Tl;dr
i was going to write a giant wall of text, but it's just as likely that someone will read that as someone will click any of those youtube links.
but walls of text is what i DO, yo.
been on a bad religion kick lately. trying not to think about that remastered box thing, i'm not sure of the specifics on it because if i did look closely at it, i'd feel compelled to buy the thing. and that's more money than i want to spend on all the same albums i already own. even if it does mark the first official release of into the unknown. i don't imagine the audio on that sounds vastly different than the bootleg versions that have surfaced over the years, and i'm kind of attatched to the shitty sound quality. makes the shitty sounding toons more awesome. and yes, the synths in "billy gnosis" are awesome.
bad religion kicks usually lead to pennywise/old school epitaph records kicks where punkorama 1-6 compilations get brought out. it's too bad that those compilations stopped being good after 6 (and i'm sure some purist out there would argue that 6 wasn't even good), that 7 was godawful, and the hip-hop that all kinds of kids balked at on 8 were by far the most interesting songs on the double-disc catastrophe. if they even put out anymore under that name after 8, i don't know about it, and don't want to know about it. i'd be lying in epitaph wasn't important to me, if i wasn't one of those kids in the 90s that got into punk rock starting with a steady diet of stuff from that label. in my mind, any band that ever put out anything under either that brand or hell cat is the punk rock stuff everyone knows. that's your big name bands, the all your rancid, dropkick murphys, bad religion, pennywise, duane peters' projects, solo/side projects from band members in those bands or their close friends/ex-bandmates--because in punk rock, it's all about inbreeding. that's why there's no good place to begin, really. everything becomes inextricably linked back to each other, and you can't trace an origin because it spreads and overlaps into too many other genres.
i started out listening to music when i was 7, but refused to listen to anything other than them til i was 14. because the epitaph/side one dummy/the other label i'm totally blanking on now that is arguably bigger than side1dummy...was the most popular, most easily obtainable, it's so easy to start with a band like tiger army, and delve into psychobilly, rockabilly, original to throw-back stuff. i have a love-hate relationship with the way the whole greaser thing melds into country, because it's a perfectly viable transition but i hate what it turned into when johnny cash died and all these kids who'd never heard [insert random song title here, any cash will suffice] were going around wearing the fuck off tshirts because all of a sudden it's cool. mike ness has always been great about forcing that on people who've ever listened to a social distortion album. and he's right, because johnny cash bridging hank sr into carl perkins/gene vincent/eddie cochran is a beautiful thing, via the stray cats or not depending on how you feel about them (i dig), because in the end it's just rock n roll. you want to go surf rock? because everyone needs a little bit of the ventures in their life. like zombies with your stand-up bass? you get the idea.
"street punk" does the same thing, in the way that it branches off to come from rock n roll roots as well as oi. "street punk" gets thrown around as term to describe anything from sham 69 to the ducky boys. it's either the business, the oppressed, cocksparrer, etc. or it's the hudson falcons doing springsteen covers or songs that sound like they could have been written by the rolling stones circa exile on main street. boston-based street punk could be a category used to describe a sizable number of bands on my ipod because i live in new england and it's always seemed a lot easier for me to trace jason bennett & the resistance after the end of suspect device which i heard of cos the ducky boys thanked them on some album who i of course knew of since the dropkick murphys first recording was a split 7"...so on and so forth. sure, the internet makes a lot of that argument moot at this point, but i haven't quite caught up. or am too entrenched in the intricacies of my "local" scene to worry about what happened to the brassknuckle boys, if they're still around and who else from KC is similar/worth hearing. i'd probably list singing along loudly and with no shame to some super catchy, anthemic song with a lot of "whoaaaas" and "nah nah nah"s in it ranks as one of my all-time favorite things in the world, whether it's alone at home or at a show amidst a bunch of sweaty bald dudes.
we aren't going to talk about that tendency street punk bands have to go toward irish music. but i do love me some flatfoot 56 still. or maybe we will. because clearly, you can go DKM/flogging molly back through the pogues to straight up folk music if you so please. and it's a good time, as long as there are no frat boys or red sox fans nearby.
and hardcore. oh, what to do with hardcore. old school nyhc, youth crew, straightedge stuff...i'm a little geographically impaired and tend to put west coast into categories of "stuff that sounds like black flag" or "stuff that probably gets termed old school skate punk" like the adolescents, gbh, circle jerks, germs, et al. i tend to assume everyone knows sheer terror, agnostic front, cro-mags, slapshot, blood for blood, sick of it all if they say "i like hardcore"...i hate listing bands, because i'll inevitably leave off a million, as it is, if shouter reads or skims through this i picture him sitting there pulling out his hair 1) because of all the classic bands i will forget and 2) the geography thing. but anyway...there was a time when i was at umass where i would listen to absolutely any album bridge 9 sent my way.
the clash. aside from it being a given that everyone knows london calling, the musical clusterfuck of sandinista! is kind of where i'm going with this. and then a few decades later, joe strummer made listening to steel drum music from trinidad and tobago cool. but more importantly, ska/reggae/dub...take your punk rock starting point, and branch off either in a roots direction (starting with the motherfucking skatalites, although someone else is going to jump in and offer another opinion, telling me that the skatalites did not invent ska. i know), contemporary sort of thing--coughthespecialscough--or look to what came out of that: mighty mighty bosstones, catch-22, streetlight manifesto, all that pop-punk-ska shit was huge where i went to high school because all the band geeks could try to be green day while still playing their trombones.
i'd be somewhat hyperbolic if i claimed that everything i know about music stems from listening to punk rock. but having come from a very narrow focus of the beatles>oldies station/motown/60s rock n roll>mainstream rock radio [thank god that was short-lived]>epitaph records punk rock>everyone's favorite "who invented punk rock, the clash or the ramones?">EVERYTHING ELSE "bands that sound like..." "bands that played shows with..." "bands that were doing something drastically different at the same time as the last band i was listening to..." "yeah, i knew "which side are you on" before DKM was even a band, but that sort of thing made me go back and revisit all that pete seger/weavers/woodie gutherie/joe hill pro-union stuff." you get the idea.
Operation Ivy's Energy 
i saw someone comparing the who and the jam once, tried to adapt their argument that both bands came from the same place (i figured they were talking musically, but it's been a while since i thought about it, so for all i know paul weller and pete townshend grew up in the same town? no idea) and then diverged into different things. i'm not so sure i'd agree, but for some reason it stuck with me. the implication there being that early who=some kind of a mod/punk rock thing. does not work well at all with anyone who got angry and said the clash sold out when they opened for them. then you get people who want to define "punk rock" as something other than just music, some misguided high school kid who might sew a who patch on a hoodie because other kids point out the various other typical punk rock patches, look at that one and go, eew i don't know about them though, just because they think that attitude is...yes, i still have the hoodie. it's still wearable. but anyway, i like what shouter said.
