Proto-punk
subgenre of rock music
Proto-punk (or protopunk) is music that foreshadowed the punk rock genre, particularly rock music artists during the 1960s and early-to mid 1970s. A retrospective label, the musicians involved were generally not originally associated with each other and came from a variety of backgrounds and styles; together, they anticipated many of punk's musical and thematic attributes.
The tendency towards aggressive, raw, simplistic rock songs is a trend rooted in the earliest forms of rock and roll. The American garage rock movement of the mid-1960s is a key influence in the development of punk rock. By the late 1960s, Detroit bands the Stooges and MC5 had taken the influence of garage groups to form a distinct prototypical punk sound. In the following years, this sound spread both domestically and internationally, alongside glam rock and pub rock, into several regional early underground punk scenes in New York, Ohio, Australia and England.
Etymology
The term proto-punk has been defined differently by several writers and publications. In his essay Protopunk: the Garage Bands, music critic Lester Bangs applied the term to 1960s garage rock acts as well as Ritchie Valens' 1958 cover of "La Bamba".
However, in 2010, writers Lars J. Kristiansen, Joseph R. Blaney, Philip J. Chidester, Brent K. Simonds in their book Screaming for Change: Articulating a Unifying Philosophy of Punk Rock, defined "proto-punk" as emerging after the wave of mid-60s garage rock, and specifically referring to groups who were inspired by Detroit acts such as the Stooges and MC5, with the sound then spreading to the United Kingdom, New York, Australia and Cleveland, Ohio:
Although Velvet Underground served as an important influence, proto-punk is largely a term used to describe bands that followed in the wake of the first wave of garage rock. More specifically, it is a label normally reserved for bands such as MC5 and the Stooges that sprung out of Detroit, Michigan, and its surrounding areas.
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This entry incorporates text from “Proto-punk” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.