page_title: American popular music
section_title: Punk and alternative rock
hierarchical_section_title: American popular music / 1970s and 1980s / Punk and alternative rock
caption_attribution_description: Joey Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone in concert. The Eagle Hippadrome, 1983 Ramones concert in Seattle, WA. It was the last show at the venue before it was torn down and became a parking lot. Photo was taken with a cheap 110 camera. A little later in the show, Dee Dee Ramone was hit with a beer bottle that someone thew. He tossed off his bass and jumped in to the crowd to kick the crud out of the guy. He jumped back on stage and walked off and all the while the rest of the guys just kept jamming. They took a break, then all came back on and continued with the show.
context_page_description: American popular music has had a profound effect on music across the world. The country has seen the rise of popular styles that have had a significant influence on global culture, including ragtime, blues, jazz, swing, rock, bluegrass, country, R&B, doo wop, gospel, soul, funk, heavy metal, punk, disco, house, techno, salsa, grunge and hip hop. In addition, the American music industry is quite diverse, supporting a number of regional styles such as zydeco, klezmer and slack-key.
  Distinctive styles of American popular music emerged early in the 19th century, and in the 20th century the American music industry developed a series of new forms of music, using elements of blues and other genres of American folk music. These popular styles included country, R&B, jazz and rock. The 1960s and 1970s saw a number of important changes in American popular music, including the development of a number of new styles, such as heavy metal, punk, soul, and hip hop. Though these styles were not in the sense of mainstream, they were commercially recorded and are thus examples of popular music as opposed to folk or classical music.
context_section_description: Punk was a kind of rebellious rock music that began in the 1970s as a reaction against the popular music of the day - especially disco, which was seen as insipid and uninspired. Punk drew on American bands including the Velvet Underground, The Stooges and the New York Dolls. Punk was loud, aggressive and usually very simple, requiring little musical training to play. Later in the decade, British bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash found short-lived fame at home and, to a lesser degree, in the United States. American bands in the field included most famously The Ramones, as well as groups like the Talking Heads that played a more artsy kind of music that was closely associated with punk before eventually evolving into pop-new wave. Other major acts include Blondie, Patti Smith and Television. Most of these bands got their start at what is considered "ground zero"  of punk rock, a club named CBGB. The small club in New York threw a festival in 1975 that showed off the "top 40 unrecorded rock bands". Among these bands were the previously mentioned The Ramones, Sex Pistols, Blondie and the like.
  Hardcore punk was the response of American youths to the worldwide punk rock explosion of the late 1970s. Hardcore stripped punk rock and New Wave of its sometimes elitist and artsy tendencies, resulting in short, fast, and intense songs that spoke to disaffected youth. Hardcore exploded in the American metropolises of Los Angeles, Washington, DC, New York and Boston and most American cities had their own local scenes by the end of the 1980s.
  Alternative rock is a diverse grouping of rock bands that in America developed largely from the hardcore scene in the 1980s in stark opposition to the mainstream music scene. Alternative rock subgenres that developed during the decade include indie rock, Gothic rock, noise rock, grunge, and college rock. Most alternative bands were unified by their collective debt to punk, which laid the groundwork for underground and alternative music in the 1970s. Though the genre is considered to be rock, some styles were influenced by American folk, reggae and jazz. Like punk and hardcore, alternative rock had little mainstream success in America in the 1980s, but via the grassroots establishment of an indie scene through touring, college radio, fanzines, and word-of-mouth, alternative bands laid the groundwork for the breakthrough of the genre in the American public consciousness in the next decade.
caption: Joey and Dee Dee Ramone in concert, 1983
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