Punk rock is an anti-establishment rock music genre and movement that emerged in the mid-1970s. Preceded by a variety of protopunk music of the 1960s and early 1970s, punk rock developed between 1974 and 1977 in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, where groups such as the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and The Clash were recognized as the vanguard of a new musical movement.

Punk bands, eschewing the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock, created short, fast, hard music, with stripped-down instrumentation and often political or nihilistic lyrics. The associated punk subculture expresses youthful rebellion, distinctive clothing styles, a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies, and a DIY (do it yourself) attitude.

Punk rock became a major phenomenon in the United Kingdom during the late 1970s; its popularity elsewhere was more limited. During the 1980s, forms of punk rock emerged in small scenes around the world, often rejecting commercial success and association with mainstream culture. By the turn of the century, punk rock's legacy had led to development of the alternative rock movement, and new punk bands popularized the genre decades after its first heyday.

Characteristics

The first wave of punk aimed to be aggressively modern, distancing itself from the bombast and sentimentality of early 1970s rock. According to Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone, "In its initial form, a lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting. Unfortunately, what happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the likes of Hendrix started noodling away. Soon you had endless solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock 'n' roll". Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren recalls feeling "punk rock had to come along because the rock scene had become so tame that [acts] like Billy Joel and Simon and Garfunkel were being called rock and roll, when to me and other fans, rock and roll meant this wild and rebellious music". In critic Robert Christgau's description, "It was also a subculture that scornfully rejected the political idealism and Californian flower-power silliness of hippie myth". Patti Smith, in contrast, suggests in the documentary 25 Years of Punk That year, when punk broke nationwide in Great Britain, was to be both a musical and a cultural "Year Zero". that the hippies and the punks were linked by a common anti-establishment mentality. In any event, some of punk's leading figures made a show of rejecting not only mainstream rock and the broader culture it was associated with, but their own most celebrated predecessors: "No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977", declared The Clash. Even as nostalgia was discarded, many in the scene adopted a nihilistic attitude summed up by the Sex Pistols slogan "No Future".

Punk bands often emulate the bare musical structures and arrangements of 1960s garage rock. This emphasis on accessibility exemplifies punk's DIY aesthetic and contrasts with what those in the scene regarded as the ostentatious musical effects and technological demands of many mainstream rock bands of the early and mid-1970s. A 1976 issue of the English punk fanzine Sideburns featured an illustration of three chords, captioned "This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band".

Typical punk instrumentation includes one or two electric guitars, an electric bass, and a drum kit, along with vocals. In the early days of punk rock, musical virtuosity was often looked on with suspicion. According to Punk magazine founder John Holmstrom, punk was "rock and roll by people who didn't have very much skills as musicians but still felt the need to express themselves through music".

Punk vocals sometimes sound nasal, and are often shouted instead of sung in a conventional sense. Complicated guitar solos are considered self-indulgent and unnecessary, although basic guitar breaks are common. Guitar parts tend to include highly distorted power chords, although

UK punks, circa 1986

some punk bands have taken a surf rock approach with a lighter, twangier guitar tone. A wild, "gonzo" attack is sometimes employed, a style that stretches from Robert Quine, lead guitarist of seminal punk band The Voidoids, back through The Velvet Underground to the 1950s recordings of Ike Turner. Bass guitar lines are often basic and used to carry the song's melody, although some punk bass players such as Mike Watt put greater emphasis on more technical bass lines. Bassists often use a plectrum rather than fingerpicking due to the rapid succession of notes, which makes fingerpicking impractical. Drums typically sound heavy and dry, and often have a minimal set-up. Production is minimalistic, with tracks sometimes laid down on home tape recorders.

Punk songs are normally between two and two and a half minutes long, though many last for less than a minute. Most early punk songs retained a traditional rock 'n' roll verse-chorus form and 4/4 time signature. However, second wave punk bands—including bands from both the post-punk and hardcore punk subgenres—often sought to break from that format. In hardcore, the drumming is considerably faster, with lyrics often half shouted over aggressive guitars. In critic Steven Blush's description, "The Sex Pistols were still rock'n'roll...like the craziest version of Chuck Berry. Hardcore was a radical departure from that. It wasn't verse-chorus rock. It dispelled any notion of what songwriting is supposed to be. It's its own form".

Punk lyrics are typically frank and confrontational, and often comment on social and political issues. Trend-setting songs such as The Clash's "Career Opportunities" and Chelsea's "Right to Work" deal with unemployment, boredom, and other grim realities of urban life. The Sex Pistols songs "God Save the Queen" and "Anarchy in the U.K." openly disparaged the British political system. There is also a strain of anti-romantic depictions of relationships and sex, exemplified by the The Voidoids' "Love Comes in Spurts". According to Search and Destroy founder V. Vale, "Punk was a total cultural revolt. It was a hardcore confrontation with the black side of history and culture, right-wing imagery, sexual taboos, a delving into it that had never been done before by any generation in such a thorough way."

With Patti Smith as the groundbreaker, Siouxsie Sioux, The Slits, Pauline Murray, Nina Hagen, Gaye Advert, Poly Styrene, and other punk vocalists, songwriters, and instrumentalists introduced a new brand of femininity to rock music: "They adopted a tough, unladylike pose that borrowed more from the macho swagger of sixties garage bands than from the calculated bad-girl image of bands like The Runaways. They went beyond the leather outfits to the bondage gear of Sioux and the straight-from-the-gutter androgyny of Smith. They articulated a female rage that surpassed the anger of the women's movement of the sixties".

The classic punk look among male musicians harkens back to the T-shirt, motorcycle jacket, and jeans ensemble favored by American greasers of the 1950s associated with the rockabilly scene and by British rockers of the 1960s. In the 1980s, tattoos and piercings became increasingly common among punk musicians and their fans.

EMO

Emo is a genre of rock music. Since its inception, emo has come to describe several independent variations of music, linked loosely but with common ancestry. As such, use of the term has been the subject of much debate.

In its original incarnation, the term emo was used to describe a subgenre of hardcore punk which originated in the Washington, DC music scene of the mid-1980s. In later years, the term emocore, short for "emotional hardcore", was also used to describe the DC scene and some of the regional scenes that spawned from it. The term emo was derived from the fact that, on occasion, members of a band would become spontaneously and strongly emotional during performances. The most recognizable names of the period included Rites of Spring, Embrace, One Last Wish, Beefeater, Gray Matter, Fire Party, and, slightly later, Moss Icon. The first wave of emo began to fade after the breakups of most of the involved bands in the early 1990s.

Starting in the mid-1990s, the term emo began to reflect the indie scene that followed the influences of Fugazi, which itself was an offshoot of the first wave of emo. Bands including Sunny Day Real Estate and Texas Is the Reason put forth a more indie rock style of emo, more melodic and less chaotic in nature than its predecessor. The so-called "indie emo" scene survived until the late 1990s, as many of the bands either disbanded or shifted to mainstream styles.

As the remaining indie emo bands entered the mainstream, newer bands began to emulate the more mainstream style, creating a style of music that has now earned the moniker emo within popular culture. Whereas, even in the past, the term emo was used to identify a wide variety of bands, the breadth of bands listed under today's emo is even more vast, leaving the term "emo" as more of a loose identifier than as a specific genre of music.

The punk revival

and Along with Nirvana, many of the leading alternative rock artists of the early 1990s acknowledged earlier punk acts (both famous and obscure) as influences, helping to inspire a punk rock resurgence. In 1994, California punk bands like Green Day, The Offspring, RancidBad Religion had substantial crossover success with the aid of MTV and popular radio stations like KROQ-FM. Although Green Day and Bad Religion were already on major labels, indie record companies like Epitaph also benefited from punk's revival. Green Day and The Offspring's enormous commercial success paved the way for bankable pop punk bands such as blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, and Sum 41 over the following decade. The Vans Warped Tour and the mall chain store Hot Topic brought punk even further into the U.S. cultural mainstream.

Following the lead of Boston's Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Long Beach, California's Sublime, ska punk and ska-core became widely popular in the late 1990s. The original 2 Tone bands had emerged amid punk rock's second wave, but their music was much closer to its Jamaican roots—"ska at 78 rpm." Ska punk bands in the third wave of ska created a true musical fusion with punk and hardcore. The success of Rancid's 1995 album ...And Out Come the Wolves helped fuel this ska revival, and ska punk bands such as Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake continued to

The Offspring in concert in 2001

attract fans into the 2000s. Other bands with roots in hardcore, such as AFI, also had chart-topping records in the new millennium. Celtic punk, with bands such as Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys merging the sound of Oi! and The Pogues, reached broad audiences. The Australian punk rock tradition continued with groups such as Frenzal Rhomb, The Living End, and Bodyjar. A growing number of bands bridged the divide between punk and the rock styles it had originally rebelled against: "The Hold Steady, The Constantines, and...Call Me Lightning have drawn from punk and classic-rock history in equal doses, merging the former's spitfire energy with the latter's sense of larger-than-life grandeur."

With punk's renewed visibilty came concerns among some in the punk community that the music was being co-opted by the mainstream. Committed participants in the scene argued that by signing to major labels and appearing on MTV, punk bands like Green Day were buying into the system that punk was created to challenge. Many punk fans "despise 'corporate punk rock', typified by bands such as Sum 41 and Blink 182". Such controversies have been part of the punk phenomenon since The Clash were widely accused of "selling out" when they signed with CBS Records in 1977. By the 1990s, punk rock was sufficiently ingrained in Western culture that punk trappings were often used to market highly commercial bands as rebels. Marketers capitalized on the style and its connotations of hipness to such an extent that a 1993 ad campaign for an automobile, the Subaru Impreza, claimed that the car was "like punk rock". Although the commercial mainstream has exploited many elements of punk, numerous underground punk scenes still exist around the world.