Style
Their music is mostly in rockabilly form, played at varying tempos, with a minimal drumkit. An integral part of the early Cramps sound is dual guitars, without a bassist. The focus of their songs' lyrical content and their image is camp humor, and retro horror/sci-fi b-movie iconography.
Their sound was heavily influenced by early rockabilly, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll like Link Wray and Hasil Adkins, 1960s surf music acts such as The Ventures and Dick Dale, 1960s garage rock artists like The Standells, The Gants, The Trashmen, The Green Fuz and The Sonics, as well as the post-glam/early punk scene from which they emerged. They also were influenced to a degree by the Ramones and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who was an influence for their style of theatrical horror-blues.
In turn, The Cramps have influenced countless subsequent bands in the garage, punk and rockabilly revival subgenres, and helped create the psychobilly genre. "Psychobilly" was a term coined1 by The Cramps, although Lux Interior maintained that the term did not describe their own style.
Read more about this topic: The Cramps
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.”
—André Malraux (1901–1976)
“A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it’s a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself—or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind.... You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)