Sometimes, in order to distance itself from the more corporate new wave or avant-garde post-punk, punk (re)established its extreme identity as hardcore and oi by drawing from metal’s toolbox of raw sounds. United by “raw”-ness, both genres also share a common pursuit of the extreme, that (un)holy grail around which they have often crossed, overlapped, or fused. What Lester Bangs said of punk could just as easily have been said of metal: “Punk rock has been around from the beginning-it’s just rock honed down to its rawest elements” (Heylin 32). But they were both rebellious outsider subcultures built around guitar-based primal rock music. And yes, punk valued lyrical social messaging more than metal. Yes, metal valued musical complexity more than punk. In reality, the distance between our two self-imposed camps was not as far as we made it out to be. How could we ignore those fat metal riffs coming from the dual guitar maestros-one on a Flying V-in Penetration? Or the note-bending “rockist” guitar solos of Captain Sensible from the Damned? And how could they not see that Lemmy and Motörhead had just as much attitude in common with their punk peers as their metal ones? Yet, even then, punk-metal hybrids lingered within our midst. The idea that there could be any common ground between us, never mind a fused identity, seemed inconceivable and wholly undesirable at the time. To them, we were spikey-haired cultural slummers willing to settle for musical incompetence and amateur ambitions. To us, those long-haired “freaks” represented everything we despised about rock culture: musical pretension and self-indulgence absurd fantasy escapism and post-prog stadium-rocking narcissism. I recall our class camped out in the library for study hour, my punk friends and I on one side of the room and the metal-heads on the other. By 1978, both the punk and metal subcultures had taken root at my high school in the outer suburbs of London.
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