What separates the exceptional punk bands from the rest of the mob is that while these selected few stayed true to the core values and benchmarks of punk, they also managed to transcend them. On the contrary, it probably tells us more about what caused the downfall of the genre.Īnger, noise and a hard-edged sound are not sufficient in themselves because without a sense of purpose punk music often degenerates into adolescent neurosis directed at nothing in particular. Although it’s hard to argue against this way of epitomizing the genre at large, it doesn’t capture what made the classics of the punk movement great.

These attributes can be spotted from the beginnings in early 1970s proto-punk, through the “golden age” of mid-to-late-1970s punk rock and finally in the genre’s culmination as hardcore punk, thrash and grindcore in the 1980s. Punk is rebellious, intense and stripped-down (in relation to other forms of rock music). In summaries of punk as musical and cultural phenomenon, three attributes are frequently used as main descriptors. The Exceptional and the Rest – Three Attributes of Punk The same could be said about their extra-musical aesthetics and choice of lyrical subject matter. While the ratio of mediocre metal music to the excellent has increased exponentially for some time, the decay has been running longer and harder in punk.įor this reason, the Misfits are a good place to start: their distinctive form of horror punk - an amalgamation of 1970s melodic punk rock and hardcore punk, injected with musical ideas of bygone eras like 1950s rockabilly and surf rock - seems to connect well with metalheads. Musicians appreciated these shared influences and used them to produce classics like Overkill, Show No Mercy and Morbid Tales on the metal side and Arise!, The Age of Quarrel and Dealing With It on the punk edge.Įxploring punk music comes with its pitfalls: the genre has become depleted over the years, so it is easy to go wrong with punk. While there is a stubborn tradition of hostility between metal and punk fans, owing in part to the class divide imposed by the social justice politics of later punk, many metalheads acknowledge the interweaving of hardcore punk with the genetics of metal from speed metal to later transformations into death and black metal. This attitude obscures the fact that the best of punk is worth exploring on its own terms and merits, starting with perhaps the greatest influence of punk technique and heightened aesthetics in that genre, hardcore punk‘s The Misfits. Metalheads tend to be wary of punk, recognizing it only for its role as an influence on metal.

Misfits discography rare