ABSTRACT
While discussions of the non-musical elements of the British and American punk explosions of the 1970s are of interest, this chapter concentrates primarily on punk rock as a music genre. A difference between American and British punk rock is the relationship between the punk scene and the mass media. In America, early punk-rock bands such as The Ramones, Suicide and Television played concerts and released records away from the media limelight, and consequently American punk rock, and the scene surrounding it, developed at a relatively leisured pace. For the purposes of the chapter, punk rock from the mid-1970s will be examined in the section entitled 'musical texts', while the influence of bands that pre-date this period. Punk-rock tracks invariably feature one or more guitars, which are invariably ‘treated’ with distortion or feedback. In the mid-1970s, this was a reaction to the ‘clean’ sounds of mainstream pop.
