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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Jakub Kolář Differences Between the American and the British First Wave of Punk Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph. D. 2017 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. PhDr. Tomaš Pospišil, Ph. D. for his advice, encouragement, and willingness to work with a punk like me. Table of Contents Introduction.......................................................................................................................1 1. The Punk Subculture and Its Beginnings.......................................................................3 2. Hooray for the USA.......................................................................................................7 2. 1. The '70s Punk in America.....................................................................................7 2. 2. We Are the Ramones, and You've Heard It First.................................................11 3. Anarchy in the UK.......................................................................................................17 3. 1. The '70s Punk in Great Britain............................................................................17 3. 2. Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols...............................................21 4. The Differences between the American and the British Punk Scenes.........................27 4. 1. The Differences between the Ramones and the Sex Pistols...............................29 5. The Analysis of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols' Song Lyrics..................................32 5. 1. A Corpus Analysis...............................................................................................32 5. 2. A Subject Matter Analysis...................................................................................34 5. 2. 1. Romantic and Sexual Relationships...........................................................36 5. 2. 2. The First Person Feelings...........................................................................38 5. 2. 3. The Second and the Third Person...............................................................39 5. 2. 4. Social and Political Comment....................................................................40 5. 2. 5. Music and Dancing.....................................................................................40 Conclusion.......................................................................................................................42 Bibliography....................................................................................................................44 Résumé (English)............................................................................................................47 Résumé (Czech)...............................................................................................................48 Introduction We knew how to get to the backstage window. And so when the Ramones were getting ready to do their concert. I was there, Simo, Jonesy, some of the Sex Pistols. We were in a back alley, and we threw a rock at the window. I think, Johnny Ramone stuck his head out and went, “What?” And we went, “Hey, this is the Clash, and this is Pistols, and we need to get in.” So they kind of formed a sort of human chain and pulled us up through this window. And that was the first time we met them, and it was just a really great punk rock moment. (Joe Strummer, the Clash's singer-guitarist, in End of the Century) The authors dealing with punk agree that its definition is problematic. This thesis will use the term in a wide sense of the complex of music, audience, and institutions (including fanzines,1 record labels, clubs and shops) that “caused uproar and alarm among critics, politicians, media pundits, and record company executives” (Laing, viii) in the second half of the 1970s. This sense also includes a wide range of music inspired by punk in later years. In the thesis, mainly the first wave of punk, that corresponds roughly to the years 1974-1978, is considered because this is a safe area, considering different opinions on punk. The authors usually agree that punk had originated in America and was imported to Britain where it bloomed. There were different epicenters of punk, but the scope of the thesis is narrowed to the scenes centered around the CBGB club in New York and the band Sex Pistols in London. The aim of this work is to summarize the differences between the two main epicenters mentioned above and their main protagonists the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. The differences will be demonstrated on the lyrics of the songs from the debut albums of the two bands. The bands have been chosen as the main protagonists because 1 “[T]he small-scale, semi-underground publications of music enthusiasts” (Laing 13). 1 the Sex Pistols were the first punk rock group in Britain, inspiring other musicians, and the Ramones, being from the New York scene, where the most influential punk rock bands started simultaneously, are frequently listed as the best punk artists of all time (“Fifteen Greatest Punk Bands of All Time”). There were “considerable differences of musical approach between the various punk groups” (Laing 39), and, as Roger Sabin, the editor of Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk, highlights, “subcultures themselves are constantly mutating, and [the] participants negotiate their own positions in them” (5). In consequence, nothing in the punk subculture is absolute, and even statements from inside punk are inconsistent. For that reason, the thesis is partly subjective, even if it tries to synthesize different opinions. The first three chapters provide a background for the rest of the work by presenting the history of the punk subculture in general, the New York and the London scenes, the Ramones, and the Sex Pistols and putting it into the context of other music genres and subcultures. The fourth chapter is a summary of differences between the American and the British '70s punk and a summary of the differences between the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. The fifth chapter then presents two lyric analyses illustrating these differences. The first analysis is corpus based, executed using the Sketch Engine. The corpora used consist of lyrics taken from the sleeve of the Ramones' LP and from the Sex Pistols' official website and adjusted to correspond with the records. The second analysis analyzes the lyrics from the point of view of subject matter. 2 1. The Punk Subculture and Its Beginnings Because the punk subculture started as a genre of music–in contrast to majority of other youth subcultures that adopted already existing genres (Laing xi)–it is not possible to separate the subculture from the genre. During the second half of the twentieth century, the word punk was used to describe many different bands, sometimes having a little in common, although some of them later influenced punk rock. Subsequently, different groups of people listening to these bands started to call themselves punks. In the mid-1970s, appeared a new concept of punk, propagated by fanzines. The aim of these publications was to raise the alternative culture: first, by reminding its readers of some representatives of the popular music (mainly the past popular music from the 1950s and the 1960s, some of them later to be called proto-punk) and criticizing others, and second, by propagating new artists. Some of the new artists would later become the leaders of the new punk subculture, including the Sex Pistols (ibid 13) and the Ramones (ibid 23). This concept of punk “as a musical type and ideal” originated in America, where it emerged in the early 1970s as a reaction against progressive rock (ibid 13). Punk in the current meaning came into existence mainly as a result of mutual influences between New York and London. Both the economic situation and the state of the music industry in the 1970s contributed to the emergence of the punk subculture. New York was on a verge of bankruptcy, and whole Britain was experiencing a crisis (“Blank Generation”). In the music industry, it was getting harder for new bands to become popular as recording technologies were increasingly sophisticated, and record companies were investing large sums into preparation and recording in the studio. In consequence, it was commonly believed that a good record equals an expensive one. 3 Therefore, the genre of progressive rock was steadily gaining popularity since the late 1960s. Progressive rock, with its large musical forms and concept albums, preferred recorded music to live performances, which were supposed to exactly recreate the recorded sound, requiring expensive equipment and additional musicians. This led to growing costs of the performances (Laing 3), increasing demands on musicians, and alienation of devotees from their idols. “People started overindulging with long solos, and you watched someone like Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix, and you felt like you'd have to practice for twenty years to be able to play [the] song,” said Johnny Ramone, the guitarist of the Ramones, about the late 1960s in the documentary Seven Ages of Rock (see “Blank Generation” in the bibliography). While some claim that punk was mainly about the return to the roots of rock music, the return was predominantly in the area of