By late 1976, bands such as the Ramones, in New York City, and the Sex Pistols and The Clash, in London, were recognized as the vanguard of a new musical movement. The following year saw punk rock spreading around the world, and it became a major cultural phenomenon in the United Kingdom. For the most part, punk took root in local scenes that tended to reject association with the mainstream. An associated punk subculture emerged, expressing youthful rebellion and characterized by distinctive styles of clothing and adornment and a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies.
By the beginning of the 1980s, faster, more aggressive styles such as hardcore and Oi! had become the predominant mode of punk rock. Musicians identifying with or inspired by punk also pursued a broad range of other variations, giving rise to post-punk and the alternative rock movement. By the turn of the century, pop punk had been adopted by the mainstream, as bands such as Green Day and The Offspring brought the genre widespread popularity.
Throughout punk rock history, technical accessibility and a DIY spirit have been prized. In the early days of punk rock, this ethic stood in marked contrast to what those in the scene regarded as the ostentatious musical effects and technological demands of many mainstream rock bands. Musical virtuosity was often looked on with suspicion. According to Holmstrom, punk rock was "rock and roll by people who didn't have very much skills as musicians but still felt the need to express themselves through music". In December 1976, the English fanzine ''Sideburns'' published a now-famous illustration of three chords, captioned "This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band." The title of a 1980 single by the New York punk band Stimulators, "Loud Fast Rules!", inscribed a catchphrase for punk's basic musical approach.
Some of British punk rock's leading figures made a show of rejecting not only contemporary mainstream rock and the broader culture it was associated with, but their own most celebrated predecessors: "No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977", declared The Clash song "1977". The previous year, when the punk rock revolution began in Great Britain, was to be both a musical and a cultural "Year Zero". Even as nostalgia was discarded, many in the scene adopted a nihilistic attitude summed up by the Sex Pistols slogan "No Future"; in the later words of one observer, amid the unemployment and social unrest in 1977, "punk's nihilistic swagger was the most thrilling thing in England." While "self-imposed alienation" was common among "drunk punks" and "gutter punks", there was always a tension between their nihilistic outlook and the "radical leftist utopianism" of bands such as Crass, who found positive, liberating meaning in the movement. As a Clash associate describes singer Joe Strummer's outlook, "Punk rock is meant to be our freedom. We're meant to be able to do what we want to do."
The issue of authenticity is important in the punk subculture—the pejorative term "poseur" is applied to those who associate with punk and adopt its stylistic attributes but are deemed not to share or understand the underlying values and philosophy. Scholar Daniel S. Traber argues that "attaining authenticity in the punk identity can be difficult"; as the punk scene matured, he observes, eventually "[e]veryone got called a poseur".
Punk rock vocals sometimes sound nasal, and lyrics are often shouted instead of sung in a conventional sense, particularly in hardcore styles. The vocal approach is characterized by a lack of variety; shifts in pitch, volume, or intonational style are relatively infrequent. Complicated guitar solos are considered self-indulgent and unnecessary, although basic guitar breaks are common. Guitar parts tend to include highly distorted power chords or barre chords, creating a characteristic sound described by Christgau as a "buzzsaw drone". Some punk rock bands take a surf rock approach with a lighter, twangier guitar tone. Others, such as Robert Quine, lead guitarist of The Voidoids, have employed a wild, "gonzo" attack, a style that stretches back through The Velvet Underground to the 1950s recordings of Ike Turner. Bass guitar lines are often uncomplicated; the quintessential approach is a relentless, repetitive "forced rhythm", although some punk rock bass players—such as Mike Watt of The Minutemen and Firehose—emphasize more technical bass lines. Bassists often use a pick due to the rapid succession of notes, which makes fingerpicking impractical. Drums typically sound heavy and dry, and often have a minimal set-up. Compared to other forms of rock, syncopation is much less the rule. Hardcore drumming tends to be especially fast. Production tends to be minimalistic, with tracks sometimes laid down on home tape recorders or simple four-track portastudios. The typical objective is to have the recording sound unmanipulated and "real", reflecting the commitment and "authenticity" of a live performance. Punk recordings thus often have a lo-fi quality, with the sound left relatively unpolished in the mastering process; recordings may contain dialogue between band members, false starts, and background noise.
Punk rock lyrics are typically frank and confrontational; compared to the lyrics of other popular music genres, they frequently comment on social and political issues. Trend-setting songs such as The Clash's "Career Opportunities" and Chelsea's "Right to Work" deal with unemployment and the grim realities of urban life. Especially in early British punk, a central goal was to outrage and shock the mainstream. The Sex Pistols classics "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen" openly disparage the British political system and social mores. There is also a characteristic strain of anti-sentimental depictions of relationships and sex, exemplified by "Love Comes in Spurts", written by Richard Hell and recorded by him with The Voidoids. Anomie, variously expressed in the poetic terms of Hell's "Blank Generation" and the bluntness of the Ramones' "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue", is a common theme. Identifying punk with such topics aligns with the view expressed by V. Vale, founder of San Francisco fanzine ''Search and Destroy'': "Punk was a total cultural revolt. It was a hardcore confrontation with the black side of history and culture, right-wing imagery, sexual taboos, a delving into it that had never been done before by any generation in such a thorough way." However, many punk rock lyrics deal in more traditional rock 'n' roll themes of courtship, heartbreak, and hanging out; the approach ranges from the deadpan, aggressive simplicity of Ramones standards such as "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" to the more unambiguously sincere style of many later pop punk groups.
The characteristic stage performance style of male punk musicians does not deviate significantly from the macho postures classically associated with rock music. Female punk musicians broke more clearly from earlier styles. Scholar John Strohm suggests that they did so by creating personas of a type conventionally seen as masculine: "They adopted a tough, unladylike pose that borrowed more from the macho swagger of sixties garage bands than from the calculated bad-girl image of bands like The Runaways." Scholar Dave Laing describes how bassist Gaye Advert adopted fashion elements associated with male musicians only to generate a stage persona readily consumed as "sexy". Laing focuses on more innovative and challenging performance styles, seen in the various erotically destabilizing approaches of Siouxsie Sioux, The Slits' Ari Up, and X-Ray Spex' Poly Styrene.
The lack of emphatic syncopation led punk dance to "deviant" forms. The characteristic style was originally the pogo. Sid Vicious, before he became the Sex Pistols' bassist, is credited with initiating the pogo in Britain as an attendee at one of their concerts. Moshing is typical at hardcore shows. The lack of conventional dance rhythms was a central factor in limiting punk's mainstream commercial impact.
Breaking down the distance between performer and audience is central to the punk ethic. Fan participation at concerts is thus important; during the movement's first heyday, it was often provoked in an adversarial manner—apparently perverse, but appropriately "punk". First-wave British punk bands such as the Sex Pistols and The Damned insulted and otherwise goaded the audience into intense reactions. Laing has identified three primary forms of audience physical response to goading: can throwing, stage invasion, and spitting or "gobbing". In the hardcore realm, stage invasion is often a prelude to stage diving. In addition to the numerous fans who have started or joined punk bands, audience members also become important participants via the scene's many amateur periodicals—in England, according to Laing, punk "was the first musical genre to spawn fanzines in any significant numbers".
==Pre-history==
Most of the songs are barely distinguishable from each other in their primitive two-chord structures. You've heard all this before from such notables as the Seeds, Blue Cheer, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and the Kingsmen. The difference here ... is in the hype, the thick overlay of teenage-revolution and total-energy-thing which conceals these scrapyard vistas of clichés and ugly noise. ... "I Want You Right Now" sounds exactly (down to the lyrics) like a song called "I Want You" by the Troggs, a British group who came on with a similar sex-and-raw-sound image a couple of years ago (remember "Wild Thing"?)That August, The Stooges, from Ann Arbor, premiered with a self-titled album. According to critic Greil Marcus, the band, led by singer Iggy Pop, created "the sound of Chuck Berry's Airmobile—after thieves stripped it for parts". The album was produced by John Cale, a former member of New York's experimental rock group The Velvet Underground. Having earned a "reputation as the first underground rock band", The Velvet Underground inspired, directly or indirectly, many of those involved in the creation of punk rock.
In the early 1970s, the New York Dolls updated the original wildness of 1950s rock 'n' roll in a fashion that later became known as glam punk. The New York duo Suicide played spare, experimental music with a confrontational stage act inspired by that of The Stooges. At the Coventry club in the New York City borough of Queens, The Dictators used rock as a vehicle for wise-ass attitude and humor. In Boston, The Modern Lovers, led by Velvet Underground devotee Jonathan Richman, gained attention with a minimalistic style. In 1974, an updated garage rock scene began to coalesce around the newly opened Rathskeller club in Kenmore Square. Among the leading acts were the Real Kids, founded by former Modern Lover John Felice; Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band, whose frontman had been a member of the Velvet Underground for a few months in 1971; and Mickey Clean and the Mezz. In 1974, as well, the Detroit band Death—made up of three African-American brothers—recorded "scorching blasts of feral ur-punk", but couldn't arrange a release deal. In Ohio, a small but influential underground rock scene emerged, led by Devo in Akron and Kent and by Cleveland's The Electric Eels, Mirrors and Rocket from the Tombs. In 1975, Rocket from the Tombs split into Pere Ubu and Frankenstein. The Electric Eels and Mirrors both broke up, and The Styrenes emerged from the fallout.
Britain's Deviants, in the late 1960s, played in a range of psychedelic styles with a satiric, anarchic edge and a penchant for situationist-style spectacle presaging the Sex Pistols by almost a decade. In 1970, the act evolved into the Pink Fairies, which carried on in a similar vein. With his Ziggy Stardust persona, David Bowie made artifice and exaggeration central—elements, again, that were picked up by the Sex Pistols and certain other punk acts. The Doctors of Madness built on Bowie's presentation concepts, while moving musically in the direction that would become identified with punk. Bands in London's pub rock scene stripped the music back to its basics, playing hard, R&B-influenced; rock 'n' roll. By 1974, the scene's top act, Dr. Feelgood, was paving the way for others such as The Stranglers and Cock Sparrer that would play a role in the punk explosion. Among the pub rock bands that formed that year was The 101'ers, whose lead singer would soon adopt the name Joe Strummer.
Bands anticipating the forthcoming movement were appearing as far afield as Düsseldorf, West Germany, where "punk before punk" band NEU! formed in 1971, building on the Krautrock tradition of groups such as Can. In Japan, the anti-establishment Zunō Keisatsu (Brain Police) mixed garage psych and folk. The combo regularly faced censorship challenges, their live act at least once including onstage masturbation. A new generation of Australian garage rock bands, inspired mainly by The Stooges and MC5, was coming even closer to the sound that would soon be called "punk": In Brisbane, The Saints also recalled the raw live sound of the British Pretty Things, who had made a notorious tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1965. Radio Birdman, cofounded by Detroit expatriate Deniz Tek in 1974, was playing gigs to a small but fanatical following in Sydney.
Dave Marsh was the first music critic to employ the term ''punk rock'': In the May 1971 issue of ''Creem'', he described ? and the Mysterians, one of the most popular 1960s garage rock acts, as giving a "landmark exposition of punk rock". Later in 1971, in his fanzine ''Who Put the Bomp'', Greg Shaw wrote about "what I have chosen to call 'punk rock' bands—white teenage hard rock of '64-66 (Standells, Kingsmen, Shadows of Knight, etc.)". Lenny Kaye used the term "classic garage-punk," in reference to a song recorded in 1966 by The Shadows of Knight, in the liner notes of the anthology album ''Nuggets'', released in 1972. In June 1972, the fanzine ''Flash'' included a "Punk Top Ten" of 1960s albums. By that December, the term was in circulation to the extent that ''The New Yorker''s Ellen Willis, contrasting her own tastes with those of ''Flash'' and fellow critic Nick Tosches, wrote, "''Punk-rock'' has become the favored term of endearment." In February 1973, Terry Atkinson of the ''Los Angeles Times'', reviewing the debut album by a hard rock band, Aerosmith, declared that it "achieves all that punk-rock bands strive for but most miss." Three months later, Billy Altman launched the short-lived ''punk magazine''.
In May 1974, ''Los Angeles Times'' critic Robert Hilburn reviewed the second New York Dolls album, ''Too Much Too Soon''. "I told ya the New York Dolls were the real thing", he wrote, describing the album as "perhaps the best example of raw, thumb-your-nose-at-the-world, punk rock since the Rolling Stones' ''Exile on Main Street''.'" Bassist Jeff Jensen of Boston's Real Kids reports of a show that year, "A reviewer for one of the free entertainment magazines of the time caught the act and gave us a great review, calling us a 'punk band.' ... [W]e all sort of looked at each other and said, 'What's punk?'"
By 1975, ''punk'' was being used to describe acts as diverse as the Patti Smith Group, the Bay City Rollers, and Bruce Springsteen. As the scene at New York's CBGB club attracted notice, a name was sought for the developing sound. Club owner Hilly Kristal called the movement "street rock"; John Holmstrom credits ''Aquarian'' magazine with using ''punk'' "to describe what was going on at CBGBs". Holmstrom, McNeil, and Ged Dunn's magazine ''Punk'', which debuted at the end of 1975, was crucial in codifying the term. "It was pretty obvious that the word was getting very popular", Holmstrom later remarked. "We figured we'd take the name before anyone else claimed it. We wanted to get rid of the bullshit, strip it down to rock 'n' roll. We wanted the fun and liveliness back."
Out in Forest Hills, Queens, several miles from lower Manhattan, the members of a newly formed band adopted a common surname. Drawing on sources ranging from the Stooges to The Beatles and The Beach Boys to Herman's Hermits and 1960s girl groups, the Ramones condensed rock 'n' roll to its primal level: "'1-2-3-4!' bass-player Dee Dee Ramone shouted at the start of every song, as if the group could barely master the rudiments of rhythm." The band played its first gig at CBGB on August 16, 1974. Another new act, Blondie, also debuted at the club that month. By the end of the year, the Ramones had performed seventy-four shows, each about seventeen minutes long. "When I first saw the Ramones", critic Mary Harron later remembered, "I couldn't believe people were doing this. The dumb brattiness." The Dictators, with a similar "playing dumb" concept, were recording their debut album. ''The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!'' came out in March 1975, mixing absurdist originals such as "Master Race Rock" and loud, straight-faced covers of cheese pop like Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe".
That spring, Smith and Television shared a two-month-long weekend residency at CBGB that significantly raised the club's profile. The Television sets included Richard Hell's "Blank Generation", which became the scene's emblematic anthem. Soon after, Hell left Television and founded a band featuring a more stripped-down sound, The Heartbreakers, with former New York Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan. The pairing of Hell and Thunders, in one critical assessment, "inject[ed] a poetic intelligence into mindless self-destruction". A July festival at CBGB featuring over thirty new groups brought the scene its first substantial media coverage. In August, Television—with Fred Smith, former Blondie bassist, replacing Hell—recorded a single, "Little Johnny Jewel", for the tiny Ork label. In the words of John Walker, the record was "a turning point for the whole New York scene" if not quite for the punk rock sound itself—Hell's departure had left the band "significantly reduced in fringe aggression".
Other bands were becoming regulars at CBGB, such as Mink DeVille and Talking Heads, which moved down from Rhode Island. More closely associated with Max's Kansas City were Suicide and the band led by drag queen Wayne County, another Mercer Arts Center alumna. The first album to come out of this downtown scene was released in November 1975: Smith's debut, ''Horses'', produced by John Cale for the major Arista label. The inaugural issue of ''Punk'' appeared in December. The new magazine tied together earlier artists such as Velvet Underground lead singer Lou Reed, the Stooges, and the New York Dolls with the editors' favorite band, The Dictators, and the array of new acts centered around CBGB and Max's. That winter, Pere Ubu came in from Cleveland and played at both spots.
Early in 1976, Hell left The Heartbreakers; he soon formed a new group that would become known as The Voidoids, "one of the most harshly uncompromising bands" on the scene. That April, the Ramones' debut album was released by Sire Records; the first single was "Blitzkrieg Bop", opening with the rally cry "Hey! Ho! Let's go!" According to a later description, "Like all cultural watersheds, ''Ramones'' was embraced by a discerning few and slagged off as a bad joke by the uncomprehending majority." At the instigation of Ramones lead singer Joey Ramone, the members of Cleveland's Frankenstein moved east to join the New York scene. Reconstituted as the Dead Boys, they played their first CBGB gig in late July. In August, Ork put out an EP recorded by Hell with his new band that included the first released version of "Blank Generation".
The term ''punk'' initially referred to the scene in general, than the sound itself—the early New York punk bands represented a broad variety of influences. Among them, the Ramones, The Heartbreakers, Richard Hell and The Voidoids, and the Dead Boys were establishing a distinct musical style. Even where they diverged most clearly, in lyrical approach—the Ramones' apparent guilelessness at one extreme, Hell's conscious craft at the other—there was an abrasive attitude in common. Their shared attributes of minimalism and speed, however, had not yet come to define punk rock.
Like their garage rock predecessors, these local scenes were facilitated by enthusiastic impresarios who operated nightclubs or organized concerts in venues such as schools, garages, or warehouses, advertised via inexpensively printed flyers and fanzines. In some cases, punk's do it yourself ethic reflected an aversion to commercial success, as well as a desire to maintain creative and financial autonomy. As Joe Harvard, a participant in the Boston scene, describes, it was often a simple necessity—the absence of a local recording industry and well-distributed music magazines left little recourse but DIY.
One thing I remember having had a really depressing effect on me was the first Ramones album. When I heard it [in 1976], I mean it was a great record ... but I hated it because I knew we’d been doing this sort of stuff for years. There was even a chord progression on that album that we used ... and I thought, "Fuck. We’re going to be labeled as influenced by the Ramones", when nothing could have been further from the truth.
On the other side of Australia, in Perth, germinal punk rock act the Cheap Nasties, featuring singer-guitarist Kim Salmon, formed in August. In September 1976, The Saints became the first punk rock band outside the U.S. to release a recording, the single "(I'm) Stranded". As with Patti Smith's debut, the band self-financed, packaged, and distributed the single. "(I'm) Stranded" had limited impact at home, but the British music press recognized it as a groundbreaking record. At the insistence of their superiors in the UK, EMI Australia signed The Saints. Meanwhile, Radio Birdman came out with a self-financed EP, ''Burn My Eye'', in October. ''Trouser Press'' critic Ian McCaleb later described the record as the "archetype for the musical explosion that was about to occur".
Bernard Rhodes, a sometime associate of McLaren's and friend of the Sex Pistols', was similarly aiming to make stars of the band London SS. Early in 1976, London SS broke up before ever performing publicly, spinning off two new bands: The Damned and The Clash, which was joined by Joe Strummer, former lead singer of The 101'ers. On June 4, 1976, the Sex Pistols played Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall in what came to be regarded as one of the most influential rock shows ever. Among the approximately forty audience members were the two locals who organized the gig—they had formed the Buzzcocks after seeing the Sex Pistols in February. Others in the small crowd went on to form Joy Division, The Fall, and—in the 1980s—The Smiths.
In July, the Ramones crossed the Atlantic for two London shows that helped spark the nascent UK punk scene and affected its musical style—"instantly nearly every band speeded up". On July 4, they played with the Flamin' Groovies and The Stranglers before a crowd of 2,000 at the Roundhouse. That same night, The Clash debuted, opening for the Sex Pistols in Sheffield. On July 5, members of both bands attended a Ramones club gig. The following night, The Damned played their first show, as a Pistols opening act in London. In critic Kurt Loder's description, the Sex Pistols purveyed a "calculated, arty nihilism, [while] the Clash were unabashed idealists, proponents of a radical left-wing social critique of a sort that reached back at least to ... Woody Guthrie in the 1940s". The Damned built a reputation as "punk's party boys". This London scene's first fanzine appeared a week later. Its title, ''Sniffin' Glue'', derived from a Ramones song. Its subtitle affirmed the connection with what was happening in New York: "+ Other Rock 'n' Roll Habits for Punks!"
Another Sex Pistols gig in Manchester on July 20, with a reorganized version of the Buzzcocks debuting in support, gave further impetus to the scene there. In August, the self-described "First European Punk Rock Festival" was held in Mont de Marsan in the southwest of France. Eddie and the Hot Rods, a London pub rock group, headlined. The Sex Pistols, originally scheduled to play, were dropped by the organizers who said the band had gone "too far" in demanding top billing and certain amenities; The Clash backed out in solidarity. The only band from the new punk movement to appear was The Damned.
Over the next several months, many new punk rock bands formed, often directly inspired by the Sex Pistols. In London, women were near the center of the scene—among the initial wave of bands were the female-fronted Siouxsie and the Banshees and X-Ray Spex and the all-female The Slits. There were female bassists Gaye Advert in The Adverts and Shanne Bradley in The Nipple Erectors. Other groups included Subway Sect, Eater, The Subversives, the aptly named London, and Chelsea, which soon spun off Generation X. Farther afield, Sham 69 began practicing in the southeastern town of Hersham. In Durham, there was Penetration, with lead singer Pauline Murray. On September 20–21, the 100 Club Punk Festival in London featured the four primary British groups (London's big three and the Buzzcocks), as well as Paris's female-fronted Stinky Toys, arguably the first punk rock band from a non-Anglophone country. Siouxsie and the Banshees and Subway Sect debuted on the festival's first night; that same evening, Eater debuted in Manchester. On the festival's second night, audience member Sid Vicious was arrested, charged with throwing a glass at The Damned that shattered and destroyed a girl's eye. Press coverage of the incident fueled punk's reputation as a social menace. Some new bands, such as London's Alternative TV and Edinburgh's Rezillos, identified with the scene even as they pursued more experimental music. Others of a comparatively traditional rock 'n' roll bent were also swept up by the movement: The Vibrators, formed as a pub rock–style act in February 1976, soon adopted a punk look and sound. A few even longer-active bands including Surrey neo-mods The Jam and pub rockers The Stranglers and Cock Sparrer also became associated with the punk rock scene. Alongside the musical roots shared with their American counterparts and the calculated confrontationalism of the early Who, the British punks also reflected the influence of glam rock and related bands such as Slade, T.Rex, and Roxy Music. One of the groups openly acknowledging that influence were The Undertones, from Derry in Northern Ireland. Another punk band formed to the south, Dublin's The Radiators From Space.
In October, The Damned became the first UK punk rock band to release a single, the romance-themed "New Rose". The Vibrators followed the next month with "We Vibrate" and, backing long-time rocker Chris Spedding, "Pogo Dancing". The latter was hardly a punk song by any stretch, but it was perhaps the first song ''about'' punk rock. On 26 November, the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." came out—with its debut single the band succeeded in its goal of becoming a "national scandal". Jamie Reid's "anarchy flag" poster and his other design work for the Sex Pistols helped establish a distinctive punk visual aesthetic. On December 1, an incident took place that sealed punk rock's notorious reputation: On ''Thames Today'', an early evening London TV show, Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones was goaded into a verbal altercation by the host, Bill Grundy. Jones called Grundy a "dirty fucker" on live television, triggering a media controversy. Two days later, the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, and The Heartbreakers set out on the Anarchy Tour, a series of gigs throughout the UK. Many of the shows were cancelled by venue owners in response to the media outrage following the Grundy confrontation.
The California punk scene was in full swing by early 1977. In Los Angeles, there were The Weirdos, The Zeros, The Germs, X, The Dickies, The Bags, and the relocated Tupperwares, now dubbed The Screamers. San Francisco's second wave included The Avengers, Negative Trend, The Mutants, and The Sleepers. The Dils, from Carlsbad, moved between the two major cities. The Wipers formed in Portland, Oregon. In Seattle, there was The Lewd. Often sharing gigs with the Seattle punks were bands from across the Canadian border. A major scene developed in Vancouver, spearheaded by the Furies and Victoria's all-female Dee Dee and the Dishrags. The Skulls spun off into D.O.A. and The Subhumans. The K-Tels (later known as the Young Canadians) and Pointed Sticks were among the area's other leading punk acts.
In eastern Canada, the Toronto protopunk band Dishes had laid the groundwork for another sizable scene, and a September 1976 concert by the touring Ramones had catalyzed the movement. Early Ontario punk bands included The Diodes, The Viletones, The Battered Wives, The Demics, Forgotten Rebels, Teenage Head, The Poles, and The Ugly. Along with the Dishrags, Toronto's The Curse and B Girls were North America's first all-female punk acts. In July 1977, the Viletones, Diodes, Curse, and Teenage Head headed down to New York City to play "Canada night" at CBGB.
By mid-1977 in downtown New York, punk rock was already ceding its cutting-edge status to the anarchic sound of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and Mars, spearheads of what became known as No Wave, although several original punk bands continued to perform and new ones emerged on the scene. The Cramps, whose core members were from Sacramento by way of Akron, had debuted at CBGB in November 1976, opening for the Dead Boys. They were soon playing regularly at Max's Kansas City. The Misfits formed in nearby New Jersey. Still developing what would become their signature B movie–inspired style, later dubbed horror punk, they made their first appearance at CBGB in April 1977.
''Leave Home'', the Ramones' second album, had come out in January. The Dead Boys' debut LP, ''Young, Loud and Snotty'', was released at the end of August. October saw two more debut albums from the scene: Richard Hell and The Voidoids' first full-length, ''Blank Generation'', and the Heartbreakers' ''L.A.M.F.'' One track on the latter exemplified both the scene's close-knit character and the popularity of heroin within it: "Chinese Rocks"—the title refers to a strong form of the drug—was written by Dee Dee Ramone and Hell, both users, as were the Heartbreakers' Thunders and Nolan. (During the Heartbreakers' 1976 and 1977 tours of Britain, Thunders played a central role in popularizing heroin among the punk crowd there, as well.) The Ramones' third album, ''Rocket to Russia'', appeared in November 1977.
The Ohio protopunk bands were joined by Cleveland's The Pagans, Akron's Bizarros and Rubber City Rebels, and Kent's Human Switchboard. Bloomington, Indiana, had MX-80 Sound and Detroit had The Sillies. The Suburbs came together in the Twin Cities scene sparked by the Suicide Commandos. The Feederz formed in Arizona. Atlanta had The Fans. In North Carolina, there was Chapel Hill's H-Bombs and Raleigh's Th' Cigaretz. The Chicago scene began not with a band but with a group of DJs transforming a gay bar, La Mere Vipere, into what became known as America's first punk dance club. Tutu and the Pirates and Silver Abuse were among the city's first punk bands. In Boston, the scene at the Rat was joined by the Nervous Eaters, Thrills, and Human Sexual Response. In Washington, D.C., the Controls played their first gig in spring 1977, but the city's second wave really broke the following year with acts such as Urban Verbs, Half Japanese, D'Chumps, Rudements and Shirkers. By early 1978, the D.C. jazz-fusion group Mind Power had transformed into Bad Brains, one of the first bands to be identified with hardcore punk.
Scores of new punk groups formed around the United Kingdom, as far from London as Belfast's Stiff Little Fingers and Dunfermline, Scotland's The Skids. Though most survived only briefly, perhaps recording a small-label single or two, others set off new trends. Crass, from Essex, merged a vehement, straight-ahead punk rock style with a committed anarchist mission. Sham 69, London's Menace, and the Angelic Upstarts from South Shields in the Northeast combined a similarly stripped-down sound with populist lyrics, a style that became known as streetpunk. These expressly working-class bands contrasted with others in the second wave that presaged the post-punk phenomenon. Liverpool's first punk group, Big in Japan, moved in a glam, theatrical direction. The band didn't survive long, but it spun off several well-known post-punk acts. The songs of London's Wire were characterized by sophisticated lyrics, minimalist arrangements, and extreme brevity. By the end of 1977, according to music historian Clinton Heylin, they were "England's arch-exponents of New Musick, and the true heralds of what came next." Alongside thirteen original songs that would define classic punk rock, The Clash's debut had included a cover of the recent Jamaican reggae hit "Police and Thieves". Other first wave bands such as The Slits and new entrants to the scene like The Ruts and The Police interacted with the reggae and ska subcultures, incorporating their rhythms and production styles. The punk rock phenomenon helped spark a full-fledged ska revival movement known as 2 Tone, centered around bands such as The Specials, The Beat, Madness, and The Selecter.
June 1977 saw the release of another charting punk album: The Vibrators' ''Pure Mania''. In July, the Sex Pistols' third single, "Pretty Vacant", reached number six and The Saints had a top-forty hit with "This Perfect Day". Recently arrived from Australia, the band was now considered insufficiently "cool" to qualify as punk by much of the British media, though they had been playing a similar brand of music for years. In August, The Adverts entered the top twenty with "Gary Gilmore's Eyes". As punk became a broad-based national phenomenon in the summer of 1977, punk musicians and fans were increasingly subject to violent assaults by Teddy boys, football yobbos, and others. A Ted-aligned band recorded "The Punk Bashing Boogie".
In September, Generation X and The Clash reached the top forty with, respectively, "Your Generation" and "Complete Control". X-Ray Spex' "Oh Bondage Up Yours!" didn't chart, but it became a requisite item for punk fans. In October, the Sex Pistols hit number eight with "Holidays in the Sun", followed by the release of their first and only "official" album, ''Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols''. Inspiring yet another round of controversy, it topped the British charts. In December, one of the first books about punk rock was published: ''The Boy Looked at Johnny'', by Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons. Declaring the punk rock movement to be already over, it was subtitled ''The Obituary of Rock and Roll''. In January 1978, the Sex Pistols broke up while on American tour.
The Victims became a short-lived leader of the Perth scene, self-releasing the classic "Television Addict". They were joined by The Scientists, Kim Salmon's successor band to the Cheap Nasties. Among the other bands constituting Australia's second wave were Johnny Dole & The Scabs, the Hellcats, and Psychosurgeons (later known as the Lipstick Killers) in Sydney; The Leftovers, The Survivors, and Razar in Brisbane; and La Femme, The Negatives, and The Babeez (later known as The News) in Melbourne. Melbourne's art rock–influenced Boys Next Door featured singer Nick Cave, who would become one of the world's best-known post-punk artists.
Nineteen seventy-seven also saw the debut album from Hamburg's Big Balls and the Great White Idiot, arguably West Germany's first punk band. Other early German punk acts included the Fred Banana Combo and Pack. Bands primarily inspired by British punk sparked what became known as the Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW) movement. Vanguard NDW acts such as the Nina Hagen Band and S.Y.P.H. featured strident vocals and an emphasis on provocation. Before turning in a mainstream direction in the 1980s, NDW attracted a politically conscious and diverse audience, including both participants of the left-wing alternative scene and neo-Nazi skinheads. These opposing factions were mutually attracted by a view of punk rock as "politically as well as musically...'against the system'."
Briard jump-started Finnish punk with its 1977 single "I Really Hate Ya"/"I Want Ya Back"; other early Finnish punk acts included Eppu Normaali and singer Pelle Miljoona. In Yugoslavia, punk rock acts emerged in Croatia (Paraf), Slovenia (Pankrti), and Serbia (Pekinška patka). In Japan, a punk movement developed around bands playing in an art/noise style such as Friction, and "psych punk" acts like Gaseneta and Kadotani Michio. In New Zealand, Auckland's Scavengers and Suburban Reptiles were followed by The Enemy of Dunedin. In Brazil, punk first came to prominence in Brasília, the capital, with the bands Aborto Elétrico and Dado e o Reino Animal. Punk rock scenes also grew in other countries such as Belgium (The Kids, Chainsaw), the Netherlands (The Suzannes, The Ex), Spain (La Banda Trapera Del Río, Kaka De Luxe), Sweden (Ebba Grön, KSMB), and Switzerland (Nasal Boys, Kleenex).
As hardcore became the dominant punk rock style, many bands of the older California punk rock movement split up, although X went on to mainstream success and The Go-Go's, part of the Hollywood punk scene when they formed in 1978, adopted a pop sound and became major stars. Across North America, many other first and second wave punk bands also dissolved, while younger musicians inspired by the movement explored new variations on punk. Some early punk bands transformed into hardcore acts. A few, most notably the Ramones, Richard Hell and The Voidoids, and Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers, continued to pursue the style they had helped create. Crossing the lines between "classic" punk, post-punk, and hardcore, San Francisco's Flipper was founded in 1979 by former members of Negative Trend and The Sleepers. They became "the reigning kings of American underground rock, for a few years".
Radio Birdman broke up in June 1978 while touring the UK, where the early unity between bohemian, middle-class punks (many with art school backgrounds) and working-class punks had disintegrated. In contrast to North America, more of the bands from the original British punk movement remained active, sustaining extended careers even as their styles evolved and diverged. Meanwhile, the Oi! and anarcho-punk movements were emerging. Musically in the same aggressive vein as American hardcore, they addressed different constituencies with overlapping but distinct anti-establishment messages. As described by Dave Laing, "The model for self-proclaimed punk after 1978 derived from the Ramones via the eight-to-the-bar rhythms most characteristic of The Vibrators and Clash. ... It became essential to sound one particular way to be recognized as a 'punk band' now." In February 1979, former Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose in New York. If the Sex Pistols' breakup the previous year had marked the end of the original UK punk scene and its promise of cultural transformation, for many the death of Vicious signified that it had been doomed from the start. By the turn of the decade, the punk rock movement had split deeply along cultural and musical lines, leaving a variety of derivative scenes and forms. On one side were New Wave and post-punk artists; some adopted more accessible musical styles and gained broad popularity, while some turned in more experimental, less commercial directions. On the other side, hardcore punk, Oi!, and anarcho-punk bands became closely linked with underground cultures and spun off an array of subgenres. Somewhere in between, pop punk groups created blends like that of the ideal record, as defined by Mekons cofounder Kevin Lycett: "a cross between Abba and the Sex Pistols". A range of other styles emerged, many of them fusions with long-established genres. The Clash album ''London Calling'', released in December 1979, exemplified the breadth of classic punk's legacy. Combining punk rock with reggae, ska, R&B;, and rockabilly, it went on to be acclaimed as one of the best rock records ever. At the same time, as observed by Flipper singer Bruce Loose, the relatively restrictive hardcore scenes diminished the variety of music that could once be heard at many punk gigs. If early punk, like most rock scenes, was ultimately male-oriented, the hardcore and Oi! scenes were significantly more so, marked in part by the slam dancing and moshing with which they became identified.
Bringing elements of punk rock music and fashion into more pop-oriented, less "dangerous" styles, New Wave artists became very popular on both sides of the Atlantic. New Wave became a catch-all term, encompassing disparate styles such as 2 Tone ska, the mod revival inspired by The Jam, the sophisticated pop-rock of Elvis Costello and XTC, the New Romantic phenomenon typified by Ultravox, synthpop groups like Tubeway Army (which had started out as a straight-ahead punk band) and Human League, and the sui generis subversions of Devo, who had gone "beyond punk before punk even properly existed". New Wave became a pop culture sensation with the debut of the cable television network MTV in 1981, which put many New Wave videos into regular rotation. However, the music was often derided at the time as being silly and disposable.
Post-punk brought together a new fraternity of musicians, journalists, managers, and entrepreneurs; the latter, notably Geoff Travis of Rough Trade and Tony Wilson of Factory, helped to develop the production and distribution infrastructure of the indie music scene that blossomed in the mid-1980s. Smoothing the edges of their style in the direction of New Wave, several post-punk bands such as New Order (descended from Joy Division), The Cure, and U2 crossed over to a mainstream U.S. audience. Bauhaus was one of the formative gothic rock bands. Others, like Gang of Four, The Raincoats and Throbbing Gristle, who had little more than cult followings at the time, are seen in retrospect as significant influences on modern popular culture.
A number of U.S. artists were retrospectively defined as post-punk; Television's debut album ''Marquee Moon'', released in 1977, is frequently cited as a seminal album in the field. The No Wave movement that developed in New York in the late 1970s, with artists such as Lydia Lunch and James Chance, is often treated as the phenomenon's U.S. parallel. The later work of Ohio protopunk pioneers Pere Ubu is also commonly described as post-punk. One of the most influential American post-punk bands was Boston's Mission of Burma, who brought abrupt rhythmic shifts derived from hardcore into a highly experimental musical context. In 1980, Australia's Boys Next Door moved to London and changed their name to The Birthday Party, which evolved into Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Led by the Primitive Calculators, Melbourne's Little Band scene would further explore the possibilities of post-punk. Later alternative rock musicians found diverse inspiration among these post-punk predecessors, as they did among their New Wave contemporaries.
The lyrical content of hardcore songs is often critical of commercial culture and middle-class values, as in Dead Kennedys' celebrated "Holiday in Cambodia" (1980). Straight edge bands like Minor Threat, Boston's SS Decontrol, and Reno, Nevada's 7 Seconds rejected the self-destructive lifestyles of many of their peers, and built a movement based on positivity and abstinence from cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, and casual sex. In the early 1980s, bands from the American southwest and California such as JFA, Agent Orange, and The Faction helped create a rhythmically distinctive style of hardcore known as skate punk. Skate punk innovators also pointed in other directions: Big Boys helped establish funkcore, while Venice, California's Suicidal Tendencies had a formative effect on the heavy metal–influenced crossover thrash style. Toward the end of the decade, crossover thrash spawned the metalcore fusion style and the superfast thrashcore subgenre developed in multiple locations.
The Oi! movement was fueled by a sense that many participants in the early punk rock scene were, in the words of The Business guitarist Steve Kent, "trendy university people using long words, trying to be artistic ... and losing touch". According to Bushell, "Punk was meant to be of the voice of the dole queue, and in reality most of them were not. But Oi was the reality of the punk mythology. In the places where [these bands] came from, it was harder and more aggressive and it produced just as much quality music." Lester Bangs described Oi! as "politicized football chants for unemployed louts". One song in particular, The Exploited's "Punks Not Dead", spoke to an international constituency. It was adopted as an anthem by the groups of disaffected Mexican urban youth known in the 1980s as ''bandas''; one ''banda'' named itself PND, after the song's initials.
Although most Oi! bands in the initial wave were apolitical or left wing, many of them began to attract a white power skinhead following. Racist skinheads sometimes disrupted Oi! concerts by shouting fascist slogans and starting fights, but some Oi! bands were reluctant to endorse criticism of their fans from what they perceived as the "middle-class establishment". In the popular imagination, the movement thus became linked to the far right. ''Strength Thru Oi!'', an album compiled by Bushell and released in May 1981, stirred controversy, especially when it was revealed that the belligerent figure on the cover was a neo-Nazi jailed for racist violence (Bushell claimed ignorance). On July 3, a concert at Hamborough Tavern in Southall featuring The Business, The 4-Skins, and The Last Resort was firebombed by local Asian youths who believed that the event was a neo-Nazi gathering. Following the Southall riot, press coverage increasingly associated Oi! with the extreme right, and the movement soon began to lose momentum.
The movement spun off several subgenres of a similar political bent. Discharge, founded back in 1977, established D-beat in the early 1980s. Other groups in the movement, led by Amebix and Antisect, developed the extreme style known as crust punk. Several of these bands rooted in anarcho-punk such as The Varukers, Discharge, and Amebix, along with former Oi! groups such as The Exploited and bands from father afield like Birmingham's Charged GBH, became the leading figures in the UK 82 hardcore movement. The anarcho-punk scene also spawned bands such as Napalm Death, Carcass, and Extreme Noise Terror that in the mid-1980s defined grindcore, incorporating extremely fast tempos and death metal–style guitarwork. Led by Dead Kennedys, a U.S. anarcho-punk scene developed around such bands as Austin's MDC and Southern California's Another Destructive System.
Other bands pointed punk rock toward future rock styles or its own foundations. New York's Suicide, L.A.'s The Screamers and Nervous Gender, Australia's JAB, and Germany's DAF were pioneers of synthpunk. The Ex, from the Netherlands, were in the art punk vanguard. Chicago's Big Black was a major influence on noise rock, math rock, and industrial rock. Garage punk bands from all over—such as Medway's Thee Mighty Caesars, Chicago's Dwarves, and Adelaide's Exploding White Mice—pursued a version of punk rock that was close to its roots in 1960s garage rock. Seattle's Mudhoney, one of the central bands in the development of grunge, has been described as "garage punk".
As American alternative bands like Sonic Youth, which had grown out of the No Wave scene, and Boston's Pixies started to gain larger audiences, major labels sought to capitalize on the underground market that had been sustained by hardcore punk for years. In 1991, Nirvana emerged from Washington State's grunge scene, achieving huge commercial success with its second album, ''Nevermind''. The band's members cited punk rock as a key influence on their style. "Punk is musical freedom", wrote singer Kurt Cobain. "It’s saying, doing, and playing what you want." The widespread popularity of Nirvana and other punk-influenced bands such as Pearl Jam and Red Hot Chili Peppers fueled the alternative rock boom of the early and mid-1990s.
In 1991, a concert of female-led bands at the International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, Washington, heralded the emerging riot grrrl phenomenon. Billed as "Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now", the concert's lineup included Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, L7, and Mecca Normal. The riot grrrl movement foregrounded feminist concerns and progressive politics in general; the DIY ethic and fanzines were also central elements of the scene. Singer-guitarists Corin Tucker of Heavens to Betsy and Carrie Brownstein of Excuse 17, bands active in both the queercore and riot grrrl scenes, cofounded the celebrated indie/punk band Sleater-Kinney in 1994. Bikini Kill's lead singer, Kathleen Hanna, the iconic figure of riot grrrl, moved on to form the art punk group Le Tigre in 1998.
In 1993, California's Green Day and Bad Religion were both signed to major labels. The next year, Green Day put out ''Dookie,'' which became a huge hit, selling nine million albums in the United States in just over two years. Bad Religion's ''Stranger Than Fiction'' was certified gold. Other California punk bands on the independent label Epitaph, run by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz, also began achieving mainstream popularity. In 1994, Epitaph released ''Let's Go'' by Rancid, ''Punk in Drublic'' by NOFX, and ''Smash'' by The Offspring, each eventually certified gold or better. That June, Green Day's "Longview" reached number one on ''Billboard''s Modern Rock Tracks chart and became a top forty airplay hit, arguably the first ever American punk song to do so; just one month later, The Offspring's "Come Out and Play" followed suit. MTV and radio stations such as Los Angeles' KROQ-FM played a major role in these bands' crossover success, though NOFX refused to let MTV air its videos. ''Smash'' went on to sell over twelve million copies worldwide, becoming the best-selling independent-label album of all time.
Following the lead of Boston's Mighty Mighty Bosstones and two California bands, Berkeley's Operation Ivy and Long Beach's Sublime, ska punk and ska-core became widely popular in the mid-1990s. By 1996, genre acts such as Reel Big Fish and Less Than Jake were being signed to major labels. The original 2 Tone bands had emerged amid punk rock's second wave, but their music was much closer to its Jamaican roots—"ska at 78 rpm". Ska punk bands in the third wave of ska created a true musical fusion between the genres. ''...And Out Come the Wolves'', the 1995 album by Rancid—which had evolved out of Operation Ivy—became the first record in this ska revival to be certified gold; Sublime's self-titled 1996 album was certified platinum early in 1997.
In Australia, two popular groups, skatecore band Frenzal Rhomb and pop punk act Bodyjar, also established followings in Japan.
Green Day and ''Dookie'''s enormous sales paved the way for a host of bankable North American pop punk bands in the following decade. With punk rock's renewed visibility came concerns among some in the punk community that the music was being co-opted by the mainstream. They argued that by signing to major labels and appearing on MTV, punk bands like Green Day were buying into a system that punk was created to challenge. Such controversies have been part of the punk culture since 1977, when The Clash was widely accused of "selling out" for signing with CBS Records. The Vans Warped Tour and the mall chain store Hot Topic brought punk even further into the U.S. mainstream.
Other new North American pop punk bands, though often critically dismissed, also achieved major sales in the first decade of the 2000s. Ontario's Sum 41 reached the Canadian top ten with its 2001 debut album, ''All Killer No Filler'', which eventually went platinum in the United States. The record included the number one U.S. Alternative hit "Fat Lip", which incorporated verses of what one critic called "brat rap." Good Charlotte, from Maryland, had three successive top ten albums beginning with ''The Young and the Hopeless'' in 2002. Florida's Yellowcard, which had been together since 1997, had its first hit in 2003 with its major-label debut, ''Ocean Avenue''. Simple Plan, from Montréal, climbed to number three in the United States with ''Still Not Getting Any...'' in 2004. That same year, Green Day, which had gone through a relatively fallow period commercially, took ''American Idiot'' to number one on both the U.S. and UK charts; the band matched the feat five years later with ''21st Century Breakdown''. Jimmy Eat World, taking emo in a radio-ready pop punk direction, had top ten albums in 2004 and 2007. In a similar style, Fall Out Boy hit number one with 2007's ''Infinity on High''. The wave of commercial success was broad-based: AFI, with roots in hardcore and skate punk, had great success with 2003's ''Sing the Sorrow'' and topped the U.S. chart with ''Decemberunderground'' in 2006. Two years later, The Offspring had its fifth top ten album with ''Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace'' and its third Modern Rock/Alternative Songs chart-topper with "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid". Starting in 2003, Alkaline Trio had four consecutive top twenty-five albums, peaking at number eleven with 2010's ''This Addiction''.
The effect of commercialization on the music became an increasingly contentious issue. As observed by scholar Ross Haenfler, many punk fans "'despise corporate punk rock', typified by bands such as Sum 41 and Blink 182". At the same time, politicized and independent-label punk continued to thrive in the United States. Since 1993, Anti-Flag had been putting progressive politics at the center of its music. The administration of George W. Bush provided them and similarly minded acts eight years of conservative government to excoriate. Rise Against was the most successful of these groups, registering top ten records in 2006 with ''The Sufferer & the Witness'' and two years later with ''Appeal to Reason''. Leftist folk punk band Against Me!'s ''New Wave'' was named best album of 2007 by ''Spin''. In the realm of the U.S. independents, Celtic punk attracted a substantial audience. Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys each had top twenty albums on small labels, with the former's ''Float'' landing at number four in 2008.
Elsewhere around the world, "punkabilly" band The Living End became major stars in Australia with their self-titled 1998 debut. The group topped the national album chart again with ''State of Emergency'' in 2006 and ''White Noise'' in 2008.
Category:Culture of New York City Category:Rock music genres Category:Underground culture Category:Youth culture in the United Kingdom
ar:بانك bar:Punk be-x-old:Панк-рок br:Punk rock ca:Punk rock cs:Punk rock da:Punk-rock de:Punk (Musik) et:Punk rock el:Πανκ es:Punk eu:Punk fa:پانک راک fr:Punk rock fy:Punk rock gd:Punc ko:펑크 록 hr:Punk rock id:Punk rock it:Punk rock he:פאנק רוק ka:პანკ როკი lv:Pankroks lt:Pankrokas lmo:Punk rock mk:Панк рок nl:Punk (muziek) ja:パンク・ロック no:Pønkrock nn:Pønkrock uz:Punk rock pl:Punk pt:Punk rock ro:Muzică punk ru:Панк-рок simple:Punk rock sk:Punk rock sl:Punk sv:Punkrock th:พังก์ร็อก tr:Punk rock uk:Панк-рок zh:朋克搖滾This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
The Gang of Four () was the name given to a political faction composed of four Chinese Communist Party officials. They came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and were subsequently charged with a series of treasonous crimes. The members consisted of Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's last wife as the leading figure of the group, and her close associates Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen.
The Gang of Four effectively controlled the power organs of the Communist Party of China through the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution, although it remains unclear which major decisions were made through Mao Zedong and carried out by the Gang, and which were the result of the Gang of Four's own planning.
The Gang of Four, together with disgraced Communist general Lin Biao, were labeled the two major "counter-revolutionary forces" of the Cultural Revolution and officially blamed by the Chinese government for the worst excesses of the societal chaos that ensued during the ten years of turmoil. Their downfall in a ''coup d'état'' on October 6, 1976, a mere month after Mao's death, brought about major celebrations on the streets of Beijing and marked the end of a turbulent political era in China.
Most Western accounts consider that the actual leadership of the Cultural Revolution consisted of a wider group, referring predominantly to the members of the Central Cultural Revolution Group. Most prominent was Lin Biao, until his purported flight from China and death in a plane crash in 1971. Chen Boda is often classed as a member of Lin's faction rather than Jiang Qing's.
Around the time of the death of Lin Biao, the Cultural Revolution began to lose impetus. The new commanders of the People's Liberation Army demanded that order be restored in light of the dangerous situation along the border with the Soviet Union (see Sino-Soviet split). The Premier, Zhou Enlai, who had accepted the Cultural Revolution but never fully supported it, regained his authority, and used it to bring Deng Xiaoping back into the Party leadership at the 10th Party Congress in 1973. Liu Shaoqi had meanwhile died in prison in 1969.
Near the end of Mao's life, a power struggle occurred between the Gang of Four and the alliance of Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and Ye Jianying.
It does appear that their influence was in decline before Mao's death: when Zhou Enlai died in January 1976, he was succeeded not by one of the radicals but by the unknown Hua Guofeng. In April 1976, Hua was officially appointed Premier of the State Council. Upon Mao's death Hua was named Communist Party chairman as well.
The "Gang" had arranged for Deng Xiaoping's purge in April 1976 (however, he would return and by 1978 become the real power of the Party). They hoped that the key military leaders Wang Dongxing and Chen Xilian would support them, but it seems that Hua won the Army over to his side. On 6 October 1976, Hua had the four leading radicals and a number of their lesser associates arrested. A massive media campaign was then launched against them, dubbing them the Gang of Four and blaming them for all the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. (The Chinese words for "four" and "death" are nearly homophones, and thus the moniker contained a second, inauspicious meaning.)
Han Suyin gives a detailed account of their overthrow:
Although not referred to as such in China, because, the Communist Party remained in control, this was effectively a coup d'etat. Beginning on 21 October, nationwide denunciations of the Gang began, which culminated in the December releases of files related to the Gang's alleged crimes to the public. Celebrations were prominent and not limited to the streets of Beijing and other major cities.
The prosecution separated political errors from actual crimes. Among the latter were the usurpation of state power and party leadership; the persecution of some 750,000 people, 34,375 of whom died during the period 1966-76. The official records of the trial have not yet been released.
Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao received death sentences that were later commuted to life imprisonment, while Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan were given life and twenty years in prison, respectively. They were all later released. All members of the Gang of Four have since died; Jiang Qing committed suicide in 1991, Wang Hongwen died in 1992, and Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan died in 2005.
Supporters of the Gang of Four, including Chen Boda and Mao Yuanxin, were also sentenced.
Category:Cultural Revolution Category:Anti-Revisionists 4 Category:Factions of the Communist Party of China Category:Articles about multiple people Category:Maoist terminology Category:History of the People's Republic of China
ar:عصابة الأربعة br:Bandenn ar Pevar bg:Банда на четиримата ca:Banda dels Quatre cs:Gang čtyř da:Firebanden de:Viererbande (China) es:Banda de los Cuatro eo:Bando de la Kvar fr:Bande des Quatre ko:사인방 hi:चार की टोली id:Kelompok Keempat it:Banda dei quattro he:כנופיית הארבעה hu:Négyek bandája ms:Geng Berempat nl:Bende van Vier ja:四人組 (中国史) no:Firerbanden pl:Banda czworga pt:Camarilha dos Quatro ru:Банда четырёх fi:Neljän kopla sv:De fyras gäng ta:நால்வர் குழு (சீனா) th:แก๊งออฟโฟร์ tr:Dörtlü Çete uk:Банда чотирьох vi:Tứ nhân bang zh-yue:四人幫 zh:四人帮This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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