I probably know more about art punk than anything else there is, quite frankly. There’s a good 35+ year history to this music, which is basically exactly what the name sounds like, avant-garde ideas applied to spare, loud and energetic rock music. I consider myself pretty knowledgable about the subject, and I host a weekly radio show more or less devoted to it. Probably the only thing that even comes close to my knowledge of art punk is my knowledge of old video games, but that’s a different topic for another day.
Part of what keeps me knowledgeable about it, and has really honed my interest in it, is Web 2.0 applications. Around my Freshman year of high school when my family finally got broadband internet access, I encountered the first important one of these in the form of Yahoo! Music, called LAUNCHcast as Yahoo! had not taken it over yet. The way it worked, back around 2002 or 2003 anyway, was one would watch a stream of either music videos or listen to a stream of audio, and with each song or video that would come on, one would rate it one to five stars, sort of like Netflix. Through this system, LAUNCHcast honed in on music that I was guaranteed to like, which mostly consisted of bands like Mission of Burma, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Joy Division and Sonic Youth. It also introduced e to many other music styles and bands I love, including all sorts of heavy metal, electro, more straightforward indie rock and more traditional sounding punk.
Sometimes the importance of Web 2.0 gets a bit overstated. LAUNCHcast was far from the only factor in my becoing a fan of this music. Other contributing factors included a 1983 edition of the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll I found, my own guitar playing starting at age 13 really provoking my interest in music in a more general sense, and the immense success of The Strokes in the early aughts, who, although accessible and poppy, were nonetheless highly indebted to art punk. The Strokes and their contemporaries (Interpol, TV On The Radio, the aforementioned Yeah Yeah Yeahs) also had the distinct honor of being the first band that wasn’t my parents music that I really loved and gravitated towards. Geography might also have something to do with it. I was born and raised in Baltimore, only about an hour from Washington DC, home to art punk and hardcore powerhouse Dischord records , and since around 2006 itself home to bands like Double Dagger, Videohippos and Ponytail.
I now use Last.fm for my Web 2.0 aided music discovery. Last.fm “scrobbles” your iPod and iTunes plays to determine what you are listening to and how often you are listening to it, and makes recommendations based upon those. It is a highly interactive website, and I’ve authored the Last.fm wiki for the art punk tag as it currently stands. The trouble is, sometimes I wind up taking art punk for granted. I get used to its genre conventions and lyrical themes, and forget how wonderful it can be. All it really takes is a dip into the world of say, the Black Eyed Peas to reaffirm me of art punk’s power, invention and passion, and how glad I am to have found it.
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