Or even Generation X (Billy Idol was the Diamond Dave of punk rock, after all). The Motors will never, ever be spoken of in the same regard as Richard Hell. This isn't just "punk," this is everything that was boiling beneath the surface, the whole of the late-70s underground brought to light. Deadbeats and dilettantes, glammed progenitors and goth poseurs, the revered and the reviled. No Thanks! isn't about "essential" it's "scope," pure magnitude. With barely a track to spare for The Clash, The Ramones, or The Fall, they're barely an afterthought here. Of all the admirable successes of No Thanks!, the finest is surely the deliberateness with which it unearths so many of the also-rans long-since buried in the Pistols' wake. That the Pistols are conspicuously absent on No Thanks! might be the doing of a petulant Lydon (presumably irked that Rhino pulled a stateside release of a Sex Pistols box a few years back), but fitting nonetheless. While punk remained a mostly well-kept (and easily documented) secret prior to the Sex Pistols' spectacular collapse, the aftermath of the punk explosion was a shambles. Conventional wisdom is often simplistic like that.įortunately, Rhino's overwhelmingly comprehensive four-disc love letter to the heart and soul of punk music isn't particularly conventional. Punk rock, bang-to-bust, a flicker of revolutionary greatness smothered by de rigeur rebellion, and all neatly summed up in a tumultuous microcosmic two-month tumble. Most of the press dried up, casual, rubbernecked gawkers looked for another car wreck, and inside of five years, the punk journalists had burnt out, the punk heroes had blown up, and punk footnotes like The Avengers had simply faded away. For better or worse, they were the public face of punk, a voice for all the restless rejects shouting down all comers, and they were on a collision course with the southern United States.īy December 30th, 1977, the Sex Pistols didn't even have visas less than three weeks later, after a brutal reception throughout America's heartland, John Lydon sat dejected on the stage of the Winterland Ballroom and famously asked, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" With his last words as Johnny Rotten, he cast off the fetid mantle of punk's figurehead, and the most notorious punk band of the era had hung it up with Goliath slain, so died the "big story" of punk.
None, of course, screamed louder than the Sex Pistols, though with some careful management, in just over a year, the Pistols had enjoyed more controversy and notoriety than most other punk acts combined. The Ramones were finally bringing the Bowery to Britain, and the few, nascent battle-cries of the MC5, The Stooges, and the New York Dolls from a few years back were now being echoed by thousands of new voices. Even Lester Bangs, the most vociferously jerky of all knee-jerk misanthropes, was predicting great things he'd just published a three-part treatise on egalitarianism, the new democracy of music, and the frailties of human nature in NME masquerading humbly as an observer's tour diary with the Clash. All you disenfranchised modern malcontents, you grew up too damn late. It was the best of punk, it was the worst of punk it was December 1977, the winter of nearly everyone's discontent, but it had been a banner year for angry young men on a handful of continents. Danny Furious of The Avengers, on opening for the Sex Pistols at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, Jan. But it was just sensationalism, a spectacle."
Age of rebellion review how to#
"It was obvious at Winterland- everyone knew how to behave, everyone knew how to spit, how to dress- everyone knew how to pack the place.
Age of rebellion review license#
"At its best new wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they'll be creative about it, and do something good besides."
0 kommentar(er)
