It's interesting, the way everybody else seems to regard the arrival of punk rock in '76 or '77 as a tumultuous sweeping-away of the conservatism that pervaded in those long-gone days. I've always thought of punk as being deeply conservative, albeit in a very adolescently posey way, with its violent (and self-glorifyingly stupid) eschewing of book-larrning, its disinterest (I know, I know, the Clash) in politics, its celebration of primitive musicianship. Unless you were lucky enough to fall over Joe Strummer in those days, punk was quite likely to push you pogoing straight onto the dole queue and forever after into a life of shit jobs, football hooliganism and National Front (and subsequently BNP) membership. O England! O St George! O Winston! Farkin foreigners...
The punks I knew were conformist cowards who kicked the shit out of anybody who was weak or different because it made their dumb friends laugh, although the black kids were usually harder than them when it came to the big scraps in the park. Kids with glasses, kids with spots, kids with spastic limbs, kids with long hair, kids who read books...everybody got it. The punks were about as far outside the System as Enoch Powell or your stereotypical misanthropic Granny wheeling out the biscuit trolley before she sits down to regurgitate a hate-filled Sun newspaper editorial all over you. And most of the music, when you listen to it without the wax of age and unwarranted nostalgia clotting up your ears, is crap. Now ska...that was a different matter...
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