Word: punks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Vince Lombardi High School, the movie's back-drop, indiscriminately mixes atmospheres of mid-'70s boredom and early '60s California youth culture. For the first 15 minutes, Rock and Roll High School could be an updated surfing movie, just as the Ramones are in a sense punk's answer to the Beach Boys. The jokes are the oldest in the book--football players stuff freshmen in closets; a shy, bespectacled girl sidles up to a football captain; the wonks display gadgets at a "science fair...
...movie might go on like Animal House at the secondary school level, but for Riff Randall (P.J. Soles), a blitzkrieg teenybopper who plays "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" over the school's public address system and lifts the whole movie out of its doldrums. Soles is the only real performer here--aside from the Ramones, of course, she plays the cheerleader-like Ramones groupie with enough cuteness and savvy to give her a fighting chance against the awkward screenplay...
...thought we had given so-called 'punk rock' a bad enough name--what with the chains, the leather and Sid Vicious' 'suicide'--but then the critics turned around and called it 'new wave.' We thought disco would bring home the bacon, but what has John Travolta done for us lately? We thought the days of the early 1970s would go on forever, the time when we could deal with a few big names like Elton John, Wings, Lead Dirigible, whoever. But we didn't have it wired...
...Ramones are the group most responsible for the spread of "new wave" in its most virulent form, that known as "punk rock." Listeners at Ramones concerts are regularly reported as having gone deaf. Their songs not only advocate "sniffing" glue, which causes brain damage and generally leads to addiction to heroin, but demand sedation, describe chainsaw massacres, and even outline the "blitzkrieg" technique of warfare popularized by the Nazis in World...
...that will do to point toward something moribund in a culture, the metastasis of despair that occurs when a society loses faith in its own future, when its energy wanes and dies. It would probably be more narrowly accurate to use words like corrupt or depraved to describe, say, punk rock, or murder in a gas line, but decadent is more popular because it contains a prophecy. To be decadent is to be not just corrupt, but terminally corrupt. "Decadence" speaks with the iron will of history and the punishment of the Lord. It is an accusation. "Woe to those...