''I was young, 21 years old, didn't really have clue what was going on. It was a time when no one had jobs and the country was a mess, pretty much like it is now. It's like its gone full circle. 'There needs to be a new band. There ain't been a movement for a few years. I'm tired of people just using us 35 years later as the ones who got up and said something about what was happening.''
That's Steve Jones, former Sex Pistol, current L.A. DJ talking to TNT Magazine.
Actually, there have been any number of musical revolutions since punk:
hip hop
mtv
grunge
file sharing
dance
streaming
So some musical and some not so musical, but all big deal game changers. For instance, grunge saw a seachange in American can doism evolve into a pragmatic neutrality: do what you can do, be on the side of the angels, and don't expect a damn thing in return.
Which was in many ways the opposite of punk: Steve Jones also noted that the Sex Pistols were a great band musically. Oh, I don't know about that. It doesn't really matter if they were technically useless, they got by on sheer spirit. And that is the great lost art of punk rock. Everybody starts somewhere, but punk said EVERYBODY START SOMEWHERE. It is wonderful, stunningly naive idea, and it hits at the working class heart of Presley and rock and roll.
The whole point of rock and roll was amplified guitars could drown out an orchestra so you didn't need to be able to afford an orchestra to make music. It was a working class art form if only because it could be done on the cheap and that mad all the difference. The front line of rock and roll were black drifters and white trash.
Punk was just white trash.
And Steve Jones was a teenage juvenile delinquent, pick pocket, who got his first guitar by pinching it out of the Faces van. And used it to change the face of rock and roll.
That should be enough for any man.