Getting The Punk Out !

Two things have been on loop in Dubai recently. A 100 degree C sun (with 900% humidity) and The Police : Live! playing in my car and phone. And via Misters Sting , Summers and Copeland , I drove on down the road to punk rock.  

To those of us rockists born too late - and,in any case, living too far-  when little punk kicked big rock's ass, it's worthwhile listening to late seventies punk to recognize it for the revolution that it undoubtedly was. I mean how much guitar-and-keyboards progressive rock - ' phony Beatlemania bitten the dust' ,in the words of that Clash song - could the world have taken without either going up in flames or going to sleep ? 

I went off that too-trodden classic rock-only road a few years ago and discovered a fantastic other world out there but other than,say, a London Calling on the radio I hadn't sampled punk. Then I got on to the Ramones a few days ago and Blitzkrieg Bop came on like the fucking Luftwaffe on steroids. So did all the other tracks that followed in that eponymous album , a succession of two-minute shock waves that end before you've had enough of hearing two chords played over and over.  That's where they nailed it, these punksters, and where prog rock missed the trick of ending their songs before you tired of hearing 200 chords!

The Ramones album is very samey. Each track sounds like the one before it and you can't hear the album nonstop without coming unhinged.  But take this album  a few tracks at a time and you get its innate genius. What it is is consistent :  the shortness , simplicity , starkness and the silliness - all of  those gel together to such perfection.

You can imagine how it , along with those other seminal albums from the Pistols ,Clash and the like, could have spoken Truth to this whole other species as removed from your own middle class Indian reality as could be - of angry young unemployed white street hoodsters all drunken rage and druggy fucked-up raggedness. What better test for greatness in art ?

As you hear it now, you can trace the arc of its influence-trajectory into everything from the first Dire Straits album through post-punk and New Wave to,heck, maybe even the New Wave of British Heavy Metal thing.

And The Police ? A really amazing subtext to the whole thing. On which more later.

Here's Blitzkrieg Bop if  you hadn't heard it before. Turn the mofo up.  Bop on !