AboutCaleb Expertise I'm happy to help you with suggesting bands to listen to, or resolving questions about the history of punk. I end up telling most people to listen to the Velvet Underground - definitely check them out of you haven't yet.
Question Recent punk bands (Green day,The offspring etc...) is almost rotten at the core.
Above all,they are too much pop.
Did punk rock die?
Answer Yes and no and yes.
Punk has always been pop music. That's what the punk movement was about... a rebellion against progressive rock which was all technical precision with no mojo.
Punk was about getting back to the basics, the 60s garage style of catchy, simple songs, but heavier and sometimes angrier, and sometimes political. The original punk bands were very influenced by 60s British Invasion pop music as well as bands such as the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, David Bowie, T-Rex and others, who were very influenced by either pop, blues, or both.
However, the punk movement only lasted a few years. It morphed into new wave and post-punk, which gave birth to alternative rock (it was Husker Du and R.E.M. that marked the point where post-punk became alternative rock) and then indie. The same movement. Grunge was sort of part of that movement too... it merged punk with metal and sludgy Stooges-style rock (it's no coincidence that the Stooges were very influential on both punk and metal), and slowed it all down. And Brit-pop, while hearkening back to 60s pop again, was also indie-influenced.
That movement took us through from rock's rebirth in the mid-70s until the mid-90s, but it's pretty much died now... if you look at the so-called indie nowadays, it's just boring safe hipster music. That's a generalisation of course, but what passes as indie nowadays is a far cry from the awesome real indie bands such as Pavement, Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth and Sebadoh.
So punk in the sense of punk-to-indie-and-everything-in-between has pretty much died, yes. And punk in the sense of pure-straight-up-punk died before the end of the 70s. Lots of bands in the 80s tried to flog the punk horse, but they invariably sucked. Minor Threat, for example. They sucked. But Fugazi were quite cool. (there are exceptions of course, i'm sure there are SOME good 80s punk bands, the Minutemen for example, and i'm sure even minor threat are quite good once you give them a chance. But generally speaking, 80s punk was bad news).
But then there was Nirvana in the late 80s/early 90s. They were very Beatles-influenced, as well as influenced by various types of hard rock, and followed in the footprints of Husker Du and the Pixies before them, and Cheap Trick before that (and in fact, early Kinks before them) merging hard rock with pop hooks. It was a hit, and Nirvana's breakthrough brought grunge and alternative into the mainstream, but while they were partially part of those movements, the best word to describe them was punk.
Nirvana kind of disprove my "punk died in the late 70s" theory, but I think it's important to differentiate between the punk movement (which in my eyes only lasted a few years before it split off to punk/hardcore which mostly sucked, and post-punk/alternative which was mostly awesome) and the punk style. A style can never die, obviously. It can just be done so much that anyone who tries it is only being derivative of what has come before. But a movement can die.
Which brings us to the later movement known as pop-punk. In the early 90s, bands such as Green Day, Blink-182 and the Offspring took punk and Nirvana and made it lighter, friendlier, more immature and (arguably) catchier. They started up a new sound, different from punk but it became known as punk anyway, and appealled to a generation of kids, myself included (don't worry, i've mostly grown out of it now).
It's definitely not pure punk, it's immature and their voices can be quite annoying. But I think some of those early pop-punk bands were pretty good. The Offspring's first two or three albums are great, and the same goes for Green Day and Blink. And even their later, worse albums are a hell of a lot better than the commercial rubbish that followed.
You see, the music industry saw that pop-punk was popular, and (just as they did with grunge, creating post-grunge) started encouraging lots of bands to follow the pop-punk mould. Truly ghastly bands like Simple Plan started springing up. In the last year or so, the "emo" look has become cool, and that's been merged with the pop-punk thing and it's becoming the new mainstream, but it's so horrible.
Don't blame Green Day though. Even their new album is not bad. It's very influenced by the Who (whereas their previous album was very influenced by the Kinks, and that was quite a good album too). They're not doing much new anymore, but they're still a decent band.
The only problem I have with them is their new image. They tried to appeal to the faux-punk, faux-emo image, as well as tapping into the lucrative market of kids who hate Bush but don't know why, and they were very successful. Their newest album became their most popular ever. Bloody sell-outs. But musically, they haven't sold out. It's not as good as their early albums but it's interesting.
And also, don't blame pop, because pop's not the problem. Most music nowadays (including so-called "indie pop" which is neither poppy nor independent) needs a healthy injection of real pop.
Blame commercialisation - that's where the real blame lies. Music made to make money is almost always crap.
