by Cskoyles

Created on: April 19, 2009

In its prime, punk rock was a movement which transcended its origins as a rough and ready musical sub-genre. It was an attitude, a philosophy, a way of life.

At its heart lay a word feared by few, romanticised by many. A word which gripped the imaginations of a generation of young people who embraced punk as their own and which caused a certain sense of panic and confusion in an army of adults too old and too set in their ways to, you know, get it'.

That word was rebellion'.

Musically, punk rock was a backlash against the overblown, overproduced, corporate rock of the time. Stripped back to basic, snarling guitars, simplistic rhythms and sneering, angst-fuelled vocals, punk rock's most prominent exponents issued a wake-up call to both fans and the industry.

The message was simple. You didn't need years of classical training to play music, nor did you need the brute force of the record industry to succeed. It was a message which, perhaps perfectly summed up by British group, Radiohead, years later said anyone can play guitar'.

And so they did.

Taking the punk rock ethos of music making to heart, scores of fans picked up instruments, joined forces with their friends and embarked on what were often short-lived careers as punk rock musicians.

Indeed, with the exception of handful, few punk rock bands ever made it further than cutting a rough demo, and even less made it that far.

But punk's legacy does not lie solely in its musical output.

Inspired by the often socio-political lyrical content of their heroes, fans of the genre took punk to be much more than an excuse to make loud, and usually terrible, music. They took it as a call to arms to rebel, to revel in anarchy and fight the system.

Of course, there were those who understood the ethos of punk, who understood that, at the crux of it all, this was about being dissatisfied with the status quo and disenfranchised by a system which didn't seem relevant to their generation. Armed with enough knowledge and logic, they fought for change, for a new way of thinking and a new way of doing.

Then there were the others; the ones who found themselves swept along in the euphoria of an uprising of youth, the ones who embraced every irrelevant and superfluous element of punk to make sure they weren't seen as having missed the boat, the ones who didn't really know what they were rebelling against and simply decided to rebel against everything.

Anarchy was raped of its social and political context and morphed into an excuse for violence,

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