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The Imports | |
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Origin | Chicago, Illinois, United States |
Genres | Punk rock, post-punk |
Years active | 1979–1980 |
Members | Ben Krug (Vocals) Tom Krug (Guitar) Joe Strell (Bass) Tom Wall (Drums) |
Past members | John Krug (Drums) Alec Dale (Drums) |
The Imports were a Chicago punk rock band that formed in 1980. In a response to a solicitation for information on influential people, bands, clubs, zines, etc., for a Chicago Punk History Radio Documentary in 2006, Steve Albini of Big Black listed The C*nts, The Imports, Coolest Retard, Wax Trax, and WZRD. [1] Members of The Imports later went on to play with the Vagueleys, Silly Carmichaels (a pre-Ministry Al Jourgensen project), Sharkey's Machine, ¡Ack-Ack!, The Arms of Someone New, Split Heavens, Sylvia Darling and The Moon Seven Times.
The Imports formed in 1979 in Chicago's South Side Hyde Park neighborhood. The band consisted of Ben Krug (vocals), Tom Krug (guitar) and Joe Strell (bass). The Imports went through a series of drummers including John Krug, Alec Dale, who accompanied the outfit through its transition from punk rock to post-punk, and finally Tom Wall.
During their brief career, the Imports played the nightclub circuit of Chicago's underground music scene, a scene they shared with other Chicago punk rock and/or new wave music bands such as Bohemia, C*nts, Da!, the Dadistics, Epicycle, the Ferraris, Heavy Manners, the Men, Naked Raygun, the Oil Tasters (from Milwaukee), Painter Band, Phil 'n' the Blanks, Poison Squirrel, Skafish, Special Affect, Static Cling, the Subverts (from Rockford), the Sweatermen, the Throbbers, the Trouble Boys, and the Vaguelys. As Ken Mierzwa writes in Ephemeral Creation: Music and Art in Chicago, 1978-1982, "none of the first batch of local bands ever enjoyed more than regional success". [2] The nightclubs in which The Imports played included The Lucky Number, Tuts, Jamie's Elsewhere, and Exit. The majority of The Imports' band members were excluded from these venues on nights when they were not playing on account of being under the legal age for drinking, making it difficult for them to view acts who weren't on the same bill.
Initially, the Imports played a short pop punk set of originals inspired by late seventies American and British punk acts such as Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Jam. Their repertoire grew to over sixty originals, few of which ran much longer than two minutes. However, soon after their Chicago debut at the club Ann Arkees on March 6, 1980, the Imports gave up their high-intensity pop-punk style for a melancholic, brooding post-punk sound.
While together, The Imports released only one professional recording: a 7-inch single on Cirkle Records, published in 1980 with the songs "Visions of Reality" and "Darkness of Light". These songs were recorded on a four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder in the Imports rehearsal space in the basement of the Krug's home in Hyde Park. The recording engineer was Andrew Clark, guitarist and vocalist of the band Epicycle. In order to achieve some manner of separation between tracks, each member of the band was sequestered in his own corner of the basement.
New wave is a music genre that encompasses pop-oriented styles from the 1970s through the 1980s. It is considered a lighter and more melodic "broadening of punk culture". It was originally used as a catch-all for the various styles of music that emerged after punk rock. Later, critical consensus favored "new wave" as an umbrella term involving many contemporary popular music styles, including synth-pop, alternative dance and post-punk. The main new wave movement coincided with late 1970s punk and continued into the early 1980s.
Rock is a broad genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of different styles from the mid-1960s, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, a style that drew directly from the genres of blues, rhythm and blues, and from country music. Rock also drew strongly from genres such as electric blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz and other musical styles. For instrumentation, rock has centered on the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar, drums, and one or more singers. Usually, rock is song-based music with a 4
4 time signature using a verse–chorus form, but the genre has become extremely diverse. Like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political. Rock was the most popular genre of music in the U.S. and much of the Western world from the 1950s to the 2010s.
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Popular music of the United States in the 1980s saw heavy metal, country music, Top 40 hits, hip hop, MTV, CMJ, and new wave as mainstream. Punk rock and hardcore punk was popular on CMJ. With the demise of punk rock, a new generation of punk-influenced genres arose, including Gothic rock, post-punk, alternative rock, emo and thrash metal. Hip hop underwent its first diversification, with Miami bass, Chicago hip house, Washington, D.C. go-go, Detroit ghettotech, Los Angeles G-funk and the "golden age of old school hip hop" in New York City. House music developed in Chicago, techno music developed in Detroit which also saw the flowering of the Detroit Sound in gospel. This helped inspire the greatest crossover success of Christian Contemporary Music (CCM), as well as the Miami Sound of Cuban pop.
Popular music of the United Kingdom in the 1970s built upon the new forms of music developed from blues rock towards the end of the 1960s, including folk rock and psychedelic rock movements. Several important and influential subgenres were created in Britain in this period, by pursuing the limitations of rock music, including British folk rock and glam rock, a process that reached its apogee in the development of progressive rock and one of the most enduring subgenres in heavy metal music. Britain also began to be increasingly influenced by third world music, including Jamaican and Indian music, resulting in new music scenes and subgenres. In the middle years of the decade the influence of the pub rock and American punk rock movements led to the British intensification of punk, which swept away much of the existing landscape of popular music, replacing it with much more diverse new wave and post punk bands who mixed different forms of music and influences to dominate rock and pop music into the 1980s.
The Music of North Dakota has followed general American trends over much of its history, beginning with ragtime and folk music, moving into big band and jazz. With the development of mass media, local artists in North Dakota, as in the rest of the country, saw a rapid loss of opportunity to create, perform, and sell popular music to the regional audience that had previously provided a market. Punk Music is a major genre in the modern youth scene of North Dakota.
Rock music and its subgenres are very popular in Portugal. The history of the Portuguese rock music scene spans several decades.
The Diodes are a Canadian punk rock band formed in 1976 in Toronto. They released five albums: Diodes (1977), Released (1979), Action-Reaction (1980), Survivors (1982), and Time/Damage Live 1978 (2010). They were one of the first Canadian bands to embrace this style of music and helped to foster the original core Punk scene in Toronto.
Jay's Longhorn Bar was a nexus of the punk rock and New Wave scenes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Enemy You was an American punk rock band from San Francisco, California, United States, that formed in 1997.
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Joe Strell is an American bass player and songwriter. He was a member of The Imports (1980–81) and ¡Ack-Ack! (1984–86). In 1986 he founded Dansbane Eländet recording studios and began releasing cassette albums under the name Split Heavens.
The Scenics are a band from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, active from 1976 to 1982, and from 2008 to the present.
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