Philosophy and aesthetics of Punk-Rock, Part I: before 1977
Genres through a philosophical, artistic and poetic dissection. I'll start with this first part that talks about the true origin of punk rock as an historical ideal, I hope you enjoy it.
Endnotes, identified with numbers.
The Stooges live, Cincinnati, year 1970. The worship of the masses changes course, twenty-five years ago to receive this adoration you should have been Mussolini. But the world would have changed forever...Source
The Age before the Sex Pistols.
Before 1977 Punk-rock existed, but it did not have a name. In fact, the punk movement initiated in the UK was not such; like all major primordial philosophical currents was not created if not named. Aggressiveness in music and distortion can find precedents in lyric music and atonal symphonies, the slogan "Destroy everything" is nothing more than an evocation of purer nihilism, in the rejection of social and religious dogmas it is inevitable to think in Diógenes the Cynic the Philosopher who ordered Alexander the Great to move away because his shadow was in his way, comparable to the founding song of British punk God Save the Queen. But we'll go to that in another article.Before the classic Punk Rock, between 1977 and Nietzsche, there was a cloud of hatred, irrationality and irreverence in the air of the great metropolises. Nonconformism was present in the flower power movement, the remains of the Second World War had given for twenty years the illusion that the world would now be more peaceful, but there were others with different ideals in mind. Aggression, simplified by hippies as a symbol of evil was exalted by Proto-Punk (a rock band whose message was cruder than normal) as a force of nature. The destruction was no longer associated with war in the memory of the community and began to be related as a force of shock and change.
These young people, even without agreeing on their ideas, shared several similarities; Protopunk is not a joint movement, but an individual expression and a retrospective classification that musicologists give to a series of groups whose aggressive nonconformist behaviors and transgressive performance inherited from the recently forgotten Dadaists manifested in different parts of the world, sometimes without have to see each other So while there are Totems universally present in all cultures such as the God, the Warrior, the Fortune-teller or the Dragon, the punk faith is brewing as a reaction to a world already understood as violent, consumerist and aberrant, which was had to fight with their own means.
Who Were the Proto-Punk?
Pioneers
Everything begins with the Saicos (1964) the most innovative Latin American group of all time, with challenging lyrics and aggressive voices were a totally transgressive group in their native Lima, but an isolated case that did not become famous if not after much. One of its letters, Demolición, reflects the maximum tool of the nihilism conjugated with the anarchist, and although it makes reference to a train station (We do not understand if this is or not an anti-industrialist sign), the first trace of considering the Destruction is elucidated as an exalted and positive concept in modern music. In a world dominated by the concept of love as a solution to the world, the proposal of the Saicos was controversial. (1)
The interesting thing about this group is that it demonstrates how several ideas intrinsically linked to the Punk ideal already existed in several parts and are not necessarily a chain effect, if not part of a collective unconscious.
We like to fly the train station (demolish, demolish , demolish, demolish) - Los Saicos / Demolicion (1965)
Thematic innovation
Then The Veltvel Underground (1965) burst into a scene where this time it would have a totally direct influence, New York, the center of the world. Although the story of The Velvet is long and confusing, we talked about the first stage where controversial allusions outside the reach of the hippies of the time such as transvestism, sadomasochism and heroine.
The imaginary of The Velvet is that of a city devoted to decadence, a loss of identity and meaning reminiscent of the Marques de Sade. While they do not use destruction as an active component (if not passive, masochistic), and still have an influence of psychedelic rock on them, it is definitely the spirit of transgression and the admission of one's internal decadence coupled with their modes of production that makes them an indispensable piece in punk music, and globally, in all music.
And I do not think I've made a big decision / I'm gonna try to nullify my life / because when the blood begins to flow / When it shoots up the dropper's neck / When I'm closing in on death/ And you can't help me, not you guys ... - The Velvet Undreground / Heroin (1967)
The Velvet Underground had converted from a band to a total artistic project Source
Madness and dementia
However, The Stooges are the clearest influence of Punk; already here all the common elements, Philosophical; The nihilism, the destruction as a tool and sense of life, the unlimited freedom promulgated by the cynics and the social elements; Semi-antisocial behavior, the pleasure to transgress and the aesthetics of the disruption of the values of the prevailing culture. The band, commanded by Iggy Popo, one of the key characters of twentieth-century music, who at first wanted to make Blues, but Iggy had almost taken to developing a more aggressive style according to his performances on stage worthy of the performance art; cutting himself in public, smearing meat and food on his body, urinating on the audience and showing his genitals. The own Personality of Iggy, uncontrolled and excessive would give shape to the Way of life of great part of the population of the world.
This behavior that can be seen as irrational, is rather a byproduct of many social facts; World War II had affected this generation, not concisely, if not in a symbolic way since they did not face it as their parents but their influences and the shock of globalization and the opening of the world. Finally, the conservative society would serve as a representative of a moral and ethical power that was already beginning to break down, and its debris generated not a logical argument but a demonstration of an artistic method that wanted to abolish its remains. (2)
I am a Streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of Napalm. I'm a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb. I am the world's forgotten boy, the same one who seeks and destroys- The Stooges / Search and destroy (1973)
The Poet of Punk
Patti Smith would be the latest element before the catalytic arrival of the Sex Pistlos. With the Patti Smith Group (1973) I add a final touch to the creation of punk, Philosophy and art. If the transgression for Iggy Pop and Lou Red in the early seventies was something completely literal, for Patti Smith it was an essentially symbolic theme. She could do without scourging herself or her audience, because she counted on the poetry of Rimbaud and the symbolists as a primordial weapon. It is essentially the difference that classifies the rebellion, the transgression depends on what is wanted to transgress, and as much as the wild presentations of The Who or The New Yorks Dolls, were the letters of the intellect.
Patti Smith was defiant not only for being a woman, for dressing androgynously, but for trying to break the music; brought the influence of Beat poets, William Burroughs and Allen Gisnberg and coupled them to their own style making a unique mess. In itself, Patti Simth gives to Punk music that would be born two years later a higher existential reason, and although sometimes this reason was ignored and supplanted the poetics by politics (3), finished by being anarchism as the backbone of punk music
And is that although we know this genre for its harshness and brevity, used to carry an emotional and poetic weight for being an epigone of poetry, since its foundation was not right if not in it; Baudelaire's life was internal decadence, the attitude of Iggy Pop was the expression of Apollinaire undermined by Márquez de Sade "the perpetual immoral subversion of the established order", and while the Saicos applied the simple expression of their rights to say it all Patti Simth condensed everything with his eyes towards the field of art. (4)
Life is filled with holes, Johnny's laying there, his sperm coffin /Angel looks down at him and says, "Oh, pretty boy,
Can't you show me nothing but surrender ?"/ Johnny gets up, takes off his leather jacket, Taped to his chest there's the answer, /You got pen knives and jack knives and Switchblades preferred, switchblades preferred.-Patti Smith / Horses (1975) (5)
In the case of Patti Smith and Iggy Pop there was already a strong relationship despite their differences in style, which as it will be seen are not completely impossible to reconcile Source
The Sense of Destruction as a creative passion and vital force of the universe
Jhony Cash and the advent of rock and roll are nothing more than the representation of an ecclesiastical era, the Proto-Punk project of destroying the simplistic and monotonous version of the love propagated by the hippies was to some extent fruitful; although largely their goal was only to bother, after carrying a long chain of human thoughts before them, theologically it is a kind of Luciferian rebellion, a stage of insolence and extreme defense to the individuality of everyone in the century famous for its intransigent ideologies.
Even, in a certain way, it is a democratic thought, but as we have mentioned, trying to attack and capture the attention of the people. The destruction, demonized by the two wars, is understood as a natural element in all existence because before 1977, punk was more a philosophy without a name or exponents, an awareness of the disorder slowly developing, waiting to emerge from the darkness.
It says the Hindu doctrine that the world comes from the rest of other worlds and so eternally, it indicates to us the scientific knowledge that the universes exist by the explosion of the stars. Governments and ideologies rigid and useless at that time, the Jurassic remnants of extreme conservation without meaning of the world sought to be challenged by this force of nature, represented in noisy young people, with a desire to change or end the world.
But none of this was new, we are not going through a diagram of musical evolution if not trying to understand that despite the relationship of one or another group the idea of Punk is simply the musical version of a much older idea; Subversion, rebellion and aggressive change. And history is undermined by these examples; it must be understood as an artistic expression carried to its ultimate consequences, Punk could not have been born, it was only baptized, because it is nothing more than a small branch in the tree of human insubordination.
END OF PART I.
Notes
1: Remember that in the year 1964 was entering the first Single of The Beatles I Want to Hold Your Hand, and where they began to have important authors like Bob Dylan, and sounded other such as The Sound of Silence. That year, while Ian Fleming moria and Nicolas Cage was born, governed in Peru Fernando Belaúnde, and the Lima society was extremely conservative, conserving in powerful influence of the catholic church. I have to make a personal comment; and is that Anthropologically the Inca people seem a clear example to represent subversion.
2: Precisely Iggy Pop formulates his way of seeing the world through his performance, he prefers to howl than to shout and resort to a miltonian stigma of "better rule in hell than to serve in heaven", defying all Autorcitas with his behavior , contributing a kind of dialectic until that moment nonexistent to convulse what is considered the most disastrous era of all, the nuclear age. With several of its letters the constant allusion to the nuclear catastrophe is verified, which confirms my vision.
3: Poetics and politics, two Aristotelian concepts in perpetual opposition. Patti Simth decides to make her * social criticism * through poetics, that is, in a language that depends on the image and the metaphor and to a certain extent surreal and encrypted. However following the track to the genre there would be few attempts to redirect punk towards poetics, whose most memorable example is Ian Curtis of Joy Division
4: Art is, actually the predecessor of Punk and Patti Simth knew it. There was nothing new in punk but rather forgotten, Dadaism dated back to 1920, but the cynical and skeptical school would have more than two thousand years. It was with Henry Miller and the rise of Beat poetry that the ideal of perpetual rebellion as art returns to the global scene but with a much more digestible message and with a more efficient means of spreading, the radio.
5: This quote is probably the most difficult to read between the lines, but at most you want the same desire for destruction and challenge. The fact of contrasting words without apparent context as "Sperm Coffin" reflects a debt to surrealism and symbolism, currents devoured by some newer ones of modernism.
END OF NOTES.
Original Content of; Luis Rafael Moya Φ, 2018.