Punk's homage to Elvis Presley

"The rise of Punk reflected the crisis of the traditional white male working-class culture in the deep recessions of the late seventies and early eighties, particularly in Great Britain. It was developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. It still has a strong following today and many genres try living up to the punk attitude. It uses fast, hard-edged music, typically with short songs, stripped-down instrumentation, and often political, anti-establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY ethic; many bands self-produced recordings and distributed them through informal channels.

In these pictures I am looking at the similarity between the two albums and why this was done. The clash blatantly reference Elvis with their album cover. This is a sort of homage to Elvis and Rock and Roll, but in a way that it mocks the past it references also. Elvis is shown playing a guitar and singing, but in the clash’s album cover the bassist Paul Simonon is seen destroying his guitar. The destruction of the guitar in my opinion was to signify the bands opposition to commercial music, as the guitar itself was most likely the best representation of commercial music at that time."

I found this on music in the postmodern era, and how new genres of music use earlier styles or even play on them to sometimes rebel or reinforce what the original artist represented in their music. I selected this part specifically because  it relates to music, however, the whole text is useful for our topic.

Crowder, M. (2013) Postmodernism and Postmodern Music [date accessed: 30 March 2014] http://crowderdesign.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/postmodernism-and-postmodernist-music/