Lean!
When you think of “punk”, what do you think of? Speed? Sneering attitude? Sloppy playing? Sheer volume?
While all those things can play a role, one thing that sometimes gets overlooked is how punk’s impetus to strip things down can accentuate the beauty of melody. For all their near-inhuman velocity and faux-cretinism, the Ramones were famously big fans of Brian Wilson.
It’s not that speed and volume can’t play a role – but what those elements can do, in the hands of a truly gifted songwriter, is force them to present their song’s melody in its most elemental, direct form. Mostly-short melodic lines, with few vocal grace notes, tightly circling the theme; a burst of pop in perfect miniature, delivered in a fast, precise series of staccato strikes. Nothing but naked earworm, presented without ornamentation, or even any need for elaboration.
And when the band is on (and criminey, the Buzzcocks and especially Hüsker Dü – one of the all-time great rock trios – were on), the overall effect is to present hooks that are dense and diamond-sharp; song as sandblaster, shooting sugar straight to your synapses.
This post is 100% correct. The Sex Pistols would also support your thesis. The layers of attitude and bourgeois-epate-ing were spread over some impeccable songwriting.
Those Husker Du videos remind me how hard and expensive it was to sync music to video back then.Report
While the Pistols’ reputation as “anti-musical” was certainly over-exaggerated, they certainly seem less melodic to me than the examples here (I think it’s fair to characterize Johnny Rotten’s vocal lines as deliberately anti-melodic, though obviously they had their own highly-original-and-now-oft-imitated hectoring quality). I think of Pistols songs as “catchy” certainly (especially the riffs), but not very “melodic”; (possibly relatedly) they were often also slower in tempo than a lot of the other original punks were.Report
Ever Fallen In Love is one of the all-time great pop songs. The fact that it’s branded as punk means it’ll never be heard by many that should hear it.
Here’s a great cover: https://youtu.be/4op1esLn4mcReport
“Ever Fallen” was why I had to say “mostly” short melodic lines – the melodic line in the chorus of that one is ridiculously, comically long.
One thing that I’d never really realized before – Morrissey took the whole “no gendered pronouns” thing from Buzzcocks. Which makes sense, given the history of Manchester punk.Report
Hmm, I was wondering who you’d go with. My first memory of that song was as Fine Young Cannibals’ cover, completely destroying the hipster cred it has been my life’s work to amass.Report
This is like the third time FYC have come up in my life recently. What is going on?Report
I’m busy watching “live” videos of FYC during their brief heyday. It is really depressing. Roland Gift had a once-in-a-lifetime distinctive vocal style. They were a terrible live act that embarrassed you to watch.Report
Another great pop tune hidden in the punk oeuvre (maybe..are the Replacements considered punk or just brilliant Midwest power poppers?) is Kiss Me on the Bus. The yearning in the lyrics get me every time.
Here’s the performance that got them banned from SNL: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6yi55_that-s-where-we-re-riding_musicReport
Right on. When i was a snot nosed teen and in college radio circa the 80’s one the things all my Alt loving friends always laughed about was how so much of punk or new wave or Alt was just catchy pop or straight ahead rock or in many ways easily accessible. However because AOR/ classic rock ruled the waves none of it could get played. Hell i had people say REM or U2 were to far out or weird. Geez the rock world got so full of spit and pompous in the 70’s and 80’s ( and i like plenty of rock from those years) but still true.
Punk saved rock from becoming completely ossified.
What no love for Orgasm Addict?Report
Speaking of R.E.M., a friend of mine had a discomfiting experience recently.
He was in a stereo shop, to buy a new center channel. While one clerk was helping him, the other clerk (a young gal with hipster glasses and plentiful face piercings) was picking out tunes on the computer, and she seemed pretty knowledgeable about music. One of the things she picked out was something off the new Death Cab for Cutie album (a breakup record! She just couldn’t believe Zooey D. would break Ben’s heart like that!) so my friend started chatting to her (not really flirting, as he is old enough to be her dad, just making conversation while he waited for the other guy to do something) about music and bands.
He mentioned that he was going to go see a band with Mike Mills/Pete Buck in it at a local club that night – for people of our generation, seeing a couple former members of R.E.M. play in a tiny local club is like having Paul McCartney in your living room or something.
She just totally gave him a blank “who’s ‘R.E.M.’?” No clue at all who they were. (To be fair, her coworker, who was roughly her age, was just as surprised that she was drawing a blank).
But my friend and I did the math and realized, yeah, their last significant hit would have happened when this girl was very young, and since their profile had dropped even before they split, they have fallen into a weird cultural amnesia crack right now (my wife said they don’t even really get played on the Pandora stations you’d expect them to show up on, though perhaps that’s a licensing thing).
Anyway, that was our “holy cow we are OLD” moment, to realize that something once so ubiquitous was now largely-unknown, even amongst the kids who count themselves alt-music fans.
I mean…R.E.M.?! I wasn’t alive in the sixties either, but that’d be like me not knowing who…well, maybe not the Beatles or Stones, but like not knowing who The Who or CCR are.Report
I almost feel like it’s difficult to be a DCFC fan and not know R.E.M.Report
I know, right?!
But where/when would she have heard them? They didn’t keep plugging away, a la U2 or the Stones. According to my wife, they don’t show up on Pandora much. Although they were very much an inspiration for some contemporaries or followers that still have cultural currency today (Cobain said R.E.M.’s artistic/career path was what he hoped to emulate; the second time I saw Radiohead, they were opening for R.E.M.), they were themselves somewhat “classicist” in a lot of their music (early on they were murky, sure, but those were basically Byrds riffs) – so I think they may not have something that makes them “stand out”. And by the time of their last few post-Berry albums, only the die-hards were still on board, there were no real radio hits IIRC.
Actually, CCR is a good analogue for R.E.M. In some ways CCR was so “traditional” sounding, and consistent, and resolutely non-flashy, that maybe it’s easy to forget what a great band they were (also like CCR, R.E.M. created albums tailor-made for distance-driving). CCR were not particularly widely-known amongst youth in the ’80s either.Report
I’ve heard them on the classic rock station here, which may be the problem.
Also, was CCR the first band that was really one dude with 3 guys he toured with? I mean, technically they were all involved in the recording process, but it was pretty well known that John Fogerty recorded most of the parts.Report
Interesting (and maybe not totally surprising) – they went straight to “classic rock”.
First big one I can think of, anyway. Obviously later Stevie Wonder and Prince and Billy Corgan have done similar.
I wonder if Fogerty is the first because before him no one thought (or was enough of a control freak) to do it that way; or if it’s just that by his time, recording tech was advanced enough to allow one person to track everything separately and then put it together after the fact.Report
Who Came First (which is Pete Townshend solo album where he did everything but make the tea) came out in ’72, after CCR’s main success.Report
Speaking of “lean”, have you guys seen Bob Mould lately? Dude looks *fit*. When I was a skinny lad, I remember him being a little chubby. Now I’m the chubby one. 🙁
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