The bands that made the 1990s the “new punk rock” era, according to Bono
The punk movement remains one of the most pivotal in music, and equally one of the trickiest to define. It seems that even wordsmith Bono struggled to pin down what the sound meant.
In the late 1970s, society and political tension was at an all-time high, as the wealth gap throughout the country grew and it felt as though the working class were constantly sold the worst end of every deal. People formally used music as a means of escapism from these troubling times, but even that was becoming inaccessible. Going to a Rolling Stones gig meant paying a lot of money for a ticket that would put you at the back of a field surrounded by tens of thousands of people. If you held your thumb out in front of you, it would block the view of the stage.
The way was set for a new form of counterculture, and that came in the form of a new rage-infused kind of music. Bands like the Sex Pistols littered the streets with tattered clothes and fuck you attitudes, taking to stages across the country to eminate their frustration at the system which was keeping them down.
When discussing Britain at the back end of the ‘70s, Lydon said it was “A very depressing place.” He continued, “There was trash on the streets, total unemployment – just about everybody was on strike, if you came from the wrong side of the tracks, then you had no hope in hell and no career prospects at all […] Out of that came the Sex Pistols and then a whole bunch of copycat wankers after us.”
The punk movement burned bright and fast. While some punk bands went on to become the stuff of legend, such as The Clash and Sex Pistols, the majority of acts used punk as a jumping off point but then adapted their sound. There was a lot to love about the genre, such as the chaos, abrasiveness and anti-authoritarian aspects of the music. This was the kind of stuff that could soundtrack a rebellion, that would play through the streets as an anthemic revolution, and as such it has bled into multiple different styles of music since, with the term “punk” having morphed into something much broader.
We can apply the term punk to anything which is shocking and cutting edge. You will frequently see bands, attitudes and various other aspects of music given the punk moniker, even if they have nothing in common. It means the term is elusive and difficult to pin down on one specific aspect of music, but the free range nature of punk is what so many people find appealing about it.
Billie Joe Armstrong puts the loose nature of the term into perspective best: “A guy walks up to me and asks, ‘What’s punk?’. So I kick over a garbage can and say, ‘That’s punk!’. So he kicks over a garbage can and says, ‘That’s punk?’ and I say, ‘No, that’s trendy’.”
When Bono was talking about punk, he spoke about the style of music more as a movement than a mindset, as opposed to a specific sound. This is why he said that there was another punk uprising in the ‘90s which came in the form of grunge. He credited an abundance of distortion wielding, rhythm manipulating musical innovators with this new era of punk, such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
“It’s important to remember that at that very moment in the early ’90s, there were a lot of people making kind of a new punk-rock music in short pants and plaid shirts,” said Bono, “The grunge movement was just getting off the ground. Nirvana had just released ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Pearl Jam were coming through with Ten [1991]. Primal Scream had done something similar with Screamadelica [1991]. Then Radiohead was coming through. Oasis. Massive Attack. Björk. It was a very fertile period, the early ’90s.”
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