After reading chapter Punk The Sound of Criticism? in the reader I have a little more insight to a period of music history which fascinates me. Basically the article is about a rock journalist observing a music festival at CBGB’s in the summer of 1975 during the beginning of the first wave punk movement right before the punk explosion in 1977 when it really hit the mainstream. He details what CBGB’s looked like and the general atmosphere of the festival, then begins to mention the now iconic bands Television, the Talking Heads, and briefly The Ramones. He goes on about how punk is the kind of music that is “saving”  rock from the over the top arena rock of the day. He also draws a lot of comparisons to the punk bands and the Velvet Underground and the Warhol art movement of the late 1960’s. I personally found this article to a be little ironic since the author goes on about how these bands and this movement aren’t pretentious yet he writes about them in a pretentious way (or at least to me he comes off as pretentious). I disagree with some of his description of Television and his comparison of Tom Verlaine to Keith Richards, but do love his short depiction of The Ramones. I also agree to an extent that the Talking Heads may have been the closest band of that scene to be the most “Velvet Underground-ish” because both bands had such an odd way of going about making music which made them both so unique to themselves. Towards the end he asks the question if these bands will ever become bigger than just CBGB’s regulars but in the end it doesn’t matter which made me laugh only because he had no idea how iconic these bands would become in the years to follow or how popular the Talking Heads would be. One of the reasons I deeply enjoy punk music and the culture of it is because this initial scene in New York in the mid to late 1970’s which focused on making music that had a message and allowed people to freely express themselves however they wanted regardless of musical skill. This notion appeals greatly to me and is what I believe punk it truly about which is why a band like the Sex Pistols rub me the wrong way in some aspects since they seemed (or at least some members of the band seemed) to be more focused on fashion and using punk as an excuse to party all the time and act like animals rather than express ideas the way many American punk bands did. Not to say the NY bands didn’t focus on punk fashion and party a lot, but they didn’t seem to let it get in the way of their music.