punk

The Jam | Absolute Beginners

“The Jam were the most popular band to emerge from the initial wave of British punk rock in 1977; along with the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Buzzcocks, the Jam had the highest impact on pop music,” (Qobuz). “While they could barely get noticed in America, the trio became genuine superstars in Britain, with an impressive string of Top Ten singles in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The Jam could never have a hit in America because they were thoroughly and defiantly British … More than any other group, the Jam kept the tradition of the three-minute, hook-driven British guitar pop alive through the ’70s and ’80s, providing a blueprint for generations of bands to come.

Under the direction of guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Paul Weller, the trio spearheaded a revival of mid-’60s mod groups, in the style of the Who and the Small Faces. Like the mod bands, the group dressed stylishly, worshipped American R&B, and played it loud and rough. By the time of the group’s third album, Weller’s songwriting had grown substantially, as he was beginning to write social commentaries and pop songs in the vein of the Kinks … as the Jam grew more popular and musically accessible, Weller became more insistent and stubborn about his beliefs, supporting leftist causes and adhering to the pop aesthetics of ’60s British rock without ever succumbing to hippie values. Paradoxically, that meant even when their music became more pop than punk, they never abandoned the punk values — if anything, Weller stuck to the strident independent ethics of 1977 more than any other punk band just by refusing to change.”

“Absolute Beginners” (1981) begins in D major; at 0:53, the chorus shifts down to B major, but the tune ends decisively in E major. Despite not getting much airplay in the US, the video couldn’t adhere any more closely to the standards of the earliest days of MTV, featuring over-exposed, over-lit footage.

21 Guns (from “American Idiot”)

“When young dirtbag punk trio Green Day signed to a major label in 1994, their first album, Dookie, captured the small pleasures of a disconnected working-class youth that was fast running out of options,” (The Guardian). “Their songs about getting high, jerking off and defiantly refusing to participate in the system were relatable and catchy – pleasingly melodic with 1950s doo-wop influences, coupled with California punk-style bass and drums. Pop-punk would later explode as a genre, in part to emulate Green Day’s singable raucousness.

Their ideas back then were scattershot, more informed by feeling than sociopolitical thought. But 10 years later, the band found their political voice and released their manifesto: American Idiot. Billed as a “rock opera”, the album was a sophisticated, horrified portrait of America in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the conservative Bush presidency, and rapidly disappearing opportunities for those living close to America’s poverty line. American Idiot was a smash, selling 15 million records – and in 2010, a stage adaptation landed on Broadway. The album’s driving rock structure was coupled with songs from Green Day’s next album, 21st Century Breakdown, and caressed into soaring, edgy vocal arrangements and new orchestrations by the band and composer Tom Kitt, whose musical Next to Normal picked up a Pulitzer prize that same year.”

The original “21 Guns,” released on 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown, was written in one key throughout. But the Broadway version, while built around the same repeating melodic phrases and lyrics-forward delivery, features several changes in tonality. Starting in G minor, the tune shifts (after two verses and a chorus in the relative Bb major performed by female vocalists) to D minor as Green Day’s lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong takes the reins. For the second chorus, the key flips over to the relative F major at 2:34. More key changes follow throghout.

The original video by the band is included after the cast version from the 2010 stage producion, below.

The Offspring | Americana

“In 2015, The Offspring auctioned off the rights for their Columbia Records catalogue to Round Hill Music, a $35 million deal that included a total of six studio albums and a greatest hits LP — all released after 1994’s Smash, the group’s Epitaph breakthrough and still the best selling independent album of all time … (but) Round Hill was interested primarily in the crown jewel of (1998’s) Americana,” (Stereogum). The album’s lead single, “Pretty Fly for a White Guy,” is almost certainly the band’s best known track.

” … The Offspring’s transgressions in the ’90s did not exactly mirror those of their fellow radio-rockers; they did not hold as explicit a strain of toxic misogyny that saddled so many of their pop-punk peers and later descendants … As a whole, Americana practices a sort of ‘respectability politics’ against people in poverty — criticizing junkies, criminals, and the unemployed for not owning up and dealing with their problems, all the while conveniently neglecting any structural factors that may be at the root. Basically, it re-imagines punk rock as Fox News.” The Album reached #2 on the Billboard 200 album chart before being certified gold and then platinum.

As if “Americana” didn’t have enough energy to begin with, the band adds a half-step key change just before the track’s end (2:35).

Devo | Whip It

“The magnitude of Devo’s effect on music is one that is horrifically overlooked… something that completely baffles me,” (DrownedInSound). “Here is a band with everything required. Great catchy songs? Check. Insane live show? Check. Uber-intelligent members with a penchant for witty socio-political satire? Check. A sound completely different to everyone else? Check.

For many, Devo are just ‘that band’ who wrote ‘Whip It’ and wore red flower pots on their heads … This was when punk music was taking off; when ripped T-shirts and spikes were de rigeur. There were only three chords to a song, and certainly no keyboards or synths … What Devo did was decapitate the evolution of music. Their sound was not the next genesis of what had come before them. They envisioned a sound and distilled it, as opposed to (99 per cent of other) bands that merely mix various influences to create something ‘new’.

Devo’s Gerry Casale: ‘We had punk elements, but we were Punk Scientists. We weren’t nihilists or anti-intellectual. We had a degree of anger and intensity that definitely echoed punk, but we weren’t writing the same type of music. We were much more experimental … we met with so much resistance from radio and never got help from the powers that be, so we never really made any money. I made a little from the publishing of ‘Whip It’ … I wish Devo had made money, but it is nice to have respect from other creative people now … It is a great feeling and something a lot of people don’t get.'”

“Whip It” (1980) featured an intro verse written in an oddly colorless key of E, comprised of a non-standard quadratonic scale — only the first, fourth, fifth, and flatted seventh steps of the key (joined by the second/ninth in the guitar hook starting at 0:39). At 0:49, the chorus arrives for the first time; the highest keyboard notes finally throw us a bone with a major third, revealing that this section is in C major. The pattern continues from there.

The Ramones | Bonzo Goes to Bitburg

“In 1986, the Reagan Administration entered into its second year of the second term in office,” (Consequence). “The Iran-Contra affair hadn’t fully been exposed at the time, and a group of leather jacketed punks from Queens, NY called The Ramones were entering their twelfth year together.” About a year before the release of The Ramones’ album Animal Boy in 1986, “President Reagan had made plans to observe the 40th anniversary of V-E Day. As a result of preplanned events, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl took the opportunity to show the strength between the U.S. and Germany and mend the differences between the nations that existed forty years prior. After all was said and done, President Reagan’s trip to Bitburg on May 5th, 1985 immediately caused outrage within the United States.” Much upset resulted — please look up the details. But the Jewish Virtual Library called it “one of the most acrimonious confrontations between any U.S. administration and the American Jewish Community.”

Consequence continues: “Joey Ramone (himself Jewish and sickened by Reagan’s visit), Dee Dee Ramone, and Plasmatics’ keyboardist/bassist Jean Beauvoir wrote the song in protest as well as a document of American history. “Bonzo” refers to the chimpanzee in the two movies that Reagan starred in during his acting career in the 1950’s, Bedtime For Bonzo (1951) and Bonzo Goes To College (1952).

At 2:39, the tune — an uncharacteristically polished and lengthy release for the band — shifts up a full step.

Good Charlotte | Wondering

“Wondering” is the fourth track on the 2002 album The Young and the Hopeless by the American rock band Good Charlotte. After their first record did not sell as well as they hoped, the group decided to let inspiration guide them for this release. “Nothing about that record was pre-meditated, we were just having fun, and trying to do the best we could to achieve that goal,” lead guitarist Benji Madden said. “We’d gone out into the world and felt both the positive and the negative. And on The Young And The Hopeless we decided to really take a direction and stand up for ourselves, in a way.”

The track shifts from B up a whole step to C# at 3:00

Green Day | Brutal Love

“Brutal Love” is the lead track on the 2012 album ¡Tré!, the third and final installment of a series released by the American rock band Green Day (who today make their MotD debut.) According to Billboard, the track “marries glam-rock, doo-wop and soul music. Part of the melody is lifted from Sam Cooke’s 1962 hit “Bring It On Home To Me,” leading him to be credited as a co-writer.

The song begins in Ab and modulates up to A coming out of the second bridge at 3:45.

The Ramones | I Wanna Be Sedated

Bob Boilen wrote an NPR review of “I Wanna Be Sedated,” the 1978 punk single-turned-classic, to accompany the song’s inclusion in the NPR 100. “I love The Ramones. I think The Ramones took rock ‘n’ roll back to its soul. In the mid-’70s, rock had grown into something big, fat, bloated. Bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes and Kansas were touring huge arenas. Large truck convoys followed them, filled with light towers and smoke machines and other things that had little to do with music … Along came Joey, Johnny, Tommy and Dee Dee, four guys from Queens with a passion for short, loud and fast songs with great hooks … The Ramones’ music was a call to brandish guitars, shift music back to the clubs and sing from the heart and the gut. And don’t forget: This is supposed to be fun … The Ramones’ vision never changed: Make fast, loud, fun music. No solos. Keep it short. Play to your audience, not to each other.”

Time Magazine recognized the tune as part of its All-Time Best 100. “The Ramones’ buzz-saw bubblegum was a spitball of opposition to nearly everything else happening in pop in the mid-’70s … (it’s) hilarious where it could have been self-indulgent, mostly because nobody had ever sung so earnestly about longing for tranquilizers. And they were famously averse to rock-‘n’-roll frippery like guitar solos, so Johnny Ramone’s ultra-minimalist solo here is both an upraised middle finger and a brilliant show of compositional chutzpah.”

The band’s trademark three-chord harmonic vocabulary instantaneously doubled when a whole-step modulation hits at 1:11. The tune has become a persistent pop culture ingredient, including the 1980 movie Times Square; TV’s My So-Called Life, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Beavis + Butthead; the video games Guitar Hero, Jam Sessions, and Rock Band 3; and many others. Many thanks to MotD regular Rob Penttinen for this submission.

Buzzcocks | I Don’t Mind

“With their crisp melodies, biting lyrics, and driving guitars, the UK’s Buzzcocks were one of most influential bands to emerge in the initial wave of punk rock,” AllMusic reports. “Buzzcocks were inspired by the Sex Pistols‘ energy, but they didn’t copy the Pistols‘ angry political stance. Instead, they brought that intense, brilliant energy to the three-minute pop song.”

Buzzcocks’ album Another Music In A Different Kitchen (1977) featured the single “I Don’t Mind,” which reached #55 on the UK Singles charts. The tune features a bridge at 1:16 — unusual for the punk genre. But at the end of the bridge, another rarity arrives: a half-step modulation (1:50), making this 2:20 track quite unusual within its genre.

Many thanks to Rob Penttinen for this contribution!

Talking Heads | Psycho Killer

A contribution from our frequent mod flyer JB: “Psycho Killer,” a single from the debut album of the American art punk band Talking Heads, Talking Heads 77 (1977), reached #92 on the Billboard hot 100. The tune also earned a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.

AllMusic calls the track a “deceptively funky ‘New Wave/No Wave song’ with an insistent rhythm, and one of the most memorable, driving bass lines in rock and roll.” From Robert Christgau’s review in The Village Voice: “…these are spoiled kids, but without the callowness or adolescent misogyny…in the end the record proves not only that the detachment of craft can coexist with a frightening intensity of feeling—something most artists know—but that the most inarticulate rage can be rationalized. Which means they’re punks after all.”

The tune overall is in A minor, with an intermittent overlay of A major in this live version; not surprising, given the absolute primacy of Tina Weymouth’s iconic bassline. The bridge (3:28 – 4:05) is an odd mix, but is built around A major. The modulation hits with zero warning and a complete lack of fuss at the bridge, which continues with a choppy energy, befitting the perpetual motion machine that the band has set in place. Unlike the studio version, this live performance features Adrian Belew, known for his work with King Crimson, on guitar; Belew’s solo could probably win the award for “Best Guitar in the role of a Theremin.”