Wait a second -- Beatlemania was WAYYYY different than punk in the 80s.
Punk only got popular in retrospect. The Sex Pistols first and only LP did not go gold until the late 1980s, over ten years after its release, and did not go Platinum until a few years after the release of Nirvana's _Nevermind_ -- when magically everyone liked "punk." The Pistols' LP -- which I am using as an example of one of the most popular albums of the genre -- barely broke the Top 100 when it came out in 1977. That is very, very different than Beatlemania. Punk was almost universally loathed in its heyday, not just by parents or conservative ministers, but by people that considered themselves cool people, fans of music, normal kids -- normal kids who would beat up kids for dressing punk in the slightest way at school. That is the polar opposite of Beatlemania, where you weren't normal unless you liked the Fab Four, almost. People that know me well know one of my big pet peeves is the false historicization of punk as this cool thing everyone and their grandmother loved. That's just not true. It was not Beatlemania by any means.
No, but you are overstating this distinction. Punk was big in the late seventies and I recall several of the Pistols' singles being top ten hits in the UK including God Save the Queen and Anarchy in the UK. That's not quite beatlemania but it's also not nothing. Punk never could have had universal appeal because of its multiple oppositions; it was opposed to the establishment (polite society), it was anti-hippie and it was also anti-disco. It could therefore never have been universally popular amongst the youth, any more than, say, glam rock a few years earlier could have. (In fact it is probable that the universalism of beatlemania and the rock and roll before it will never be repeated.) But that didn't mean that it didn't have commercial potential. This happened in two ways. Firstly there was the gradual absorption of punk into fashion (as long hair, beards and beads went out). But secondly there was the popularity of bands that were on the fringe of punk, like Blondie, who were mega hitmakers. The trouble with punk was that after it there didn't seem anything left to say. Rock music in the 80s was generally putrid, so I guess many people did stick with the original punk classics for a while.
BTW I wonder if anyone agrees with me that punk was invented by the staff of the NME. I was an avid NME reader throughout the seventies and I was quite familiar with the term 'punk', from oh about 1974 already. What it referred to then was the kind of garage rock (US - e.g. Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers) and some of the pub rock (UK - e.g. Dr Feelgood) that preceeded the punk explosion proper. But my theory is that by using a term for a nascent cultural phenomenon and backing this up with punchy criticism of, especially, the dreadful prog rock of the early 70s, the NME crowd kind of made it all happen. One of the interesting things also is the role of Virgin Records. Branson's fortune was made by two albums, first Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and then the Pistols' Bollocks. And it is incredible to think that only about 4 years separated those two polar opposite releases. That was how quick the punk phenomenon ignited once it showed itself as the way out of the beards and beads identity. Some of it still sounds fabulous today.
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