ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes broader continuities within British popular music in the 20th century. It persists even in UK punk rock, a music that rejected rock music of the past for its artifice and pretension. British Rock emerged in a period when a post-imperial Britain was in transition from post-war scarcity to a new, and it turned out, precarious, economic upturn. In the case of the artists and groups from the British Invasion, the link between rock music and modernism is evident in their shared aesthetic strategies. In contrast, British women singers of the 60s mostly struggled throughout the decade to maintain their economic foothold, and in rare cases, define their own aesthetic niche in "swinging London". The Sex Pistols rejected the received version of history: but their singer, John Lydon, forged a persona cobbled together from a dark visionary strain in British literature.
