This chapter begins in the late 1970s – not with Abba, or Queen, or Evita, all of which were internationally successful at the time, but with punk rock. Even when dealing with ostensibly popular music, there remains a tension between critical and populist versions of music history, and some history books devote much space to punk while others avoid it. Here pop music towards 2000 is depicted, in a necessarily selective way, as being in the front line of a shift in critical thought from class-based critique to identity politics. Through staying power pop music became established as art form; a case is also made here for a looser discursive model based in movement and creative dialogue, focusing on remix and cover. The perspective of the chapter starts from Britain and jumps around with dates, though the reader may sense a certain centre of gravity around the year 1985.

Punk

Punk rock is sometimes seen as a spearing of the bloated beast which pop and rock had become over the decade from 1965 to 1975. Above all others, The Sex Pistols supplied many of the great iconic moments, over the remarkably short period of time from their first single ‘Anarchy in the UK’, released on 19 October 1976, to their last concert in San Francisco on 14 January 1978. (‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ was singer Johnny Rotten’s memorable last comment.) The Pistols provided great entertainment: spewing foul language over teatime telly, bagging the number one spot with an antimonarchy rant at the time of the Queen’s jubilee, annoying British town councils and American rednecks, and eventually supplying for pop hedonism, in Sid and Nancy, its ultimate Romeo and Juliet script.