often run into who I've heard say on more than one occasion that 'if you don't like the Clash, you don't like rock 'n' roll.' This creature has a huge collection of Clash rarities, and his indiscriminate attitude towards the group makes his pronouncements about music dryly amusing to anyone who's taken the trouble to read a book or two on aesthetics. I can remember going to a party years ago at a rich girl's house (there was a yacht in the front garden and a swimming pool at the back) and complaining about the awful music, only to be told 'but it's the Clash!' I hadn't kept up with the group's rock career and this was the first time I'd heard Should I Stay Or Should I Go. I commented that I only liked the group's early records and someone started enthusing about the album London Calling. It turned out that nobody else present had heard any of the really early material. However, worse was still to come with Cut The Crap, the last Clash album, on which Joe Strummer attempted to return to his 'roots' by making another 'Punk' record. All he succeeded in doing was demonstrating that he'd well and truly lost it.

The Clash were only one side of the English PUNK ROCK story during the '76/'77 era. Equally good were those novelty records whose 'creators' made no attempt at passing their product off as authentic. One of the greatest punk singles of all time has got to be Pogo Dancing by the Vibrators with Chris Spedding. The minimal lyrics rival anything written by the Ramones:

"Hey, this is your chance, to do the pogo dance / So if your feet ain't on the ground, I'll catch you on the way down / Pogo dancing it's the latest thing going around / Why move from side to side when you can jump up and down / Little Suzie had a try / But she jumped so high / That she went over the hill / I hear she's up there still..."

Released on Mickie Most's independent RAK label in November '76, this classic attempt at exploiting changing musical trends deserved to be a smash but unfortunately it was overshadowed by the Sex Pistols utterly inferior Anarchy In The UK – and at the time, even I was bamboozled about the relative merits of the two records. RAK also released the Vibrators anthem We Vibrate, another punk classic, before they lost the band to the CBS corporation, who'd also signed up the Clash.

The established pop format of the dance song worked well when enlisted into the evolving novelty genre of PUNK ROCK. If Pogo Dancing played on the relationship between punk and pop then Do The Robot – a summer '77 release by the Saints – emphasised that this particular brand of novelty music could also operate within the parameters of the 'rock' genre. Appropriately enough, the Saints had been signed up by EMI subsidiary Harvest on the strength of their debut single I'm Stranded, and record company money made it possible for them to relocate from their native Australia to Britain. Their first two albums, I'm Stranded and Eternally Yours, are brilliant punk platters, while the third – Prehistoric Sounds – saw them abandoning this energetic novelty genre in favour of a dull rock sound. After this the band broke up, although singer Chris Bailey went on using the name for his dreadful rock releases. Guitarist Ed Kuepper has had an equally long and uninspired career as a rock musician – both as a solo artist and with the Laughing Clowns. Kuepper, fed up with the way in which Bailey endlessly traded on the glories of their collaborative efforts eventually formed a combo called the Aints. True to the punk spirit, Kuepper was shameless about cashing in on his own past and transformed it into an excellent joke. Perhaps this sense of humour explains why his output has been marginally better than Bailey's since they parted company fifteen or so years ago.

Do The Robot was initially released as one of the two tracks on the B-side of This Perfect Day in its 12 inch format. A sticker added to the back of the picture sleeve by the record company states:

"IMPORTANT NOTICE Due to an administrative error, this limited 12" pressing of the Saints' This Perfect Day c/w L-I-E-S single contains a third, additional title not available on the normal 7" pressing. This additional title, Do The Robot, has consequently been withdrawn from future release consideration and will now be available only on this 12" pressing."

This was no more than the usual record company come on to get the punters to part with their cash – and because punk was a novelty genre, the record companies had a field day using gimmicks to flog product. However, it wasn't the corporate record companies who pioneered these scams, they simply tail-ended the independents – Stiff and Chiswick were particularly adept at marketing ploys. Everything was grist to the hip-capitalists' mill; limited editions, coloured vinyl, picture bags, 6 inch singles, 12 inch singles, 10 inch albums, 45 rpm 'albums', scratch 'n' sniff sleeves etc etc. The seventies PUNK ROCK explosion didn't have much impact on the American market, and as a consequence 'new wave' didn't single-handedly reverse the major record labels ailing fortunes. Nevertheless, late seventies PUNK ROCK was of supreme importance to the corporate entertainment industry as an exercise in marketing research and development. In this sense, PUNK ROCK can be said to have saved the major record labels from collapse.

Do The Robot turns up alongside an alternative take of the same tune under the title International Robots among the bonus tracks on the Fan Club CD reissue of Eternally Yours. Do The Robot is by far the better version of the song because the delivery is deadpan, whereas International Robots features laughter and jokey backing vocals. Many journalists fail to appreciate that PUNK is a novelty genre because it works best when it is played 'straight', which means that self-styled 'contemporary cultural critics' are free to make fools of themselves by indulging their penchant for literalism. Imagine what someone like Groovy Greil Marcus could do with the 'surreal' lyrics of Do The Standing Still by the Table, a 1977 release on Virgin that gives the punk use of the established dance lyric format an 'art' spin. Over a bass line that's as inspired as anything to be found within the Rezillos output, the singer intones the following: 'On my window sill in the morning / I can hear the wild geese calling / Do the standing still.' While this is a catchy song with a good punch line, the rest of the words simply aren't interesting enough to be worth reproducing.

Taking the avant-garde input into PUNK seriously is a losers game because while certain musicians may have been 'inspired' by revolutionary cultural movements, what they took from these so called 'precursors' was either a simple sense of anarchic fun or else a po-faced attitude that's worthy of nothing but contempt. I can't think of a single PUNK record that does anything with 'ideas' taken from Futurism, Dadism, Surrealism or Situationism which is actually interesting enough to make these anti-institutional cultural formations worth discussing as an influence on this evolving musical genre. Personally, I believe it's worth taking the final chapter of Roger L. Taylor's book Art, An Enemy Of The People (Harvester Press, Hassocks 1978) seriously. In' A Warning Of The Corrupting Influence Of Art On Popular Culture', Taylor demonstrates very convincingly that the intellectualisation of jazz was fundamentally an act of violence on the part of the ruling class, it was a very carefully directed blow designed to cripple the energetic culture of various external opponents of the power elite. Serious culture is in a state of terminal decline and its supporters no doubt see the co-option of PUNK ROCK as the metaphorical equivalent of a blood transfusion.

Returning to the songs I've been discussing, it's obvious that there's a fundamental difference between Do The Standing Still, Do The Robot and Pogo Dancing, and singles such as White Riot and Complete Control by the Clash. While all five tracks fit easily into PUNK as a fluid musical genre, only the two titles by the Clash treat Punk rhetoric with enough 'seriousness' for it to be taken up as a confused and ill-defined ideology. This difference is most easily denoted by saying that while the Vibrators, the Saints and the Table played punk rock at specific periods of their assorted musical careers, until the end of 1978, the Clash played Punk Rock, an individual strand within this musical genre which I will signify through the use of capitalisation.

Punk Rock, despite its shifting parameters, can be treated teleologically, which is something I intend to do within the course of this text. While sticking firmly to the principal that because I'm dealing with a musical genre it isn't possible to fix a definitive point of origin for the Punk Rock discourse, I can give a rough outline of its movement, and from this make predictions about the most likely course of its future development. Ironically, Punk Rock's cousin, punk rock (in lower case), is doomed to eternal repetition. When dealing with it, one experiences no sense of progression. This is at once its glory and its tragedy – while the ideologues scream that Punk Rock Will Never Die (the title of a song by the Gonads, a defunct Oi! group led by one time music journalist and now tabloid TV critic Gary Bushell), the truth is that Punk Rock is likely to wither away long before its lower case cousin punk rock. One further refinement is necessary if the distinction I am making is going to be clear: from now on when talking broadly about PUNK ROCK as a musical genre that incorporates both novelty punk rock and ideological Punk Rock, I will indicate that I am doing this by using upper case characters for all eight letters that make up the term.

If the Clash were briefly the premier exponents of Punk Rock, after scraping the bottom of the rock cliché barrel with Never Mind The Bollocks, the Sex Pistols unburdened themselves of Johnny Rotten and set about creating some of the greatest punk novelty items since the bubblegum explosion of the late sixties. Not only was The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle that rare thing, a watchable 'rock 'n' roll' movie in something other than a documentary format, the accompanying soundtrack album was an excellent novelty record. However, the band really hit their peak with the spoken word Some Product Carri On Sex Pistols, which is a punk rock classic. The one track that stands head and shoulders above everything else is Big Tits Over America, largely the creation of Steve Jones, who remained THE key figure in the band throughout their career. The track is a recording of a Sex Pistols appearance on a Californian radio phone-in, where Jones transforms the proceedings into a farce by swearing and asking most of the female callers – and several males – if they have big tits.

To clarify the distinction I've been making, it's perhaps useful to observe that while the MC5 were a Punk Rock band at the time Kick Out The Jams was released, the Stooges were always a lower case punk act. Proceeding on this journey into the past, it thus becomes clear that while the Velvet Underground were never a PUNK phenomena, back in the sixties the US produced a whole slew of lower case punk rock bands in the form of the Kingsmen, the Sonics, the Seeds, the Standells, the Litter, the Warlords and the Swamp Rats. Now, it's perhaps possible to observe that punk rock is generally more common than Punk Rock. This is not to say that I consider one form to be superior to the other, although there is a fundamental distinction between the way I consume each subgenre. With punk rock, I tend to laugh along with what the band is doing, whereas with Punk Rock (which despite its lack of substance, usually takes itself very seriously in a futile attempt to project an image of intransigent 'authenticity'), I generally laugh at the 'musicians'.

One of the ways in which Punk Rock, at least around the 1977 period, projected an image of intransigent 'authenticity' was through a rejection of so called 'Coca-Colonisation', and the use of vague anti-American rhetoric. While there have undoubtedly been American Punk Rock bands, I have already cited the example of the MC5 in the late sixties, towards the end of the seventies, the way in which British bands such as the Clash appropriated the Punk Rock discourse, made it very difficult for the Punk Rock phenomena to flourish in the US. There were, of course, notable exceptions such as the Germs or the Dils but songs like I'm So Bored With The USA on the first Clash long player, and the resultant insistence on singing in British regional accents, made it impossible for American groups to project themselves as being at the cutting edge of Punk Rock at that particular point in time. The contrast in attitudes between Punk Rock groups and the less self-conscious punk acts is clearly evident in the title of the second single by schoolboy band Eater, whose Thinking Of The USA posits America as a place of mythic fulfilment. The Clash chant 'Move over Starsky for the CIA / Suck on Kojak for the USA,' while Eater sweetly sing 'Lou Reed comes from the USA / Walter Lure comes from the USA / Richard Nixon comes from the USA / Gary Gilmore came from the U-S-A!'

This combination of anti-Americanism and regionalism resulted in late seventies style Punk Rock establishing itself very strongly in the various areas of Europe where a 'minority' language is spoken. One of the most vibrant Punk Rock scenes erupted in Finland, which with its small population and Finno-Ugric language (that is unrelated to Indo-European tongues such as English, German, French, Spanish and Italian) led to a great deal of importance being laid on bands singing in their native tongue. Groups such as Ratsia and Kollaa Kestaa would do Finnish language versions of songs by British acts including the Buzzcocks and the Adverts as well as their own material. While these bands sound great, language did prove a barrier to widespread acceptance and groups such as Briard, who sang in English, have tended to make more of an impact outside Scandinavia and Central Europe. Briard's concise output included a hilarious punk version of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, as well as excellent originals such as Fuck The Army, with a roaring guitar riff that has to be heard to be believed. The band's lyrics are classic sneering punk, for example from Miss World: 'You're so fucking clean / I wanna sniff your underwear... I wanna sniff the clothes you wear... Your public image is so unreal / I wonder if you ever masturbate.' Obviously, while some Finnish punk bands sang in English, Finnish Punk Rock was necessarily ranted in the native language, which means it's difficult for me to make very many judgements about the more ideologically 'committed' end of that particular scene.

Returning to Britain, one of the reasons that seventies PUNK ROCK had such an impact in this country was that we lacked the punk tradition which is such an integral part of American popular culture. In the States there is a long history of independent record production, whereas in Britain, from the fifties through to the mid-seventies, with the exceptions of a few maverick operations such as Mickie Most's RAK label, the corporate giants had the market stitched up like a kipper. Prior to the 'new wave' explosion of 1977 there had been no equivalent history of British bands and independent record shops releasing their own product, and so this in itself appeared to be a novelty and created a great deal of interest. Thus, while American regional bands of the sixties had issued their own records in pressings as low as 100 to 500 copies and sold them at gigs, any independent British PUNK release in 1977 was guaranteed sales of ten thousand and upwards as long as the label behind it had the confidence to order such a huge quantity of vinyl. Singles on the bigger independents, such as Step Forward, were selling as many as sixty thousand copies. Naturally, as the novelty wore off, the sales dropped dramatically, but for a brief period the British independent record release was a highly viable commodity.

It might surprise fans of the corporate garbage produced by the likes of U2 and Phil Collins to know that the most successful 'rock' song of all time is the punk anthem Louie Louie. Music journalist Dave Marsh has written a book about the song, Louie Louie (Hyperion, New York 1993), which is likely to offend any fan of ear-piercing garage rock because within it he reproduces all the reactionary platitudes spouted by the kind of humanist arsehole who thought Live Aid was a good idea. I'm not trying to suggest that Marsh has done his research badly because this isn't the case, in fact many parts of the book are well worth reading, particularly those pertaining to the FBI's interest in the song as a piece of subversion once rumours had spread far and wide that it contained dirty lyrics. This does not, however, mean that I endorse Marsh's abysmal prose style, his pseudo-intellectual bullshit, or the particularly crap line in rhetorical questions and exegesis that he favours. In many ways this tome is a classic argument for physically preventing rock journalists from writing at length about music. What's particularly objectionable about the book is Marsh's overbearing focus on Richard Berry as the 'author' of Louie Louie, when in fact the song the R&B star 'originally' wrote is very different to the pop classic of the same name that the insanely restrictive property laws of the so called capitalist 'democracies' treat as the 'work' of a single 'composer'. While I'd be the last person to begrudge Richard Berry the money that lifted him out of the poverty trap, the sentimental way in which Marsh tells the story of how this tunesmith regained the publishing rights to Louie Louie (which he'd sold cheaply to raise money for his marriage) reinforces several highly repressive cultural stereo-types.

In many ways, Richard Berry is not the author of Louie Louie, at best he is a co-author despite the fact that according to 'copyright law' he is the sole author. Many of the laws framed with specific reference to song-writing were enacted to defend the financial interests of Tin Pan Alley against the threat of the infant gramophone industry. Richard Berry wrote and released a number entitled Louie Louie; several years later Rockin' Robin Roberts recorded a raucous cover of the song. The Kingsmen made a particularly inept copy of the cover version. In the process Louie Louie was transformed, Berry's soft R&B number became a garage novelty item and an international hit to boot, all on the back of its raw energy and being 'so bad it was good'. The mumbled lyrics which many people misheard as being 'suggestive' facilitated the audience's realisation of its productive role in the creation of culture. Listeners heard whatever they wanted to hear in the song, something that hadn't been possible with the Berry 'original'. The lack of a discernible lyric transformed the 'words' into a mirror for the fantasies, fears and desires of millions of Americans. Likewise, the famous cry of 'let's give it to them, right now!' was missing from the Berry 'original'. This had been the contribution of Rockin' Robin Roberts. But the fact remains that the most important contribution to the reworking of the song was made by the general public rather than a musician. Louie Louie was no longer the competent R&B number Berry had written, it had become a monster.

Marsh documents certain developments of the song. He notes that the dirty words become a reality on the Iggy And The Stooges version, recorded live and released semi-legitimately on Metallic KO, a kind of apotheosis of punk. Unfortunately, his brain seems to have addled since the days in which he co-founded the rock magazine Creem, probably as a result of rubbing by-lines with wankers like Greil Marcus at Rolling Stone and listening to garbage produced by the likes of Bruce Springsteen. Marsh suggests on page 165 of his book that 'Louie Louie as a trope made virtually no appearance during the punk rock heyday and the couple of efforts that found their way to wax (the Bloodclots' 1977 affray, for instance) don't amount to much.' This is a strange comment because what is to date the 'definitive' version of the song was released in the very year Marsh reductively believes was 'the punk rock heyday'. Personally, I find this phrase absurd, the musical genre of PUNK ROCK has such flexible parameters that it is utterly meaningless to talk about it having a 'heyday'. Even more bizarre is the fact that the to date 'definitive' version of Louie Louie is not to be found in the discography that concludes Marsh's book, in fact, it is not mentioned anywhere in his tome. Marsh appears never to have heard of, let alone heard, the version of Louie Louie by John The Postman's Puerile released on Manchester's Big Bent Records circa 1977.

John The Postman was a well known face on the Manchester PUNK scene, 'famous' for getting up onto the stage of the Electric Circus after the bands had played and in an inebriated state, giving renditions of Louie Louie. On the back of this, someone decided to let the Postman, and his backing band Puerile, loose in a recording studio to make an album. Naturally, one side is taken up with two renditions of Louie Louie, credited on the label, which the consumer is expected to cut out of a larger sheet and then glue onto the record, as Louie, Louie, (version) and Louie, Louie, (slight return VOL. 7.....). Louie, Louie, (version) takes the amateurism of the Kingsmen to its logical conclusion with grossly incompetent musicianship and a drummer who seems to be experiencing extreme difficulty simply keeping time. Instruments stop and start and the song goes on and on, while over the top of this cacophony, John The Postman sings the chorus and then whatever comes into his head instead of the original words:

"You're gonna have to listen to this / For the next fifteen minutes or less... I hate the door / And I hate the window / And I hate you all / Looking at me now... You're coming up to the middle section / And we're gonna keep it beyond your comprehension..."

This is the destruction of Berry's 'original' song, begun by the Kingsmen, taken to its logical conclusion. Louie, Louie, (slight return VOL. 7.....) is marginally more competent but it still makes the Kingsmen sound like Led Zeppelin. It probably won't surprise those not already in the know that John The Postman's next release was an equally long and shambolic rendition of Gloria.

There are other 'important' punk covers of Louie Louie missing from both Marsh's discography and his book. Take, for instance, the Angry Samoans, whose June 1981 set at the 700 Club in New York concluded with a version of Louie Louie. This was released posthumously as part of Return To Samoa by Shakin' Street in 1990. Without doubt, the Angry Samoans were one of the best West Coast punk bands of the early eighties, with short catchy songs and the ability to get right up the noses of the music business establishment. Perhaps the group's greatest achievement was Get Off The Air, a character assassination of LA DJ Rodney Bingenheimer. The radio personality made himself look like a complete jerk by threatening legal action over lines such as:

"He can't read / Baby he can't walk / He's LA's favourite punk rock jock / Glitter bands and Bowie's cock / Are his ideas of new wave rock / You're just a fucking piece of shit now Rodney / I don't think you're so hot / You make me laugh with those clothes you wear / And those lame brain teeth you've got / 8pm and Rodney's on the air / He's beating off in Joan Jett's hair / Christmas Eve and what have you got? / Four hours of Phil Spector rot / Get off the air / Get off the air you pathetic male queer / You don't impress me / Get off the air / You're just a jerk as far as I can see."

Homophobia recurred frequently in the Angry Samoans lyrics, to such an extent that it became a fixation. The group's sneering attitude towards the musical establishment and straight society in general was something they were only able to match in sheer intensity with these obsessive references to a love that dare not speak its name. Whether or not the band were ever able to give physical expression to these urges, there can be little doubt that they knew the etymological origins of the term PUNK and that the frisson this created gave them quite a thrill. The Angry Samoans managed to combine their two major interests yet again on a reworking of their song Steak Knife, which they retitled Posh Boy's Cock. For the benefit of those not already in the know, Posh Boy was the name of an LA based punk rock record label, and the lyrics ran: 'If you wanna make a record / if you wanna rock / Just grab a hold of Posh Boy's cock / Three big inches long and mean / Posh Boy's cock is on the scene.'

Such tortured expressions of sexual desire are common among the more 'guttersnipe' brands of PUNK ROCK, and relate very closely to the pleasures and pains associated with rituals of male bonding. This can be witnessed not only in song lyrics but also in the mock violent interaction of the audience occupying the pit immediately in front of the stage at PUNK ROCK concerts. While, as should be clear from what I've already stated, this form of sexual expression is rarely given open verbal articulation outside that particular strand of Punk Rock known as Queercore, such boundaries are occasionally crossed by individuals who are less confident about defining their own sexuality but nevertheless feel compelled to address the issue because their ideological beliefs necessitate the transgression of all social norms. The fact that the Angry Samoans did not come out of the closet is one of a number of factors that led me to the conclusion they were a punk rock, and not a Punk Rock, band.

One band not afraid of addressing this issue were the London based Apostles, although they made no attempt to resolve the contradictions which they presented to their audience. The Apostles operated on the fringes of the anarcho-'punk' scene, but were never really integrated into it because their Punk Rock attitude prevented the ideology they'd adopted from becoming coherent enough to be acceptable to their apparent peers in the Conflict/Crass/Poison Girls camp. Songs such as Fucking Queer won the band few friends:

"Boots and braces in nineteen seventy-six / Some of us had knives others carried sticks / Oppressed with guilt and fear looking for a fucking queer / Clapham Common was our training ground / We'd kick that fairy in when no one was around / We had to make it clear we were not fucking queer / It seems so long ago when we were real men / Memories linger on I feel guilt now and then / For one day I awoke my thoughts no longer dim / I met this strange young lad and fell in love with him / And so I realise while I'm laying here / The truth that I despise that I'm a fucking queer."

Several records and a couple of years later, the Apostles followed this up with a 1984 EP entitled The Giving Of Love Costs Nothing. The platter showed that the band were still prepared to address sexual issues but the way in which they did so lost them most of the few friends they'd made along the way. One side of the record featured what appears to be a gay love song and a rant against bigotry, the flip contradicts this with tracks entitled Rock Against Communism and Kill Or Cure. The lyric to the latter song runs as follows:

"They walk the streets at night / A pathetic sight to see / A product of our sick society / Earls Court and Piccadilly / Hanging round toilets all night long / Thank God they stay away from me / Kill, kill, kill or cure / Kill, kill, kill or cure / Or put them all out of their misery."

While the so called anarcho-'punk' groups weren't really playing PUNK ROCK at all, because notions of ideological coherence came to dominate their thinking and these were reflected in every aspect of their activity, the Apostles were locked into a rigid Punk Rock groove where a desire to explore contradictory impulses resulted in stasis if not actual paralysis. Conflict, Crass and the Poison Girls reached a huge audience, many of whom considered themselves to be 'Punks', but as I've already pointed out, they'd been left behind by the Punkgeist whose dialectic was very different to that of anarcho-pacifism. While the Apostles remained true to the spirit of Punk, this was very much in the form of a return at a lower level. The schizophrenic attitude of the band made it impossible for them to move in any direction whatsoever, unless this was done in a completely tentative fashion and quickly negated by some contradictory action. As a form of discourse developed to a large extent by teenagers, Punk 'progressed' very much through the transformation of quantity into quality. What was required was a push in a single direction until changes in quantity became a change of quality, just as raising the temperature of water eventually transforms it into steam. I shall return to this theme later.

Previous: Chapter II: Blood Splattered With Guitars

Next: Chapter IV: Relics From The Past

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