If one thinks of rock music as a means of expressing rebellion than there is no genre of rock that better exemplifies this than punk, a type of rock music that flourished in the mid-1970s.

Punk music in its purest form has two essential elements. First, a stripped down musical approach that consists of guitar, bass, and drums in a context that eliminates most solos and celebrates simplicity. second, lyrics sharply critical of the existing political system and everything that derives from it.

Roots

A strong argument could be made that punk originated in Detroit in the music of the MC5 and more importantly, the Stooges. Both of these bands were active in the late 1960s and their sound and subject matter were the inspiration for many later groups. Examples of influential songs were "Motor City is Burning" by the MC5 and "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by the Stooges.  "Motor City is Burning" is about the riots that tore Detroit in 1967. The riot started outside an after hours drinking establishment but its roots were in the racial tensions caused by an all white police force and a lack of good, affordable housing for African Americans. If you listen carefully to the Stooges music you can hear a template for the punk sound of the Ramones---distorted guitar, simple progressions, and seething vocals. New York City was also fertile ground for punk and the group that most successfully adopted the punk ethos there was the Ramones. This group of four musicians from Queens came out of a middle class background but cultivated a working class appearance by wearing Converse sneakers, torn jeans, scruffy t-shirts, and leather jackets. Their songs were short, fast,  and often included lyrics that spoke of boredom and depression. A great example is "I'm Against It."

Anarchy in the UK

In the UK, a more extreme version of punk developed that combined a musical style similar to the Ramones with a strong dose of political protest burst forth in 1977 with the debut albums of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. The Sex Pistols were conceived by boutique owner Malcolm McClaren as a means to purify rock music and unite it with politics. The lyrics in songs like Anarchy in the UK  and God Save the Queen were meant to be outrageous and they were. The Pistols were banned from the BBC radio and its charts and denounced in Parliament. Their band was short-lived; they only put out one album and broke up shortly after touring the US.

Like the Sex Pistols, the Clash wrote songs that were full of criticism of the social order in the UK. They were somewhat more polished than the Pistols musically, though and not as determined to be so deliberately offensive. They enjoyed a longer career, turning out several additional recordings and touring extensively.

After the 1970s

Aside from these frontline groups a host of other punk groups emerged in both the US and the UK including Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Television, Pere Ubu, the Buzzcocks, Black Flag and many more. In the 1980s, an even more radical form of punk called hardcore emerged. The musicians playing this music wanted to make it even more elemental than the punk of the 1970s---faster, louder, more pure.. The documentary American Hardcore (2006) uses interviews with many punk musicians interspersed with footage of concerts to reveal that the sentiment against the political system as well as popular music continued to be very much alive more than a dozen years after Iggy Pop espoused his views near the end of the 1960s.

Black Flag (pictured above) featured frontman Henry Rollins.