generic glam rock.
you don't need to pull an obscure demo out of somebody's attic to know that punk was developed in the 60s in detroit and seattle, largely as an american reaction to the british invasion.
Matthew Perry
In what why is this likened to glam rock? It definitely displays the characteristics of early punk. In my opinion its one of the finest examples of it.
IvoryPagoda
The idea is that these guys were doing something that just wasn't being done at the time. And I fail to see the connection to glam that you suggest.
deathtokoalas
but, it was being done at the time. there's a few songs that are right off aladdin sane, which was itself an attempt to capture the sound of detroit bar bands, and a definite t-rex influence. todd rundgren? another blatantly obvious influence is early queen. they claim they were influenced by the who, and it's obvious. what i fail to hear is anything novel, here. i mean, it's not bad as far as early glam goes, but it's not groundbreaking.
IvoryPagoda
Aladdin Sane? Totally not hearing the connection there. Yeah, I get it, we're gonna capitalize (again) on the Sound of Detroit, but Death sounds like 1973 Bowie? That is a huge stretch, and I'm gonna have to disagree...
deathtokoalas
i was admittedly trying to avoid the obvious cooper/mc5/stooges comparisons, which are weaker than a new york dolls comparison.
and i'll admit it's sort of curious how similar the sound is to at the drive-in.
...but if you listen a little more carefully, the bowie comparison is there in the more straight-up rock material. it occupies a position between glam and punk that a lot of other acts in the period were straddling. that being said, it does open the question: was death one of the nameless detroit bar bands bowie was emulating?
it's probably better if people connect to it as it is, rather than compare it to other things. it's not fair to attack the band for it's marketing technique. shit sucks; we all need marketing techniques. it's just that the idea that punk was novel in 1974 isn't correct. at all. 1964, more like it.
(i should probably clarify that i'd argue that the 70s punk thing was actually a retro movement, maybe the first modern retro movement, at least i don't see an earlier one. specifically, a retro movement to 60s mod music. if you listen to what punk musicians actually said at the time, they were all on about resurrecting the 60s mod scene or even going back to 50s rock. so, how does the idea of saying "this band was ahead of their time because they were punk" make any sense if it's understood that punk was about going backwards in time? i know that's not the modern interpretation, which considers punk the beginning of modern music, but that's what it was to the musicians at the time. punk became novel when it became hardcore through scenes in dc (bad brains), the uk (crass) and california (dead kennedys), as well as when it went art-prog in new york. the ramones were just the kinks played at the wrong speed. and this is just period glam...)
Miloš Milosavljević
right. everyting is the same. just different speed, different lyrics, different vocalisation. of course you cannot come up with something entirely new, but you can come up with something distinct enough from everything else it follows up on to be able to call it a genre. Or else it's all music, and we can relativise anything by pulling out bits and pieces that sound like something you've heard before.
Death was the closest thing to what stabilised as early punk a couple of years after they created their sound. Closer than the Stooges, or MC5, that's for sure. And you can't liken the Mods or Glam to this. There are shared elements, as with everything else that evolves in music and art.
And you assumption about Bowie is probably correct. As much as I love the guy, he was one of the slickest thieves of sound in popular music.
deathtokoalas
well, it's not a right/wrong issue, to begin with. somebody pulled a demo out of an attic by a band that nobody's ever heard of and proclaimed "invented punk!", but the reality is that they're roughly ten years too late to make the claim in the first place (everybody knows punk came out of the 60s), and on top of that it just sounds like all the other glammy rock bands that existed in detroit at the time.
you've just all fallen for a goofy marketing campaign. but, as i mentioned, that's not why it's irritating to me. what's irritating to me is that falling for the marketing campaign requires a level of historical ignorance, and that if that's not corrected then it's going to result in an inaccurate historical revisionism.
this isn't a new tactic by record companies, either. a few years ago, the industry found itself in need of a way to market a handful of records that were done by some of the members of the foofighters before they were in the foofighters, when they were in a band called sunny day real estate. now, those of us that lived through the 90s remember sdre as a minor grunge act that was known mostly for a leftfield hit they released on one of the batman soundtracks, called 8. people into sdre were also into radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, spiritualized, the manics...maybe sigur ros. but that wasn't good enough to market to foofighters fans, so they packaged it together with a weezer record that everybody hated (pinkerton) and marketed it under the label of a type of 80s punk that was seeing a resurgence. the whole thing is absolute corporate bullshit that never happened, but it's enshrined in wikipedia and therefore must be true, right?
and i didn't even mention malcolm mclaren.
again, this isn't the worst period glam i've heard, but there's nothing new relative to 1974 here.
Hanuman Ares
I support your stand 100% The band is fine and has some nice things going, but is obviously not some form of timeless wonder sprung out of nowhere to invent punk - a genre and term who's history has been traced to much earlier origins somewhere in the mid 60's.
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deathtokoalas
well, i did listen to the whole disc. and i've offered concrete comparisons. i'm sort of starting to wonder why this simple observation is getting so much traffic, though. how many of these people work for the record industry and are trying to enforce the marketing scam?
Xterminating Angel
the eye opener is these are so called niggers in 1975 LOl!
deathtokoalas
but, there were several other black glam and proto-punk acts, too. pure hell is one.
Xterminating Angel
true but Death set the slandered before punk existed no gettn around that LOL!
Please Tell me the bands im an audiophile!
Death is not glam these guys lived in the hood,In those days that fairy shit didnt fly. If you dressed like a woman you better stay at home LOL! They're black neighbors hated "The white boy music and called the cops" Death is the full circle lets not forget who invented rock n roll......Brothers LOL!
deathtokoalas
glam was a proto-punk phenomenon that had one of it's epicentres in detroit. you may have heard of iggy pop, who fronted a band called the stooges. they even cite alice cooper as an influence. glam, in turn, was a merging of white mod culture with black funk & soul, a precursor to disco. punk was actually a sexual term that referred to male prostitution. it was initially a fundamentally queer rock movement, in opposition to the heteronormality pushed down by early metal bands.
at the time, "punk" basically meant "fag". it's not a coincidence that it got applied to musical styles that derived from early 70s glam. and, again, that had a lot of overlap with the specifically black queer culture that was all over the mixed industrial centres of the american northeast - and detroit (then a wealthy cosmopolitan center) was at the center of that. at least as much as mod culture did...
again, my point is simply that this is not particularly novel. it fits right into the mid 70s proto-punk/glam scene that was spilling out of detroit, and that was actually fairly biracial in it's merging of soul and mod (and heavy blues) influences.
just to throw this out there.....and it makes me a little bit sad....but with all the reversals in civil rights that have happened since reagan (which, i'll remind you, punk took a very vocal stance against), it's easy to forget that there was a period in the late 60s and early 70s where a real kind of integrationism and post-racialism was in the culture. punks tended to find hippies naive (no, holding hands isn't going to accomplish anything, you need to go out and break shit), but there were a lot of shared values there. in a real sense, punk rock was born out of the civil rights legislation of the 60s. it wasn't the only kind of music that can make that claim, either. there was a substantial fusion movement that was trying to be syncretic and inclusive.
so, yeah. it's not that odd. there were black musicians all over punk rock, from the drumkit in the dk's to the bassist in magazine to the creation of hardcore by bad brains in dc. those are just the famous bands. if you dig into the scenes of city after city you find solid racial politics and full racial integration. perhaps we can say something about racism in the media regarding what got picked up and what didn't, ok, but punk itself does not make sense when stripped from it's biracial character. it just creates an attitude that ought to be told to fuck off...
....meaning that maybe there is something to say, here, about how the substantial contribution of black people (on both sides of the ocean) to punk rock has been marginalized and forgotten. i'll state my initial reaction again: that people are shocked by the existence of this record is just surreal.
Miloš Milosavljević
all sounds great. I really can see you know your stuff, but then instead of beating around the bush and speaking in general terms, just dish out a list of bands, link to their tracks or performances with dates. I can't say for myself that I am an uber pundit, but equating glam with punk just won't do. Death is not glam.
sazopro
Well, I got lost at the Todd Rundgren comparison. Definetely 'Politicians In My Eyes' is like 'I Saw The Light' lol. But I kinda see your point: "nobody is a true original" I guess.
IvoryPagoda
I understand the point you are driving at, and your arguments are well-put. I am willing to admit that there has been a lot of interplay in that fuzzy zone between the so-called punk icons and the world of glam - and yes, as you point out - even in the years where these words were not universally being applied to the music it now represents. But let's remember where this traffic began. It isn't so much that Death was really all that special, and it's not that they were the Black Grandfathers of Punk. Whatever they were, I still can't go so far as to agree that they were Glam - not by 70s definitions, and not in any decade since. bad brains, DK, crass - similar, but later. Iggy? Closer in sound and chronology, but iffy. Bowie? Nah. Not really a whole to compare them to from 1974. Is their music fabulous? Not really. But whatever: it isn't Glam.
Xterminating Angel
death could have sighned with SST records in 1975 oh wait they didnt exist...This is what make death special.I never considered the sex pistols or the GBGb stuff real punk.ity was pure rockn roll to me. then again i was in the pit during the dead kennedys/black flag west coast punk
Sharangir
They did not invent punk. But they are a 70s protopunk rock band like there are a handful of others. The actual peculiar part about this band is that they were not allowed to exist because nobody would sign them cause they were a black rock band (ignoring the obvious hypocrisy due to rock's origins). And that the records were just sitting in an attic from 1977 until 2008 when the three sons of one of the bandmembers found them and decided to cover the albums, resulting in the band trying to release the record again in 2009.
Geron Fletcher
i cant really call this a REACTION to british rock when british rock was a reaction to black rock and rollers like chuck and jimi. this is more of just in line with chuck and jimi with a garage city midwest twist.
deathtokoalas
your jimi part is anachronistic (jimi went to britain to connect with some of his influences, like clapton, and then came back to america after making a name for himself on the british heavy blues circuit, which is actually where early metal bands like sabbath and zeppelin came from rather than from where punk was developing in what is now the american rust belt extending into nyc) but the berry part is right to an extent. jimi hendrix has a complex place in punk history, in the sense that he was revered as an icon that could not be emulated without losing his brilliant idiosyncrasies, but it's usually not as a musical influence. it would have been common to run into punks in the mid-to-late 70s that wrote off people like van halen by saying "he can't hold a candle to hendrix".
something that happened in the british invasion is that the structures of "rhythm and blues" became warped into the kind of rock music that is now called punk, partially by going through a synthesis with folk rock. you can compare the who or a specific period of the beatles (around revolver) much more readily to the ramones than you can to 50s rockers like chuck berry. it's a flow of influences, but the shift happened in the 60s rather than the 70s.
i'm just going to reiterate my earlier point: this wasn't novel relative to the mid 70s, and i've presented a number of examples and a great deal of reasoning to demonstrate my argument. if you choose to reject those comparisons, that's your choice, but i feel i've demonstrated them well. this doesn't sound remotely like anything that was ever released on sst in it's hey day, it sounds like doomy black eyeliner-wearing early 70s glam rock. my lack of response was actually due to my laptop's hard drive faulting on me, but i'd like to move away from this discussion.
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deathtokoalas
the reason it matters is that creating a contrived history of punk to sell records has the potential of erasing the actual history if people don't bother to take the time to correct it.
to answer a specific one of your inanely hypothetical questions, though, you could give acknowledging a diversity of opinions a try. not just here, but generally. it might stop you from having further terrible toddler internet temper tantrums.
that actually applies to a few of you.
as mentioned, i stated my case, some disagree, it's time to move on, now. further viewers can decide for themselves: is this glammy proto-punk truly novel, or do they sound like a thousand other failed bar bands from the period?
Rich Latta
except this Death album sounds more aggressive than your typical glam.
deathtokoalas
i'm sorry, but, as i stated previously, this thread is now closed. all further comments will be deleted. all complaints will be deleted.
(if you don't like it, start a new thread)
