What is "psychobilly"

n. (context music English) A genre of popular music, blending rockabilly with punk rock, that has grotesque or humorous lyrics which often draw heavily on the imagery of 1950s science fiction and horror films.

Psychobilly is a fusion genre of rock music that mixes elements of punk rock, rock and roll, rockabilly, and rhythm and blues. It is one of several subgenres of rockabilly which also include thrashabilly, punkabilly, surfabilly and gothabilly. Merriam-Webster defines it as "music that blends punk rock and rockabilly"; another dictionary defines it as "loud frantic rockabilly music." About.com defines psychobilly as "tak[ing] the traditional countrified rock style known as rockabilly, ramp[ing] up its speed to a sweaty pace, and combin[ing] it with punk rock and imagery lifted from horror films and late-night sci-fi schlock,...[creating a] gritty honky tonk punk rock." Psychobilly, "while rooted in the twang of rockabilly, owes just as much to the sound of straight up three-chord punk, often with a dose of thrash metal."

Psychobilly is often characterized by lyrical references to science fiction, horror and exploitation films, violence, lurid sexuality, and other topics generally considered taboo, though often presented in a comedic or tongue-in-cheek fashion. Psychobilly bands and lyrics usually take an apolitical stance, a reaction to the right- and left-wing political attitudes which divided other British youth cultures. It is often played with an upright double bass, instead of the electric bass which is more common in modern rock music, and the hollowbody electric guitar, rather than the solid-bodied electric guitars that predominate in rock. Many psychobilly bands are trios of electric guitar, upright bass and drums, with one of the instrumentalists doubling as vocalist.

Psychobilly gained underground popularity in Europe beginning in the early 1980s, with the UK band The Meteors, but remained largely unknown in the United States until the late 1990s. The second wave of psychobilly began with the 1986 release of British band Demented Are Go's debut album In Sickness & In Health. The genre soon spread throughout Europe, inspiring a number of new acts such as Mad Sin (formed in Germany in 1987) and the Nekromantix (formed in Denmark in 1989), who released the album Curse of the Coffin in 1991. Since then the advent of several notable psychobilly bands, such as the US band Tiger Army and the Australian band The Living End, has led to its mainstream popularity and attracted international attention to the genre.