Punk Avant Garde has No Class

Now it can be revealed! After some deliberation and argumentation these are the 9 most “avant garde” bands associated with “punk rock” in my opinion.

1.       CRASS Total subversion, total anarchy, vegan chaos, swearing, blasphemy, pay no more than 49p to hide from Reality Asylum with Shaved Women and screaming babies. Best before 1984 but sadly even more relevant today.

2.       THE POP GROUP We are time, deconstructed chaos, reconstructed dub without the boring Jah Jah cannabis sunshine daydream

3.       THIS HEAT Never forget you have a choice, intense prog rock in HEAVY disguise

4.       WIRE Accidentally invented hardcore punk, intentionally invented dugga and too clever for their own good

5.       DOME Weird offshoot of WIRE with silly tube hats mostly hated by “punks”

6.       THE FALL How old are the stars really? How can you quantify destruction?

7.       MELT BANANA Teeny shiny hyper video chipmunk core from Tokyo, Japan

8.       SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES Middle class girl transforms herself into a walking singing work of art, and I’m hearing voices, drop dead, she’s your little voodoo dolly, accidentally invented eighties Goth scene

9.       PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED First three albums only and Lydon’s a buttery shithead these days, totally lost the plot after ripping off Flipper

With the exception of The Fall. PIL and The Pop Group most of these bands are mostly from middle class backgrounds as far as I know, rather disproving a friend’s assertion that “the avant garde is working class.” The “avant garde” has no class. Who should be number 10?

Later I wrote this in reaction to many suggestions, including that Throbbing Gristle and Pere Ubu should be on this list:

Well Mission of Burma wouldn’t be in a “top ten” but if we expand this list to fifty or more then they have to feature. Roger Miller has made much more experimental music outside of Mission of Burma. The same would be true of Gang of Four, who no one has mentioned yet! I think it would be an interesting exercise to try to expand this list to a hundred bands, but maybe limit it to bands that came into existence between 1975 and 1980. It probably makes sense to ditch the hierarchical aspect as this is mostly too subjective. Throbbing Gristle should certainly feature and would be a candidate for the no 1 slot in a hierarchy, I was really just arguing for the sake of it. So should Pere Ubu, despite David Thomas’ jaundiced view of “punk rock.” Even though I love a lot of the music, I hate the term “punk” but it has a cultural and musical meaning that has eclipsed its prison slang origin, in much the same way that “gay” is rarely used to mean happy anymore. Another standard term I hate is “krautrock” which is especially silly when applied to bands that aren’t German. In making Crass the most “avant garde” band I wasn’t just thinking of their sound, but of their politics and cultural impact. They and Throbbing Gristle both got bourgeois tory scum agitated about their art and that makes them more “avant garde” than any of the other bands. I also think that Siouxsie has had such a huge cultural impact and that no matter how many poppier singles the Banshees made, they are still more important to any historical narrative than relatively unknown noisier or weirder sounding artists. If we looked at the so called “avant garde” of “punk rock” then I can’t think of any bands who had more cultural impact than Siouxsie, TG, Wire and Crass. All four created new musical genres, whether they meant to or not. As far as I’m aware only Crass had the intention of instigating and nurturing a scene (Anarcho-Punk) and this in itself makes them more interesting to me. Actually their aims were probably far more ambitious than that, and as far as I’m concerned they haven’t failed yet. They’d almost found anarchy and peace when the system dropped its bomb. And in the ruins the survivors start all over again. And that’s where Killing Joke stride in…