Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1967

Proto-punk

Emerged 1967 Origin Detroit / New York, USA Subgenres — Vocals Sung
Heaviness
5
Speed
7
Melody
5

Sung. Melodic singing throughout.

In short

Garage rock turned hostile and repetitive, with noise and nihilism. Nobody called it punk yet, but everyone at CBGB copied from it.

How it sounds

  • A repetitive, near-hypnotic riff held without development — the opposite of blues rock soloing.
  • Spoken or shouted vocals delivered with calculated contempt.
  • Noise, feedback and lyrics about boredom, drugs and urban alienation.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
140-180 bpm
Song length
2.5-6 min
Tuning
E standard, cheap guitars, and a deliberate refusal of the technical standard rock had reached by 1969.
Production
Raw, loud and frequently badly recorded, sometimes because of budget and sometimes as a stated position. The Stooges' records were made to sound confrontational.
Written about
Boredom, The body, Nihilism, Drugs, unromantically

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Two chords held past the point of comfort, with the fuzz on and no solo worth the name. The repetition is the aggression.
  • Bass Locked and unmoving, holding a single figure for whole songs, which is what makes the guitar's refusal to develop feel deliberate.
  • Drums Simple, heavy and slightly ahead, with almost no fills. This is where hardcore's drumming ultimately comes from.
  • Vocals Sung with contempt, sneered rather than performed, and mixed forward. Iggy Pop's delivery is the direct model for almost every punk vocalist.
  • Saxophone On the Stooges' second record, used as pure noise rather than as melody — a free-jazz idea imported into rock.

What it isn't

That these bands were ahead of their time. They were commercially unsuccessful in their own time, which is a different thing, and the retrospective tidiness of the label hides how unlike each other they were: the MC5 were a political rock band, the Velvets an art project, the Stooges something closer to performance. What they share is being cited by people who came later, which is a fact about 1977 rather than about 1969.

Told apart from

  • Garage rock Protopunk is what a handful of garage bands became after 1967, when the rest turned psychedelic. Heavier, longer and much more hostile.
  • Punk rock Protopunk is the same instincts before there was a name, a scene or an audience for them. These bands were commercial failures at the time.
  • Acid rock Both came out of the same volume and the same year. Acid rock's repetition aims at transcendence; this aims at confrontation.
  • Noise rock Noise rock inherits the Velvets' side of this directly — dissonance, drone and volume used to abrade.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

In a declining industrial Detroit, The Stooges and MC5 played loud and hostile to audiences expecting psychedelia. In New York, the Velvet Underground did the same thing by intellectual means. None of these bands sold much at the time, but everyone at CBGB and in 1976 London knew their records by heart.

Descended from

On the timeline

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.