E-Mail This Article to a Friend True believers Rancid pay their respects to Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone BY MATT ASHARE

There’s no such thing as punk rock. Or, to put it more accurately: in 2003, there’s no one form of music that everyone can agree constitutes punk rock. Of course, that was also true of its beginnings, back in the ’70s. Was punk the overtly political rebel rock that coalesced around art-school students and working-class issues in England circa ’77? Or were the bands who’d been bashing it out at CBGB’s just a few years earlier (the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Television, etc.) the real heart of the movement? And what about the raging nihilism of the Stooges and the political agitation of the MC5? Not to mention the dressed-up-to-destroy moves of the New York Dolls? It wasn’t until the ’70s bled into the ’80s and new wave emerged as a commercial form of post-punk that a line got drawn between the hardcore bands of the underground and the MTV fodder dressed in punk clothing. Yet even that distinction blurred when bands like the Clash started showing up in videos.

So it should come as little surprise now that punk rock, which continues to enjoy remarkable commercial success, is more fractured and splintered than ever. One of the most telling T-shirts I encountered at last month’s Warped Tour stop in Brockton — where as one of the nominal headliners Rancid honed the tunes from their then-forthcoming sixth CD, Indestructible (Hellcat) — was a homemade job that had the words "Emo Sucks" scrawled angrily in Sharpie. That was one young punk-rocker’s way of protecting her version of punk from the encroachment of another brand that has of late, in the hands of bands like Dashboard Confessional and labels like Jade Tree and Vagrant, made significant cultural inroads.

Emocore, with its earnest male vocalist, tightly wound arrangements, stark melodicism, and woe-is-me overtones, is just one of the high-profile punk offshoots that’s feeding into a lucrative punk industry — so lucrative that Rancid, who once turned down a million-dollar deal with Epic, have resigned themselves to the benefits of having Indestructible distributed by major label Warner. So much for remaining independent of the corporate music industry. But that’s not to imply in the least that the East Bay foursome have lost their way. Rancid have held their ground over the course of six albums in 12 years, sticking to the same basic guns and ammo that constituted the Clash’s firepower back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with just enough old-school American hardcore punk thrown in for an extra boost of power, and a touch of ska tacked on as a nod to the roots of singer/guitarist Tim Armstrong and bassist Matt Freeman in the formative East Bay outfit Operation Ivy.

Their previous CD, 2001’s Rancid (Hellcat), found them jettisoning the extraneous musical elements they’d picked up following the early success of "Salvation" in favor of laying down a solid foundation of loud, fast hardcore punk — the same sounds that have been blasting from SoCal skateparks for two decades. In that sense, it was an artistic step back from the reggae and Caribbean-inflected experiments, dub productions, and folkish musings that had offered appealing respites from the guitarstorms on their two previous CDs, And Out Come the Wolves and Life Won’t Wait (both Epitaph), albums that proved Rancid capable of matching the multicultural legacy of Clash albums like London Calling and Sandinista. Rancid had demonstrated the ease with which punk’s DNA could be recombined with strains from other forms of protest music. But with their punk contemporaries heading off in other directions — Green Day wooing the Top 40 with a gentle ballad; Offspring and Blink-182 taking punk down a jock-laden path toward metallic riffs and sophomoric jokes — Rancid, with its stark black-and-white cover and furiously short songs, turned out to be a wise career move. It placed the band at the center of the old-school punk revival that traced its roots back through politicized American and British bands like the Clash, the Exploited, and Bad Religion, whose former guitarist, Brett Gurewitz, would produce Indestructible.

As for emo, it’s something that Rancid are clearly not ready to embrace. Tim Armstrong may sing from a personal point of view on the new album’s title track — "Music has been our savior since day one," he spits out in a barely intelligible flurry of syllables." And he’s certainly an earnest character. But rather than enumerating the ways rock and roll has saved his life, he thanks the classic punks who came before: "This one’s for Joey, Dee Dee, and Joe/Because through music you can live forever." (If you have to ask who Joey and Dee Dee are, it’s time for a punk primer; "Joe" refers to "Strummer," whose name is later rhymed with "Drummer.") Armstrong, guitarist/vocalist Lars Frederiksen, bassist Matt Freeman, and drummer Brett Reed don’t offer much in the way of Ramones-style buzzsaw-guitar tunes on Indestructible. But as on most Rancid albums, there’s much that can be traced back to the Clash, from the "Rudy Can’t Fail" ska of "Red Hot Moon" to the sing-along organ-laced zydeco-flavored rhythms of "Memphis" to the Western-tinged chord progressions of "Django."

There’s also much on Indestructible that draws on Rancid’s own legacy as punk standard bearers for a new generation of rebel rockers. The pounding "Spirit of ’87" is an ode to all the all-ages punk shows that were a refuge for Armstrong and his friends back when they were in the audience instead of on stage: "The show was a refuge from the seemingly perilous situations that presented themselves in everyday life — this is an anti-violence song." In that sense, punk rock remains a folk-music form for Rancid, a way of using old chord progressions to put contemporary issues into song. Sure, you can accuse them of stealing from the Clash (among others), but who else is left to perpetuate what remains a forceful form of music? Bands like Rancid — and albums like Indestructible — are few and far between.