Political Punk Rock

by Steve Sailer

September 07, 2016

…

Hillary’s recent speech denouncing the alt-right has raised eyebrows. It was as if in 1976 progressive-rock titans Emerson, Lake & Palmer had released a double album devoted to excoriating this new band nobody had ever heard of before called the Ramones.r

If you can remember back four decades, it might strike you that the alt-right phenomenon of 2016 is basically political punk rock: loud, abrasive, hostile, white, back to basics, and fun.

Johnny Ramone was not as talented a musician as Keith Emerson, but a decade after Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper’s he had some timely ideas about how rock should get on track again. ...

But it didn’t seem that way to many at the time. The punk rockers struck most nice people then as barbaric.

Which they sort of were. That was the point of picking up an electric guitar: to make a lot of noise.

Even the most deplorable habit of a few on the alt-right—the use of Nazi imagery—has its punk predecessors. The Ramones’ greatest song was “Blitzkrieg Bop.”

Mick Jones’ proto-Clash band was the London SS. Malcolm McLaren handed out swastikas to his Sex Pistols.

Why? Because it was offensive. And offensive was enjoyable.

I’d add that the early punks, especially The Clash, even though they were a famously leftist band, were also an implicit white identity movement.

I’ll leave the evidence for that for another day.

[Comment at Unz.com]