Word: punks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...latest album, Sheik Yerbouti (on Zappa Records), he lashes out more than ever before at today's "young generation." Zappa mocks punk, disco, kinky sex, JAPs, and yes -- even Peter Frampton. As for the album's title, well, only Zappa could concoct a name that uses disco jargon to suggest OPEC domination. Unfortunately, the music itself is mechanical and boring, and the lyrics provoke the listener without providing any insight in return...
...violinist criticized today's popular music. "Every six months it's something different--either punk, hunk, stunk or bunk," Stern said...
Facile condemnations of this sort of thing clearly won't do. It's hard to get a handle on the punk fascination with Nazism: Elvis Costello talks about emotional fascism, Johnny Rotten sings about Belsen, and the swastika is the dominant icon in punk life, but what does it all add up to? With Rotten, it may just be the shock value, as when he used to tell people he cut out his hemmorhoids with a razor. And just how is one supposed to react to something like Belsen, anyway...
...album closes with Sid Vicious's "My Way," already a punk classic. Sid hams it up in a thickened, quavering voice until Steve Jones's guitar breaks the song into the desperately vital punk mode. The poignancy of the lyrics, in light of Vicious's early death, need not be belabored here. Just let "My Way" stand as a testament to his visceral understanding of the punk aesthetic...
...long overdue obituary for Sid Vicious. Sid Vicious had the extraordinary good fortune of the very, very few who are born into an artistic movement that mirrors their inner sensibility, whose untrammeled self-expression jibes exactly, as if predestined, with the zeitgeist. He was the quintessential punk, with his chalk-white, emaciated body, his spiked hair and suicide-scars and drunken, fun-loving leer. When he danced the pogo, it became the rage; when he pieced together his clothes with safety pins, that device became the emblem of an entire subculture. He realized that old age would be a breach...