ABSTRACT
The period starting in the mid-1970s saw the meteoric rise of punk music and disco. Soul music’s popularity faded, as the slicker soul
productions, such as those of Gamble and Huff in Philadelphia, lost popularity. The pop music scene was divided into two camps: on the one hand there were the technology-driven disco records, featuring synthesizers, drum machines, and samplers, and on the other hand was punk music. Disco was very much a record producer’s music, and the impetus for the music was putting the beats together, getting the singer to perform the vocal, and then putting the vocal and instrumental tracks together. It was not an idiom that encouraged anything resembling blues, although the occasional record such as Trammps’ Disco Inferno did have some R&B ingredients. Punk was sort of jointly birthed in New York and London, and was, if anything, even farther away from the blues. It was the absolute opposite to disco in that the music was ultra-simple; there was no orchestration at all, and the whole intent was that it did not require a great deal of musical sophistication to play the music. Punk soon evolved into New Wave music and even glam rock, but once again these musical genres did not have much to do with the blues.
