THE BEST PUNK SONGS OF ALL TIME – a potentially divisive and contentious topic to discuss! Probably more so than THE BEST POWER POP SONGS OF ALL TIME that I posted not too long ago. But as usual in order to list down THE BEST PUNK SONGS OF ALL TIME, I need to explain a few concepts first.
Punk. We recognise that the earliest punk scenes emerged in New York and London sometime in the early to mid 1970s. In hindsight, music historians have long identified a protopunk genre that originated in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Back then, these ‘protopunk’ bands would have been aghast to be associated with anything other than rock ’n’ roll.
The honour roll of ‘protopunk’ pioneers would include The Stooges, the MC5, New York Dolls, T. Rex, David Bowie, Lou Reed et al. However, as influential as these bands were, the roots of the 1970s punk explosion lay in 1960s pop.
Classic sixties bands like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks inspired American teenagers to form bands and make noisy rock music in the garages at their parents’ home and gave birth to a genre imaginatively known as ‘garage’.
‘Garage’ would eventually seep into the mainstream with bands like The Kingsmen, Paul Revere & the Raiders, The Sonics, The Standells, The Seeds, The Monks and the like, which provided a platform for the ‘protopunk’ bands to express themselves in the late 1960s onwards.
Thus, from about 1974 to about 1978, a movement of Punk bands would crawl out of the underground both in the USA and the UK to provide a counterpoint to the hard rock and progressive rock music that dominated the music industry at the time.
THE BEST PUNK SONGS OF ALL TIME is therefore a list of the emergent bands for this special epoch in rock history. You will notice I hardly mention any music made in the 1980s, as the original punk music began to be adapted by bands and blended with other styles to splinter into nascent punk sub-genres like hardcore, emo, anarchy punk, Oi!, cowpunk etc etc etc. Comments as usual at our Facebook page.
… still there’s more …