Punk In New York America

In 1976, Patti Smith ended her rendition of The Who's "My Generation" with the declaration, "We created it; let's take it over!" She knew what she was talking about. Punk rock by birthright was an American creation, originated by New York City musicians during the mid 1960s, but the British version of punk was more famous. Punk was born with the Velvet Underground in New York City. Though the Velvets achieved cult status and eventually critical acclaim, such British bands as the Sex Pistols were better known. As a result, twenty years later, punk is falsely considered a British creation.


In an academic context, New York's punk rock is difficult to explain. It eludes blanket generalizations of content and philosophy and never became popular enough during its original inception to be incorporated into mass culture. New York punk's philosophy evolved out of necessity. Jon Savage captured the idea in his book, England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, and Beyond. For his book, Savage interviewed Richard Hell of the New York band Television, and established that Hell considered rock music to be "secret teenage news" (Savage 88). Punk was about youth; it borrowed the street and rebellion element from rock's origins, and promised individuality. The best way to describe punk is to say what it was not. In the imagination of rock music audiences, the pop charts of the late 1960s and early 1970s are saturated with rebellion and sexual revolution. In reality, the charts reflected a homogenized landscape of bland pop. Punk rock certainly did not crack the veneer of pop, but it expanded pop's boundaries....
The beat generation, which emerged in the late 1940s, followed in the tradition of Western culture's youth-obsessed artistic and literary idealists. Beatniks claimed to be outside the ranks of cultural norms, but they were actually products of a middle class heritage that in turn influenced their work. In late nineteenth century France, a group of young artists and writers known as bohemians disavowed the restrictions and norms of their cultural heritage. The beats copied these French bohemians and their romantic ideals of artistic productivity.

The beats saw themselves as a modern version of the "lost" generation of post-World War I and as outcasts in a society recovering from a war in which they were too young to fight. The "lost" generation established a new pattern of migration--instead of flocking to Paris as expatriates, the beats fled to such urban environments as New York City and San Francisco.

The beats also influenced later generations of youth subcultures. The early punk movement during the mid-1970s emulated beat poetry and lifestyle to forge a new genre of rock'n'roll music. These musicians borrowed heavily from both the beats and the French romantic poets to emerge as distinct from the rock musicians of the time....