Re: Blues & Jazz (and punk!)

[dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx (Doug Henwood)]

At 11:12 AM 5/29/96, zodiac wrote:

>BTW -- Since we are talking music... I wanna mention PUNK.
>
>My pet theory, which has started more than a few friendly bar shouting
>matches, is that punk is a direct branch of the blues folk tradition.
>(See, the controversy comes when the other punk, who has been nodding at
>me with glazed eyes and slack jaw, suddenly realizes that means punk is
>somehow related to Led Zepplin Baaaahahahaahaha.. It usually gets ugly at
>that point.)
>
>Punk, aside from being merely a marketing scam of Malcolm McLaren, is
>_modern_ urban/industrial/under-class folk music. And that is why
>blues/folk/punk is still very much alive in bands like Bad Religion and
>Killing Joke and Dead Kennedys -- whereas jazz-fusion shit is absolutely
>nothing. It has almost no social relevance.

Yeah, but lots of the cool indie punksters are pretty upscale - rebel
bourgeois. A friend of mine who follows the genre closely says that the
mark of Harvard University, of all things, is all over indie rock. It's a
nonpopular subset of a massively popular art form, full of contradictions.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
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