Popular wisdom has it that punk was a revolutionary force that constituted a radical break with all that had come before and decimated everything in its path. The Guardian's Alexis Petridis isn't the first person to complicate or challenge that myth - in Rip It Up And Start Again, for instance, Simon Reynolds makes a convincing case for punk having a rock 'n' roll lineage and post-punk being the genuine rupture - but his analysis of the UK music press around the pivotal year of 1976 makes for fascinating reading.
On the one hand, Petridis' research reveals that there was a sense of stagnation, sterility and boredom within the music scene, and that punk's arrival did "obliterate everything that came immediately before it from the collective memory" - as evidenced by bands like Doctors Of Madness and Sailor, hyped as the Next Big Thing only to disappear without a trace once the Sex Pistols rocked up. (To add insult to injury, Doctors Of Madness gave Johnny Rotten's mob a leg up along the way in the form of a support slot.)
But on the other hand, Petridis notes that it's striking "how little impact [punk] had on the rock aristocrats some observers thought it would dethrone: the Rolling Stones' career continued unimpeded, as did those of Elton John, Queen, ELO, Pink Floyd et al". Perhaps more surprisingly, given the general air of disaffected gloom hanging over things, rock scribes didn't greet punk's arrival "with untrammelled delight", often dismissing it as contrived or cartoonish rather than instantly hailing its exciting transformative energy.
Overall, the article is an instructive qualification/corrective to common perceptions, and in general terms a lesson in the value of maintaining a healthy scepticism rather than uncritically swallowing myths that have accreted over time.
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