Rockpedia
Rock branch Full entry · 1979

Anarcho-punk

Emerged 1979 Origin United Kingdom Subgenres — Vocals Shouted
Heaviness
4
Speed
7
Melody
4

Shouted. Barked or chanted, and you can still make out the words.

In short

Total political punk: collectives, self-releasing and militant pacifism. It laid down the DIY ethic the underground still runs on.

How it sounds

  • Raw production, often with noise, collage and radio recordings.
  • Irregular, sometimes nearly improvised structures.
  • Dense, pamphlet-like text printed in full on the gatefold sleeve.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
150-200 bpm
Song length
2-4 min
Tuning
E standard, played cheaply, with a deliberately unpolished tone. Musical convention is one of the things being refused.
Production
Rough, dry and vocal-forward, frequently self-released on the band's own label with hand-assembled sleeves. The production is part of the politics — these records were made to be cheap and to be copied.
Written about
Anarchism, War and the state, Feminism, Animal rights

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Fast, atonal-leaning barre chords with little regard for conventional progression, sometimes two guitars in deliberate disagreement.
  • Bass Driving and simple, holding songs together while the guitars argue.
  • Drums Fast and martial, frequently with a marching feel that suits the sloganeering.
  • Vocals Shouted, spoken and frequently traded between men and women — Crass's use of multiple voices, including spoken-word collage, is a genuine formal innovation.
  • Tape collage Found sound, news broadcasts and montage used between and inside songs, which almost no other punk genre attempted.

What it isn't

That the politics made the music secondary. Crass's records are formally adventurous in ways their contemporaries were not — tape collage, multiple simultaneous vocalists, tracks running into each other, spoken word — and the band ran a functioning independent label, distribution network and printing operation. The politics produced the formal experiments rather than crowding them out.

Told apart from

  • Punk rock Anarcho-punk took punk's politics literally and built infrastructure around them — labels, squats, distribution — where punk had mostly used politics as attitude.
  • Crust punk Crust came out of this scene and added metal's tuning and distortion. Anarcho is faster, cleaner and more explicitly ideological.
  • Oi! / street punk Both are working-class British punk genres from the same years. Oi is about immediate circumstance; anarcho is about systems.
  • D-beat D-beat is the sonic wing of the same politics, reduced to one rhythm and a handful of slogans.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Crass released records on their own label, at prices printed on the cover, from a commune farmhouse in Essex. They were investigated by the British government after faking a recording of Thatcher and Reagan. Their model of self-releasing and DIY networking matters more to underground music than their actual songs.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Zeuhl 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
  • Proto-punk 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Rock
  • Screamo 2.4 apart by rating · meets it at Punk rock

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.