Gavin B.

You're right on the money with your comments. Townes Van Zandt once said, "There's two kinds of music in the world: the blues, and all the other stuff."

Either the music has the passion, the power and the authenticity of the blues or it doesn't. And the blues has a ruthless standard of authenticity: You can the blues or you can't. There's no middle ground of musical mediocrity in the blues or other forms of music.

That standard of authenticity applies to type music be it jazz, funk, reggae, country music, or rock and roll. Most of the music that sells well in the marketplace exploits authenticity to the ends of commerce. Both Michael Jackson and Madonna were masterful at borrowing musical authenticity from the street, and passing off those ideas as their own unique innovations. Mainstream pop music success sells the illusion of authenticity as the real thing.

The Sex Pistols were right about the great rock and roll swindle. 90% of the pop music artists are marginally talented poseurs who are marketing a personae and their music is irrelevant because their musical product won't stand the test of time.

Madonna is selling an image, not music. The rise of MTV and the rock video reinforced that idea that music was secondary to being photogenic, charismatic and fashionable. Who cared if Madonna couldn't sing because she made cool videos and always looked cool?

Michael Jackson's estate is cash-cow, not because of his musical legacy, rather because the person or corporate enity that owns the rights to the reproduction of Jackson's image is sitting on a fortune. Elvis' biggest financial asset wasn't his music, it was the future copyright royalties for the use of his name an image on products. The same goes for Michael Jackson.

John Lydon's proclamation "rock and roll is dead" seems prophetic in 2009. If you look at last week's Billboard chart, the only album by a rock band in the Top 50 is Linkin Park at *46, if you call Linkin Park a rock band. Remember Lydon declared the death of rock and roll 33 years ago when rock and roll music dominated the music sales charts.

The Clash is the prime example of a punk band that fell under the weight of it's own internal contradictions. On one hand, the Clash was anti-capitalist band but on the other hand, the Clash began to achieve the same kind of mainstream noterity as any other pop music band. The Clash's mainstream success began to erode their credibility as a punk band. The Clash stayed together for another five years and made 3 or 4 albums that disappointed their both their fans and music critics. Ironically those vapid latter day albums, like Combat Rock and Cut the Crap, sold a lot more units than their first four albums, but it’s The Clash, Give ‘Em Enough Rope and London Calling that are the best sellers in Clash’s back catalog in 2009. Good music stands the test of time, even when it's punk.

A similar thing happened to Kurt Cobain when he was confronted with success. Cobain began to hate himself for the commercial success of Nirvana and Kurt left the building, before he had to confront the contradiction of being an anti-corporate rocker who had become a cash-cow commodity owned by corporate rock. The Sex Pistols had the common sense to not give a shiite about commercial success and deliberately self-destructed on their first major tour of America. Failure was an inevitable for a band that declared war on the music industry, society and the entire universe. The Sex Pistols achieved immortality by failing.

John Lydon understood that Malcolm McLaren and Virgin Records were up to, when they marketed the Sex Pistols as the angry vanguard band in the punk rock movement. Maybe Sid Vicious was too drunk and stoned to “get it” but John Lydon understood the rules of the game even better than McLaren. Lydon embodied the “revolution for the hell of it” existentialism of punk.

What made the Sex Pistols such an interesting band was they were the first rock band had a sophisticated intellectual perspective on rock and roll as a capitalist commodity. Failure was Lydon and McLaren's idea of success in the marketplace. By the punk ethic, commercial success was a failure, in and of itself.

McLaren and many early punk rock bands had their roots in the ideas of the Situationist International, a group of agit-prop artists who had a lot to do with the 1968 strikes in Paris.

Source: Situationist International Online

For a Situationist perspective, to overthrow such a system, the artist must turn the mass media upon itself by pulling off the mask of capitalist civility and revealing the human degradation is the product of capitalism. Early punk and many post-punk groups like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Stranglers, the Gang of Four, the Au Pairs, Sonic Youth, the Mekons, Essential Logic, the Slits, X-Ray Spex, Fear, the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Fugazi and the Buzzc0cks have acknowledged the influence of Guy Debord and the Situationists in shaping their dialectical perspective on music and the arts.

Sonic Youth and the Mekons are the only two bands left standing 33 years after the punk revolution. Both bands have survived not in spite of , but because of their lack of success as marketable musical commodities. The fact that the Mekons and Sonic Youth have endured so long without selling a lot of records tells us that a band with a punk perspective can survive in the marketplace by transforming the conventional notion of what "success" means. Punk success rejects the marketplace in it's entirety. Even when Sonic Youth signed with a major label they eventually toss because of their refusal to swim with the durrent of the pop mainstream.

It could be argued that Elvis Costello is also a survivor but he's sold a lot of records over the years and reinvented himself into something entirely different from his earliest angry punk rock personae. That isn't meant as a negative remark, rather it's a comment on Costello's talent and versatility as a musician.

In the final analysis the Sex Pistols didn't invent punk but that they invented "punk" as a signifier for the kind of music they were playing. The Sex Pistols brought a level of self-consciousness to the relationship between the artist and the capitalist marketplace which was a revolutionary development in an era where most rock bands wanted to get a major label contract, sell a million albums, drive a Ferarri, get lotsa chicks and live in a mansion on the hill.

In light of that, Cardboard Adolescent's remark is a perceptive one:Indeed analyzing punk as a musical genre is self-defeating... but that's what I've just done with this rambling and self indulgent analysis, in order to prove the futility of subjecting punk to the rigors of intellectual analysis. Which was the entire point that Lydon and McLaren were trying to make in the first place. It really doesn't answer the question I originally posed when I started the this thread: "What is punk?" I think when that question is finally answered, punk will be dead.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt