The Punk Rock Ramones

The Punk Rock Ramones

The Ramones were an American rock band often regarded as the first punk rock group. Formed in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, in 1974, all of the band members adopted pseudonyms ending with "Ramone", though none of them were actually related. They performed 2,263 concerts, touring virtually nonstop for 22 years. In 1996, after a tour with the Lollapalooza music festival, the band played a farewell show and disbanded. A little more than eight years after the breakup, the band's three founding members—lead singer Joey Ramone, guitarist Johnny Ramone, and bassist Dee Dee Ramone—were dead. The Ramones were a major influence on the punk rock movement both in the United States and the United Kingdom, though they achieved only minor commercial success. Their only record with enough U.S. sales to be certified gold was the compilation album Ramones Mania. Recognition of the band's importance built over the years, and they are now cited in many assessments of all-time great rock music, such as the Rolling Stone lists of the 50 Greatest Artists of All Time and 25 Greatest Live Albums of All Time, VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock, and Mojo's 100 Greatest Albums. In 2002, the Ramones were ranked the second greatest band of all time by Spin magazine, trailing only The Beatles. On March 18, 2002, the Ramones—including the three founders and drummers Marky and Tommy Ramone—were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The original members of the band met in and around the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills in the New York City borough of Queens. John Cummings and Thomas Erdelyi had both been in a high-school garage band in 1966–67 known as the Tangerine Puppets. They became friends with Douglas Colvin, whose family had recently moved to the area. Jeffrey Hyman was in the short-lived early 1970s glam rock band Sniper. The Ramones began taking shape in early 1974 when Cummings and Colvin invited Hyman to join them in a band. The initial lineup featured Colvin on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Cummings on lead guitar, and Hyman on drums. Colvin, who soon switched from rhythm guitar to bass, was the first to adopt the name Ramone, dubbing himself Dee Dee Ramone. He was inspired by Paul McCartney's use of the pseudonym Paul Ramon during his Silver Beatles days. Dee Dee convinced the other members to take on the name and came up with the idea of calling the band the Ramones. Hyman and Cummings became Joey Ramone and Johnny Ramone, respectively.

The Punk Subculture

The Punk Subculture

The punk subculture is a youth movement based around punk rock. Punk first emerged from the rock music scene in the United States and the United Kingdom in the mid-1970s. Since then, the punk movement has spread around the world and developed into a number of different forms with much regional variation. Punk culture encompasses certain styles of music, ideology, fashion, visual art, dance, literature, and film. Punks tend to live a certain lifestyle and share a sense of community with one another.

The punk scene is composed of an assortment of smaller subcultures, such as Oi! and hardcore punk. These subcultures distinguish themselves from one another through unique variations on punk culture. Several of these factions have developed out of punk to become youth movements in their own right, including straight edge, goth and psychobilly. Punk has had a tumultuous relationship with both popular culture and other subcultures.

Punk Rock News

Punk Rock News

Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock. They created fast, hard-edged music, typically with short songs, stripped-down instrumentation, and often political, anti-establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY (do it yourself) ethic, with many bands self-producing their recordings and distributing them through informal channels.

By the beginning of the 1980s, faster, more aggressive styles such as hardcore and Oi! had become the predominant mode of punk rock. Musicians identifying with or inspired by punk also pursued a broad range of other variations, giving rise to post-punk and the alternative rock movement. By the turn of the century, pop punk had been adopted by the mainstream, with bands such as Green Day and The Offspring bringing the genre widespread popularity.

The first wave of punk rock aimed to be aggressively modern, distancing itself from the bombast and sentimentality of early 1970s rock. According to Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone, "In its initial form, a lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting. Unfortunately, what happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the likes of Hendrix started noodling away. Soon you had endless solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock 'n' roll." John Holmstrom, founding editor of Punk magazine, recalls feeling "punk rock had to come along because the rock scene had become so tame that [acts] like Billy Joel and Simon and Garfunkel were being called rock and roll, when to me and other fans, rock and roll meant this wild and rebellious music." In critic Robert Christgau's description, "It was also a subculture that scornfully rejected the political idealism and Californian flower-power silliness of hippie myth." Patti Smith, in contrast, suggests in the documentary 25 Years of Punk that the hippies and the punk rockers were linked by a common anti-establishment mentality.

Punk Oi Gallery

Punk Oi Gallery

The music and associated subculture had the goal of promoting unity between punks, skinheads and other non-aligned working class youths (sometimes called herberts). The Oi! movement was partly a response to a sense that many participants in the early punk rock scene were, in the words of The Business guitarist Steve Kent, "trendy university people using long words, trying to be artistic...and losing touch".

In the words of André Schlesinger, "Oi shares many similarities with folk music, besides its often simple musical structure; quaint in some respects and crude in others, not to mention brutally honest, it usually tells a story based in truth. The Oi! genre became a recognized genre in the latter part of the 1970s, emerging after the perceived commercialization of punk rock, but still before the soon-to-dominate hardcore punk sound. It fused the sounds of early punk bands such as Sex Pistols, The Clash, the Ramones and The Jam with influences from early British rock bands such as the Rolling Stones and The Who; football chants; pub rock bands such as 101ers and Eddie and the Hot Rods; and glam rock bands such as Slade and Sweet. Direct precursors to the first Oi! bands included Sham 69, Cock Sparrer and Menace, who were around for years before the word Oi! was used retroactively to describe their style of music.

Originally the music style was called street punk, streetpunk, new punk or real punk. Other terms that have been used at certain points are street rock, street rock 'n' roll, Oi!/street punk and streetpunk/Oi!. In 1980, writing in Sounds, rock journalist Garry Bushell labeled the movement Oi!, taking the name from the garbled "Oi!" that Stinky Turner of Cockney Rejects used to introduce the band's songs. The word Oi is an old Cockney expression, simply meaning hey or hello.

Some of the first bands to be explicitly labelled as Oi! were Cockney Rejects, Angelic Upstarts and The 4-Skins. The first wave of Oi! bands was followed by bands such as The Business, Blitz, The Blood, The Last Resort, Combat 84, Infa Riot, The Burial, Condemned 84 and The Oppressed. The general ideology of the original Oi! movement was a rough sort of quasi-socialist working class populism. Lyrical topics included unemployment, workers' rights, harassment by police and other authorities, and oppression by the government.[2] Oi! songs also covered less-political topics such as street violence, football, sex and alcohol. Although Oi! has come to be considered mainly a skinhead-oriented genre, the first Oi! bands were composed mostly of punk rockers and people who fit neither the skinhead nor punk label.

The Punk Paris

The Punk Paris

With the hot pink hair and whatnot, Paris Hilton sure is a punk. Oh, did I mention the attitude? I guess she's trying to look more "punk" and "rocker chick" because of her new boyfriend Benji Madden.

Patti Smith Punk

Patti Smith Punk

Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer–songwriter, poet and visual artist who was a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. Called the "Godmother of Punk", she integrated the beat poetry performance style with three-chord rock. Smith's most widely known song is "Because the Night", which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978. In 2005, Patti Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture,[ and in 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Patti Smith was born in Chicago on December 30, 1946. Her mother, Beverly, was a jazz singer and her father, Grant, worked at the Honeywell plant. She spent her entire childhood in Deptford Township, New Jersey. Raised the daughter of a Jehovah's Witness mother, she claims she had a strong religious education and a very good Bible education, but left organized religion as a teenager because she felt it was too confining and much later wrote the opening line ("Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine") of her cover version of Them's "Gloria" in response to this experience. Smith graduated from Deptford Township High School in 1964. The family was not well-off, and Smith went to work in a factory. Patti Smith was voted "Class Clown" in her senior year.

The Anarcho Punk

The Anarcho Punk

Anarcho-punk is a subculture that combines punk music and anarchist politics. Some important anarcho-punk bands include Crass, Conflict, and Subhumans. Common ideas that many anarcho-punks support are anti-war, animal rights, feminism, environmentalism, equality, anti-capitalism and other common anarchist causes.

The term anarcho-punk is sometimes applied exclusively to bands that were part of the original anarcho-punk movement in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Crass, Conflict, Flux of Pink Indians, Subhumans, Anthrax, Poison Girls, Rudimentary Peni and Oi Polloi. Some use the term more broadly to refer to any punk music with anarchist lyrical content. This broader definition includes crust punk bands, such as Nausea, and d-beat bands, such as Discharge. The term may also include American hardcore punk bands, such as MDC, folk punk artists such as This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, or artists in other sub-genres.

Anarcho-punk has been highlighted as one of the social phenomena which took anarchism in the direction of "lifestylism." Some argue that style became an essential ingredient of the movement, sometimes obscuring other factors, although others would reply that the performers who aligned themselves with anarcho-punk in fact embraced a wide diversity of approaches in both format and ideas. This would appear to be borne out by the range of anarcho-punk artists and performers. As well, it is often argued that the fashion was simply representative of the ethics associated with anarchism, such as anti-corporate, do-it-yourself beliefs.

The Clash Punk

The Clash Punk

If you’re looking for a biography of the Clash, I suggest you head immediately to this excellent Wikipedia page, or even the official Clash website. Hell, even a cursory search for “the clash” on Google will yield tons of biographical information, discographies, playlists, etc. Knock yourself out. I want to focus instead on two key facts about the most important band to come out of the British punk boom in the late ‘70s: their political idealism, and their incorporation of multiple musical styles into their repertoire, and how the sum of those (and other) parts added up to a much more significant – and lasting – whole than most of their punk peers.

Were they sincere? Authentic? Does it matter? Whole books have been written taking the Clash to task for adopting a pose of radical left-wing idealism when in fact they came from fairly privileged backgrounds (Joe Strummer’s father was a British foreign-service diplomat; Mick Jones went to art college). But the band’s rejection of the nihilism, anarchy and/or cartoonish idiocy of most of their peers, as well as the way they broadened punk to include the widest possible variety of musical styles, made for the best kind of art, art that inspires, art that causes you to think as (or after) you absorb it. And that matters a hell of a lot more than how sincerely they believed their own lyrical content.

Over the course of five studio albums (again, you can’t count Cut the Crap; it was made after the departure of founding member Mick Jones, and was more of a Joe Strummer/manager Bernie Rhodes side project), the Clash embraced reggae, ska and dub more than any other style, for the most part staying true to that music’s inherent style and political posturing (see Deep Cuts: The Clash) for a fairly comprehensive look at the band’s reggae output).

Skinhead Rock n Roll

Skinhead Rock n Roll

Brass knuckles an boots a halo on yer head, you walk down the street and they wish you were dead • You got fire in yer gut and no burdens on yer soul, they all want you to stop but will you? ...Fuck No! • They can’t change your fate, head shaved for battle, they can’t disguise their hate for you, the skin • Oi Oi skinhead get yer hair cut and you count on no one when you fight in a ruk. You skinhead you saint you’re the way of the youth. You skinhead you saint yeah you are the truth.

It happened one day, a message in a bottle; It had to be a message from God, a ray from the clouds, or just way too much Bushmills, the voice said: Skinhead don’t you know you’re a saint. You tear down the walls when they try to oppress you, you always gotta fight they won’t leave it alone. They stand in your way, as if they could stop you.

When you spill their blood it is for them to atone • There may be blood on yer boots but no burden on your soul, yeah God’s screamin’ YES and they’re screamin’ NO • Brass knuckles and boots baby • Because when yer a saint or when yer a skin; you’ve got the world in the palm of yer hand, and if their under yer boot? Well that’s all the better, give ’em the religion in a way they’ll understand.

Ben Sherman Skinheads

Ben Sherman Skinheads

Ben Sherman clothing designs sometimes feature the roundel and colours of the British Royal Air Force, often called the mod target. More recent Ben Sherman shirts are often identified with unusual and complex designs, and the so-called Carnaby-style of fitted shirts. The company has four ranges of clothing: Women's, Men's, Youth and Kids.

The company was founded in 1963 by Arthur Bernard Sugarman (1925-1987), who was born in Brighton as a son of a Jewish salesman. He emigrated to the United States in 1946, via Canada, and changed his nationality to American. He married the daughter of a Californian clothes producer and later returned to Brighton, where he bought a concourse shirt factory. The brand became famous for being sported by several well-known musicians and singers. The brand has been the fourth largest men's casual wear brand in the United Kingdom.

Skin Head Punk

Skin Head Punk

A skinhead is a member of a subculture that originated among working class youths in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and then spread to other parts of the world. Named for their close-cropped or shaven heads, the first skinheads were greatly influenced by West Indian (specifically Jamaican) rude boys and British mods, in terms of fashion, music and lifestyle. Originally, the skinhead subculture was primarily based on those elements, not politics or race.[2] Since then, however, attitudes toward race and politics have become factors in which some skinheads align themselves. The political spectrum within the skinhead scene ranges from the far right to the far left, although many skinheads are apolitical. Fashion-wise, skinheads range from a clean-cut 1960s mod-influenced style to less-strict punk- and hardcore-influenced styles. In the late 1950s, the United Kingdom's entrenched class system limited most working class people's educational, housing, and economic opportunities. However, Britain's post-war economic boom led to an increase in disposable income among many young people. Some of those youths spent that income on new fashions popularised by American soul groups, British R&B bands, certain movie actors, and Carnaby Street clothing merchants.

These youths became known as the mods, a youth subculture noted for its consumerism—and devotion to fashion, music, and scooters. Mods of lesser means made do with practical styles that suited their lifestyle and employment circumstances: steel-toe boots, straight-leg jeans or Sta-Prest trousers, button-down shirts, and braces (called suspenders in the USA). When possible, these working-class mods spent their money on suits and other sharp outfits to wear at dancehalls, where they enjoyed soul, ska, bluebeat and rocksteady music. Around 1965, a schism developed between the peacock mods (also known as smooth mods), who were less violent and always wore the latest expensive clothes, and the hard mods (also known as gang mods), who were identified by their shorter hair and more working-class image. Also known as lemonheads and peanuts, these hard mods became commonly known as skinheads by about 1968. Their shorter hair may have come about for practical reasons, since long hair can be a liability in industrial jobs and a disadvantage in streetfights. Skinheads may also have cut their hair short in defiance of the more bourgeois hippie culture popular at the time.

Crass Punk Gallery

Crass Punk Gallery

Crass were an English punk band, formed in 1977, which promoted anarchism as a political ideology, way of living, and as a resistance movement. Crass popularized the seminal anarcho-punk movement of the punk subculture, and advocated direct action, animal rights, and environmentalism. The band both utilised and advocated a "Do It Yourself" approach, producing sound collages, graphics, albums and films. Crass also criticized and attempted to subvert the dominant culture with messages promoting feminism, anti-racism, anti-war, and anti-globalization.

Crass practiced their "direct action" philosophy by spray-painting stencilled graffiti messages around the London Underground system and on advertising billboards, coordinating squats, and organising political action. The band also expressed its ideals by dressing in black,military surplus-style clothing and using a stage backdrop which amalgamated several "icons of authority" and an Ouroboros. The band were critical of the punk movement itself, as well as wider youth culture in general. Crass promoted the type of anarcho-pacifism that eventually became more common in the punk music scene. They are also considered part of the art punk genre, due to their use of tape collages, graphics, spoken word releases, poetry and improvisation.