BY: VERONICA B. WHITNEY
As an avid lover of music and the diversity of our vast world, I've always felt touched and inspired by way music connects its listeners
in various ways, oftentimes based off of the culture or community in which the music thrives and develops.
My original plan for this website was to add a map that marks places that have had - or still have - thriving punk rock scenes.
If you clicked on a marker, it would've zoomed up on the specified location and opened markers that would list prominent bands from those places.
However, I was not able to get this feature to work - so I ended up embellishing the rest of the site with further information about punk rock genres
and some thoughts on punk rock from the artists themselves. Strangely, I also had problems getting my pop-up boxes (except one) to close properly,
so refreshing the page is the only way to get them to close. Apologies.
Throughout this course, I've definitely learned that Javascript and JQuery do not come very easily to me. Some things were challenging, but I eventually overcame a majority of those obstacles
at one point or another, which was encouraging and helped keep me motivated.
Punk rock is a style of music that branched off of rock n' roll. It surfaced around the mid-sixities and has continued to evolve throughout the past few decades.
Typically, punk rock songs tend to be faster in pace and often shorter in length, with heavy guitar influence.
While subjects along the lines of liberal politics - such as blatant anti-establishment and pro-feminist views -
are commmonly promoted by punk musicians through their lyrics, the eccense of punk music lies within raw honesty, passion, and freedom of expression in general.
The genre of punk rock is also noted for its heavy influence in pioneering the DIY ethic in music.
If you're familiar with the basics of punk - and even if you're not - it's likely that you've heard the names of iconic punk bands floating around, such as The Buzzcocks, Ramones, and Sex Pistols. However, the genre is not restricted to these more generalized sounds. As I stated previously, punk rock has been developing and changing in various ways since the 1960s. Because of this, punk rock is broken down into countless subgenres. Here are some of the most prominent styles:
Although not described this way at the time of it's estimated beginning in the mid-1960s,
garage rock is a genre that basically derived from the type of rock bands that often began as a group of young amatuers practicing in a family's garage.
Garage rock, which later became known as a subgenre of punk rock, is typically described as "raw" and "entergetic."
Early examples of this genre include The Kinks' All Day and All of the Night,
The Who's My Generation
and The Sonics' He's Waitin'.
The Allmusic guide summed up Protopunk by stating it was "never a cohesive movement, nor a readily identifiable proto-punk sound that made its artists seem related at the time.
What ties proto-punk together is a certain provocative sensibility that didn't fit the prevailing counterculture of the time," and that it was "consciously subversive and fully aware of its outsider status...
In terms of its lasting influence, much proto-punk was primitive and stripped-down, even when it wasn't aggressive, and its production was usually just as unpolished."
The genre existed throughout the 1960s and early '70s.
Examples of this genre include The Velvet Underground's I'm Waiting for the Man,
The Stooges' Search and Destroy,
and The Modern Lovers' I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms.
Glam punk - also often referred to as "mock rock" - was a short-lived genre of punk rock that combined the likes of punk rock with the emergence of glam music in the early to mid-1970s.
Art punk branched off protopunk and emerged in the late 1970s. It was a subgenre that thrived off of free-spirited creativity and oftentimes, controversey.
Examples of this genre include Television's See No Evil,
Talking Heads' Psycho Killer,
and Devo's Uncontrollable Urge.
The prominent sounds of Hardcore punk are fast and heavily instrumental with lyrics that often promote aggression and/or anger
towards political and social atmospheres.
Examples of this genre include Black Flag's Rise Above,
Bad Brains' I Against I,
and Minor Threat's Seeing Red.
Originating out of the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s, the main content matter addressed by Riot Grrrl was the promotion of radical, third-wave feminism.
Examples of this genre include Bikini Kill's New Radio,
Sleater-Kinney's Don't Think You Wanna,
and Bratmobile's Eating Toothpaste.
Oftentimes, certain scenes and genres associated with punk rock have emerged from specific geographic regions or cities,
giving them a defining sound.
For example, several hardcore punk groups with lyrics containing political themes - such as Minor Threat and Bad Brains -
emerged from Washington D.C. in the early 1980s, initiating a well-known D.C. punk scene.