100 Years of Music / Genre
Punk
Three chords, two minutes, no permission. Punk was assembled from garage rock and the Velvet Underground in New York and Detroit, named in 1976, and exported to London, where it became a movement. Its real product was the idea that anyone could do this.
The lineage
Punk’s ingredients were lying around for a decade before anyone put them together. The garage bands of the mid-1960s played three chords badly and loudly. The Velvet Underground (1967) played about heroin and made noise on purpose. In Detroit the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams (1969) and the Stooges’ first two records (1969, 1970) were rock with the manners removed; Iggy Pop cut himself on stage. The New York Dolls (1973) wore lipstick and could barely play. All of this is called proto-punk now, and in this history that stream begins in 1969. The word itself was on the cover of a magazine, Punk, in January 1976, and by then the music had a home: CBGB, a bar on the Bowery, where the Ramones played their first show in August 1974 and where Television, Patti Smith, Blondie and Talking Heads followed.
The Ramones’ first album (Sire, 23 April 1976) is where this history puts the genre’s start: fourteen songs in twenty-nine minutes, downstroked guitar, no solos, a cartoon of rock and roll that was also its purest form. They played the Roundhouse in London on 4 July 1976, and the audience formed bands. The Sex Pistols had already played their first show the previous November; their Manchester gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976 seeded Buzzcocks, Joy Division and the Smiths. "Anarchy in the U.K." came out in November, the band swore on teatime television a week later, and "God Save the Queen" was banned and reached number two during the Silver Jubilee. The Clash (April 1977) added politics and reggae; Buzzcocks’ self-released Spiral Scratch (January 1977) proved you could put out your own record. That is the DIY idea, and it outlasted every band.
By 1978 punk had split into two futures. Post-punk kept the attitude and threw away the three chords: Public Image Ltd, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (1979), Gang of Four, Wire, the Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees took dub bass, synthesizers and art-school ideas and built the sound the 1980s would call alternative. 2 Tone (the Specials, 1979) fused punk with ska. In America the second future was hardcore: faster, harder and further from the record business. Black Flag’s "Nervous Breakdown" (1979) on their own SST label, the Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, and Minor Threat in Washington, whose Dischord label and straight-edge ethic (1981) built a national network of all-ages shows, fanzines and vans. Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen and the Replacements grew out of that circuit and became college rock.
The next generation made it sell. In Washington in 1985 Rites of Spring played hardcore about feelings and got called emo. In Olympia, Washington, Bikini Kill started riot grrrl in 1991 with zines and a demand that girls come to the front. Green Day’s Dookie (February 1994) sold ten million and the Offspring’s Smash (1994) became the best-selling independent album ever; pop punk, which the Buzzcocks and the Descendents had invented years earlier, was now radio music. The Warped Tour began in 1995. Blink-182’s Enema of the State (1999), then My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy and Paramore in the 2000s, made emo and pop punk the sound of the suburban teenager, complete with a store in every mall.
Punk’s legacy is less a sound than a method. The Strokes, Interpol and the whole 2001 revival came from the Velvets and Television. Idles, Fontaines D.C., Amyl and the Sniffers and Turnstile (Glow On, 2021) are the current line. Machine Gun Kelly and Olivia Rodrigo’s "good 4 u" (2021) put pop punk back at number one. Pussy Riot got sent to prison for it in 2012. But the lasting product is the permission slip: the idea, proved in 1976 and 1977, that you do not need to be able to play, you do not need a label, and you do not need to ask. Every bedroom producer on SoundCloud is a punk in that sense, whether they own a guitar or not.
Branches
Proto-punk
The rock that punk was made from: the Velvet Underground, the MC5, the Stooges (1969), the New York Dolls, the Modern Lovers. Loud, crude, confrontational, and mostly ignored at the time.
New York punk
CBGB’s house bands from 1974: the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, Blondie, Talking Heads, Richard Hell. Art-school and street in the same room, and the Ramones’ first album (1976) as the founding text.
UK punk
The Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex, the Slits. A movement with a uniform, a politics and a tabloid panic, over almost as soon as it started. Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) is the monument.
Post-punk
Punk’s energy applied to new sounds: dub bass, synthesizers, funk rhythm, angular guitar. Public Image Ltd, Joy Division, Gang of Four, Wire, Talking Heads, the Cure. The seedbed of alternative rock.
2 Tone
Punk speed and politics with Jamaican ska, from multiracial bands in the English Midlands. The Specials, the Selecter, Madness, the Beat. Its label’s black-and-white check became the movement’s flag.
Hardcore
American punk made faster, shorter and angrier, on the bands’ own labels and touring circuit. Black Flag, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, the Misfits. Straight edge, DIY and the all-ages show come from here.
Emo
Hardcore turned inward, starting with Rites of Spring in Washington in 1985. Sunny Day Real Estate and Jawbreaker in the 1990s, Jimmy Eat World, then My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy as pop in the 2000s.
Riot grrrl
Feminist punk from Olympia and Washington, D.C.: Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, Sleater-Kinney. Zines, meetings and songs about bodies and power. Its ideas travelled further than its records.
Pop punk
Punk speed with pop melody, invented by Buzzcocks and the Descendents and sold by the million after Green Day’s Dookie (1994). The Offspring, Blink-182, Sum 41, then Paramore and the 2021 revival.
How to listen
Time it. A punk song is usually under three minutes, and the good ones under two. Listen for how little happens: two or three chords, a verse and a chorus, no solo, no bridge. Then notice how much energy that leaves room for. The Ramones cut everything that was not necessary and found there was a lot of it.
Then listen for the guitar’s downstroke and the drummer’s ride. Punk rhythm guitar hits every string on every beat, usually all downward, which is why it sounds like a machine; the drummer pushes ahead of the beat rather than sitting on it. Compare that to a hardcore record, where the tempo doubles, and to a post-punk record, where the bass takes over and the guitar goes sideways.
Play the exports. The Stooges’ "I Wanna Be Your Dog" (1969), the Ramones’ "Blitzkrieg Bop" (1976), the Sex Pistols’ "Anarchy in the U.K." (1976), Minor Threat’s "Straight Edge" (1981), Bikini Kill’s "Rebel Girl" (1993), Green Day’s "Basket Case" (1994). Same chords, different room, different reason.
Across the decades
Raw power before it had a name
Punk did not exist in 1969. Everything it would need did. The garage bands of the mid-decade had already stripped rock back to three chords and a shout. The Velvet Underground, managed by Andy Warhol and ignored by everyone else, had put out a record in March 1967 about heroin and sadomasochism with a viola droning through it, and sold almost nothing. Brian Eno later said everybody who bought it started a band.
Detroit finished the job. The MC5 recorded "Kick Out the Jams" live at the Grande Ballroom over two nights in October 1968, with a manager who ran a political party and an opening line that got the record pulled from a Detroit department store chain. Down the road in Ann Arbor, the Stooges, with a singer who called himself Iggy and treated the stage as a contact sport, released their first album in August 1969: "I Wanna Be Your Dog" is three chords, a sleigh bell and one piano note hammered for three minutes. In 1976 the kids at CBGB and the 100 Club would know every word.
The middle finger to excess
Tired of solos that lasted longer than your lunch break? Punk stripped rock down to its studs: fast, loud, angry and raw. No frills, no solos, no apologies. Its roots were in Detroit and New York in the late sixties: the Stooges' bare-chested chaos with Iggy Pop, the Velvet Underground's drone, the MC5's noise, and then the New York Dolls in 1973, sleaze and glam and proto-punk rage. Rock critics coined the word "punk" for garage bands before anyone wore safety pins.
The scene had an address: CBGB, a biker bar on the Bowery that opened in December 1973 and let Television, then Patti Smith, then the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads and the Dead Boys play there on the condition that they played their own songs. Richard Hell, of Television and then the Voidoids, wore the ripped T-shirt and the spiked hair first. Patti Smith's "Horses" (November 1975), produced by John Cale, opened with her rewriting Van Morrison's "Gloria" as a poem about desire and refusal. The Ramones' debut (April 1976) had fourteen songs in twenty-nine minutes, three chords and a snarl, and Johnny Ramone's downstroke buzz-saw guitar. It sold almost nothing and started everything.
In London the manager of a King's Road shop called SEX, Malcolm McLaren, put together the Sex Pistols. "Anarchy in the U.K." came out on 26 November 1976. Five days later, filling in for Queen on a teatime television show, the band swore at host Bill Grundy live on air and woke up on every front page. "Never Mind the Bollocks" (October 1977) is one album and it is enough. The Clash gave punk political power and genre-bending ambition, writing about tower blocks and riots and, by "London Calling" (December 1979), pulling in reggae, rockabilly and soul. The Damned put out the first British punk single, "New Rose", in October 1976. The Buzzcocks pressed their own EP, "Spiral Scratch", and showed that anyone could. X-Ray Spex had a saxophone and Poly Styrene's voice. The Slits and Siouxsie and the Banshees proved punk's women would not be backing singers.
Then punk mutated. Wire's "Pink Flag" cut songs to under a minute. Gang of Four played funk with a political science degree. Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" (June 1979), produced by Martin Hannett in Manchester, was punk's energy slowed to a cold, spacious dread, and post-punk had its masterpiece. In Coventry, the Specials' 2 Tone label put Black and white kids in the same band and revived Jamaican ska as an answer to the National Front. And on the pop side, new wave: Blondie's "Heart of Glass" put a disco beat under a CBGB band, Elvis Costello wrote bitter, brilliant songs at speed, the Cars, the Police and Devo made punk's energy safe for the radio without making it boring. By the end of 1979, punk had done what it set out to do: kill rock's excess. What it did not expect was to have children.
Hardcore: loud, fast, DIY, repeat
Punk did not die in 1980. It got faster, shorter and further underground. Hardcore was built around zines, basement shows, seven-inch singles and a refusal to ask permission. Black Flag in Los Angeles ran the label, SST, booked the tours and took the beatings from the LAPD; "Damaged" (1981) is the sound of that. Minor Threat in Washington, DC lasted three years, coined "straight edge" in a song under a minute long, and left behind Dischord Records, still run by Ian MacKaye on the same terms.
Bad Brains, four Black Rastafarians from DC who had started as a jazz-fusion band, played faster than anyone and switched to reggae between songs; their 1982 cassette on ROIR is still the fastest thing on this page. Dead Kennedys turned San Francisco satire into a political weapon and ended up in court over an album insert. The Misfits gave the scene horror-movie makeup; the Descendents and Circle Jerks gave it the skateboard.
Post-punk was the other road out of 1977: Joy Division, Gang of Four, Public Image Ltd, the Fall, Wire, the Raincoats. When Ian Curtis died in May 1980, the rest of Joy Division became New Order and took the road toward the dance floor. Hardcore kept running. By 1987 MacKaye had formed Fugazi, five-dollar shows, all ages, no merchandise, and the ethic had outlived the tempo. The 1990s would call the result "emo" and "post-hardcore". Fugazi called it a band.
Dookie, the Warped Tour and the emo basement
Punk went to the suburbs. Green Day, three kids from the East Bay who had grown up at the all-ages Gilman Street club, signed to Reprise and released "Dookie" on 1 February 1994. It sold ten million copies in America; I call it the gateway drug. The Offspring's "Smash", on the independent Epitaph, sold eleven million and became the best-selling indie-label record there had ever been. Rancid, Bad Religion, NOFX, Lagwagon and MxPx filled the two independent labels, Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords, that made punk a business without a major. The Vans Warped Tour started in 1995 and put a skate ramp next to the stage. blink-182's "Enema of the State" in June 1999 was crude jokes and big hooks, and it set up the 2000s pop-punk boom, including Sum 41, who formed in 1996 and would arrive with the new decade.
Ska-punk rode the same wave. Sublime from Long Beach mixed reggae, dub, hip-hop and hardcore and their singer Bradley Nowell died two months before the album that made them famous. No Doubt's "Tragic Kingdom" and "Don't Speak" put Gwen Stefani on every magazine cover. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Reel Big Fish wore suits and played horns. For a year or two in 1997 every high school had a ska band.
Underneath, punk evolved emotionally. Fugazi in Washington kept the five-dollar shows and the DIY ethics and made records of political fire and dynamic invention. Jawbreaker were the raw emo blueprint soaked in cigarette smoke. Sunny Day Real Estate's "Diary", on Sub Pop in 1994, was beautiful, anguished and genre-defining. Texas Is the Reason, Mineral and Braid were the Midwest cornerstones; The Promise Ring, The Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World turned it into songs. In Sweden, Refused made "The Shape of Punk to Come" in 1998, broke up weeks later, and were right about the title. At the Drive-In, from El Paso, were about to prove it. Bikini Kill, Bratmobile and riot grrrl, from Olympia, had already remade the scene's rules about who got the microphone.
Heart on sleeve, scream in throat: emo, pop-punk and the Warped Tour
Emo went mainstream in the 2000s, and it did not lose its teeth. Whether you were crying in your bedroom or shouting in a VFW hall, this music caught the full spectrum of emotional chaos. Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American put The Middle on every radio in July 2001. Dashboard Confessional was the acoustic confessor who made crying cool. Taking Back Sunday brought dual-vocal drama and Long Island angst. Brand New started pop-punk and ended devastating and literary. Thursday, Thrice and Underoath were screamo's melodic, explosive vanguard. My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, in October 2006, was theatrical and bombastic, emo's Bohemian Rhapsody. Paramore's Riot! gave the scene Hayley Williams: power, melody and fiery vulnerability.
Pop-punk 2.0 took the torch from the nineties and ran with it, polished it and dominated the charts and the Hot Topic shelves. Blink-182 went from jokes to heartbreak on Take Off Your Pants and Jacket and the untitled 2003 record. Sum 41 was skate punk with metal flair. Good Charlotte wrote anthems for the eyeliner generation, Simple Plan pure teen melodrama. New Found Glory, the Used and All Time Low were Warped Tour royalty. Fall Out Boy's From Under the Cork Tree in 2005 and Panic! at the Disco a year later made Fueled by Ramen the label of the moment. Green Day, elder statesmen at this point, made American Idiot in September 2004, a punk rock opera about a country at war that went to Broadway.
The heavier scene screamed, riffed and threw down in basements and parking lots. Post-hardcore and metalcore, with their heavy breakdowns and screamed-clean vocal trades, were music for catharsis and moshing: Underoath, Atreyu, Killswitch Engage, Alexisonfire, Poison the Well, Glassjaw, and late in the decade Bring Me the Horizon going from deathcore to melody. At the Drive-In's Relationship of Command, in September 2000, is where a lot of it starts.
Emo grows up, pop punk refuses to die, hardcore learns to groove
The emo revival is one of the decade's quiet successes. Bands who had grown up on Midwestern nineties records brought back the twinkly guitar lines, the confessional lyrics and the maths-rock time signatures, and did it in basements and on Bandcamp with no industry help: Modern Baseball, the World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, Foxing, Sorority Noise, Tigers Jaw, Tiny Moving Parts. American Football reunited and it did not feel like nostalgia. Pinegrove's Cardinal in 2016 folded country twang into it.
Pop punk had its third act. The Story So Far, Neck Deep and State Champs played it straight; Paramore went alt-pop and made After Laughter, a record about depression that sounds like an eighties party; blink-182 carried on without Tom DeLonge. The Warped Tour, the genre's summer home since 1995, ran its final full cross-country tour in 2018. By then pop punk was already leaking into hip-hop, and Machine Gun Kelly and Yungblud were building the crossover that would define the early 2020s.
Hardcore and its heavy cousins mutated in every direction. La Dispute and Touché Amoré made post-hardcore that read like memoir. Code Orange used samplers and industrial noise. Knocked Loose made a genuinely frightening record in 2019. Bring Me the Horizon went from deathcore to arena synth-rock in ten years. And Turnstile, out of Baltimore, made hardcore you could dance to, which turned out to be the most influential idea any of them had.
Pop-punk renaissance and the new hardcore
Yes, pop punk came back, and it came back loud, viral and Gen Z as hell. Driven by nostalgia, trap fusion and digital charisma, the Warped Tour energy returned in hybrid form. Machine Gun Kelly went from rap to full-blown pop punk on "Tickets to My Downfall" and took it to number one. Travis Barker produced half of it and then produced everything else. Olivia Rodrigo's "Sour" had the angst, riffs and hooks of 2000s teen rock. jxdn, MOD SUN, KennyHoopla and Royal & the Serpent blended punk with pop, emo and electronic edges. blink-182 got Tom DeLonge back in 2022 and had a number one album a year later.
The heavy end was healthier than the chart end. Turnstile, five men from Baltimore, made "Glow On" in 2021: hardcore with Cure guitars and gang vocals, and it ended up on NPR and at the Grammys without losing a single kid from the pit. Knocked Loose from Kentucky made the most violent record any major festival has ever booked and played it on late-night television. Soul Glo, Zulu and Scowl brought political edge, racial diversity and underground fire back into a scene that had gotten comfortable.
Underneath all of it, the internet's own punk kept mutating. Hyperpop and digicore, from 100 gecs to glaive to underscores, ran punk energy through broken synths and blown-out beats. It is fast, glitchy, auto-tuned and experimental, and it treats distortion as a feeling rather than a genre. SOPHIE, who built the sonic language most of them use, died in Athens in January 2021.
Timeline
The Who stutter through "My Generation"
Pete Townshend wrote it as a mod anthem and Roger Daltrey sang it with a stammer that the BBC worried was mocking people who stuttered. John Entwistle took a bass solo, which was not done. The song rose through several keys and ended in feedback. Released in Britain in October 1965, it reached number two there. The line about hoping to die before getting old became the decade's most quoted and least followed piece of advice.
"The Velvet Underground & Nico" sells almost nothing
Andy Warhol paid for it, put a peelable banana on the cover and added a German model named Nico as singer. Lou Reed wrote about heroin, amphetamines and whips; John Cale played a viola drone under it; Moe Tucker stood up at the drums. It came out on Verve in March 1967; the exact day is not documented, and March 12 is the date convention has settled on. Verve barely promoted it, a lawsuit over the back cover forced a recall, and it never charted above 171. Everybody who bought one, the story goes, started a band. Punk, art rock and indie all start here.
Detroit: "Kick Out the Jams" and "The Stooges"
The MC5 recorded "Kick Out the Jams" live at the Grande Ballroom on October 30 and 31, 1968, and Elektra released it in February 1969 with the opening obscenity intact; a department store refused to stock it and the label dropped the band. In Ann Arbor, the MC5's little brothers the Stooges, with Iggy Pop on vocals and Ron Asheton on a wah pedal, released their first album on August 5, 1969. "I Wanna Be Your Dog" is three chords, a sleigh bell and one piano note. Punk had its Detroit chapter written seven years early.
CBGB opens on the Bowery
Hilly Kristal opens a bar at 315 Bowery in December 1973 meaning to book Country, Bluegrass and Blues, which is what the letters stand for. Instead, from March 1974, Television talk him into letting them play, on the condition that bands play their own songs. Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, the Dead Boys and Richard Hell follow. The room smells of dog and the stage is tiny. Everything American punk becomes is worked out here.
Patti Smith, "Horses"
Released 10 November 1975 on Arista, produced by John Cale at Electric Lady. It opens with a poet from New Jersey announcing that Jesus died for somebody's sins but not hers, and then tearing into Van Morrison's "Gloria". Robert Mapplethorpe shoots the cover: Smith in a white shirt and braces, jacket over the shoulder. It is the first album out of CBGB, and it says that punk can be literary, female and furious at once.
The Ramones release their debut
Recorded in a week for about six thousand dollars and released 23 April 1976. Fourteen songs, twenty-nine minutes, three or four chords each, Johnny Ramone's all-downstroke guitar, Joey's hiccup, and songs about sniffing glue and beating on the brat. It peaks at 111 on the American chart. In July they play London's Roundhouse and members of the Clash and the Sex Pistols are in the crowd. British punk speeds up overnight.
"Anarchy in the U.K.", and the Bill Grundy interview
The Sex Pistols' first single comes out on EMI on 26 November 1976. On 1 December, standing in for Queen at short notice on Thames Television's teatime "Today" show, they are goaded by host Bill Grundy and Steve Jones calls him a dirty rotten rotter and worse, live. The next morning's Daily Mirror headline reads "The Filth and the Fury". EMI drops them in January. Punk is now the thing every parent in Britain has heard of.
Talking Heads: 77
Three art students from Rhode Island and a keyboard player from the Modern Lovers release a debut in September 1977 of tight, nervous songs about buildings and food and, in "Psycho Killer", a murderer who cannot stop apologising, sung by David Byrne in a strangled yelp over Tina Weymouth's bass. Recorded the same year as "Never Mind the Bollocks", it is the other thing punk could be: brainy, funky and polite. Brian Eno produces the next three.
"Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols"
Released 28 October 1977 on Virgin, after EMI and A&M had signed and dropped the band, and after "God Save the Queen" had been kept from number one during the Silver Jubilee, by the chart compilers many still believe. Twelve songs, Steve Jones's guitar recorded in layers, Johnny Rotten sneering about the Berlin Wall and abortion. Shops are prosecuted for displaying the title. It is the only studio album the band makes and it is the whole of British punk in thirty-nine minutes.
Blondie, "Parallel Lines"
Released in September 1978, produced by Mike Chapman, who had made glam hits for Sweet. Debbie Harry, a former Playboy bunny and CBGB regular, sings power pop, girl-group revival and, on "Heart of Glass", a disco song with a Roland rhythm box, which goes to number one on both sides of the Atlantic in 1979. Punk purists call it a betrayal. It is new wave finding out that it can be pop.
Sid Vicious dies
John Simon Ritchie, who had replaced Glen Matlock on bass in the Sex Pistols because he looked right, dies of a heroin overdose in a Greenwich Village apartment on 2 February 1979, aged twenty-one, while on bail for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The band had broken up on stage in San Francisco a year earlier. Punk, which had promised no future, has its first martyr, and its first cautionary tale.
2 Tone: the Specials release "Gangsters"
Jerry Dammers, a keyboard player from Coventry, prints five thousand copies of a single on his own 2 Tone label on 4 May 1979, credited to the Special AKA vs Rico, with a cartoon rude boy on the sleeve and a Prince Buster ska tune rewritten about a promoter who held the band's gear hostage. A Black and white band playing Jamaican ska at punk speed, in a city where the National Front marched, goes top ten. Madness, the Selecter and the Beat follow within months.
Joy Division, "Unknown Pleasures"
Released 15 June 1979 on Factory Records in Manchester, in a sleeve of white pulsar waves on black with no words on it. Producer Martin Hannett records the drums one at a time, drenches them in digital delay, and makes a punk band sound like an empty building. Ian Curtis sings in a baritone about losing control. Post-punk has its masterpiece, and the sound of Manchester, and of the 1980s' gloomier half, begins here.
The Clash, "London Calling"
Released 14 December 1979 as a double album sold for the price of a single one. Punk is three years old and the Clash are already past it: reggae ("Guns of Brixton"), rockabilly ("Brand New Cadillac"), soul, ska and jazz, produced by the drunk and brilliant Guy Stevens. The cover is Paul Simonon smashing his bass at the Palladium, in a layout copied from Elvis's debut. Punk's promise of freedom is kept by breaking punk's rules.
Motörhead's "Ace of Spades" and Judas Priest's "British Steel"
Two British records set metal's terms for the decade. Motörhead played it at punk speed with Lemmy's bass overdriven into a rhythm guitar. Priest cut the songs to three minutes, put on leather and studs, and gave every later band its uniform. Thrash and glam both start here.
Ian Curtis dies; Joy Division becomes New Order
Joy Division's singer took his own life on 18 May 1980, two days before an American tour and two months before "Closer" was released. "Love Will Tear Us Apart" came out in June. The three survivors carried on as New Order and, over three years, walked post-punk onto the dance floor.
Minor Threat and "Straight Edge"
Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson formed Minor Threat in Washington, DC in 1980 after the Teen Idles split, and started Dischord Records to release the records. Their first EP included "Straight Edge", forty-six seconds that named a movement: no drink, no drugs, no excuses. The band lasted until autumn 1983. The label is still there.
Black Flag release "Damaged"
With Henry Rollins newly on vocals, Greg Ginn's Los Angeles band recorded hardcore's founding full-length. MCA refused to distribute it, calling it "anti-parent", so SST put it out itself. The band toured relentlessly in a van and built the circuit every American independent act of the decade would use.
Bad Brains release their ROIR cassette
Four Black musicians from Washington, DC who had started as a jazz-fusion band and converted to Rastafarianism recorded the fastest punk yet made, breaking every few songs for a reggae tune. Released only on cassette by ROIR in New York, it became hardcore's secret handshake.
Fugazi play their first show
Dischord dates the first Fugazi show to 3 September 1987, at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Five-dollar tickets, all-ages venues, no merchandise, their own label. The line-up settled over the following year: Dischord's credits for the 1988 demo list Ian MacKaye on vocals and guitar, Guy Picciotto on vocals alone, Joe Lally on bass and Brendan Canty on drums. Hardcore's ethic had survived hardcore's tempo, and the 1990s would call the result post-hardcore.
The first Lollapalooza
Perry Farrell built a farewell tour for Jane's Addiction and invited Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T's Body Count, Living Colour, the Butthole Surfers and the Rollins Band to come along, with tents for political groups and piercing stalls. It opened in Arizona on 18 July 1991 and ran every summer through 1997. Alternative music had a travelling capital, and so did the idea that a festival could be a culture.
Nirvana, "Nevermind"
Released 24 September 1991 on DGC, produced by Butch Vig, expected to sell a quarter of a million copies. It hit number one on 11 January 1992, one week after Michael Jackson's "Dangerous", and the Library of Congress essay on it is right that the ground had moved: how records sounded, what they were about, and what a rock band was for. Three power chords through a Boss distortion pedal, a chorus about apathy that a whole generation shouted back, and a punk band from Aberdeen that credited every influence it had. Hair metal was over by Christmas.
Nirvana, "In Utero"
Released 21 September 1993, recorded in two weeks with Steve Albini, who mic'd the drums like a punk record and refused to touch the mixes. Geffen panicked and had two songs remixed for radio. Cobain called it the sound he had wanted all along. "Heart-Shaped Box", "Rape Me", "All Apologies". It went to number one anyway. Seven months later he was dead.
Green Day, "Dookie"
Released 1 February 1994 on Reprise, three kids from the all-ages Gilman Street club in Berkeley with fourteen songs about boredom, panic attacks and masturbation. It sold ten million copies in the United States, won a Grammy, and got the band banned from Gilman for signing to a major. I call it the gateway drug. The Offspring's "Smash" arrived nine weeks later on an indie and sold eleven million. Punk was pop now, and the argument about that never ended.
Woodstock 94 and the mud
On 12 to 14 August 1994, three hundred and fifty thousand people went to a farm in Saugerties, New York, for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Woodstock. It rained. Green Day started a mud fight with the crowd and became famous for it; Nine Inch Nails took the stage coated head to foot and gave the performance that made industrial rock a mainstream event. Pay-per-view sold the whole thing. Five years later the sequel would burn.
Woodstock 99
On 22 to 25 July 1999, on a decommissioned air base in Rome, New York, in hundred-degree heat, with four-dollar water and overflowing toilets, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine, Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers played to two hundred thousand people. During "Break Stuff" the crowd did. On the last night bonfires became riots, and the reports of sexual assault came out in the weeks after. Three months earlier Columbine had blamed Marilyn Manson; Rolling Stone ran his answer. The decade that had sold authenticity ended by asking what a crowd owed anyone.
At the Drive-In's Relationship of Command
Released 12 September 2000 and produced by Ross Robinson, the El Paso band's third album was post-hardcore with the energy of a riot and the melodies of a pop record. One Armed Scissor was on MTV within weeks. The band split in 2001; Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala formed the Mars Volta, and everyone else in the emo and screamo scenes spent the decade chasing this sound.
Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights
Released on Matador on 19 August 2002, recorded in a Connecticut house studio, Interpol's debut was New York in suits: Paul Banks' baritone, Daniel Kessler's clean guitar arpeggios, a bass player who dressed like a mortician. Critics said Joy Division; the band said the Chameleons. NYC and Obstacle 1 were the songs. It was the second half of the New York revival the Strokes had started, and the darker one.
MySpace launches
Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe launched MySpace on 1 August 2003 with a music player any band could put four songs into. By 2005 it was the biggest social network in the world and News Corp bought it for 580 million dollars. Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Adele, Panic! at the Disco and thousands of emo bands were discovered on it. For a few years the friend count was the chart.
Green Day's American Idiot
Released 21 September 2004, six weeks before the presidential election, American Idiot was a punk rock opera about Jesus of Suburbia, a kid raised on television and a war on the news. Boulevard of Broken Dreams won Record of the Year at the Grammys in February 2006. It sold sixteen million copies, went to Broadway in 2010, and gave a band that had seemed finished the biggest record of its life. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame calls it the moment punk went where it had never gone before.
Arctic Monkeys make chart history
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not was released on 23 January 2006 and sold more than 360,000 copies in its first week, the fastest-selling debut album in British history, outselling the rest of the top twenty combined. The Sheffield band had handed out demo CDs at gigs in 2003 and let fans put them online; by the time the album arrived they had two number one singles. The BBC quoted HMV saying nothing like it had happened since the Beatles.
My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade
Released 23 October 2006 and produced by Rob Cavallo, who had made American Idiot, The Black Parade was a concept album about a dying man, played in marching-band jackets, with a title track that changes time signature like Bohemian Rhapsody. It went platinum in two months. NPR later wrote about the taste war it started, the last time a band this theatrical was this big. The kids in eyeliner at Warped Tour had their opera.
LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver
Released 12 March 2007 in Britain and a week later in America on James Murphy's DFA label, Sound of Silver was the record where the DFA joke, punks playing disco, became serious: All My Friends is a song about getting old built on one piano chord, and Someone Great is about a death set to a synth pulse. The Guardian ranked it fifth among the century's albums. The dance-punk scene Murphy had started with the Rapture in 2002 had produced its masterpiece.
LCD Soundsystem say goodbye at Madison Square Garden
James Murphy retired his band with a three-and-a-half-hour show at Madison Square Garden on 2 April 2011, filmed, recorded and treated as the end of an era. He un-retired it six years later with american dream, which annoyed some people and delighted more. The goodbye still stands as the moment the dance-punk decade formally ended.
The SoundCloud generation starts dying
Lil Peep died of an overdose on 15 November 2017 at twenty-one. XXXTentacion was shot dead in June 2018 at twenty. Juice WRLD died of an overdose in December 2019 at twenty-one. They had all made emo-influenced rap about anxiety and pills for enormous young audiences, and the songs turned out to be documentary.
Juice WRLD dies at twenty-one
He had a seizure at Chicago Midway airport on 8 December 2019 and died. He was twenty-one, and he had been the most naturally melodic of the SoundCloud rappers, freestyling for an hour at a time without repeating himself. He closed a decade that had lost too many of its youngest voices.
Machine Gun Kelly takes pop-punk to number one
Tickets to My Downfall, produced by Travis Barker of blink-182, debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 on the chart dated 10 October 2020. A Cleveland rapper had made a 2003 pop-punk record, and a generation who were not born in 2003 bought it. Barker went on to produce for half the scene, and the revival ran for the rest of the decade.
Playboi Carti's Whole Lotta Red splits the room
Released on Christmas Day 2020, Whole Lotta Red debuted at number one. It is deliberately ugly: distorted, shrieked, punk in tempo and attitude, and half of Carti's own fanbase hated it on arrival. Within two years it was the most imitated rap record of the decade, and the rage-beat sound it launched was everywhere.
Turnstile's Glow On drags hardcore into daylight
Glow On, released 27 August 2021, debuted at number thirty on the Billboard 200, which for a Baltimore hardcore band is roughly impossible. It has breakdowns and gang vocals and also Cure guitars, a Blood Orange feature and songs that sound like sunshine. It did not soften hardcore to get there. It just refused to accept that the audience had a ceiling.
Artists
Everyone in the century tagged Punk, in the order they arrived. Each name opens its full entry in the chapter that carries it.
The Who
- My Generation
- Substitute
- I Can See for Miles
- Tommy
The Velvet Underground
- The Velvet Underground & Nico
- White Light/White Heat
- The Velvet Underground
The Stooges
- The Stooges
- Fun House
MC5
- Kick Out the Jams
- Back in the USA
Patti Smith
- Horses
- Easter
Ramones
- Ramones
- Rocket to Russia
- Blitzkrieg Bop
Sex Pistols
- Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
- Anarchy in the U.K.
- God Save the Queen
The Clash
- The Clash
- London Calling
Talking Heads
- Talking Heads: 77
- Fear of Music
- Psycho Killer
Elvis Costello
- My Aim Is True
- This Year's Model
- Armed Forces
Blondie
- Parallel Lines
- Eat to the Beat
- Heart of Glass
The Police
- Outlandos d'Amour
- Reggatta de Blanc
- Roxanne
Joy Division
- Unknown Pleasures
- Closer
Black Flag
- Nervous Breakdown
- Rise Above
- TV Party
- My War
Dead Kennedys
- California Über Alles
- Holiday in Cambodia
- Too Drunk to Fuck
The Cure
- Boys Don't Cry
- Close to Me
- Just Like Heaven
- Pictures of You
Bad Brains
- Pay to Cum
- Banned in D.C.
- I Against I
Minor Threat
- Straight Edge
- Minor Threat
- Out of Step
The Replacements
- I Will Dare
- Unsatisfied
- Bastards of Young
- Can't Hardly Wait
Hüsker Dü
- Something I Learned Today
- Celebrated Summer
- Could You Be the One?
Beastie Boys
- (You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)
- Paul Revere
- Hey Ladies
- Shake Your Rump
Fugazi
- Repeater
- Red Medicine
Nirvana
- Nevermind
- In Utero
- MTV Unplugged in New York
Rage Against the Machine
- Rage Against the Machine
- Evil Empire
- The Battle of Los Angeles
Sublime
- 40oz. to Freedom
- Sublime
Bikini Kill
- Pussy Whipped
- Reject All American
Weezer
- Weezer (The Blue Album)
- Pinkerton
Green Day
- Dookie
- Insomniac
- Nimrod
The Prodigy
- Music for the Jilted Generation
- The Fat of the Land
Ani DiFranco
- Not a Pretty Girl
- Dilate
Sleater-Kinney
- Call the Doctor
- Dig Me Out
The Hives
- Veni Vidi Vicious
- Hate to Say I Told You So
- Tyrannosaurus Hives
blink-182
- Take Off Your Pants and Jacket
- blink-182
- I Miss You
Interpol
- Turn On the Bright Lights
- Antics
Killswitch Engage
- Alive or Just Breathing
- The End of Heartache
- As Daylight Dies
LCD Soundsystem
- Losing My Edge
- LCD Soundsystem
- Sound of Silver
- All My Friends
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
- Fever to Tell
- Maps
- It's Blitz!
Franz Ferdinand
- Franz Ferdinand
- Take Me Out
My Chemical Romance
- Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge
- The Black Parade
- Welcome to the Black Parade
Green Day
- American Idiot
- Boulevard of Broken Dreams
- 21st Century Breakdown
Arctic Monkeys
- Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
- Favourite Worst Nightmare
- I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor
Fall Out Boy
- From Under the Cork Tree
- Infinity on High
- Dance, Dance
Paramore
- Riot!
- Misery Business
- Brand New Eyes
Paramore
- Paramore
- After Laughter
XXXTentacion
- 17
- SAD!
Turnstile
- Time and Space
Knocked Loose
- A Different Shade of Blue
- You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To
- Suffocate
Playboi Carti
- Whole Lotta Red
- MUSIC
- Sky
Olivia Rodrigo
- drivers license
- Sour
- Guts
Turnstile
- Glow On
- Never Enough
- BLACKOUT
Wet Leg
- Chaise Longue
- Wet Leg
- Moisturizer
Fontaines D.C.
- Skinty Fia
- Romance
- Starburster
Records
Every record in the century tagged Punk, oldest first. Each title opens its write-up in its own decade.
The Sonics
Here Are the Sonics
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground & Nico
MC5
Kick Out the Jams
The Stooges
The Stooges
Patti Smith
Horses
Ramones
Ramones
Television
Marquee Moon
Sex Pistols
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
Suicide
Suicide
Blondie
Parallel Lines
Joy Division
Unknown Pleasures
The Clash
London Calling
Black Flag
Damaged
Bad Brains
Bad Brains
The Replacements
Let It Be
Hüsker Dü
Zen Arcade
Minutemen
Double Nickels on the Dime
Beastie Boys
Licensed to Ill
Nirvana
Nevermind
Rage Against the Machine
Rage Against the Machine
Nirvana
In Utero
Weezer
Weezer (The Blue Album)
Green Day
Dookie
The Offspring
Smash
Sunny Day Real Estate
Diary
The Prodigy
The Fat of the Land
Refused
The Shape of Punk to Come
At the Drive-In
Relationship of Command
Jimmy Eat World
Bleed American
Converge
Jane Doe
Interpol
Turn On the Bright Lights
blink-182
blink-182
Green Day
American Idiot
Arctic Monkeys
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
My Chemical Romance
The Black Parade
LCD Soundsystem
Sound of Silver
Twenty One Pilots
Blurryface
LCD Soundsystem
american dream
Turnstile
Time and Space
Machine Gun Kelly
Tickets to My Downfall
Playboi Carti
Whole Lotta Red
Olivia Rodrigo
Sour
Turnstile
Glow On
Wet Leg
Wet Leg
Fontaines D.C.
Romance
Knocked Loose
You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To
Turnstile
Never Enough
The Mixtape
I Wanna Be Your Dog
The StoogesThree chords, a sleigh bell, and one piano note hit by John Cale for three minutes. Punk, seven years early, from a basement in Ann Arbor.
Gloria
Patti SmithJesus died for somebody's sins, but not hers, and then the band tears into Van Morrison. The first record out of CBGB, and proof punk could be poetry.
Blitzkrieg Bop
RamonesHey ho, let's go. Two minutes, three chords, downstrokes only. The song British punk sped up to match, and the most useful chant in rock.
Anarchy in the U.K.
Sex PistolsA sneer, a laugh, and the line about being an antichrist. Released five days before the Grundy interview put the band on every front page in Britain.
Psycho Killer
Talking HeadsTina Weymouth's bass line, a chorus half in French, and David Byrne apologising for being a murderer. The other thing punk could be: nervous, funky, and smart.
Disorder
Joy DivisionHook's bass playing the melody, drums like a machine in a cathedral, and Ian Curtis waiting for a guide to come and take him by the hand. Punk's energy turned into post-punk's space.
London Calling
The ClashThe Thames flooding, the ice age coming, and Joe Strummer howling like a wolf at the end. Punk three years old and already writing its own apocalypse. End the decade here.
Love Will Tear Us Apart
Joy DivisionReleased a month after Ian Curtis died. The bridge from post-punk to everything New Order, the Cure and the Smiths would do with sadness.
Rise Above
Black FlagHardcore's anthem, from a band that booked its own tours and took its own beatings. Two and a half minutes of refusing to lie down.
Basket Case
Green DayA song about a panic attack that ten million suburban kids learned on their first guitar. The gateway drug, as I call it, and still the fastest way in.
The Middle
Jimmy Eat WorldA two-minute pep talk with a guitar solo. Emo leaves the basement for the radio without changing what it is about.
American Idiot
Green DayThree chords and a country at war, six weeks before the election. The punk rock opera starts here, and it ended up on Broadway.
Welcome to the Black Parade
My Chemical RomanceStarts on a single piano note and ends as a marching band. Emo's Bohemian Rhapsody, and the kids in eyeliner got their opera.
BLACKOUT
TurnstileHardcore with Cure guitars and a chorus a festival field can shout. Proof heavy music never needed to soften itself to get big.