Mezz Mezzrow, an unsuccessful white clarinetist but reasonably successful weed dealer from the 1930s who was obsessed with documenting slang in the jazz scene, defined it in the most awkwardly problematic possible language as a “young man who plays the feminine role in a homosexual relationship.” By the mid 20th century, punk had, on one hand, evolved to be synonymous with the ever-problematic “thug,” while the general-purpose term for a sex worker of Shakespeare’s day had become very specific. First showing up as a reference to a sex worker in a 1575 song called “Simon The Old Kinge” (with an appropriately stripped down chord progression, but the least punk of all time signatures: 3/9), by 1899 it was appearing in print as a description of amateurishly performed music. “Punk” as a word has a long and storied history. Long before Sid Vicious ever sneered into a microphone as part of an extraordinarily elaborate viral marketing campaign for Vivian Westwood’s clothing line, punk had been loud, Black, and queer. For a literal century before John fucking Lydon gentrified punk rock, the word had denoted a thriving mess of contradictions, derisions, and rebellions. Punk rock had even already at that point been declared dead (for the first of at least a billion times) by a music critic in Ontario following a disappointing Alice Cooper show in 1972. By 1976, the word “punk” had already been in common usage for 400 years.
The most reductive possible version of the story goes like this: On February 12th, 1976, a quartet of straight white boys called The Sex Pistols took the stage at The Marquee Club in London and with the first wail of feedback, punk rock was born.
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