Invariably anticipating that it would drive me completely around the bend, my great friend Aleph forwarded me this bit of utter fucking nonsense on Facebook…
"After being tagged by William Faith in one of these top "10 favorite Punk songs ever" tag-people thingies. I'm gonna play, but I'm doing albums instead."
So, Aleph broke the “rules” by doing albums instead of songs. I, meanwhile, completely set fire to the rulebook and posted all my picks at once (sparing unwitting contacts an avalanche of music over the course of a week that they invariably didn't want to see in their feeds), and did way the Hell more than ten, because picking only ten favorite punk songs, for me, is a fool’s errand and a slow boat to madness.
But the part that almost made me part with my already tenuously harnessed sanity was the quandary of who to include and who to exclude. Because the stipulation was “punk” and not “post-punk,” I left out a slew of bands like Gang of Four, Public Image, Joy Division and my beloved Killing Joke. And because the stipulation was “punk” and not “hardcore punk,” I similarly omitted any citation of bands like the Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Kraut, Bad Brains, etc. And because the stipulation was “punk” and not “proto-punk,” I skipped otherwise crucial names like The Stooges, The MC5, The Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls, The Modern Lovers, Pere Ubu, Dr. Feelgood, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, etc.
I also demurred from adding bands who, while technically lumped in with all things Punk, still could not sit comfortably under that tattered umbrella, … this would include bands like DEVO, Adam & the Antz, The Soft Boys, The Police, The Tubes, XTC, The Tom Robinson Band, etc.
But, honestly, there really isn’t anything more ponderously laborious than listening to a music geek work themselves up into a frothy lather about proper categorization, so let’s just get to it, shall we? My apologies in advance. Find my picks below, and feel free to start a big ugly fight about them! I'm ready for ya.
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