T.S. Eliot and punk rock:

Listening to a teenage band play Black Sabbath's 1970 song "Paranoid" today, I was reminded of how the history of punk rock in the 1970s provides an excellent example of a point made by T.S. Eliot around 1920 in his first volume of literary criticism: the innovative artist is a catalyst that creates his own tradition by highlighting common elements in various past works of art that nobody had previously noticed had much in common.

Punk rock emerged as as a distinct genre in 1976-77, primarily due to The Ramones and the Sex Pistols. But once you knew what punk rock was, you would also notice older songs, such as "Paranoid" and Led Zeppelin's "Communication Breakdown" that were clearly punk rock before the word existed, in that they followed the much more linear riffing style enshrined by The Ramones. And for English working class thuggishness of the Sex Pistols style, there's a remarkable predecessor in the 1973 song "Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting" by Bernie Taupin and ... Elton John, of all people.

Until The Ramones and the Sex Pistols came along, though, nobody noticed that these isolated, and uncharacteristic songs were part of a genre.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer