Peter Hammill- Nadir’s Big Chance
The lyrics are also very punk. They are pretty real and talk about how he thinks glam rock sucks. “I’ve been hanging around, waiting for my chance/ to tell you what I think about that music that’s gone down/ to which you madly danced-frankly, you know that it stinks. I’m gonna scream, gonna shout, gonna play my guitar/ until your body’s rigid and you see stars. Look at all the jerks in their tinsel glitter suits pansying around.” It also has a violent aspect, “gonna scream, gonna shout, gonna play my guitar” which also fits in with punk style. He is saying how he is against glam rock and all the extra production and glitter and what not. He says, “ It began to seem that in order to be in a successful group, you had to have 23 banks of keyboards and a zillion lights and all that sort of thing.” So he was trying to say that it shouldn’t be all about that and that all of that is unnecessary.
This song was a big influence on many punk musicians and actually came out before the big surge of punk music. Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols has noted how much he liked Peter Hammill.
In this album, Hammill takes on the guise of “Rikki Nadir”, who is a “dumb garage rocker”, and this was Hammill’s chance to experiment and express that side of him, so this album, particularly this song, has some rawer and more punk-like elements. He acknowledges that this album is a bunch of different things, but the fact that he does whatever he wants and doesn’t want to be defined to any one thing makes him pretty punk in that aspect. While Peter Hammill is not exactly punk, “Nadir’s Big Chance” definitely is.
Public Enemy- Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos
The music is well produced, but at the same time very simple and repetitive, which fits in with the punk style. It’s more about the message than the music. However, you can see punk aspects in production by the fact that when Flavor Flav is calling Chuck D in jail, he just went into another room and literally made a phone call and they recorded that for the song straight from the phone. That’s pretty raw, working with what you have and not being so highly technical. It’s well produced, but it’s not over produced.
This song is like many others in the punk culture because it is simple, angry, against authority, and wanting change. The musical outlet is a bit different than the rock punk, but it’s the same idea, just a different way of expressing it. This is a great example of hip hop’s answer to punk. So while this song in itself may not be considered punk, it fits into the punk style.
The Damned- Love Song
It is safe to say though that this is definitely a punk song. Despite the fact that it may seem a little poppy, it still has all the elements that make up the typical punk song: simple, fast, energetic, and short. This song may seem a bit lighter both musically and lyrically, but that may just be showing the element of punk that’s about not being so uptight and worrying about everything, to just have fun and joke around and make fun of lame love songs.