Donald Clarke: Who are you calling punk?

Imagine if some contemporary artist described himself as a Renaissance painter. You’d kick him in the pants and tell him to pull himself together. Right? You’d do the same if some fool claimed to be a Regency architect. Those words reference ages as much as artistic movements. A time machine is needed to justify such descriptions.

Fat old fools need to prepare themselves for the 40th anniversary of punk's ugly death. Being cavalier with history, we could extend the era to January 14th, 1978. It was on that day, in San Francisco, that Johnny Rotten, lead singer of The Sex Pistols, asked the audience if they ever felt they'd been cheated. He quit shortly afterwards, and the band survived as an awkward comedy rump.

But it makes more sense to date punk’s demise to the summer of 1977. An underground movement that had its roots in lo-fi instrumentation and samizdat publications, punk was, during those months, engulfed in a media furore that guaranteed its imminent detoxification.

Four decades on, have The Adverts been on a postage stamp yet? Probably not. But John Lydon (formerly Rotten) has been on I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, and that's more or less the same thing.

I've just come across an article on pitchfork.com, a respected music website, concerning Mike Mills's 20th Century Women. The nice-looking, impressively acted film, which is up for a best original screenplay Oscar, follows a group of women around Santa Barbara in sunny 1979. The soundtrack hums and buzzes with much excellent contemporaneous music. Talking Heads' Fear of Music. The Raincoats' eponymous first album. Devo's Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! You know the sort of thing.

The tunes fit into the category that we used to call new wave and now refer to as postpunk. Obviously, this isn’t punk music, because, as we just bloody explained, punk ended at some point between the late summer of 1977 and the beginning of 1978. Were you not listening?

Pretentious prog rock bands

Punk was as much a process as a musical form. By 1976 pretentious progressive-rock bands and somnambulant California singer-songwriters had taken over pop music (as your bearded older brother wouldn’t call it, because it was “rock music”, you see). If an LP wasn’t called

The Essence of a Quasi-Omnipresent Neutrino

then it was called

Laurel Canyon Comedown

.

In the following 18 months a group of aggressive new performers introduced a music defined by rawness and lack of complication. The notion was not to invent a genre but to raze a rotten institution and invite unpredictable weeds to grow in the fecund ground. Once that was achieved the battering ram that was punk rock could be abandoned as a form.

So imagine my fury when I read the headline on the Pitchfork piece: "20th Century Women Gets Early Punk Right," it bellowed. How does that make any sense? There isn't any "punk" music in the film. How could there be? It is all drawn from the years after the movement ended. It's almost as if the writers (not Mills, to be fair) believe that punk is a genre that, once created, can be endlessly reworked by subsequent acolytes. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

As we progress through the 40th-anniversary celebrations we are reminded that a division exists between US notions of punk and how purists see the music in the UK and Ireland. The problem is that Americans are too open minded and insufficiently doctrinal about culture. When they encounter a new music they naively seek to institutionalise it rather than vigorously crush it beneath the heel and wipe the remains on the kerb of history.

The culturally reactionary Rolling Stone magazine – a periodical that was born old – wasn't happy with The Clash until, on the release of London Calling, that band could comfortably be called the new Rolling Stones. Most US critics can't see the ideological absurdity of allowing things such as Green Day and The Offspring to call themselves punk. Yes, Americans such as Iggy Pop and the MC5 more or less invented the music. But that doesn't give that nation the right to redraw our long-cherished Trotskyite notions of music as permanent revolution.

Musical appreciation is as much to do with what you are not allowed to like as what you are required to appreciate. We don’t like albums with Martian landscapes or men standing beside cacti on the cover. We don’t like bands that play with double-necked guitars. We don’t like musicians who call themselves punks after 1978. I’ve forgotten what else I don’t like.

Oh dear. This has gone on for so long I can’t even tell if I’m joking any more.