Tuesday, September 3, 2013

There Was a World (and Music!) Before Punk Rock

This is in response to Laura McLay's latest blog post, "famous punk songs about climate change and optimization". Like so many young whippersnappers (and the former Soviet Union), she seems to think everything was invented by her generation. I'm here to refute that. (You'll probably want to read her post before this one, for context.)

Long before "punk rock" meant anything beyond the Jets and the Sharks:
I've probably just scratched the surface here. Heck, maybe it's true that "Everything Old Is New Again" (Peter Allen, cowritten with Carole Bayer Sager, 1974).

Update: Since Marc-André Carle brought up geometry, I feel obligated to point out that geometry begins with basic shapes:

2 comments:

  1. There is also a new tendency in some progressive rock / metal bands to get names inspired by geometry. I didn't compile a list, but the most patent example is probably the band TesseracT, named after the 4-dimension regular hypercube. For a sample of their music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkxRV4X1vLU

    It's rather ironic that a band named after a regular polytope would use so many nonstandard musical structures such as polyrhythm in their music.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. TesseracT may well have the highest-dimensional name. Before the current trend to geometric names, there was Ice Cube (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cube) ... but note the update I made to the post for some earlier geometric groups.

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