PUNK & NEW WAVE

Progressive rock was one of the most popular styles of music in the early 1970s. It
involved long, meandering structures, elongated solos and concept albums often based
on fantasy Worlds such as Tollkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’. At the same time, disco was
becoming popular in Britain with its glitz and glitterballs. Considering the high
unemployment rate and the economic problems in Britain at this time, it is not
surprising that a sizeable proportion of the population felt that this music did not cater
for where they were at. Out of this sense of discontentment sprang the aggressive,
uncompromising sound of punk music.
In the early 1970s, The Velvet Underground, The Stooges and the New York
Dolls were making music in the US that eschewed the instrumental virtuosity required
by progressive rock, concentrating instead on flamboyant and outrageous stage antics
and high energy, raucous music. They channelled the attitude of much of the nation into
attacking their instruments in a raw, uncompromising Way. These bands directly
influenced British punk bands such as The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Buzzcocks
and The Damned. The Ramones were their contemporaries in the.US, releasing
their first album just before any of the British acts.
Punk bands used their guitars almost as weapons into which they poured all their
angst, anger and frustration. You do not need to be a talented musician to play punk
music - attitude is the key factor. The instrumentation for a punk band was typically
drumkit, bass, two electric guitars and raspy, shouted vocal. The guitars were played
extremely aggressively and the guitarist would generally try to get as much distortion
and feedback as possible. Punk guitarists were not tidy players - they revelled in noise
making. There were no long solos - any solos tended to be repetitions of the vocal line
or thrashing through the chord sequence another time. At the end of 1976, The Sex
Pistols released their first single, ‘Anarchy in the UK’. This was to be the definitive
song of the style. The Sex Pistols’ antics gained them immediate public attention, such
as gratuitous swearing on a prime-time TV interview and their provocative dress style.
Punks sported dyed hair spiked into enormous Mohican styles and multiple body
piercings, as well as wearing chains, safety pins and torn clothing. Punks revelled in
causing public outrage and behaved in a manner calculated to offend, or to at least
challenge the status quo.
Punk music was an important release of a pressure valve, both in terms of the social
context of the time and as a reaction to bloated musical styles that were inaccessible
for young bands. It was destined to have a short lifespan due to its self-destructive
nature. Punk bands fought amongst themselves as well as fighting against the
establishment and eventually many split up by the start of the 1980s.
The immediate influence of punk was to encourage less talented musicians that it was
all right to have a go at making music, even if they were incapable of soloing like the
big rock acts of the time. It spawned a whole new era of experimentation where people
would look for ways to express themselves with some of the rawness of punk, but not
necessarily the attitude. New wave music fell into this category - a slightly less raw
sound than still containing powerful, simple guitar lines. New wave bands tend to have
less aggressive vocal lines than punk with more emphasis on the melody and lyrics. It
became popular on both sides of the Atlantic - in the US with bands such as the B-52s
and Talking Heads and in the UK with XTC and Elvis Costello. U2 had elements of
new wave in their early music - the Edge’s chiming, insistent guitar playing along with
Bono’s thoughtful lyrics and more tuneful style, but still delivered in a rather
challenging way (eg. ‘I Will Follow’ from their first album, ‘Boy').
In the US, another style emerged, moving in the opposite direction to new wave.
Hardcore was a more intense version of punk - punk played at a higher tempo with
even more uncompromising guitar sounds. The most famous hardcore band was the
Dead Kennedys.
 CLUB DANCE
Disco came about in the mid !1970s as a fusion of the Philly soul sound club dance with
the rhythms of funk. Originally it was mainly a feature of the gay clubs, but it gradually
made its way into the mainstream, bursting into the public imagination with the
release of the film ‘Saturday Night Fever’. Producers were very important in disco
music, With Giorgio Moroder and Tom Moulton perhaps the most famous.
Moroder Worked closely with Donna Summer on a number of her biggest disco hits,
including the classic ‘I Feel Love’. Other disco artists included the Bee Gees and the
Jacksons.
In the early to mid! 1980s, Frankie Knuckles Was DJing in the Warehouse Club,
Chicago. He played a mixture of disco hits, soul and funk, adding a Roland drum
machine to his mixes to fatten the four-to!-the-floor bass drum on the disco tracks. In
order to keep his audience interested, he started to remix the tracks he owned, adding
some extra sounds to the original tracks and mixing them together. As the music
developed, he began to use more and more of his own beats on top of which he could
add some of his standard playlist material. The style he developed was named after the
club he worked in - ‘House’ music. It had the exaggerated beat and a sparse texture.
House music became popular in the UK and, with the addition of the Roland TB-303,
it morphed into a new style called ‘acid house’, apparently named after the squelchy
sound of the TB-303 bass timbre (and not after the drug LSD, although many would
argue that it is. . .). Acid house music became very popular in the UK rave scene. The
raves would attract drug dealing, so they were made illegal in England. However, the
organisers would start to arrange them at venues dotted around the M25 outside
London, avoiding the authorities.
D] Larry Levan took influences from soul rather than R&B, mixing a more melodic
form of music than the sparse ‘house’ music in his club in New York called the
Paradise Garage. The music he mixed gradually became known as ‘garage’ music.
Garage also made a quick trans-Atlantic journey and became very popular in London
clubs such as the Ministry of Sound. Garage music, being based more on soul, was
much more melodic than house music.
Other styles of club dance music:
● Techno
● Trance
● jungle/ Drum & bass
● Trip hop
● Goa
● Hard house
There are many genres and sub-genres of club with the list growing every clay. For the
purposes of GCE Music Technology it is sufficient to learn about the main styles listed
above and how they interrelate.