The best punk song of all time, according to data science
Punk and science are two terms that don’t feel as though they should go together. Science tries to make order out of chaos, meanwhile, punk tries to add to it.
Punk has always been a pretty difficult genre to define. Ever since the style’s inception, since The Damned recorded their thrashy guitars and John Lyndon screamed angry everything down a microphone, it has been one of the most gatekept kinds of music in the world. The only thing heard over haphazard guitars are scathing indictments of “you don’t get it” and “you’re a poser” as people try hard to protect a branch of music that was supposed to be accessible to all.
John Lydon himself called the majority of punk bands who released music after the Sex Pistols “copycat wankers” as he felt as though they were getting into it for the wrong reasons. Bands like Buzzcocks and The Clash, despite resonating with listeners, didn’t come close to impressing the man who was credited with giving the genre its venom.
“What he was doing was creating division,” said Lydon when discussing The Clash’s Joe Strummer. “I told them all at the time, ‘All I want from you is tell me your middle-class experiences so we can share them instead of you coming down and imitating my lot’.” The Sex Pistol continued, “By that I mean my folk, my culture […] Have a picture taken outside council flats, you know, as if that equates integrity. No!”
It wasn’t just punks within the genre who struggled to make sense of it, but critics as well. For many, the punk movement was less of an artistic endeavour and instead a circus act. One of the reviews of Sex Pistols’ early gigs highlighted exactly that, as the music wasn’t discussed, while the anger of the band took centre stage.
“’HURRY UP, they’re having an orgy on stage,’ said the bloke on the door as he tore the tickets up. I waded to the front and straightaway sighted a chair arcing gracefully through the air, skidding across the stage and thudding contentedly into the PA system, to the obvious nonchalance of the bass drums and guitar,” read a review in the New Musical Express titled ‘Don’t Look Over Your Shoulder, But The Sex Pistols are Coming’. “Well I didn’t think they sounded that bad on first earful – then I saw it was the singer who’d done the throwing.”
Given Lydon’s disdain for many artists within the genre, and a lot of critics’ inability to understand it, it seems odd to rely on data science to provide the definitive answer as to what the best punk song is, and even odder that it would be Lydon and his merry band of Pistols who receive the acclaim, but here we are.
The website Acclaimed Music makes lists of the greatest songs from certain periods according to music magazines, radio stations and critics. In doing so, they are able to determine what the “industry” thinks about certain songs and music from different periods. When we look at those released in the 1970s, the highest ranking punk song, and so by definition the greatest punk song, belongs to Sex Pistols’ defiant ‘Anarchy In The UK’.
There’s no escaping that this song is excellent, but does this acclaim act as an oxymoron somewhat? Does the worldwide acclaim of a punk song mean that it actually can’t be counted as punk? How can something so accepted by the mainstream be described as a part of the counterculture? We find ourselves trapped in the web weaved by the gatekeeping nature of punk, a trap that is borderline impossible for us to crawl our way out of. Regardless, as far as data science is concerned, the Sex Pistols hit single is the greatest punk song of all time.
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