Blank Generation (song)

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"Blank Generation"
Blank generation.jpg
EP cover
Song by Richard Hell and the Voidoids
from the EP Another World
Released1976
Recorded1975, 1976
Genre
Length2:45
Label Sire
Songwriter(s) Richard Hell

"Blank Generation" is the title track of Richard Hell and the Voidoids' 1977 debut album Blank Generation . A rewrite of Bob McFadden and Rod McKuen's 1959 record "The Beat Generation", [3] Richard Hell wrote the new lyrics during his time with the band Television, and performed it live with another band, The Heartbreakers. [4] Malcolm McLaren claimed that the Sex Pistols' song "Pretty Vacant" was directly inspired by "Blank Generation". [5]

"Blank Generation" was previously released on the Another World EP in 1976. [6] Other versions of the punk classic were available as demos and on one 1975 limited-edition pressing as well.

An earlier live recording by the Heartbreakers, recorded at CBGB on July 7, 1975, appeared on the What Goes Around... album. [7] Demo recordings of the song also have survived.

A live March 1974 recording at CBGB with Television can be found on Spurts: The Richard Hell Story. [8]

"Blank Generation" was heavily sampled on rapper Amil's track "Get Down", from her 2000 album All Money Is Legal .

The song was featured at the end of the sixth episode of the Syfy television show Happy! . The song appears in season 3, episode 3 of Sex Education . [9]

"Blank Generation" is heard in a scene in The Exorcism (2024).

References

  1. ↑ Easely, Erica; Chalfa, Ed (2006). Rock Tease: The Golden Years of Rock T-Shirts. Harry N. Abrams. p. 52. ISBN   978-0-8109-7053-3.
  2. ↑ The Absolute Sound. Vol. 17 (83-86 ed.). Absolute Sound, Limited. 1992. p. 280.
  3. ↑ "Bob McFadden & Dor - Songs Our Mummy Taught Us". Discogs . 1959.
  4. ↑ AllMusic song review
  5. ↑ "I came back to England determined. I had these images I came back with, it was like Marco Polo or Walter Raleigh. I brought back the image of this distressed, strange thing called Richard Hell. And this phrase, 'the blank generation'. [...] Richard Hell was a definite, 100 percent inspiration, and, in fact, I remember telling the Sex Pistols, 'Write a song like Blank Generation, but write your own bloody version,' and their own version was 'Pretty Vacant'." --Malcolm McLaren in an interview in Please Kill Me, the Uncensored Oral History of Punk, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Grove Press (1996), p. 199.
  6. ↑ Another World EP at Discogs
  7. ↑ The Heartbreakers: What Goes Around... at Discogs
  8. ↑ Spurts: The Richard Hell Story at Discogs
  9. ↑ Hunt, James (September 17, 2021). "Every Song In Sex Education Season 3". Screen Rant . Retrieved September 19, 2021.


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