Word: punks
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Richard Hell's Blank Generation, delivered over a throbbing four-note bass ostinato, is already a punk classic...
Sire Records' Seymour Stein, an early champion of punk, finds that the music reflects a mood of total indifference among the young. "They feel they had nothing to do with making the world the mess it is today, and they're also not going to do anything to make it any better-because they can't. They come to the music for the sake of the music, for entertainment, for getting...
Getting it on, of course, means love and sex, passions that old time rock 'n' roll had plenty to say about. But today's punk rockers have no time for euphemisms like Chuck Berry's "ding-a-ling." Four-letter words are not spared. And when Thundertrain bawls, "I'm hot, ho, hot, hot for teacher," there is no missing the point. The 1970s have been dominated by graduates of the 1960s rock era -Paul Simon and Paul McCartney moving out on their own, groups like the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Starship...
...record companies, who in turn have to bear in mind the strictures of radio. Signing with Private Stock Records, the group Blondie agreed to change "sex-offender" to "ex-offender." Not all New Wave groups are going to be that docile. The aura of rebellion is crucial to punk's pleasure. Swing-bred parents of the 1950s may have found Elvis Presley corrupt (as did CBS-TV, which cut him off above the pelvis), but the kids loved him. Folk-and rock-bred parents of the 1970s may not love the Dead Boys, but a lot of the kids...
These backgrounders do not add an awful lot to our enjoyment of subsequent proceedings, but the mini-action sequences promise bigger, better things to come. This implied promise of livelier things to come also helps get us through a middle passage where Roy Scheider, as the punk criminal, and Bruno Cremer, as the banker, are seen to suffer interminable misery in some of the most squalid squalor anybody this side of a PBS documentarian has put on a screen in a long time. Friedkin has probably been more rigorous about all this than the requirements of popular film making dictate...