From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, American punk developed as a distinct musical style that reflected the tremendous upheaval in American society during this period. Raw and direct, punk presented an unvarnished view of changing ideas of race, the growth of American suburbia, and the heightened stakes of musical expressions of whiteness and Blackness. Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk traces the main factors at play in the punk style, including transformations to blues resources, experimental visions of the American musical past, and bold reworkings of the rock and roll ... More

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, American punk developed as a distinct musical style that reflected the tremendous upheaval in American society during this period. Raw and direct, punk presented an unvarnished view of changing ideas of race, the growth of American suburbia, and the heightened stakes of musical expressions of whiteness and Blackness. Damaged: Musicality and Race in Early American Punk traces the main factors at play in the punk style, including transformations to blues resources, experimental visions of the American musical past, and bold reworkings of the rock and roll and R&B sounds of the late 1950s and early 1960s—all in all, a historically oriented approach to rock that is strikingly different from the common myths and conceptions about punk. Eventually punk became a forum for new versions of older exchanges between the US and the UK, and the style reflected even more changes to American metropolitan areas and a shift from the expressions of older baby boomers to that of younger musicians belonging to Generation X. The book also explores the discourses and contradictory narratives of punk history, which are often in direct conflict with the world that is captured in historical documents and revealed through musical analysis.