Pop-Punk as a sub-genre is almost as old as punk. While the genre may have hit its commercial peak
in 1994, since the very start of punk rock there have been bands that mixed heartfelt lyrics
and pop suss with punk's speed and aggression. It's not always been the most respected genre,
but who says punk's “three chords and the truth” sentiment doesn't apply to the excruciation of a
relationship gone bad. The chain of influence has generally been simplified to: Buzzcocks
plus Descendents plus Husker Du equals Green Day. But its much more complex than that. So what is
the evolution of pop-punk? How did we get from the Ramones to Green Day in 18 years? And most
importantly, how did we get to the point where a “punk rock” band could sell 20 million records?
The first time pop and punk merged in a
significant way was on The Ramones debut. While bands like The Stooges and The MC5 had
previously created frenetic guitar attacks, The Ramones came at it from a different angle.
As fast as the Ramones played, for the most part they were inspired by pop music, by Phil Spector Girl
Groups and Bubblegum 7 inches. The loud guitar work is their kind of way of replicating the
force of Spector's Wall of Sound.
But their pop-leaning is most present on both their cover of Chris Montez “Let's Dance”,
and on the album's second single
The latter with its slightly slower tempo, recalls pop ballads like The Searchers' “Needles and Pins”,
which through the voice of Joey Ramone comes off as endearingly dorky. Even the infamous “Hey Ho, Let's Go!” chant was
inspired by Scottish boyband The Bay City Rollers. Said Joey Ramone in liner notes for their 1999
anthology: “I hate to blow the mystique but, at the time, we really liked
bubblegum music and we really like the Bay City Rollers. Their song “Saturday Night” had a great
chant in it, so we wanted a song with a chant in it... “Blitzkrieg Bop” was our “Saturday Night”.
Punk rock hit the UK in 1976.
While the first wave of bands were fatalistic and not wanting to give away their debt to pop
acts like T. Rex and David Bowie on their sound and personas, it was still present
though mostly played ironically. The first UK punk single released in October 76 was
“New Rose” by The Damned.
The song, unlike the politically violent stew of the Pistols, Clash
or even the Damned's later singles, was about a girl, a new romance that the singer was besotted
with. Not only that but the song's opening line is a tongue-in-cheek reference, if not complete rip,
from the Shang ra-Las' “Leader of the Pack”
and the single's b-side was a snotty double-time cover of the Beatles' “Help!”.
Pop's influence was there, but it was a joke, a goof, pop wasn't to be taken seriously. That just wasn't punk rock.
That was until Manchester's Buzzcocks.
They were one of the first bands from the first wave of British punk to properly encapsulate
the pop-punk genre. Buzzcocks dealt with romantic confusion, sexual missteps and Beatlesque melody
within the roaring punk template. Singles like “What Do I Get?”, “Ever Fallen In Love?” and
“Everybody's Happy Nowadays” are all classics, influencing a clutch of sexually-frustrated punks,
and the Manchester independent scene, in their wake. “The reason some of them have been so
popular is that things which have been going on inside my head have been going on inside lots of
other people's heads. Therefore, they get the same ideas that I do, the same confusion and the same
doubts and fears.” But their first single was trendsetting in its own way.
“Orgasm Addict” was released in November of 77, and is an ode to onanism, as well as the sexual
politics of a nymphomaniac. It also has the near perfect line:
Its subject matter made it so the song was banned by the BBC. By 1978 singer
Pete Shelley had reservations about the song and specifically his shaky vocal performance:
“That song is embarrassing. It's the only one I listen to and... shudder.” But in its
filth it set up one of the standard non-romantic topics for pop-punk song writing i.e. self love.
While not as fondly remembered as Buzzcocks, Generation X were crucial to the evolution of pop-punk,
mostly for being one of the first bands to be perceived as inauthentic, fake and therefore
lesser. As with modern pop-punk bands that seem a bit too manufactured, too pretty, too pop,
Generation X were dismissed for their look, their sound and how their singer Billy Idol just
happened to tag along with London's punk elite. The phrase used for them was “Plastic Punk”, i.e.
not quite the real thing. Of course, punk rock was always a game of proving yourself most legit:
that's why Sex Pistols' bassist Glen Matlock was famously fired for listening to ABBA and
The Beatles. It's all about the appearance of realness, a realness that Generation X lacked.
Despite this, Generation X's self titled debut is filled with pop-punk gems,
from The Who-referencing “Your Generation” to “One Hundred Punks”.
The Clash's “1977” has the lyric:
But two of these artists get positive namechecks in Gen X's first single “Ready Steady Go”;
they were not a band to shy away from their pop-centric
influences. Led by the sneering, Top of the Pops-ready face of Idol, the band appealed
to the more teeny-boppery female fans and so were not taken seriously by the punk movement
at large. But the punk street poetry of ballad “Kiss Me Deadly” would be cribbed and repeated
by the more Springsteen-friendly pop-punks, the Hold Steady, Jawbreaker and especially Green Day
on their American Idiot album. Plus for better or worst, Billy Idol would be the commercial face of
punk throughout the 80s with MTV hits in “White Wedding”, “Rebel Yell” and “Eyes Without a Face”.
From Derry in Northern Ireland, The Undertones
continued Buzzcocks work, albeit with an Irish accent, in their mum's knitted sweaters and with
a fondness for that percussive pop staple: the hand clap.
Basically a T. Rex song revved up to punk speed, “Teenage Kicks”, was named to evoke the title of the MC5 song “Teenage Lust”.
Pop-punk at its most pure, it's a song about singer Feargal Sharkley's desire for a girl in his neighbourhood.
While the other major punk band from Northern Ireland, Stiff Little Fingers, was
shouting polemic and singing directly about the violence and tragedy present at the time,
The Undertones preferred to keep things about adolescent angst. Said guitarist John O'Neill
in 1978: “The songs are a lot more personal than just commenting on a general situation like the Troubles,”
Stiff Little Fingers themselves have been an inspiration for
the pop-punk sphere; their song “Alternative Ulster”, despite The Troubles looming in the
background is about that very teenage subject: boredom.
“It was a song written in that classic punk mode about having nothing to do. That was the overriding reality of life in Belfast for
a teenager in the mid-Seventies: ...the sheer tedium of having nowhere to go”.
Also their barbed wire guitar work can be heard in Green Day's day-glo blitz.
Other bands in the UK punk scene were influential to the
pop-punk movement. From The Jam and their Who-inspired anthems of the working class,
to The Adverts and their sarcastic apathy on tracks like “Bored Teenagers”.
Also The Clash, by 1982 were playing stadiums, the first honest-to-goodness Punk act to do so,
and tracks like “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” while more straight ahead rock than punk,
created a blueprint for the Arena-bothering punks of the late 90s to replicate.
A lot of punk-ish music after 1978 was deemed to be New Wave, the commercial next step in getting
punk rock played on the radio. This included Radio-averse Elvis Costello and the Attractions,
and The Police, the latter later being covered by The Offspring, Leatherface and Fall Out Boy.
U.S. New Wave bands like Blondie, The Go Gos and even the Cars would influence the late-80s influx of
punk, in a similar way early seventies glam did for the UK Punk wave, because that's what they
grew up listening to. But rarely would they admit it.
In California 1978, The Dickies released their
debut album, The Incredible Shrinking Dickies. Their sound was closer still to the pop-punk
of blink-182, faster, more melodic and with goofy songs and singing. The Dickies themselves jokingly
called their style “easy listening punk” in a 1978 interview with Sounds. Their lyrics
weren't focused on love though, but more pop culture and silliness as on their song
“You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla)”.
Their most inspired moment was their cover of the
theme to children's TV show The Banana Splits.
A top ten hit in the UK, it was lightspeed fast,
ultra-silly and would inspire wacky pop punk covers from here onwards.
While the Dickies were faster than anything coming
out of the British wave, Hardcore was faster and heavier than The Dickies. The genre started
gathering speed from 1978 onwards with bands like Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, X and Bad Brains.
But just because it was faster and heavier, didn't mean there wasn't room for pop melody.
Hailing from Orange Country, California, The Adolescents were a hardcore band that skewed towards poppier material.
This is most present on the gang vocal harmonies of “Amoeba”.
Powered by their guitarist Rikk Agnew's superior
guitar ability, The Adolescents stood above their contemporaries: “Rikk's songwriting was really
adventurous for punk rock. He was writing stuff that was punk but had a Beatles-esque
quality with the guitar harmonies.” Because of this,
“Amoeba” became a major local hit, getting a huge amount of airplay on California's KROQ. But the
Adolescents weren't the only OC-based hardcore band that gained a local radio breakthrough.
A year previous the more Dick Dale-influenced sound of Agent Orange was playing on KROQ in
the form of “Bloodstains”.
To quote Allmusic: “Were they punk, power pop, or surf rock?”
This musical blurred line would influence a lot of pop-punk,
not least The Offspring who Agent Orange sued by for using the “Bloodstains” solo as the main riff of “Come Out and Play”.
Texas' Bowling For Soup even namecheck the band in “Girl All the Bad Guys Want”
In 1982 Social Distortion released their debut album, Mommy's Little Monster, and its title track would also get play on KROQ.
With vocalist Mike Ness' hoarse gruff voice and Johnny Cash & Clash obsession,
they would draw up a template for bands like Rancid and Jawbreaker in the 90s.
About why these bands got local famous, Adolescents singer Tony Cadena stated:
“I think bands like us and Social Distortion and Agent Orange were able to put out stuff
that stood out from the hardcore scene because we had these diverse influences. I grew up listening
to oldies radio... you gravitate toward what you're familiar with.”
All these pop-inspired hardcore bands would create a groundswell that made pop-punk a distinctly Californian genre.
Probably the most important of the Californian melodic hardcore bands was the Descendents.
Having released the coffee-powered Fat EP in 1981,
which featured five songs in four and a half minutes,
their follow up slowed down slightly and added a touch more tunefulness. Sugary sweet but with
a bitter aftertaste, on Milo Goes to College they were singing about relationships gone
wrong and other soon to be standard pop-punk fare like loserdom and wanting to be a bear.
Compared to their oft-tour mates Black Flag's psychotic rage, a song like The
Descendents' “Hope” was immediately relatable on a personal level. A look at a break up where
singer Milo Aukerman is bitter and twisted yet knows that whenever she comes back to him,
he'll still be there.
“When that one came out, I thought I could write about excruciating things. I didn't have to write about
'Reagan sucks.' I can write about my girlfriend leaving me and that's totally reasonable and
acceptable and that's what I want to do. It was a watershed moment because I realized it was the
kind of music I wanted to make.”
Milo Goes to College would be hugely influential, NOFX frontman Fat Mike has stated that it is his all-time favourite album,
and it is fair to say that Californian pop-punk would not sound the same without it. In 2001,
it was ranked at number 20 of Spin's “50 Most Essential Punk Albums”.
Just to prove that California
wasn't the only place in America that melodic hardcore was percolating, please look no further
than Minnesota's The Replacements and Husker Du. Probably the first of the American proto-pop-punks
to take the Buzzcocks' sound to heart, being that their songs jangle slightly rather than buzzsaw,
as early as 1983 the two bands were trying to outdo each other by seeing how melodic hardcore
music could be. While both their earlier albums dealt more with race-to-the-finish
hardcore assaults, by their respective second albums they were writing songs that could be
played on the radio. Husker Du had tracks like “Pink Turns to Blue” on their Zen Arcade album,
pushing melody in hardcore to its breaking point,
while The Replacements' Hootenanny LP had the this-party-sucks anthem “Color Me Impressed”.
Major labels came knocking soon after, The 'Mats signed to Sire in 1985, The Du to Warner Bros in 1986.
Though they both burnt out a few years later, they proved that punk rock could be sold to the masses.
From The Ramones to The Replacements, proto-pop-punk has had to get faster,
heavier but also juggle with its pop influences. Some get loved for their
pop-infused take of punk rock, while others are looked down on. There's heartache,
bitterness and goofiness added to the sub-genre's lyricbook but
we are still nowhere near Green Day's breakthrough release, Dookie in 1994.
So it turns out that this video is running way too long, so it's a gonna be a two-parter. So
tune in next time. Part two will feature Bad Religion, Operation Ivy, Nirvana,
Jawbreaker, Screeching Weasel, NOFX and of course Green Day. See you in two weeks.