Thoughts on Who Knows What

I’m kind of intrigued by this assignment…

I feel like we talk a lot about country and folk music in class so I figure I’ll look up something we haven’t discussed much about; punk music. I have no idea if it was around before the 90s, there’s a solid chance it wasn’t, but I want to know.

My first step was using the Google Ngram, I thought it might give me a good jumping off point, so I searched for the word “punk”.

Unfortunately I was unable to capture a decent photo of the graph, however if you look at the line itself, you’ll notice that the word has been around since the 1800. These graphs range from 1800-2018. There are a couple of interesting points where the word punk had a showed up, namely there is an increase in right at 1800, another began in 1900 and, despite a small decrease in 1940, it kept climbing. 1980 saw a serious increase in times the word appeared. I suspect that is about where punk music came to be. Considering the different meanings and uses for the term “punk” I realized I may not have been specific enough with my initial search; so I proceeded to search for the term “punk music”. The results were incredibly different. Just assume that, unless otherwise stated, I mean “punk” as in the genre of music.

Punk music didn’t appear until right before 1980. I imagine the mid 70s is when the underground phase of punk music began, I believe classic punk bands like The Clash, Sex Pistols, and Ramones formed around then. A quick google search proved I was correct.

Right before the 90s, the term “punk music” began to plateau and it wasn’t until that era that the term became popular again. I imagine this was the new wave of punk music where bands like Green Day and blink-182 appeared. A Google search of punk bands wielded nearly as many bands as classic punk did.

As someone who listens to a lot of punk music, I was curious why some of my favorites didn’t appear on the list. So I figured I’d see when “pop punk” first appeared. What I found was incredibly interesting.

The term first appeared in 1960, which is before punk music had appeared. It made me curious as to how the graphs compared, so I searched for the ngrams together. I was surprised by the sheer amount of times “punk” showed up.

It was clear that there was some disconnect between the terms, my best guess is like I said before, the term “punk” has so many different uses that it’s naturally more generic and will appear more frequently. “Pop punk” and “punk music” are significantly more specific and thus will naturally appear less often. I figures the best comparison I could make was between the more specific two, and so I made ANOTHER ngram (I promise I’m done after this…)

Just for comparisons’ sake I bumped the smoothing down to 1 when I had been consistently keeping it at 3 for the other ngrams so I figured I’d be transparent about that. (All good research is transparent and consistent but this isn’t a research class so I don’t really care.) It’s incredibly hard to notice but right around the 60s, there is a bump in the term “pop punk” and at first I was confused as to why. When looking back at the bands that appeared when I searched earlier, I noticed a few bands were from the 60s like The Stooges and MC5. Now I’d say they’re considered classic punk instead of pop punk, but in their time they may well have been popular punk since it was such a new genre. Further more, any bands that made a lasting impact and made it out of the underground scene would have had to be popular.

What’s interesting to me is also is what we classify as punk music. In their early days, bands like Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco would have been considered at least “pop punk”, they appeared in the early 2000s. Their more recent stuff is anything but punk, it’s gone entirely pop. So would bands like those two still be considered punk music? They have the same names and in some cases the same members (*cough cough* Fall Out Boy and NOT Panic! At the Disco— I’m not bitter you are…) On top of the well known bands, there’s a lot of other smaller bands that could be considered punk but none of it is really purely punk. By that I mean bands like Ludo, I Hate Kate, Sugarcult and so many others. With bands like that, you have a mix of genres— so instead of punk you have post-hardcore, indie pop punk rock, alternative punk and so much more. I believe that you can mix almost any genre together, rather any sub-genre. It makes sense, all bands take inspiration from other bands so over course there is some overlap and combining going on.

I decided to take this assignment a step further and pin down the first mention of “pop punk” since it seems to be the earliest term for what I’ve been studying. My results in Google Books from 1/1/1960 to 12/31/1969 turned up one book. It was written by University of Wisconsin–Madison (Center for Limnology) in 1967 titled Limnology News: University of Wisconsin–Madison. The term appears on pg.33 in reference to a smaller Canadian band called The Snitches. I couldn’t find much information about the band other then where they’re from and that they released two albums in Canada. If this is indeed the first use of the term “pop punk”, color me surprised that I have never heard of them and that they’re from Canada.

It’s heart breaking to think that there was a time where lynchings were ok. But it goes deeper then that. What I really can’t believe is that people, normal people like you or I, thought that these spectical lynchings were alright— and not only that they were alright but were also enjoyable events to bring family and friends to.It’s disgusting.They were a form of entertainment. What I will never understand is how people could ever be that cruel and inhumane. It goes even farther than that even…

About three hours south of where Fairfax and GMU lay, is a small city called Lynchburg, VA. I only know of this city because of an ex of mine who happens to be from there. It’s a beautiful place, situated on the top of rolling hills. I think it’s even nicknamed the “City of the Seven Hills” or “Hill City”, not that it matters. There is a strong music and art scene located in Lynchburg with more then a few bands and galleries. Generally, it’s an amazing town with beautiful greenery and some unique architecture. What I find most fascinating about this town, however, is it’s name and history.

This first point I have little to back me up then the word of my ex who had lived there all his life, however I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if it were true. He claimed that Lynchburg was where lynching was invented, by a guy named John Lynch. And that there is where the city got its name. I hope with all I can that this isn’t true.

In allure of writing this post I did a little digging into the towns past. I’m going to keep it short and sweet, you can find more at your own leisure on the city’s Wikipedia page in a mere matter of seconds. It was founded by a man of the last name John Lynch in 1721 after having been settled by Native Americans since 1270. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about how that happened. The city proceeded to make most of its money from tobacco and slave labor. During the Civil War, Lynchburg was a Confederate transportation hub and supply depot. The later history is equally as vast, however less relevant to my point and this class.

What are we saying with places like Lynchburg? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer all along. Its past and name are riddled with racism and yet we still memorialize our toxic American history. Now I’m not saying that we should change it, and I’m not saying we should keep it the same. Is it really bad for a town to be proud of its past? I think the answer is both yes and no. I should mention that there are a few confederate memorials in the city itself, so is it not ok that there is a memorial for the confederates when the confederates were not the socially acceptable side? Or you could think of the memorial as being in honor of those who died, not necessarily in honor of confederated themselves but rather in honor of the brave men (and women) who fought for what they believed in even if they were incorrect beliefs. That’s why the issue of taking down confederate and racist statues is such a sticky topic with no right answer. I personally think it’s important to remember where we came from and our past, if only so we remember not to fall onto the darker paths again. History repeats itself and it’s a good reminder of what should never happen again. At the same time, like I mentioned earlier, I don’t believe we should glamorize or dark past either which is something that I find can happen with memorials. There’s really no good answer to that….

I can’t stop hearing Hawaii in all the country music we listen to now! It’s kind of stressing me out in the most amazing way.

After our discussion about the steel guitars’ origin and how that is perpetuated in country music, my first thought was something along the lines of: “What? No way. Maybe it’s from Hawaii, but we must just be hearing it because we were primed.” And then I proceeded to hear it more. Now I can’t stop. It made me consider what that meant from a socio-cultural lense. Elvis Presley, known as the king of rock and roll is also well known for his use of steel guitar. I’ve always found that he is associated with Hawaii and wondered why. He wasn’t from there and nothing spectacular happened to him while he was there (that I know of, I’m not his biggest fan though so there isn’t likely something I’m missing). It appears I may have finally gotten my answer. This country music Hawaii contrast was only emphasize to me more with the example Professor O’Malley showed us of the quick country song he whipped together. The song very clearly read to me as country until he threw in the steel guitar, even then it still read as country, but it also emphasized the Hawaiian. It became a two for one song.

The GarageBand example brought my mind elsewhere too. Is GarageBand, in its entirety with what it does good of bad? On one hand it’s a great way to express creativity that wasn’t possible before. Some nobody with zero skills can open up the program and compose a song— even sell it given that Apple doesn’t copyright the sound bites. Is that really all god though? What does it say when we no longer need years or training and experience to become an important musician? Even more then that, what does it mean for the real people who recorded and preformed those clips? They get nothing. I don’t see how that’s fair. We learned of a sister site that contained clips of other exclusive paid sound clips meant for GarageBand. On it was a man who was on his death bed. In his life, he was and important figure in the music scene. To pay for his hospital bills, he agreed to selling his content. It’s terrifying. Not only is he selling a piece of his soul, but he’s also jeopardizing his future hiring opportunities. What’s going to happen after his hospital say? It’s not like he can just die, he had to go to the hospital and therefore he has to pay his bills. What now? I feel so bad. It makes me hate the people who would buy this kind of content. The world is all one big giant mass of people and it’s not always a good one.

Gonna be honest, this class was a slower one. There is a statement that stood out to me however, Professor O’Malley told us to think about how ugly English would be without the letter “U”. That in its self isn’t a super interesting thought, but it did lead me to think about those tests you used to get emailed back in middle school where they’d challenge you to read a paragraph with missing or mixed up letters. He then went on to point out how redundant and unnecessary certain letters are, so why do we have them? They just take up room and provide no substance, right? I couldn’t help but explore that thought. At first I agreed, it seemed language had evolved to that point we didn’t need all of our letters. Then I thought about why we had gotten to that point, and its because we see some words so often we recognize them even when they’re jumbled and there is connotation to every word that you can piece together from context. So what would happen if we completely changed the way we write, omitting “QU” and using just “Q”? What if we got rid of vowels all together? At first, I doubt anyone would struggle. People would still be able to communicate and write and speak. It’s just texting lingo after all. But over time, I imagine that would change. The repetition is the reason we understand jumbled and incorrect words, eventually that repetition would no longer exist. At that point one of two things would happen, either language would evolve to become some new version of old (almost like Shakespeare if you want to think of it that way) or people would become illiterate and mute.

That having been said, language is evolving all the time. Think of all the new language parents yell at their kids for using, lit, shook, bet, fam – the list goes on but I’ll stop for fear of sounding cringy. Our modern tongue would be unintelligible gibberish to someone from the Elizabethan era.