Originally Posted by
Baribrotzer
There is also, within punk, a "clean", intentional, post-modern intellectual current: It was born as a stripping-down, a casting-off of excess, a Marxist return of Art to the People; its background, formation, and artistic aims were fairly clear and well-documented; and it had the published manifestoes and sense of making history required for a proper "movement". Within punk, there were always people who knew exactly what they were doing on a cultural and political level, and could hold forth at length and in depth about the hows, whens, and whys of said movement. They may have lived it, but they editorialized upon it at the same time, and they were knowing in a few rock musicians were or are. All of which made punk quite well-suited to academic study.
Certainly far more so than the relatively chaotic growth of prog out of psych, orchestral pop, jazz, the BBC's restrictive broadcasting policies, Music Appreciation classes, and a dozen other threads; perhaps with parallel artistic impulses, but with a hundred different ways of realizing those, with a hundred different philosophies behind it - or with no discernible philosophy at all, other than, "Let's do something different and interesting!" And with little or no editorializing - they were too busy doing it to worry about how or when or why.
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