Musical Style and Aesthetics
Generally speaking anarcho-punk bands are often less focused on particular musical delivery and more on a totalized aesthetic that encompasses the entire creative process, from album and concert art, to political message, to the lifestyles of the band members themselves. Crass listed as band members the people who did their album art and live visuals. The message is sometimes considered to be much more important than the music. According to the punk aesthetic, one can express oneself and produce moving and serious works with limited means and technical ability. It is not uncommon for anarcho-punk songs to lack the usual rock structure of verses and a chorus, however, there are exceptions to this. For example, later Chumbawamba songs were at the same time anarcho-punk and more pop oriented and had a pop song structure that made their message more accessible, even gaining chart hits in the process. In general the genre is stylistically diverse and is often more united by common goals and community bonds than particular sounds. One of the bands to take this to the extreme was Crass with their release Yes Sir, I Will, a raging and almost free-form improvised musical backing over which the lyrics are shouted. Examples of other highly experimental anarcho-punk acts might include The Cravats, Iceland's KUKL and the partially electronic act D&V.
Read more about this topic: Anarcho-punk
Famous quotes containing the words musical, style and/or aesthetics:
“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man—and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)