Punk is an extreme manifestation of the rock project, meaning that it depends on an association of raw and authentic expression with blackness, musically represented by particular approaches to the blues, combined with processes of white appropriation, transformation and obfuscation of those blues resources. Punk's powerful affect largely derives from the tension between punk's blues foundations and strategies that obscure its roots. Punk treatments and transformations of the blues include: (1) moving from multi-part, three-chord harmonic schemes to riffs and one-and two-chord vamps; (2) taking a new approach to vocal performance styles; and (3) retaining certain melodic approaches, such as the use of pentatonic scales and monophonic textures. Punk's complex relationship to the blues, including the history of negation and erasure, continues to be a central part of the punk aesthetic.Punk musicians (either self-identified or named as such by writers) such as the Sex Pistols, Damned, Electric Eels and Black Flag quickly settled on musical conventions,

Punk emerged as a fully formed and recognizable style in the mid-1970s in the United Kingdom, primarily in London, and in the United States, primarily in New York and Los Angeles. British punk musicians such as the Damned, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols during this period put together elements from American punk and its precedents, including elements that were previously heard in distinction from each other, such as the riff-based blues of the Stooges and back-to-basics rock and roll songs of the Ramones. Although this period is marked by a preoccupation with whether punk was “invented” in the US or UK, in fact, punk is a product of exchanges between musicians across the Atlantic, with much of the music continuing a long history of white people using a vocabulary of Black musical resources, including blues and reggae, to explore identity, class distinctions, and the nature of whiteness itself. These exchanges in punk are comparable to the so-called “British Invasion” of the prior decade. The discourse of making the mid-1970s UK a starting point for punk also appears to be an idea that American musicians were primarily invested in, and an idea that further dissociated punk from its basis in Black American music.

Bill Finegan's arrangements of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue for the Glenn Miller Orchestra in 1942 and of Concerto in F for the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra in 1952 provide a basis for interpreting Gershwin's compositions. Finegan's treatments suggest that techniques central to popular forms were foundational to Gershwin's style in these pieces. Furthermore, Gershwin's and Finegan's works shed light on the concept of hybridity in the United States, especially as it concerns the label of “symphonic jazz” or “concert jazz” and ideas about race. Hybrid terms such as “symphonic jazz” manage to challenge musical and social categories while simultaneously reinforcing them.

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.

Punk’s musical style can be considered as beginning with the transformations to blues resources explored mostly by white baby boomers invested in the sixties counterculture, especially in the northern Midwest, such as the Stooges and the MC5. Their approaches to the blues were a response to the changing stakes of musical expressions of whiteness and Blackness during the 1960s, connected to the social upheaval surrounding so-called white flight to the suburbs and the Second Great Migration of African Americans from the South. Some similar approaches to the blues were also cultivated in New York among musicians such as the Velvet Underground. Their music emphasized riffs, limited harmonic movement, and other features which are described in this chapter as the “Raw Power” approach to punk. But despite punk’s deep musical roots in the blues, the discourse around punk served to obscure these connections.