Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1974

Punk rock

Emerged 1974 Origin New York / London Subgenres 31 Vocals Shouted
Heaviness
4
Speed
8
Melody
7

Shouted. Barked or chanted, and you can still make out the words.

In short

Three chords, two minutes and zero patience for solos. A full reset of rock, and the second major source of extreme metal.

How it sounds

  • Three or four chords, open position or power chords, strummed in eighths.
  • Songs of ninety seconds to two and a half minutes, with no long intro and no guitar solo.
  • Fast, cheap production with the vocals up front and simple drums on two and four.

Hear what that means

  • Three chords, all downstrokes

    Ramones - Ramones

    One guitar, no solo, no second part, and a bass playing eighth notes locked to the kick drum. Two minutes fifteen. There is nothing here that was not necessary, which was the argument.

    Open on YouTube
  • Under two minutes, and it means it

    The Clash - The Clash

    Faster and rawer than the Ramones, recorded in three weekends, and over before a second verse could soften it. Hear how far forward the vocal is - punk mixes the words loudest because the words are the reason.

    Open on YouTube
  • The wall of guitars underneath the sneer

    Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks

    The one deliberate contradiction in punk's own story: this is a heavily overdubbed, expensively produced record, with layer on layer of guitar. It sounds like a riot and it was assembled like a pop single.

    Open on YouTube

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Each opens at the start of the recording.

The specifics

Tempo
160-200 bpm
Song length
2-3 min
Tuning
E standard. Barre chords, three or four per song, and no solo worth the name.
Production
Recorded live in the room in a handful of takes, with everything peaking. The roughness is not a limitation the records regret — it is the argument they are making.
Written about
Boredom, Class, The state, Refusal

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Downstroked barre chords through an amp pushed slightly past where it sounds good, with no second guitar and nothing filling the gaps.
  • Bass Eighth notes on the root, welded to the kick drum. Its job is to make three chords sound like a wall.
  • Drums Straight eights, snare on two and four, and almost no fills — a fill would be a decoration, and the whole point was to remove those.
  • Vocals Shouted in an undisguised accent and mixed loud. Punk is the first rock genre where singing correctly would have undermined the record.

What it isn't

That punk musicians could not play. Some could not, briefly, and it stopped being true almost immediately — the records that define the genre are tight, fast and very hard to play badly. The simplicity is editorial rather than technical: the guitar solo, the key change, the studio polish and the eight-minute suite were all things punk could have done and refused, because in 1976 each of them signified a professionalised rock industry the bands were arguing against. Restraint that looks like inability is the oldest misreading in this encyclopedia.

Told apart from

  • Hardcore punk Hardcore is this played twice as fast, with the melody removed and the songs cut in half. Punk still writes a chorus and still wants you to sing it.
  • Garage rock Garage rock is the thing punk's first wave was consciously reviving: the same three chords a decade earlier, without the politics and without knowing it was a movement.
  • Post-punk Post-punk is what many of these same people did eighteen months later, once they stopped requiring the music to be simple. Same year, same cities, opposite instinct.
  • Oi! / street punk Oi kept punk's simplicity and aimed it at a working-class audience the London scene had drifted away from: shouted choruses built for a crowd rather than a sneer built for a critic.

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

History

Between 1974 and 1976, two independent scenes in New York's CBGB and in London reached the same conclusion: rock had become too expensive, too long and too professional. The Ramones stripped the formula to its essentials, the Sex Pistols added scandal, and The Clash proved you could also evolve. The self-releasing ethic left behind still powers the entire underground, metal included.

Descended from

Branches into

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.