Rip it up and start again

I looking forward to the connections between 70s progressive music and post-punk

hinted at the research here:

Blissblog: progressive part 1
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2003_10_19_blissout_archive.html#106687459497701236

PROGMETHEUS UNBOUND: THE RETURN
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2003_11_23_blissout_archive.html#106965226667575051

Also looking forward to the sections on
a: gothic rock
b: industrial

also
How much is Killing Joke covered?
Are The Opposition covered?
Are Belgian avant prog band Univers Zero covered?
Is Richard Pinhas mentioned?
What about early 80s King Crimson?

This book stops at 1984, i want to see SR justifications of why it ended there. I would have carried in on to 1985 ! to match up with the start of Blissed Out which started it's story primarily in 86.

Geeta D. mentioned today at brunch that it looks like the Brit edition is v. much the way to go here, as the American one apparently has much more of a Stateside focus in comparison.

I gather a bit of both, but I could be misremembering. Er, Simon, if you're reading this, I'll defer to you on this point! (And yes, djdee, Generation Ecstasy is shorter than Energy Flash.)

good show!

i hope to hell this was sarcasm

Also, apparently there are going to be really great things going on on the web, "footnotes" of info, discographies, etc. that sound like they might eventually contain as much info as the book.

it was called something like 'sime has a name for his new book' but for the life of me i can't find it in the archives of ilm or ilx!!

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0571215696.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

postpunk = the blob

fancy an overpriced bottle with kate n pete?!?!

read on...

http://blissout.blogspot.com
Rip It Up and Start Again appears to be out now. The publication date is April 28 but for some reason in the book world copies seem to reach the stores and on-line mail-order companies a week or two before the official release and I'm hearing from people who preordered that it's already arrived in the post.

There will be a postpunk panel discussion in London on April 27 chaired by me and featuring:

Howard Devoto
Paul Morley
Gina Birch
Richard Boon

followed by the screening of a 60 min video compiling footage of bands including New Order, the Fall, Cabaret Voltaire, Pop Group, Magazine, PIL, Orange Juice...

Free admission

Doors open 8 PM. Event starts: 8:30

Location: The Boogaloo, 312 Archway Road, Highgate, London N6
Tube: Highgate (Northern Line)

More information (directions, etc) [link]

Also from Reynolds blog:

News on the American edition: it's due February 2006 and will be altogether more compact.
Four chapters are missing--"Outside of Everything" (on Magazine and Subway Sect); "The Blasting Concept" (on SST); "Conform to Deform" (on Some Bizzare and Second-Wave Industrial); one other as yet to be confirmed. Two other chapters have been compressed into one: the Goth and Glory Boys (Echo, Teardrops, U2 etc) chapters, a merger that actually worked rather nicelyl. Another significant difference: the chapter on Mutant Disco era New York is an oral history in the UK edition, but it's a proper written-up chapter in the US Rip It Up.

I quite look forward to hearing about 'Glory Boys'. I hope that SR will not be wayward about things like The Unforgettable Fire. I mean, I hope he will say that it is good. I like it. Ditto for eg 'The Killing Moon', if you like, la.

Well, that settles that. *fires up amazon.co.uk*

I looked at it in a shop. It is quite thick, with a bright cover. Marcello Carlin is in the Index. He is quoted as saying something about the Edge. Tom Ewing, Morrissey, Mark Sinker (present in Acknowedgements) and Lloyd Cole are all absent from the Index. (I don't say that to slight any of them, at all.)

Customers who bought this item also bought:

True Faith: An Armchair Guide to New Order, Joy Division,
Electronica, Revenge, Monaco and The Other Two; Paperback ~ Dave Thompson

I'm Coming to Take You to Lunch: A Tale of Boys, Booze and How Wham! Were Sold to China; Paperback ~ Simon Napier-Bell

Industrial Evolution: Through the 80s with "Cabaret Voltaire"; Paperback ~ Mick Fish, Dave Halberry (Editor)

Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" (33 1/3 S.); Paperback ~ Chris Ott

"If...." (BFI Film Classics S.); Paperback ~ Mark Sinker

it's a shame faber didn't do a scrits-style itemized-bill thing for the cover, nice as it is.

This review makes it sound quite good.

Whammy! I like reviews that read like ILX meta-threads.

amazon lists the book as being 752pp, which it isn't. a hell of a lot of stuff will be going on website, apparently.

My first impression is that it seems a bit... entry level? Although perhaps I am not the target market, and I suppose I have only flicked through the sections that I know a thing or two about. I will delve further this evening.

i haven't got a copy yet and will probably take a month or two and i should probably finish energy flash first.

This is precisely why I love DJ Martian so much.

Man, those domestic release dates. Did Spencer think that with his anecdotes on the New Order thread he'd disprove the rule with the minor exceptions? We ALWAYS get the stuff 50 billion years after the fact, man! It's been that way for 20+ years!

It is time to adjust history: the golden age of British pop lies in the late Seventies and early Eighties, not in the Sixties. From Adam Ant to ZTT, a bizarre assortment of radicals, artists, chancers and unclassifiable oddballs took over the mainstream, and for once we had the best of both worlds. Simon Reynolds, leading pop historian of the period, makes the case that we never had it so good

In a way this article is like an introductory overview for Simon's post punk history book: Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984 , Simon Reynolds. now on sale in the UK.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,13887,1464368,00.html

x-post

I think you just beat me.

As I've said elsewhere, I'm pretty unhappy with what I'm hearing from everyone involved with the current NYC salsa dura mafia.

more thoughts on stylus in whatever feature todd burns considers useful for book reviews when i'm finished.

one practical question: why not add the material rather than subtract it for US publication? this seems like an additional cost rather than a savings?

the cover of one of their earliest things, possibly 'skank bloc bologna' (1978) has a list of recording and distribution expenses, rules about how much u need to earn to pay VAT, etc. it's repro'd in the CD booklet for the new 'early' compilation.

I slightly hesitate to suggest this is along the lines of questioning the Pope's religion or wondering about the fecal habits of bears, but I must.

Yes, I imagine Ian Curtis is in it

Neither is it very commuter friendly, being a whopper.

I want everyone to cheer whenever Morley looks up at where the studio lights would be.

Devo are in it, I think.

I'm going to want to figure this out now. I'd imagine it skews British, but I think of American post-punk (in the broadest sense--often diy/proto-indie/new pop/hardcore, no wave being the aesthetically post-punkiest American development?) as being nearly as important as British. Especially thanks to Pere Ubu, and then a number of slightly lessers (MX-80 isn't in Simon's book? How odd.).

I'm really looking forward to it, even though I'm not going.

But being an american, I mostly talk to older american music fans who remember when buying import UK singles was a weekly habit, I wonder about the flipside. I've read enough about punk->post-punkers being into reggae/dub, or funk, but not as much about what american records they were buying. The Pere Ubu stuff was licensed/compiled by Rough Trade at some point. According to Simon's discography, Rough Trade released Ubu's The Art of Walking in 1980.

The other thing that people don't mention enough, I think, is the shadow that David Bowie casts over British post-punk and new wave. I mean, it's obvious enough that it doesn't need mention, but specifically, to me, so much post-punk is just eno-era Bowie redux. What they did in 77 is where you find a lot of post-punk in 82.

This is possible?

Then again, I was raised on Joni Mitchell, and 'Blue' remains one of my top 5 records. So I guess I just don't relate to the "eww, parents" thing.

Dropped out: Howard Devoto
Replaced by: Jon King of Gang of Four

Haha, this is me! I have very little interest in Bowie, but love both Wire and The Associates. This is not at all unusual.

I can think of at least two people who would find that very unusual - Billy Mackenzie and Alan Rankine.

Still we must look on the bright side...Ricky Ross has just released his fourth solo outing!

Yes. Goodbye Mr MacKenzie!

or -- does he do both?!?!?!?! (can you really do the latter without doing the former?)

They won their semi alright. A fucking travesty if you ask me. Harbingers of a New Labour victory the missus said. I almost choked on my egg and chips I was that irate.

What was the contemporary song they had to do (I haven't quite recovered yet from Shaky's assault on "Trouble" by Pink)?

But firstly let us thank all those that made March a huge success, the wonderful
Yeti boys gave us a surprise show, a warm up for the Razorlight gig at Ally
Pally, another memorable night indeed. Well done to Bap kennedy on the recent
album launch, the reviews are rating this highly, we love the album and it
deserves the praise if we say so ourselves.

Most of our followers either saw or read about the St. Patricks Night Show by
Pete Doherty & Shane Mac Gowan. Its has now gone into rock n' roll legend, what
a great night, Thankyou to Pete, Shane, Kieron Flynn, John Henry's, Nick Allen,
TCP Security,Danny Clifford, Rolling Stone, The Riggers, The Liggers & the press
for making it all come together on the night.
That's not the last you've heard of those two & The Boogaloo, keep you eyes on
the prize!

Thanks to Razorlight & Yeti for giving us the aftershow after their storming
proformances up at Ally Pally. Johnny Borrell has the makings of a great bar man
if he ever gives up the day job.

I was also glad last night to hear Ricky Ross interviewed on R2.

I liked Morley's Observer piece on that programme. I only bought the paper for the Reynolds article.

Most people here call him 'Simon'. I do not. I suppose that they must know him, personally.

I heard a Pere Ubu track recently, on a MOJO CD: it was awful. So are Sonic Youth. David Bowie is good, though.

I think that Mr Carlin is about right about the book. I also think that JtN (private communication) is right about the book.

PJ, the cheering plan is good. But - we don't want to put him off his game?

To the kids who've discovered Josef K but have never really listened to the Talking Heads or Television.

*whistles idly* Or rather, I have listened to both...and I keep Television around but that's it. Talking Heads are the most insanely overrated group I can think of that a lot of bands I love namecheck. At most I can stand some of the singles.

Gina Birch however, she should have stayed in.

Oh I just found it quite hard work at some points.

However, my only audible heckle was "Abba are better than the Velvet Underground".

I suppose this is being true to form?

They were all wrong about New Pop. I suspect Morley might have been better but he decided to shut up for five minutes. I wish he hadn't.

I came out feeling quite angry, excluded and grumpy. As usual, really.

xpost: Shane MacGowan put his barstool on my foot, the little fvcker.

i thought morley was really betraying himself. because he likes abba, right?

in all honesty, i could have done without the people who were not paul morley and simon reynolds, on the whole.

in personal musical historical terms, though, i find reynolds' idea that the baby boomers are still imposing themselves a bit weird -- even before post-punk became 'hot' circa 2001-2, i'm not sure how far this was true. i bought my first PiL record quite a while before my first dylan, and -- this was 1997-8 -- even then PiL seemed a more "obvious" and hipsterish selection.

I just got very annoyed by Gina's "I don't want to keep on harping on about Riot Grrl..." - cue rambling goingnowhere screed that has nothing to do with any of the topics Reynolds was doing his best to introduce justifications for giving it up and having kids. I personally think there is SO MUCH to say about the brilliant females in postpunk, and yes, New Pop, and she was toeing the same old tradrockist line that 'the women in the human league were pointless' - oh for crying out LOUD woman. The "i gave up listening to records after the slits split up" - INCREDIBLY disappointing and made me as one of the few other females in the room INCREDIBLY let down.

Re: yr last point, this is where we were saying that it would have been better if one of the panelists had actually been one of 'ver kids' - but hey. I left feeling it wasn't really for the kids.

That was... a shame.

I did realise however that the Vichy Government are the future. HAHAHA WELCOME TO THE NOUGHTIES.

xposts: strange slightly smelly boy-blog universe - you joke NRQ but I definitely felt outré. As a girl with a "livejournal" for crying out loud...

more strange, for me, was reynolds' reticence. i mean, as a major writer on acid house, rave culture, art skool f4X0rz, grime, etc, i was surprised that he let the idea that everything had 'fallen off' in the mid-80s just sort of hang there.

Abba are different from the Velvet Underground, and yet in a perverse way admired as they are because of the Velvet Underground.

i'm not actually knocking you or post-punk or people like post-punk. i have the records, i went to the event, and i'll read the book. none of that matters. the point is it was already confrontational, and on the very shaky ground that -- they were there when it happened, they were in on it, and all possibilities had been used up.

i've mentioned dance culture as something that wasn't discussed or mentioned which obviously stands in the way of that argument.

but even that isn't the point: you will not win anyone over with this kind of confrontationalism. ver kidz who aren't living up to the ideal aren't going to listen, because the defenders of the post-punk flame end up sounding like ian macdonald. the values and achievements of post-punk are irrelevant (although they -- ta-da! -- need to be ripped up and started again): i *like* ian macdonald (and the sixties), but he too had to be ignored, eventually.

Your thoughts about Ian MacDonald could, I thought, have been expressed with a wee bit more sensitivity.

i was surprised that he let the idea that everything had 'fallen off' in the mid-80s just sort of hang there.

I was there at the time and I think there definitely was a "falling off" period in the mid-eighties, an awkward moment from late 84 to early 86 when post-punk was effectively dead but rave culture hadn't quite happened. It was a time when "rare groove" was big, ie the hipsters were listening to music that was 10 or 20 years old.

the substance question is interesting in a different way, because that really is what needs interrogating. i'm a bit agnostic on this score. i'm not a franz ferdinand fan, but necessarily, because i don't belong to post-punk culture, i cannot access the 'transgressive' or radical elements of post-punk music. inevitably. and so what i have to question (if i were a music critic, anyway), is the nature of post-punk's political claims. what i can't do, as the panel sort of did, is to accept it was revolutionary and leave it at that.

i didn't meant to be insensitive about ian macdonald, i admire his stuff.

how about, the fact they have taken only the surface, or perhaps, the parts of post-punk THEY liked, is what makes their take on it that little bit different? if they had this apparent 'depth' and 'understanding' (theyre not doing a dissertation on it yknow!), you guys would probably say theyre utter pastiches/revivalists.

The surprising thing about Simon's reticence is the fact that during that period he and the rest of the Monitor people were exceptionally active in trying to make something happen. Of course his Damascean conversion to rave at the turn of the '90s may be a deciding factor in his current reticence.

All of that having been said, however, most of the music to which I'm currently listening is at least 25-30 years old, if not older, so maybe I've finally reached that Hornby/IMac point of no return.

maybe this is cos in his heart of hearts, a rockcentric music critic/music lover first and foremost.

im not sure they are being utter pastiches/revivalists. franz, interpol and the like are actually bringing more of a standard pop songwriting ethos/approach to post-punk, which despite all the things theyve borrowed, make it somewhat fresh/different. its not like theyre pretending theyre living in 1980 really. the production is slightly different. theyre not as cloyingly retro as say, a lot of the detroit bands like the paybacks, detroit cobras or whoever.

this is what makes them different!

but anyway anyway anyway the obvious point is that hollywood in the 70s was quite exciting, and *beyond that* of course film studies has to be about the present. it cannot act as if film stopped in 1974, because the nature of film has changed.

now i LIKE post-punk, and i LIKE old cinema, and when i call them irrelevant it's *in a certain sense*. which i hope i've explained a bit.

(In other news)

The thing is we require more than a standard songwriting ethos/approach to post-punk. The last time bands tried this we ended up with Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, and a fat lot of good either did.

Also, any given nanosecond of Amerie's "1 Thing" knocks the collected works of Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, etc., right off the edge of the White Cliffs of Dover.

well their reference period is pretty limited i will admit, i dont think theyre purists though, which is what you almost seem to be asking for. maybe theyll broaden their palette as they go on...

"The thing is we require more than a standard songwriting ethos/approach to post-punk."

why, dont you like pop-rock songs? and anyway, its not like interpol or franz or bloc party are avril bloody lavigne!

"The last time bands tried this we ended up with Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, and a fat lot of good either did."

they had good pop singles. thats good enough for me.

"Also, any given nanosecond of Amerie's "1 Thing" knocks the collected works of Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, etc., right off the edge of the White Cliffs of Dover."

thats like saying donna summers love to love you is a 190934 times better than anarchy in the UK. theyre not even worth comparing. (and i dont mean that as in the pistols are superior to ms summer, simply that theyre both out to do different things and perform different functions).

well their reference period is pretty limited i will admit, i dont think theyre purists though, which is what you almost seem to be asking for. maybe theyll broaden their palette as they go on...

"The thing is we require more than a standard songwriting ethos/approach to post-punk."

why, dont you like pop-rock songs? and anyway, its not like interpol or franz or bloc party are avril bloody lavigne!

"The last time bands tried this we ended up with Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, and a fat lot of good either did."

they had good pop singles. thats good enough for me.

"Also, any given nanosecond of Amerie's "1 Thing" knocks the collected works of Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, etc., right off the edge of the White Cliffs of Dover."

thats like saying donna summers love to love you is a 190934 times better than anarchy in the UK. theyre not even worth comparing. (and i dont mean that as in the pistols are superior to ms summer, simply that theyre both out to do different things and perform different functions). this is like me saying the white stripes are more soulful, funkier, rawer, more earthier than most modern R&B (or something).

The ABBA/Velvets implied comparison was made by someone on the panel. I forget the context. Is "The Visitors" a post-punk album I wonder?

i'm not sure people really see the current wave of bands as particularly pastiching/fetishizing/reviving. that of course, doesn't mean that those bands aren't doing exactly that, of course, but, i'm not sure i see them as particuarly similar (other than franz ferdinand). are people including things like the killers in this? they don't really sound that early 80s to me particularly. maybe i'll relisten

it...would, wouldnt it? i think theres something in that, for us all, in a way

So, the noughties is a strange place, but what struck me is the lack of ambition to achieve anything other than bring the punters in, get signed (hahahah) etc. On our part, the other band's part, the bar's part. No future.

Franz Ferdinand's ambition was 'to make music to make girl's dance' which is not a bad ambition, but means they should be compared (unfavourably) to Amerie.

Those New Weird America People? The noise people? The LMC still banging away?

Most 'underground' scenes are still fixated on success within the scene, if not going overground.

(This is of course simplifying what the political ambitions of the era were, but it's a marker isn't it. If you're not careerist ambitious then you must have another agenda, whatever it is.)

g04's use of it is usually written up in political terms, rachel stevens or natasha bedingfield as being annoyingly po-mo. but obviously there was meta-pop before post-punk, and i don't really buy into the idea of 'laying bare the device,' certainly i think its political effectiveness needs to be argued rather than assumed.

xpost

the 'no selling out' thing is the worst thing that happened to rock music, and has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with hipster (or punk) exclusivity. you can't argue that what you're doing is progressive if you want to keep it as a self-selected 'underground'.

And that surely is what is different now. Music's better than ever, but the context feels like it has changed so much that it's impossible to even want to do those things.

xpost I used to agree with you re: selling out, but wanting to do/mean something first and foremost seems like an honourable thing that's been lost. I've got no beef with what they all called entryism ie becoming enormously popular.

what if you dont want to compromise but want to get in the charts?? whats so bad about that? make the mainstream cross over to the band instead of the other way round?

"wanting to do/mean something first and foremost seems like an honourable thing that's been lost."

OTM

d+d apparently rework v+b jokes but shorn of v+b's comfy alt-comedy-context and theoretical deconstructions if u will of morecambe + wise and liminal cup of tea rural englishness (randall and hopkirk/ catterick/ position normal/ steve beresford/ morgan fisher/ blah) aka the subtext, the Important Bit; "the kids" (do u see) consume joyfully, shout unrelativist "bogies!" in the fusty halls of hushed reverence; cos it's funny!! ; old soaks wrinkle noses disapprovingly; achieve ahistoricist total pop force forebearers never had (were never interested in?); higher echelon reappraisal of d+d ratings misguidedly places them back into continuum of mouldskool influence by having them host 'ask the family'; which even in compromised form still remains more effective than v+b's similar primetime nostalgic stab 'families at war'

ok i dunno. bogies innit

(but in a way, yeah, maybe)

also reports on this forum:
http://www.onetouchfootball.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=003242;p=0

Actually, let's have a roll call of journalists spotted in the Boogaloo. I'll start.

Robin Bresnark (Melody Maker, SMTV etc)
Tim Chipping (Bang, NME.com etc)
John Doran (Metal Hammer, Bang, Playlouder etc)
Paul Lester (Melody Maker, Uncut etc)
Adey Lobb (Bang, The Mirror etc)
Leo Lonergan (Bang etc)
Taylor Parkes (Melody Maker, Bang etc)
Simon Price (Melody Maker, Bang, Independent On Sunday etc)
Bob Stanley (Melody Maker, NME, The Guardian, The Times etc)
David Stubbs (Melody Maker, Uncut, The Wire etc)
Derek Walmsley (The Wire etc)
Suzy West (Bang, Melody Maker etc)

And many other scruffy-looking blokes with record bags slung over their shoulders, who were almost certainly...

plus
Simon Goddard (Uncut/Smiths biographer etc)

http://www.livejournal.com/users/atommickbrane/305851.html

can you add ireallylovemusic to that list ..

oh hang on .. thats the "etc" part .. fuck.

pish and tosh. grrr.

how is that baffling?

Sorry, what? Taxi?

xpost to ppp

the good news Zan Lyons has a new website:
http://www.zanlyons.com/

I have got some Bowie records. I like some more than others. (x-blog to Sarah)

Yes, Sly and Robbie's Taxi label did have a very millitant sound.

I wonder if JtN has blogged his views? I can't even rememebr the name of his blog.

Am I a mate? But then again I post not on her LJ thing, so perhaps I am a bad one. :-(

I like whichever Bowie album has "Be My Wife" on it the best!! But I will not buy it.

Reynolds did not speak with the authority of 20 years' thought and writing about pop - which I would have expected him to do. He seemed not to have many ideas - whereas I always thought he was the most idea-based of music writers. It was odd, that.

The other 3 panellists were all rubbish.

'Subversion' was mentioned. I felt that the word lacked much concrete meaning. I felt that the panel was Rockist, somehow - but do I know what I mean by that? I think it was the surprising old-hat sort of idea of Our Music vs The Man.

One reason I didn't really buy that was: I suspect most of the post-punk music doesn't sound very good.

re. debates upthread, re. 1960s, irrelevance, etc, I don't think there is a historical rule about what people have to ignore, or have to listen to. I think they should try to make their own rules, on that stuff, and not worry about those rules and trends that are being stated here. I was not born in the 1960s but Dylan means more to me than the post-punk discussed last night. For others, the reverse. Etc.

JtN and Ewing were good.

Lloyd Cole wasn't mentioned. He nearly was, but JtN told me not to Try It.

Did Morley make any comments about the Committ-AY having passed a reso-luuuu-SHUN? (Colin Crompton reference there for folk old enough, i.e. me and Dadaismus and fuck knows who else)

Dadaismus, are you sure you're not mixing Dorian Gray up with David Gray?

I still think I was right to stay in and watch The Apprentice, mind.

Or was that the other Tom?

(Actually I can remember - no. I said I'd never read it, which is true.)

Yes. I'm the Bill Fay of music writers; done it for decades but very rarely get published.

did you like abba?

Also, I wanted the Italian dude who always had a good line in waistcoats to win, he wz teh bestest. I think Saira will win on principle that SHE IS SIR ALAN but in the real actual sense of her being CRAP AT BUSINESS I am dubious!!

xpost: I've read Plan sodding B and it's terrible (no offence to er, everyone who writes on this thread who has probably written for it, oh dear).

Don't Gina Birch and Richard Boon realise that "Money Money Money" is the missing link between "Fairytale In The Supermarket" and "Boredom"?

(unless he didn't say it)

oi! miller! no spamming on ilx!

oh another meme SYNCHRONISTICALLY ends up in the guardian today, viz: bands are getting too famous too quickly and not ageing in oaken barrels like what they did when the sex pistols got signed um...

xpost: 'we're all a&r men now!'

Lou Reed was perhaps the least progressive member of the Velvet Underground.

Yes, internet message board hype - it's worked wonders with Annie From Norway and Vitalic, hasn't it?

I was in a school band at the time of Wire's first heyday and was quite elated that I could play drums as well as, or better than, Robert Gotobed.

IIRC they were on between Barry Biggs and Pussycat.

Simon Reynolds, 1988

Skimming ahead, I think the McLaren/Bow Wow Wow/Duck Rock story, which I really didn't know the heady details of, is a real eye-opener: I've never seen anything which stated what a vile shit McLaren was quite as convincingly as SR does (then again, I've never encountered The Filth and the Fury or a number of other relevant texts).

I think it's got enough analysis (some of it a little too smitten, most of it fair and critical) to justify it taking on a linear form, as opposed to being some sort of post-punk dictionary. Maybe it's up to someone else to do a more fully analytical work, to balance out things like Gimarc's "Post-Punk Diary".

Byron Coley showed up?

--David Stubbs

http://www.mr-agreeable.net/stubbs/default.asp?id=32

stubbz0r also manages to reclaim the necessity for bands who can 'really play'!!!

i'm only halfway through RIUASA and i have too much to say about it to put here, but i *will* say that the book is cold comfort indeed for 'realist-nostalgists' like stubbs (who has recently discovered that sixties counterculture didn't actually end the war in vietnam -- no kidding). it's totally not what i expected: SR is actually reading the late 70s from, i think, a late 60s persepctive...

Timing is also important. If this had come out in 2001, as it should have done (and as I think SR would have preferred, given that's when he did the original article in Uncut), when post-punk was more or less absent from the record racks, the book/author could have staked a claim to kick-starting the revival. As it is, impartial outsiders will look at it now and think, "oh right, a book about post-punk, he's just cashing in innit."

i think possibly reading that uncut piece had a big effect on me, and so since then i've read quite a lot about p-punk, and listened to it a fair amount, so that too much of the book is familiar. i mean, by chance i read 'art into pop' quite recently -- and hey presto it gets a bog shout. maybe as we get into new pop, which i know less about, i'll find it more challenging.

Interestingly, when Magz Hall interviewed Reynolds on Resonance the other night, she made the same point, viz. that what came after post-punk was actually more interesting, and in the end more directly influential, than post-punk itself. SR ummed and ahhed a bit in response to that.

Good job Mr Agreeable came back online as we'd all have forgotten about David Stubbs.

Is that true...?

Perhaps, it is.

But certainly SR did have something of a Damascean conversion circa '91-2 which has informed pretty well of his writing since then, in terms of, well, I used to be into this, but the initial formative love isn't there anymore. On reading RIU&SA the key feeling I get is that he'd rather have written a book about grime.

Heavens!

Marcello is quite correct that it would have been preferable if RITASA had come out in 2001, but anyone familiar with Reynolds knows this obsession predated the current vogue for the period. Unlike Marcello I did find it persuasive as to why post-punk should be bothering about. Then again 1982 or so was when I joined the party - Altered Images/Flock of Seagulls/early Simple Minds and U2/The Fall being my early hero’s. My lingering doubt about the book is whether he sidesteps the nostalgia trap, but then again 2005 does seem a desperately sterile time for music by comparison.

Fair enough Marcello but perhaps the test of RIUASA isn’t whether the, erm, less youthful members of ILM dust down their record collections but whether those barely born back then get inspired. I ‘m almost tempted to send Gareth my copy to see what he thinks (almost).

PS- loved your quote on Edge playing without hands

PPS –(cheap shot alert) - Ben Watson was one of the reasons I stopped my Wire subscription.

Yes, it was nice of SR to put that quote in; would have been even nicer if he'd listed the source of the quote (might have attracted even more readers to the second of my three defunct blogs, oh dear oh dear) but never mind.

Watson and Penman are allegedly the two main reasons why readers stop their Wire subscriptions, but I love 'em both...

Good God, I'd happily renew if Penman was suddenly, magically editor. Chris Bohn is a small reason why I'm letting my subscription lapse.

>>> stubbz0r also manages to reclaim the necessity for bands who can 'really play'!!!

Well, it is good to be able to play. Really.

>>> i still havent bought this book yet. i keep meaning to, i wish i was more interested in the subject matter.

I share Lido's relative lack of interest. I think that the secret fact about post-punk music is: it doesn't sound very good.

>>> it's quite an easy read. possibly a bit too easy.

Yes, I think this is fair comment.

>>> The central mistake with the book is the assumption that readers will automatically think post-punk is worth bothering with, as opposed to persuading its readers why post-punk should be worth bothering with.

So is this, from Mr Carlin. I for instance am not certain that most of it is worth bothering with.

>>> i sense el stubbo would disapprove of 'downloads', and their association with mindless, ipodded up children, listening to jennifer lopez in their hoodies and red jeans...

Perhaps that would be understandable, if he did, which I suppose he doesn't.

>>> from all i've heard the mid-eighties, 84-87, was a bad time for music across the board

Where is the evidence for this? All three Lloyd Cole & the Commotions LPs are from that period. Perhaps to you this is evidence that this was a bad time. To me, it is not. So where does that leave us? With no consensus about good and bad periods.

Why should anyone want to be part of a consensus that doesn't want them? You can keep your consensus, and I'll keep mine.

swans, sonic youth, butthole surfers, big black, foetus and neubauten amongst others all released albums that changed my world view. 'psychocandy' too.

while what is being talked about here ("new-pop") as a successor to postpunk, im sure that in the revival stakes at least, sonic youth/big black/scratch acid might well be the...next thing

though, of course the first happy mondays album, in its own way, sounds quite postpunk, that scratchyfunk type thing (though of course it is better than all postpunk and postpunk revival)

-- Marcello Carlin (marcellocarli...), May 19th, 2005.

no. the answer is yes i'm afraid. very much so for me anyway.

I have recollections of hearing great hiphop singles on NYC radio stations when I was going to school in Connecticut in '84. Minutemen-Double Nickles came out in 84, and Husker Du Zen Arcade as well I believe.

The most obvious candidate: Dave Rimmer's Like Punk Never Happened, which I've mentioned here and there and which though ostensibly about Culture Club is generally a wider study of New Pop. That of course was published in 1985 so what's really needed is a new book that would complement that one.

sorry to drag this down but i think alot of SR readers know postpunk is worth bothering with. Music 'rookies' or the mainstream don't really read SR books do they? That said, i'd love him to get more passionate about it cos now it's a bit like summing up facts and making a story around them

warning: this may be 'genre' as formal & technical underpinning/undercutting, sort of at layer1-layer2 of an OSI model of music-communication rather than the usual higher-layer interpretations running on top - but then I'm sure there's a literature out there somewhere (maybe in mark s's head at the moment) which will explain/crit my possible (mis)characterisation of the following as such properly:

the whole look-at-the-size-of-my-multitrack 12" clunk-mix, the hi-sheen tech-pop stuffed with orchestra-on-a-stick samples and 10-ft- diameter snare drums, sounds on a scale hinting at the sublime, arrangements of interlocking rhythms and (synthetic) textures of baroque ornateness that are maybe instrumental (cough) in nailing down the lid on notions of 'real' music, pop music as actually *sounding* like an epic-film-personal-soundtrack, encouraging you to feel your life as larger-than-life, industrial/economic ideology being shoved down yer ears (is '84-'86 when Walkmans really peak?)...

There are good works from '84 -'87 that could be classed within this mode, most usual suspects might be:

Grace Jones - Slave to The Rhythm
Colourbox - Colourbox
Propaganda - A Secret Wish
Scritti - Cupid & Psyche '85
Cabaret Voltaire - Code
Tears for Fears - Songs From The Big Chair
Depeche Mode - Some Great Reward / Black Celebration / Music for the Masses
Yello - Stella / One Second

maybe not so much 'meaning' thru form/pop-context :: more largeness & cartoonish/sublime unnaturalness & abrupt hard-edgedness of sounds in pop themselves AS meanings

(or, harsher - 'see you pal yer aw means and nae ends' 'haha it's the EIGHTIES mate who believes in 'ends' anymore?')

(this is not to say that some of those sound-fashions did not also become piss-poor annoyances - e.g. sa-sa-sa-sa-sample stammering)
(but was even this transform of semantics => fragments indicative of anything?)

it also depends on 'movements' as being a valid notion even when derived from backroom-staff behaviour rather than a thing crystallised & labelled through the artists/punters/critics driven loop - but i think this was not a new thing (rise of the celebrity producers of 80's - no newer/stranger than spector's fame?)
(was meek actually famous at the time or in retrospect?)
and other spheres of activity are also ok with this idea: cinema, tv,..

Marcello; write yr new pop book! No-one else will.

I haven't read Reynolds' book yet, but I've got a friend coming over from England next weekend, and I'll try and have her bring me a copy.

mike, as far as your comparison, there's something else that's different, the first list of bands are all UK and the second are all US. I woiuldn't put those two lists in the same shelf/genre, besides Television those other american bands are later. I also think you're being quick to dismiss the uk bands if you see no humor or beauty in the likes of Magazine or Scritti Politti or Wire. I wouldn't doubt question your taste in what your faves are, but it seems odd to say Magazine lacks the humour or beauty of the Swans and Big Black! Quite the contrary, I'd say, and I'm a fan of all those.

Go4 lyrics = NOT a way to pick up chixx

Of course, it could just be that I like newer bands more than older ones, hahaha.

(so says artful dodger vs the dreem teem)

Add me to the list of those who stopped buying Wire when Penman and Watson started appearing less - the fact that I disagree with both of them on oodles of things does not change the fact that they are good writers

One thing I like about The Economist - they don't tell you who wrote what!

I suppose it is so we can't start bitchy threads about them.

I haven't seen that poster. I dislike the Jordan one, as it kind of backfires on itself. I also dislike the one with just a picture of Brains on a red background.

Are there any art-school bands today that are influenced by say, dancehall, house,hiphop, and Kompakt? Or any others that are influenced by dub, etc.? Has stereotypical rap-metal and reggae-rock and other rap-rock scared some white rock musicians away from trying to incorporate such influences in a manner ala PIL or Slits or whomever?

errrrrm, doesn't the existence of rap-metal and reggae-rock kill the premise that modern rock musicians aren't influenced by reggae and rap...?

Let's make that "rock musicians" without "white", lead singer of Bloc Party to thread.

Yea, the current crop of neo-post-punkers is just exchanging their formula for another(rap-rock and reggae-rock). I agree. I find the 'rock' in the neo-post punkers sound slightly less stodgy than the rock in the rap-metalers, but that's not saying much.

NRQ,
For whatever reason--the racial climate in 70s UK as you say, I think the post-punkers were borrowing from and reworking Jamaican music that was more contemporary to their time, than uh, Sublime did.

Linkin Park may be working with Jay-Z, but their rock influences seem so retro to me. James Murphy of LCD says he listens to current commercial hiphop, but is not interested in trying to incorporate that into his sound.

Regarding embracing Jamaican music ala the post-punkers, I was thinking about how Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo and some other non-mainstream rock bands chose to tout and work with free-jazz and retro improv musicians. I think someone has previously written about how, not to suggest that they don't sincerely love those artists approach, but that subconsciously at least there are less cultural and racial trappings involved in utilizing jazz than hiphop or dancehall.

Many of today's 'indie' rockers have now chosen to just stick with obscure psych folk/new beard America stuff, rather than anything from Jamaica. That's their choice of course, I'd just like to see some rock bands that are as enthusiastic about dancehall, grime, and soca as some peole on ILM are! Of course such bands could end up sounding as eh to me as the ones I've criticized.

There were, but there were even more bands without reggae and dub elements! The reggae/dub thing was there but I dispute that it was a major strand in post-punk. There was also a lot of resistance to reggae. I remember Peel at that time playing reggae and saying he'd got a lot of abuse from listeners for continuing to play it. And that was a core post-punk constituency.

ex-post

The resistance to reggae was earlier, I think.

By the time post-punk came along it was the stripped down dancehall sound that didn't really have much opf an effect on rock music.

He said, not really knowing.

Yup. Bassist David J spoke in interviews how his whole thing growing up was half glam and half reggae -- for the darkness and depth of the bass sounds, the use of echo, etc.

Beautiful wonderful Bauhaus. I could go on. I have, elsewhere.

I think he's specifically talking about post-punk influenced underground type bands.

But Stevie the current crop of neo-post-punk bands are totally a slick homogenized formula too, or at least as much so to my ears as rap-metal was.

While I'd never say what bands like the Rapture, GGGAH, Erase Erratta or any number of other bands did was as exciting and def. not as fresh as say the Pop Group or PiL at the time, I'd certainly give them more credit for experimentation then rap-metal. Perhaps it's only because their is/was less of them, credit going to obscurity of sources? So I say compared to Wanna Buy A Bridge? the neo-post-punk is homogenized, but compared to what rock get's played on MTV and the radio, it's the cutting edge.

Unless you're talking about the "neo-post-punk" of The Killers, Bravery etc.

But it's wrong to say reggae wasn't a major strand in post-punk. For better and worse it was THE major strand, from the Slits and Clash and Ruts, to the production techniques of the Homosexuals and This Heat, to the sound of Martin Hannett, they all acknowledged Reggae as a prime mover.

art-school bands influenced by house? The Rapture. !!!, OutHud, Supersystem etc.

Isn't the likelihood of people into hiphop or kompakt making rock music very very slim really? I mean in a way you wonder why would they even bother.

x-post with Dan, I still think the house influence is fairly tenuous even in those bands, (apart from perhaps "I Need Your Love"). I am not sure that "influenced by" ever really feels significant now, I don't know if that was different in the days of PiL and the Slits and stuff.

Aren't genre boundaries a bit tighter now? Not least cos house has been around for 20 years and had time to establish itself, whereas surely at the time of post-punk this wasn't the case with disco?

did I get the right? I don't have the time to look up the lyrics!

why?

it seems to be a common theme that the breaking down of barriers is a good thing. but, i dont think it is!

i like genres!

i like that house music sounds like house music, i dont want it to sound indie, so why would i want indie to sound like house

eclecticism is the false prophet!

i see a record marketing itself as western-swing meets drill'n'bass and i want to throw up. i dont want folkjazztronica!

gah, the 90s, when everyone decided to chuck a jungle break in there. rubbish! if i wanted jungle, i'd play a dj ss mixtape, not some chancers incorporating a dance element

rubbish, the lot of them

At the same time, you kind of wonder, why not just listen to reggae if you want reggae!

x-post yeah gareth otm!

a thats right!

im not sure if id like to say it was a genre though, i know what tom means, about pop being a genre inside pop the social phenomenon of pop at the time, but even then i think that tends to be stuff that is 'of its time' that has no other genre to belong to, but that itself is time-specific. it fits because its a recreated facsimile of current sounds, 'watered down' or 'smoothed' out for consumption (neither term used as pejorative), but as time moves on, the style of records that were 'pop within pop' become 'out of pop'

perhaps this is when they move to the genre known as 'oldies'?

all genres sound homogenous to their detractors, who give no such time to differentiate

Genres, or scenes, run into trouble when they get into nothing but refinement, sharpening, narrowing, "perfecting".

During the postpunk era the indie kids of the time (or at least some of them, uh, me) were reading and hearing about PIL and the Clash namedropping and utilizing eclectic non-rock sounds. I get the impression from indie kids now, and from Pitchfork before they gave Stelfox, Harvell, Sherburne, and Shepherd columns, that things are much more tighter now, and these other sounds are ignored.

Yea, forced folktronica/dancehall whatever combinations sound ridiculous though.

Yes eclecticism is often a bourgeois thing, but a poor young Ray Charles was listening to country and gospel and pop...

I think to break down genre bounderies the best thing you can do is increase the diversity of drug consumption.

100% otm.

fine exponents of jazztronica from Norway:

Wibutee
http://www.wibutee.net/

I think I wrote on some other thread that I wished that stereotypical jambanders weren't the only significant crossover audience these days for roots reggae, afropop, and New Orleans old-school brass-led r'n'b.

Press-kit quotes are the real cinch, though: "We're going to be huge. Seriously. And it's not by accident, we want to be successful, it's not a bad thing, and I'd be lying if I told you we didn't want that." Inherently, I have no problem with this kind of thing--pop musicians generally speaking want to be pop stars--but the bandwagon-jumping aspect is a little queasy-making. And after a big ol' early-'80s NYC namecheck list (Madonna, Basquiat, Blondie, John Lurie, Liquid Liquid, James Black, ESG), we're informed, "It's unheralded." Actually, it's become a little too fucking heralded of late, and that's the problem.

Best part yet: the members are Adam 12, apparently of U.S. TV cop-show fame, and Justin Warfield, who if I'm not mistaken is the guy who did a rap album in 1993 called My Field Trip to Planet 9, widely available in better dollar bins everywhere.

http://s28.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=22DKST8MNW1OS3568809D2ITWK

I saw Antena perform last night, or more accurately Isabelle Antena and one other, playing the bulk of the Camino Del Sol album, and a cover of America's Horse With No Name. Her voice was beautiful and makes me wish more bands tried harder to find better singers.

Check out the song Achilles, it's the other song you can preview on the Numero Group web site.

Do you mean the DVD that just came out on LTM or something else? I need to get that.

"ANTENA are playing at Hothouse. Antena issued a mere, like, 13 songs, ever, back in about 1980 on Crepuscle ( I think), which was like a farm team singles off-shoot of Factory. Antena, I think, were a four pc from Belgium, all ladies. ( I am sure roughly 54 nerd dudes are going to write in and really school me on the wrong facts I got, in advance: thanks but no thanks, save it for ILM) They are like Stereolab minus all that cutey-cute "j'taime" shit -- more like riviera as ghost town. More click-click coo, inversion and hush rather than synthy time for the perc-u-lator. If you are in Chicago and you are in Chicago tomorrow, Friday. Go. Go and tell me all about it.
The reissue is available on Numbero Group GET THAT TOO>,"
http://tiny.abstractdynamics.org/

wow! they are great too. this dvd is really, really good. i was always put off crepescule slightly for the totally stupid reason that james nice once flirted with a girlfriend of mine. dumb male ego = missing out on lots of great music.

Just kidding. It seems like there could be some good stuff, combining the overt commercialism of '82 with the studio trickery of '79. But most of what I've heard snippets of (Arcade Fire, Block Party, Franz Ferdinand) had no apparent *impetus*. It was purely aesthetic, but in a bland and no-tongue/no-taste post-emo indie rock sort of way. And the weird thing was, it didn't even really seem to cop the superficial trappings of post-punk or new pop---it was pretty much sonically indie to the core---Jade Tree with Flood producing.

I've liked Erase Erratta and the Young People, though.

Dog Faced Hermans and Disco Inferno remain the most viable overt, after-the-fact extensions of the sonic spirit(s) of post-punk I've heard. Unless you count Bjork, etc.

I'll say it again, the Rapture did/do some great stuff and should not be grouped with more generic post-punk influenced rock bands. I think their hype got in the way.

and remember...Ultramarine worked for Crepuscule.

Tim ---

I think your point about the gear inadvertantly gets at what I dislike about this current (apparently "mainstream") crop: they sound like spoiled suburban indie kids at heart. Which isn't to say plenty of the first go round didn't have trust funds backing them up--but there was something simultaneously more playful and more cerebral about what they did with whatever advantages they might've had. The bands you mentioned that I've heard basically sound like a late 90s Pitchfork band with a new paint job. Which doesn't make them innately bad--just makes them have little in common with the music they're purportely furthering. All the great production in the world won't change that (and, in fact, that's probably part of what turns me off about it--it's essentially standard post-Radiohead slick indie production). It's neither audaciously adventuresome like Post-Punk nor overtly "conform-to-deform" like the wave/romantic/etc. was.

I guess really, it just bores me in the same way that most post-mid-80s indie rock (when "indie rock" became a genre, I guess)--I don't understand the motivation or the aesthetic. To me it feels like it has no brains and no balls, and not much heart, either.

But are they, though? I think of a band like Starcastle from Illinois in the seventies. They wanted to be like Yes. They had to have the equipment to get the sound and they managed to get it. Why do we inherently think of a band like that as being young MEN who had scrappy determination, and yet we think of these bands, who are probably no younger than Starcastle were then, are KIDS with trust funds?

"Which doesn't make them innately bad--just makes them have little in common with the music they're purportely furthering."

Just to clarify, I didn't mean that these bands (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Franz Ferdinand, Killers, Futureheads, Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs) are significantly furthering the aesthetics of new wave/post-punk. All I was saying was that I think they are, in a way, furthering the revival. Earlier bands may have had more art music tendencies, but, generally speaking, they didn't have as good of a sound, didn't have singers who were as good as the singers in these newer bands, and didn't write tight singles that ended up as the best things heard on alternative rock radio since the eighties.

I guess I did slightly misunderstand--I'm not familiar enough with the "revival," and didn't realise it was more than a couple years old, to know that it has progressed in and of itself.

"As good of a sound" seems strange, if you're saying that the aim of their sounds (the early- and late-revival bands, respectively) are different--the first "art," the latter "mainstream". I wasn't aware that these bands were making the radio--assumed they belonged to that middle-ground between the mainstream and the music geek spheres (commonly refered to as "hipster" territory?). Erase Eratta and Young People, et al, didn't seem interested in writing tight singles or being on the radio (or on replacing The Strokes in Pitchfork-reading CD buyers hearts).

The little I've heard of what are apparently the late-revival bands is indeed better than, say, Alanis Morrisette or the last "rock" bands I was aware of on the radio. They're probably better than Jimmy Eat World and Refused and GSYBE and the other last hipster bands I was aware of. But again, the very concept of them as a "revival" of anything (sonic or spiritual) seems strange to me--the disparity between the "art" bands and the "good singer" bands etc. didn't seem so great, at the peak of the post-punk/new-pop period.

It just makes me wonder if the name-checking I hear is wishful thinking, or what. For example--Franz Ferdinand with the Josef K and Orange Juice and "disco" comparisons---I just don't hear it. Or maybe 4% thos bands, and 96% fairly standard 90s slick indie rock/post-Radiohead sounds. I suppose if it gets young kids listening to the bands being namechecked, it's a good thing. But my hope was that eventually hearing what the namechecked bands were pulling off 25 years ago would up the ante for the young bands, make them push themselves a little harder.

BTW--"Kids" isn't a pejorative term for me (even if "suburban" might be). Habit born of my own hipster years--everyone was a "kid".

"Erase Eratta and Young People, et al, didn't seem interested in writing tight singles or being on the radio"

I always imagine that Mike from Gogogoairheart or Luke from the Rapture must hear the Killers on the radio and go, "Fuck! That could have been me!"

"my hope was that eventually hearing what the namechecked bands were pulling off 25 years ago would up the ante for the young bands, make them push themselves a little harder."

OK, but toward what? More artiness? More meaningful content in the lyrics?

So the "accuracy" thing is hard for me to follow--a) I'm not interested in bands sounding like the post-punk bands (though I think if they're advertised as "revivalists," it would make more sense if they had some sonic connections) and b) post-punk was so sonically broad that it'd be hard to be "accurately" post-punk. It was more of a thing of spirit/method/impetus/context. Remembering that this thread is (was) about Simon Reynolds' book (I'd forgotten)--I think he hit the nail on the head when he suggests that the "revival" bands lack the urgency of their supposed forebears (and he namechecks bands that I recognise as early- and late-revival, if there is such a split). The only "accuracy" I could imagine wanting from bands "sold" as "revivalists," then, would be a similar energy and awareness of context.

"Artier" isn't something I per se look for--while I gravitate toward This Heat, Pere Ubu, Family Fodder, I'm not really a fan of Joy Division or Art Bears; that said, of the hundred+ 8.0-10.0 records I'd claim from 1981, OMD's 'Architecture & Morality' might be my #1, and I'm not sure which camp (arty or pop) it would fall into. In fact, it was ultimately the relative *lack* of boundaries between art and pop that drew me so heavily into the period Reynolds covers (perhaps this lack of divisions was not explicitly experienced as such at the time--but it's apparent now in the way that seemingly disperate and diverse styles of the era mix together well to my ears). The stuff we're currently talking about seems to be drawing from a reference list of a very few bands--Gang of Four, Duran Duran, Joy Division, and if you're lucky maybe Wire and Gary Numan; whereas for me, the whole excitement of the period was that there often isn't a huge disparity of quality between the "big" names and the "who the hell is that" names.

A much slighter point, but I think as I'm especially drawn to the Raincoats and the Slits and Young Marble Giants and Ludus and The Pretenders etc etc, the relative lack of any "female energy" in the current revival puts me off. And it might also explain why Erase Eratta (who, lets be honest, have as much a debt to Sleater-Kinney as to The Ex) and Young People are the only two names I can think of when I try to identify what I see as "authentic," contemporary, spiritually post-punk music.

Weirdly, I think Belle & Sebastian made the best "post-punk revival" track I've heard in the hip semi-mainstream with "Stay Loose" last year (or whenever that was).

Taking Sides: nerd dudes vs. faux-naive dorks who can't use google or other resources because the nerd dude joke would be ruined

?

Not a Belle & Sebastian fan?

Seriously though--saw Of Montreal last night. Not a fan, liked 'Cherry Peel' but found everything I heard after that irretrievably fey and tedious. But it sounds as though they've suddenly discovered disco and post-punk and new pop and stevie wonder and Prince all at once (basically everything between the Nuggets and C86 that had been their bread and butter). And it's done them wonders. They captured much more of what is fun about post-punk/new-pop than any of the supposed revival bands I've heard. And that's what I meant with the Belle & Sebastian thing.

A bizarre sort of anti-intellectualism---getting basic facts right = being a "real" music critic = not "feeling" the music, man! ; )

Oh, that puts it mildly. It's good to hear this Of Montreal mention though, since this adds to what everyone else has been saying, namely that all of a sudden the runts of the already stunted litter that was Elephant 6 suddenly turned genius.

Oh well--I like Belle & Sebastian, you like Billy Corgan. We're (at least) even ; )

Is there a thread where you've explicated your distate for them? I'd be fascinated. Granted, I'm not big on 90s indie rock in general, but other than a seriously fallow (and overly democratic) period in the middle, I've found Belle & Sebastian to be one of the more genuinely successful pop/rock bands of the last 10 years. Definitely more Postcard, less Pastels. . .

I would. The songwriting and arranging is at an incredible level. And to top it all off: the guy's playing (plays every instrument on the album). His bass playing, in particular, is a total WTF.

"Remembering that this thread is (was) about Simon Reynolds' book (I'd forgotten)--I think he hit the nail on the head when he suggests that the "revival" bands lack the urgency of their supposed forebears"

Is it "urgency" that's the difference? Were the original post-punk bands "urgent?" What is really being said here?

All this, of course, is intellecualising that is obviously ancilary. It's for me a gut reaction first--and my gut just doesn't have a reaction to Bloc Party et al. No big deal.

xpost--

Well put, Bimble. Bloc Party sounds like Post Punk produced for play in the GAP, to me.

You can see post-punk as stretching the boundaries of rock - and yeah, sure, a lot of it did do exactly that - but I suspect that the very fact that these artists were working within rock was due to a stronger sense of organic "genre belonging" which would have been difficult to break out of - would any of the reggae-influenced post-punkers have actually been able to make it as reggae artists?

These days, especially in the world of post-dance music, the idea of sonic freedom is so firmly engrained that if a white person wants to make actual dancehall or R&B or whatever there's not much that can stop them. Music now doesn't merely entrench the "backroom boys" working method of e.g. Motown Soul; it removes even the sense of class/ethnic identity that those backroom boys could lay claim to - it's difficult to imagine a Standing In The Shadows Of Motown being made about Cheiron or Xenomania.

I think this is one of the big issues underlying the M.I.A. debate - not just M.I.A.'s own perceived "transgression" into dancehall/baile funk etc., but M.I.A. as representative of a moment when sonic freedom is relatively unfettered, at least for middle class westerners. On Dissensus Simon R largely sidestepped the M.I.A/Slits comparison (ie. how is M.I.A. more problematic than the Slits?) but I imagine his answer could have been: "no matter how into reggae Ari Up may have gotten, no matter how many of rock's "rules" she and her band may have broken, there were nonetheless rules and strictures to transgress."

The point lurking beneath this is that even the act of breaking the rules is a sign of acknowledgment of and respect for the notion that those rules may serve a purpose - the rule-breaking only makes sense, and can only be enjoyed, if you have a normative notion of rock in the first place. The breathless sense that "anything was possible" which most first-gen post-punkers cite as being the music's main selling point is dependent on the puncturing of a pre-existing belief that some or most things weren't possible, a belief that these musicians could and should only make Rock.

M.I.A., like most cosmopolitan Western musicians, has no obvious organic "genre belonging", so the only rules she can break are those of the genres she utilises (I think this is the best sense in which we can interpret the "M.I.A. comes from nowhere" argumentt) - which is problematic for people who want to interpret organic genre subversion as a metaphor for the subversion of one's own socio-political position.

I think this ties back into the "post-punk now vs post-punk then" debate because musicians are now confronted with such a dizzying array of stylistic and sonic possibilities that the decision to make post-punk-style music is obviously pretty fetishistic. As good as "I Need Your Love" is, The Rapture making post-punk that’s inflected with house is more novel than actually daring, as nothing is stopping them from going ahead and making house music anyway (as per Ronan's point) (likewise, for all the complaints that current post-punk isn't political, any actually-political current post-punk bands are invariably met with a shrug factor). And since these choices are fetishistic more than anything else, it's hardly surprising that most of the new post-punkish bands would choose to hone in on a very specific sound rather than be open to anything and everything: when you don't have an "organic genre belonging" you can always try and retroactively create one via consistency - and I think this can be done successfully! But it takes a lot of work. And I guess the argument against many of the current post-punkers is that they’re copping a previous brand of consistency wholesale, which is why I actually tend to prefer those bands whose notion of post-punk history appears hazy (e.g The Killers).

As regards rule-breaking, perhaps "novelty" is as much as we can hope for (perhaps it’s all there ever was. Genres with a high socio-cultural/stylistic correlative (e.g. dancehall or mainstream country) are more likely to be sites of the sort of "meaningful" rule-breaking we might vaguely associate with the post-punk era of rock. But whereas I suspect Simon R might go further and say that this is because this music is infused with a sense of cultural identity and location and experience etc. etc which introduces a certain creative tension to the music's adventurousness, perhaps it's simply more the case that because these genres have the outward appearance of formula, purism, rigidity etc. their transgressions are more enjoyable (I'm not saying that this formula/purism/rigidity isn't partially created by the influence of cultural identity and location etc. - merely that from a listener's position all of these things can only be imaginatively inferred from the audible traces of formula/purism etc.)

I don't think that this socio-cultural/stylistic overlap is the only way to create this sort of enjoyment - in a similar manner, Kompakt's pop leanings derived surplus enjoyment out of the fact that they were situated within a context of minimalism.

And of course this intensified rule-breaking can't be taken for granted - as the somewhat erratic, unreliable spirit of experimentalism at the heart of both dancehall and mainstream country proves.

All this is a big part of why I am fascinated/appalled by eclecticism vs purism debates, which tend to miss the fundamental point that eclecticism and purism are co-dependent, with each term only deriving meaning within the context of the other term.

fuck i have to go watch dr who.

I mostly agree with what Ian said in response to Tim Ellison's response to my earlier statement, all while I was sleeping and having bizarre dreams. I don't see any musical ambition in some of the newer bands, they are indie rock bands who perhaps came of age or hit a point where the reference points were Joy Division, Talkng Heads etc, and they're writing rock-n-roll songs that superficially sound like that. I certainly don't get the sense though that they're sitting in the studio with their own Eno exploring something new. GGGAH, the Rapture and many of their peers didn't just want to sound like those bands, but wanted to embrace those bands experimentation. Whether they could write songs is another matter. I use a simple test. If I hear a song once or twice, do I start singing it against my will over the next few days....GGGAH never did that for me while the Rapture did, which may explain some of their relative successes(and when the Rapture was hyped, that was a big question in hipster circles...why them and not GGGAH. Answer being-at least one of them, The Rapture had better hooks)

But despite of, or because of their derivation, the Rapture have been poppier, hookier, noisier, weirder, etc then Bloc Party, Killers, Bravery, Kaiser Chiefs etc. I'm listening to Alabama Sunshine right now. It has the kinds of pop hooks that hook into me, but unfortunately will never be as big as some of those other bands because I think it's two left of center. Interpol, Bloc Party etc are all exactly normal enough for mainstream appeal.

Tim, I can imagine Mike or Luke thinking "if the post-punk revival got this far why didn't we go along with it?" but I can also imagine them saying "if we had to sound like the Killers to get that popular, well I guess we'll never hit the charts."

this is absolutely the key point/distinction raised here, at least to my resolutely non-theoretical mind. does reynolds address this?

as far as female energy, well, I think there is quite a bit, but more amidst the slightly more underground aspects, again, not comparing to the Killers eschelon. I mean, Erase Erratta were amongst the biggest, then there's stuff like Glass Candy, Gang Gang Dance, Et At It, Die Monitr Batss, the Rogers Sisters, etc. Hell, I see the post-punk revival as starting with the Scissor Girls. Though most of those bands (except perhaps the Rogers) surely aren't writing the kind of pop music and aiming for the charts the way the Killers or Bloc Party or others are, so I think it's best to stop making these comparisons, the idea the neo-post-punk revival is one thing.

I'd rather hear the children of the Slits than the children of Duran Duran any day (which is probably why I've always liked Bjork so much).

Maybe an underground scene-spanning mix really would be a good thing. . .

And Ian, as for checking out the more underground bands, I don't think you're going to find much of an "urgent musical movement" there either. Dan says this:

"I certainly don't get the sense though that [these newer, successful bands of this genre] are sitting in the studio with their own Eno exploring something new. GGGAH, the Rapture and many of their peers didn't just want to sound like those bands, but wanted to embrace those bands experimentation."

My point would be that the experimentation they are embracing is precisely that: those bands' experimentation. Therefore, it is not an experimentation, but rather a genre exercise. Tim Finney says this:

"I guess the argument against many of the current post-punkers is that they’re copping a previous brand of consistency wholesale, which is why I actually tend to prefer those bands whose notion of post-punk history appears hazy (e.g The Killers)"

Purism can be very limiting. The Franz Ferdinand album sounds so much freer to me than the Rapture album.

And yes, absolutely, from the moment I first heard the first song I'd ever heard by the rapture, it stuck in my head. Killers, Bloc Party, Kaiser Cheifs have not delivered the same. And yet the Rapture are more sonically inventive. But as I said, there's a point where there's no point in comparing these bands, we're getting to a point where being influenced by early 80s post-punk is about as special as say, being influenced by the Beatles. It's not enough to make you stand out, and it's not enough to guarantee anything, it's just another reference point. This as opposed to a few years ago when everyone was running around going "holy shit, can you believe there's a band that sounds like the Gang of Four!!!!!"

But it comes down to personal preferance and what you like, and this argument becomes exactly the same as you and I discussing Scritti Politti. To me, something like Bibbly-O-Tek is the absolutely most wonderful, edgy, innovative yet catchy, beautiful, disconcerting yet accessible, exciting piece of music I've ever heard, and the neo-post-punk bands I like are the ones who strive to those same dichotomies. Call it neo-post punk hair-spitting, but most of the bands you're talking about have no interest in that sort of thing whatsoever, and it seems to me that you don't either. So if I can't convince you that Scritti Politti was worth a listen, I can hardly try to convince you that there's many valid reasons someone like me would prefer GGGAH or the Rapture to The Killers and Franz Ferdinand.

Oh, and Ian, to assume the cream of the undergound will rise, that's just dangerous! You'll miss so much. I have my ear somewhat to the ground and hear lots of new stuff. I hate most of it and stick with the old stuff, but there's plenty of good stuff that won't get through, some of it because it's a bit too weird, and some of it due to bad marketing. Such is the game.

And I'm certainly not saying that it's not valid (!) to like GGGAH or the Rapture more than Franz Ferdinand! I was just explaining why I don't.

Dan --

As for cream rising, I didn't mean in the sense of critical or commercial acclaim--but in the sense that hype will die away for everyone, and they'll be left to be evaluated by their quality alone--in the sense that now, it's clear that This Heat or (to me) Family Fodder are great bands. So maybe 5 years is optimistic--maybe it'll take 10 or 15. But if there's anything from now being listened to in 10 years, I'd rather wait than wade through a bunch of stuff that just makes me more cynical. I don't have the time or money to feel burned 24 out of 25 times, like I was from about '99 to '01 when I pretty much gave up on indie rock.

ian-the reverse is true in that some of the hype brings stuff back. Some of this dialogue started btw tim and I when somebody made the statement that people are only hyping Scritti now because of the revival of interest, the same was said about the Desperate Bicycles. In addition to the annoyance where you have people telling you must be stupid for genuinely liking something, especially when history shows their critical acclaim and signifigance anyway, there is a bit of truth in that. When I'm around other people who collect records from that period, sometimes I find they have no critical capacity whatsoever, all these obscure 50 dollar 7"s are all great to them. I said something to this effect on the old Acute Records site, I do believe that for the most part, the stuff that is remembered, is remembered because it's the best. And while I'm not about to reissue every last diy release from 1979 and claim it's all special, there are the acts that stand out but haven't had their chance yet. Like one of my favorite bands, The Lines. It's always a bit of joke, writing one-sheets and saying "this band was as good as Wire and nobody's heard of them", but I like to think that the stuff I put out really IS that good. You know, 20 years later and still nobody was talking about the Prefects. And suddenly all this stuff is getting reissued as if they're all "lost classics" when they really aren't. 15 years from now maybe there will be a reissue market for lost neo-post-punk releases from Computer Cougar or the Moving Units! (not that they're both bad, I actually haven't heard Computer Cougar and am friends with them, just making a point.)

But new wave/post-punk revivalism has been going on for nine years now and I can't think of any of it that hasn't seemed like a genre exercise.

I think this gets into the modernism/postmodernism issue. Post-punk music was modernist - deconstruction of form/moves toward abstraction/etc. Modernism has its limts. Once something has been completely deconstructed, there is nowhere to go. There are different approaches to deconstructing the music and they all get played out. No Wave couldn't go any further than the Mars EP. That's why the movement died. When it's revived, it's a genre exercise. Or noise as an outgrowth of industrial music. You can't be any more noise than Masonna or somebody. The music cannot continue to go "forward" in this sense.

Even into the nineties, there were bands who were really pushing it. I think it got to the point where, once again, you could not make rock music that was more deconstructed than the Dead C or Harry Pussy.

And then there's postmodernism - revivalism. Postmodernism is more contemporary than modernism. In light of postmodernism, the notion of experimentalism can seem old-fashioned and even stodgy. I think this is why all of these bands have more to do with revivalism than with innovation and experimentalism (which are modernist ideals).

(oh, x-post)

postmodernism-vs-modernism: reynolds brings this (which is always a slightly dodgy opposition) into his discussion of the orange juice, placing New Pop as postmodernism and po-pun as modernism

I mostly accept this and say that as a genre excercise there's different aspect to the sounds, and the bands ripping off the Pop Group are going to appeal more then the bands ripping less interesting sounds. But in the mixing and matching of sounds and influences, there's always somewhere to go, and I think the Rapture record has that excitement, PiL plus house music plus new wave plus electro plus Big Star, all ending up sounding like the Rapture. The references appeal to me because I'm a fan, the references are mixed in new/different ways, and stripped to it's essence, I enjoy the songs/songwriting, say the melodies they sing/play, which could be put in any genre, performed as klezmer or bossanova and it's still a good melody. I agree with you Tim, about no wave and modernism/post-modernism, but in pushing the sound to be more experimental, the original post-punk faves created a tension I like, that still exists in the current bands with those influences...and doesn't exist in the neo-post-punk bands that draw on more accessible sources.

The bands that work in the "spirit" won't necessarily sound the most like these sources. A group like Gang Gang Dance I see as carrying on in that spirit. But in pushing further out, they often lose me, as I'm looking for pop songs.

I am a big fan though of the Futureheads, regardless of them sounding like the Jam of XTC or whomever. Post-punk, like punk, it's a type of rock. I love the Futureheads songs. I don't see them as stealing melodies blatantly, and don't ask for them to draw influence from dub and push the boudaries with experimentation. Good rock and roll songs from people who grew up listening to good rock and roll...from the punk/post-punk era.

The "perceived" in that sentence is pretty crucial for me - I think that stuff like post-punk is "modernist" to the extent that it is popularly accepted as being so ie. music will be boundary-pushing if it appears to "break the rules" of the discourse in which it is situated.

Likewise, early examples of intelligent techno/IDM appeared "boundary-pushing" even if they were actually quite similar to Tangerine Dream, earlier ambient music, minimalism etc. because it was internal to the discourse of dance music which was predicated on physical functionalism.

Post-punk-style experimentalism paradoxically relies on the existence of scenes which are quite inward looking, not explicitly interested in or aware of outside or past music. But, again somewhat paradoxically, these scenes are often rise out of moments of radical openness or historical awareness (the emergence of house and techno out of that post-disco moment of decentered openmindedness being a fairly obvious example here, but you could make the same point for punk I think).

That's not to say that someone like the Killers, who fling a horrible synth in, that just sounds awful, are pushing boundaries.

I think the actual truth is it's not really very easy to push boundaries by melding styles, or if I'm to be harsher, maybe the idea that splicing genres together constitutes doing something new and wonderful is just a media cliché?

I'm reminded of the sort of article you get every now and again in a broadsheet where a writer claims all the best artists are those who exist between genres, and you just think "has this guy ever done more than dabble his whole fucking life"?

It's sort of sad that so many of the great optimistic backbone ideas of post-punk, at least as I percieved them, ie making people dance, rhythm as important as melody etc have all been kind of co-opted by lots of shit bands! If I hear another Franz Ferdinand fan echo that "we want to make girls dance" quote again I think I'll scream.

Though a writer I know interviewed Luke Jenner last year, and she asked a question about that quote, to which he replied "those bastards stole that quote from us!".

She then wrote this up as a serious accusation in the article.

I wonder, though, Tom -- you are right, but in terms of right this second I think that we're seeing this as less 'post-punk' than 'post-grunge/punk/nu-metal,' and we're seeing it less as a true 'post' than a 'reaction against.' Artificial and extremely limited, obv., in terms of What's Happening in the World Today (Musically and Otherwise), and like many things it'd be interesting to see how much of what was supposedly being rejected actually formed the basis of continuity.

Lots of rock and house were mixed around 1990, it was a very madchester thing to do. But it didn't last and it wasn't done much in the time between.

It's been my very non-expert take for a long while now that "punk" was really just an abberration in the course of some sort of non-prog but progressive rock-cored music. But it provided a necessary kick in the pants.

After more than a decade now of hermetically sealed, pleasant and generally unambitious indie rock, a "new" post-punk could *be* the necessary punk---kids rediscovering Can en masse, in a political context which is quite similar to circa 1981, could be what it takes to wake up music to that vein of genuinely creative outre music *and* the populist/popularist ambition of the distinctly "new" bands that were pushing what could sell and succeeding (like the Beatles before them). It *is* a spirit thing, and I don't know that the "punk" energy needs to express itself in a straighjacket fashion before things can explode.

Dan and Ned put it better than me--this stuff isn't post-post-punk nearly as much as it's "post-grung/indie/numetal" or indie with a disco beat. There is a qualitative difference; it may stem from motivation.

I just woke up, shouldn't even talk. But great points all around.

As for the potential of a new radical movement, I believe that the radicalness of Can and the spirit of '68 was predicated on the fact that Can was modernist and thus "radical." The same is true of the original post-punk. There's no way postmodern music is going to seem as sociopolitically radical simply because it's not as aesthetically radical.

http://playlouder.com/feature/~organgrinder-5/?key=2248d2-2076ed

http://pitchforkmedia.com/features/weekly/05-05-23-summer-reading-list.shtml

I also think that post-punk's modernism was something of a reaction against the romanticism of prog. (And that's the way it happens historically, right? Modernism follows romanticism.) You can just call it all postmodern - there's a validity to that. Prog was postmodern romanticism and post-punk was postmodern modernism. But then you're making no qualitative difference between the degree to which these things were postmodern and the degree to which, say, the Rapture are postmodern. Or the degree to which Acid Mothers Temple are postmodern. I think postmodernism is much more fundamental for these bands.

(POST-) PUNK'S
NOT DEAD

Hmmm...

Or to ask another tangential qn springing from your comment - what else happened in popular culture between 78 and 84? Was post-punk symptomatic of anything else?

Alternative comedy? Thatcher!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

or: hey! this is a play we are ACTING DYS?

That's an interesting perspective and in a way you're right - there is a mimicking in pop culture of the artistic arc that happened in the "high art" culture 60 or 70 years before. But the framing - the fact that it did all happen before - means that its referential and postmodern. As NRQ said there is no way you can say that Peter Saville's appropriation of Italian futurism or whatever is just pop's version of modernism. It's postmodern appropriation.

Are The Rapture really more postmodern than Throbbing Gristle? I'm not sure, but I'm inclined to say no. Their appropriation is of a different nature, that's all. Viewed from a distance, "post-punk" becomes a thing in its own right that you can riff off, without having to worry too much how it actually developed. Yesterday's postmodern appropriation is today's convention.

henry, surely 'modernism' was a retrospective definition? nobody called themselves that, they called themselves futurists, vorticists, constructivists etc. by the same token i've got no problem with simon's use of it in the book- it seems to be used to denote a concern with technology, angularity, 'making it new'. of course nothing is ever totally 'new' (etc) but the point is in the attempt.

'the postpunks couldn't have made reggae themselves'- totally disagree with this, what about UB40, or someone like the average white band? the postpunks didn't WANT to replicate reggae or funk or disco but they did want it to inform their sound, because to do otherwise would have neccessitated ignoring what was going on at the time- hence this was a 'modernist' gesture

oh and the 'brecht' thing is as much to do with 'radical content needs radical forms' as it is to do with 'uncovering the process' (i am a bit of a cheerleader for old bb tho)

largely agree with tim f's comments here except- surely the context of indie is as constrained as ever? something like 'i need your love' stood out because it had non-indie input, no? also, MIA does 'come from somewhere' (ie, west london, art school) which i think was part of the beef with her on dissensus. i made the MIA/Slits comparison over there and i do think simon sidestepped it a little- if anything i think she is the nearest thing to postpunk around now.....

but part of what is interesting about the period is that artschool/bohemian/etc types could actually influence black pop itself- art of noise most obviously. i see what charltonlido and ronan are getting at with 'genre' not necessarily being a bad thing- but there usually has to be a period of miscegneation and cross-fertilisation for a genre to emerge

frankfurt school to thread eh... would that include benjamin's mass culture lauding 'work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction'? or adorno's liking for betty boop? the connection between them and postpunk is that they're obviously fascinated by (and gain pleasure from) popular culture AND regard it as politically dubious. the constructivists, frankfurt school, the bauhaus were for the most part in love with charlie chaplin, mass production, jazz, etc- but didn't pretend that they were had some built in resistance, or were genuinely 'from the people'

also there is waaaay more to brecht than the alienation effect stuff. writing really fucking good pop songs (with weill and eisler), for one thing!

Yes but the constraint is one of consent rather than formal restriction: indie can encompass and has historically encompassed a very broad range of styles (eg. "I Need Your Love" was novel but hardly unprecedented - see Happy Mondays, Primal Scream, A.R. Kane, Chapterhouse, Pulp, Saint Etienne...); and I think most indie fans would pay lipservice to the importance of this potential diversity.

The fact that indie now tends to operate within a very limited sphere is a result of a need to define itself against this differential range. You might call it the "crisis of choice": music which allegedly has "no rules" invariably creates or adheres to other rules (sometimees implicit/unspoken) as a way of dealing with its own potential open-endedness.

Simon R explains this quite well in talking about the demise of drum & bass circa 97/98.

"also, MIA does 'come from somewhere' (ie, west london, art school) which i think was part of the beef with her on dissensus. i made the MIA/Slits comparison over there and i do think simon sidestepped it a little- if anything i think she is the nearest thing to postpunk around now....."

I agree with all this! My point was that the "M.I.A. comes from nowhere" comment only makes sense insofar as she does not have a necessary "genre-belonging" in the manner that artists in post-punk or dancehall did/does (and this lack of a genre-belonging is precisely the result of the fact that she does come from somewhere - west london, art school, Sri Lankan diaspora etc).

The interesting thing about the UB40 reference is that I could imagine Simon R arguing that M.I.A. is closer to a modern-day UB40 than a modern-day Slits: ie she simply "appropriates" genres of musich which don't "belong" to her wholesale (sorry for all the scarequotes).

I guess I hadn't thought about UB40 when making my comments above re what post-punk artists couldn't do.

"i see what charltonlido and ronan are getting at with 'genre' not necessarily being a bad thing- but there usually has to be a period of miscegneation and cross-fertilisation for a genre to emerge "

Yes exactly! This is the essence of my beef re the purism/eclecticism divide - it's the dialectic, stupid! There are certainly good and bad instances of both... and the challenge which I think Simon R has tried to step up to, but may not quite have mastered, is how to account for this, how to explain when and why purism or eclecticism is good/bad. Simon seems to want to subordinate the latter term to the former, to argue that eclecticism is a priori the lesser impulse, and that what appear as moments of good electicism are really, on some deeper level, moments of purism (ie. post-punk is diverse but not "eclectic" because there are certain rules and considerations and approaches etc shaping its incorporation of different genres).

Whereas I would think that, were it possible to universally account for these phenomena, it would probably require a third term that cuts across the purism/eclecticism divide.

benjamin is a bit to the side, but in general i think we can safely call adorno a pessimist, popular culture-wise, and obv kracauer and his, um, unique reading of the rise of the nazis in 'from caligari to hitler'. i think all that stuff needs more thorough interrogation, and although you perhaps don't expect pop musicians to do this (they have enough on their plate), at this distance the time is ripe. in the late 70s a pop group using ideas from gramsci was 'enough', but i think at this juncture we can ask: are politics *really* prior to the vagaries of science...?

but i'm still unsure about this 'crisis of choice'- punk was as much a self-imposed stricture then as indie is now. 'death disco' wasn't unprecedented either (can!) or 'being boiled' (cluster!) but the point is that it may have *seemed* unprecedented. much as 'house of jealous lovers' seemed to when i first heard it...silly as it may sound, it does depress me that you can't hear kompakt, dancehall or grime in indie. especially as i know people in indie bands who love all the latter yet would never dare to try and incorporate it into their music. i suppose it's to do with looking for things in the wrong places....

Well, you can call him what you'd like, but you'd be wrong.

I hope to agree with Lido about eclecticism. I don't want my pop to sound like house music any more than he wants his house music to sound like indie music.

Ewing is pithy.

(he says he's resigned from wire)

i wanna review this and kogan's book and marcello's book and watson's derek bailey book all in one giant clusterfuck bingo gangbang

While they contain a number of errors (and while the first volume chooses rather strange focuses during the early years, generally ignoring, for example, Eno's early records) these books are pretty great general resources--essentially chronological discographies/eventographies/gigographies of the years in question--with no (or very subtle) commentary. The massiveness of the undertaking partly inspired me to do my 1981 box. Highly recommended.

In HMV on Oxford Street it has its own special rack, with the book on top, and then, some of the music it presumably talks about, underneath, it, on the rack.

Also I have a crappy Lloyd Cole CD to exchange and I can't find any music I want.

xpost -- including propaganda, i think.

i just read the chapter on bow wow wow, mcclaren, etc. blimey.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/05/26/bmpop26.xml
(may require registration)

"But I see the iPod as an emblem of the poverty of abundance. It seems really rich to have all this music in a box, but it all just implodes into your own head space. These scenes never take place as public scenes. Music is about smell, the ripples of the crowd. It should have a pheromonal quality."

"It's hard to escape a feeling of déjà vu if you watch CDUK"

i have met mr s, and i don't think he is so old that he remembers them old days. he said he lurked here sometimes actually!

I should say that now I own an iPod I'm not a fan of it - I find it unwieldy for large collections of non-album music and it's too quiet for me.

t. s. eliot mentions solitary phonograph playin as a symptom of (haha) "our ruin" in the wasteland (1921-ish)

So presumably it's the personal cassette player that's the big bad dehumanising technological development here, and the IPod is just a refinement of that?

people walking around different districts where loud music was played in the streets was how punk-funk happened.

Wait a minute, I have.

iPods didn't come into it. Pie sods did though.

I do not think most people who own iPods are involved in social music activities. I think most of them are a bunch of twats.

Tom, you need to get into the service menu and turn off the EU nanny state volume restriction. Non! Non! Non!

That was a rare opportunity for me to sound vaguely technical.

I have got this book, the one by "Simon". I haven't started it yet. I may put it outside to attract bumble bees. I am enjoying Black Vinyl, White Powder though. I think it is perhaps a different kettle of fish, perhaps more my kind of kettle of fish.

Wow, can you actually do this?? Wahey! UP YOURS DELORS etc.

re the iPod thing, didn't greg tate say exactly the same thing about the walkman 25 years ago?

oh and EU nanny state and stuff--my main problem with the book is it constantly talking about bands feeling the pull of 'europe' and germany and then almost totally ignoring german post-punk- though the discography does redress this somewhat

Miller, I am not going to rise to your bait. It is hard, though.

I think I like what you say about the book and "'Simon'".

Ewing has become pithy and perhaps wise.

I don't think I am generally very keen on loud music playing in the streets, because it is always someone else's music, innit.

sinkah has just linked to this. he says he didn't get beyond the savaging of savage. my advice: don't read even that far.

"However bellettrist it may sound, properly objective cultural criticism needs to start by registering subjective (even disgraceful) responses."

my response: fuck this shit.

i think it might be an elaborate joke, though, in which case, well done ben, great work.

he notes the "rise of Adorno’s star in the philosophical firmament" and says "Commentators on mass music ignore Adorno’s analysis at their peril." then he accuses him of "academic protocol" and "academic orthodoxy". so we have to kowtow to acadmeic orthodoxy when ben sez. reynolds "remains obedient to the priorities and perspectives of the capitalist pop industry," but the capitalist world of hacademic publishing is presumably infallible in its choices of who to publish.

he says the 1978-84 era was "the period when fascism loomed as an electoral reality in England". okes.

he says simon reynolds is "racist", "toothless" and "witless" and has some affinities with robert mcnamara, inasmuch as pop music is a bit like genocide. he says joy division are "paltry pabulum" but he's a bit quiet about what he does like.

he somehow approriates the underground press to his argument, despite its shall we say NOT QUITE MARXIST approach to culture, which is opportunist.

me on not having read it yet (scroll down: permalinks are the class enemy)

other things i have not yet read:
i. rip it up!
ii. dissensus ever

(now i'll go and read the actual review)

b) always amusing how the mere mention of Adorno's name provokes spluttering in people who have never read a word he wrote.

Anyway fascinating read, I got flashes of Reynolds getting flashes of being back at school and geting told off for not doing his homework.

i was merely pointing out that by taking adorno's categories as the abs loo LAST WORD, and that SR's failure to be "versed" in them or indeed share them is a major plank of watson's argument. and of course this form of argument is all about orthodoxy, one way or another.

and it's stupid because it seems to me you could pop in ANY big name cult theorist instead of adorno, and see if reynolds is versed in them. ie "reynolds fails to understand david sylvester's notion of modernist realism". what of it?

i agree that watson is being resentful, though.

i don't in fact believe this entirely explains ben's resentment - which is seriously more like a“why does no one like the things i like coz they are GREAT? *lip trembles* HAH! the answer must totally be the evils of capitalism!!!" - but if i ever do write my bingo gangbang clusterfuck review i will certainly claim this!!

-- Marcello Carlin (marcellocarli...), May 24th, 2005.

i want to put that on a t-shirt

i have not commented on it anywhere either i am almost certain (commenting on things i have not read = a sin i am culpable of def in conversation and on ilx but not really in paid-for print)

haha also TS: bein right abt books you have read vs bein wrong abt books you haven't

(then see also new self-hatin post on rfn abt why i don't read things i should read sometimes)

it shd be:
haha also TS: bein right abt books you HAVEN'T read vs bein wrong abt books you HAVE

ARGH csi: my room.

I didn't think it was possible, but Watson is even more of a buffoon than I had imagined.

but as it kicks off w.a summary of savage’s england’s dreaming so ludicrously unfair as to make me wonder (not for the first time) if ben ever actually read it

If mark can wonder aloud that Watson hasn't read England's Dreaming, then I can wonder aloud if [Watson]'s actually read Rip It Up.

reynolds: p. xiv: 'the doors', 'the stones', p. xix: 'led zeppelin', 'pink floyd', 'chuck berry', p. xxi: 'david bowie', 'nico', 'brian eno', 'the velvet underground'..........

(Though he's not a band, nor is Berry or Bowie or Eno.)

For starters, certain kinds of errors, of course -- but also a lot of generic claims regarding the artifact that are indistiguishable from educated guesses, and tangential bits that really don't talk to artifact at all.

i'm always unimpressed by superficial readings of cooptation, myself. oh no adorno taught in university class oh no! he cannot be radical!

adorno is not off-limits? is he 'orthodoxy' itself? no, but watson is playing a shitty game by using adorno (and it's in part the WAY he uses adorno, which is very 'academic') and THEN hating on various oppos (here simon frith) for their 'academic orthodoxy', because his piece has all the trappings of the academy, among them elitist disdain for 'pabulum', a forelock-tugging attitude towards an Authority such as adorno (there's no need to question adorno's categories and opinions, let's just wheel them on stage so the crowd can gasp) and what is (to the outsider) an inscrutable high-table fondness for ad hominem attacks on a professional rival.

An attitude maybe concentrated in this line:

Deprived of Adorno’s notion that truth might be at variance with society as currently constituted, Reynolds can’t function as a critic.

It's phrased in such a way that implies this notion, recurrent up and down the history of human thought, is Adorno's own invention! (Unless he's trying to refer to Adorno's particular version of that notion, in which case it's kinda Watson's burden to spell-out those particulars a little.)

Is calling Adorno orthodox some sort of taboo? I'm almost impressed (prob. some continental - anglo-saxon difference.)

The thing I like about Watson though is his faith and the voice in the back of your mind he creates that goes "but what if this fool is right after all?"

What also struck me was how he calls Reynolds "a blogger", you know one of those pesky internerds. I mean with all these editions of The Wire in which they have shared reviews. Or did they send BW the magazine with all the liberal writers cut out?

Roxor.

9.99 in HMV on Oxford Street, Ned. Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. What's more it is on a special stand with some of the CDs what it goes on about.

I still haven't read it, but I like the cover more and more.

I think the cassette desgin is probably too modern though, more 1988.

this makes me very angry, about time out, about everything:

"Thanks to everyone who sent messages of congratulations on our TIME OUT article,
we would like to thank TIME OUT ,it’s unprecedented for a bar to get the
cover, so we are honoured, and also thanks to JAMES BROWN who captured the
essence of The Boogaloo in all its glory. They weren't the only media hovering
around us last month, We were also the subject of an Italian Vogue article, they
did a shoot here with members of The Clash, The Pogues, The Libertines and The
Lancaster Bombers. It comes out in print in the September edition."

The cassette (and the headphones) come from a Linotype font, Audio Pi Standard, so yes, probably much more modern than than the period in question.

he'd fit right in on here!

Is that better, Jerry?

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=18378

Philosophizing post-punk

Ben Watson

Philosophers are talking more about music than they did in the past. This is partly to do with the rise of Adorno’s star in the philosophical firmament and the fact that over half of his writings are devoted to music. But it is also because a generation that imbibed punk in its formative years is now in a position to choose the cultural objects of its intellectual scrutiny. So when a book appears called Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–1984, it raises the temperature of intellectual debate.* This was the period when fascism loomed as an electoral reality in England, and the Left made anti-racism an inescapable feature of mainstream politics. Music was crucial to the process.

The material basis for music’s cultural relevance is its industrial production and commercial distribution, initiated at the close of the nineteenth century and indelibly associated with the political upheavals of the 1960s. Mass production makes discussions of music turn ineluctably towards politics and social theory. Irony and sophistry flake off. To talk about a musical experience, you need to put yourself in the picture. Discussants wax autobiographical, they posit determinate social identities. Class issues – long hounded out of academia – become graphic and pressing. It was not for nothing that black America coined the tag ‘soul music’. In a secularized, commercialized society, music is the locus of the soul; social being becomes unavoidable, specific and poignant.

In philosophy, things began with Nietzsche on Wagner (first for, then against) and were stoked by Adorno’s polemics against classical harmony in favour of twelve-tone. Today debates turn around Noise, and the possible demise of music as system: as usual, the ‘death’ of something proclaims a new burst of life. Punk was the last time music and philosophy crossed paths in a memorable way, as pop was infected by a situationist critique of the social-democratic consensus. Guy Debord’s admiration for the antisocial sullenness of the London proletariat suddenly became a cultural phenomenon in itself. However, punk was buried by those who came to praise it. Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming told its story in the light of eventual commercial success, abolishing its sense of terminal crisis and reducing it to yet another rags-to-riches showbiz fable. Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces sidestepped punk’s challenge to representation by ignoring its class politics – Dada, the situationists and punk were all glossed as terminal romanticism. For anyone who had seen the Sex Pistols, attended the F-Club in Leeds, or had fights with fascists at Rock Against Racism gigs – or simply walked down the street wearing clothes that were an invitation to get beaten up – these books were a drear disappointment. They hid punk’s risk and violence behind a genteel screen, betraying its confrontational ethic with a liberal language of justification.

So it is hardly surprising that Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up has been flying off the shelves. With 126 fresh interviews with the protagonists, pictures researched by Jon Savage, and 550 dense pages written by a blogger ‘too young’ to have witnessed the Pistols, it promises to register what things felt like for the groundlings – those excluded from the scene-setting events in London, ‘too late’ but fully participating in punk as a mass phenomenon nonetheless. Those who cite 1976–77 as the ‘real’ moment of punk are those for whom it was a springboard to TV celebrity. Genuine punks – ‘losers’ from the spectacular point of view – actually lived punk between 1978 and 1984.

The morbidity of positivism

In telling the story of these years, Reynolds steps into a troubled zone, strafed with political and philosophical brickbats. A mild version of deconstruction – a kind of radicalism-with-compromise – is the name of his game. Green Gartside of Scritti Politti tells Reynolds that when he met Jacques Derrida, he ‘told me what I was doing was part of the same project of undoing and unsettling that he’s engaged in’. For Reynolds, society is a stable, reasonable entity ‘unsettled’ by a few dashing highwaymen like Gartside and Derrida. Unversed in Adorno, Reynolds is unaware that the crisis of Western metaphysics has social roots: society cannot get beyond its own hidebound concepts. Commentators on mass music ignore Adorno’s analysis at their peril.

Adorno emphasized psychic liberation, mimesis, mad love and musical freedom. His focus on the musical object meant he could see through the ideological packaging that surrounds the consumption of music. Like the ‘conspicuous’ in consumption, it is not completely discarded, but it stops being the whole deal. Like a manufacturer testing a sample, Adorno honed in on music’s appeal to the unconscious, revealing the sedimented historical content behind personal taste. For Pierre Bourdieu, such insights confirm the cynic’s conviction that all culture is a prop for power. For Adorno, in contrast, cravings for musical freedom are glimpses of a new social order undistorted by domination. Despite his pessimism about formal politics, Adorno understood that capitalism is creating the preconditions for freedoms undreamt of in antiquity. Hence his depressive mania: a new world is possible, yet baulked.

Writers committed to particular genres, such as free jazz (Philippe Carles, Jean-Louis Comolli, Free Jazz Black Power, Paris, 1971), funk (Ricky Vincent, Funk, New York, 1996), rock (Joe Carducci, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, Los Angeles, 1994), country (Nick Tosches, Country, London, 1989) or rai (Bouziane Daoudi, Hadj Miliani, L’aventure du raï: Paris, 1996) are duty-bound to defend generic integrity against commodification, and so make aesthetic distinctions. However, pop is not a musical genre: it is what sells. Hence writing on pop cries out for categories like capital, labour and commodity, since they are the determining forces in this ‘genre’. Adorno’s warnings about the consumption of false images of freedom are highly pertinent here: the listening ear needs to be rigorous about objective actualities of form.

In his acknowledgements, Simon Reynolds offers ‘a fervent salute to the journalists and editors of the weekly rock papers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, his ‘prime research resource’. However, he’s wrong to call 1978–84 ‘the golden age for British music journalism’. It was certainly better than what passes for music journalism today. (How can an industry which couldn’t even generate a hit denouncing the war in Iraq provide an object for serious criticism?) But the real golden age was the underground press of 1966–69; although the pre-punk NME (1975–77), with its relentless negativity about corporate label fads and ploys, was pretty hilarious too. Punk was its bruised and bloody offspring. That said, 1978 to 1984, when the NME vied with Sounds to cover the struggle against the National Front, was certainly compulsive reading. So much so, in fact, that anyone who read those weeklies then will yawn their way through Reynolds’s book: fad follows fad with a remorseless lack of logic. The conscientious page-turner has no way of avoiding the imbecilities of Kevin Rowland, Martin Fry or Lydia Lunch. Despite the 126 extra interviews, the NME sets the template, and the book reads as a breathless précis. Relief comes on page 517, when Reynolds loses faith in chart pop, and begins to make his own judgements. But it has been a long haul.

The author’s ‘subjective’ viewpoint should not just be there to provide moral asides once a story has been told (like Robert McNamara looking glum about genocide in Vietnam); it is an essential moment in the unfolding of any objective account. What was Reynolds doing during this period? Which gigs did he attend? How did he earn a living? Did he meet anyone at gigs? Was he ever scared? How did punk and post-punk challenge his sense of identity, his view of the British class system? Without information about the storyteller, we can’t get critical purchase on their story.

Reynolds has some political opinions, of course. We can plot them. He’s a liberal, so the market is a force of nature. He thinks Thatcherism was a response to unions that were ‘too strong’. He talks of interventionist governments ‘propping up ailing industries to preserve jobs’. He also mentions 1970s ‘race riots’. Now, the Daily Telegraph may have called them that, but everyone involved at street level recognized them as anti-police riots that brought whites, blacks and Asians together. A waft of confidence and good humour swept through the riot cities like some exhilarating drug.

The clichés come thick and fast: Tony Wilson’s Factory Records used situationist ideas, but Guy Debord wouldn’t have approved. Bob Last’s Fast Product anticipated a new kind of left-wing sensibility, a ‘“designer socialism” purged of its puritanical austerity and pleasure-fear’. Following the ‘mods versus rockers’ binary (half an idea baked into academic orthodoxy by Dick Hebdige and Simon Frith), Reynolds conceives pop as a natural homeostatic system, working ‘through a kind of oscillating, internal pendulum, swinging back and forth between two extremes. Some kind of return to rock values (if not inevitably to guitar music) was bound to happen.’ Postmodernism provides Reynolds with the sophistry to avoid musics outside his ken: hip-hop is dismissed as ‘fantasies of rebellion and street knowledge’. In the first 500 pages the only pre-punk band mentioned is the Beatles, and this definition of pop music as victorious commercial product shapes the book. Reynolds would doubtless be aggrieved to be called a racist – he’s appreciative of two-tone and the Specials, and even has the nous to realize Live Aid was collusive with Thatcherite anti-statism. But attention to sales figures rather than musical form inevitably underplays the contribution of blues, funk and reggae. He quotes Luc Sante on Blood Ulmer, Luther Thomas, Oliver Lake and Joe Bowie, but he has no inkling that No Wave Harmolodics was a Hendrix-scale leap forward in how rock can be played, a revolution forced underground by a music industry in retrenchment. (We had our own exponents, from Nottingham, called Pinski Zoo, but they didn’t chart, so they don’t count as ‘post-punk’.)

The black hole in pop opened up by the Sex Pistols led more adventurous punks to explore dub reggae, Free Improvisation and revolutionary politics. Reynolds, though, remains faithful to the commercial farce. This positivism deprives him of musical objectivity, of critical stance: all he can do is detail once again the careers of those whose names sold music papers. He’s aware that things got worse from The Pop Group through to ABC and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, a sorry decline into image, commercial scam and unit-shifting. However, lacking an understanding of how capitalism prioritizes product over musical event, Reynolds can only remark on a lack of ‘passion’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘substance’. Deprived of Adorno’s notion that truth might be at variance with society as currently constituted, Reynolds can’t function as a critic. His exclusive fixation on music that makes a return on capital (‘pop’) deprives him of any sense of the struggle involved in making music. There is no sign of the broken lives and bleak desperation caused by the brutal way the music industry siphons money away from working musicians and small venues. Real people are elsewhere; what we have is Narcissus in his bedroom, stacking his albums.

Walter Benjamin diagnosed morbidity as a symptom of commodity fixation and it is intriguing how often ‘marble slabs’ come up in Reynolds’s descriptions of beauty in music (Joy Division, Young Marble Giants and Scritti Politti). Christopher Gray’s Leaving the Twentieth Century (a pioneering translation of situationist texts issued in 1974) was apparently ‘the radical-chic fetish object of its era’. This description derives from Marcus’s glamorization of the book in Lipstick Traces (and the photo of a distressed cover in The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid). But anyone who read Leaving the Twentieth Century at the time felt viciously alienated, not just from consumer objects, but from non-revolutionary contemporaries, music-scene small talk, academic protocol and pop-biz machinations. Debord’s polemics threw the reader into a storm of radical politics quite beyond Reynolds’s feeble radar. It was something you read and tried to put into action, but rarely mentioned (its Lukácsian terminology was usually incomprehensible to anyone with the nerve to carry out its proposals). This action-not-words spell cast by the situationists was only broken in the late 1980s, with the publication of Lipstick Traces and the advent of Stewart Home. Action is not a word in Reynolds’s vocabulary.

Thermidor as lukewarm shower

Reynolds detests the organized Left. Rock Against Racism is only mentioned in order to berate its ‘puritan’ dogmatism and to defend the ‘unaligned’ individual (in this case, the ridiculous Howard Devoto). In fact, it was the Left’s attention to punk that created his ‘golden age’ of music journalism. When Gavin Martin wrote sourly about the huge 1981 Leeds Carnival Against Racism in NME, the next week’s letters page carried nothing but indignant rebuttals. Reynolds opines that a single quote from Jerry Dammers ‘did more for anti-racism than a thousand Anti-Nazi League speeches’, but it was activists in the ANL who originally arrived at that conclusion! That’s why we headlined the Specials at the Leeds Carnival. It was precisely because the ANL was not centred around political speeches, but around gigs and street action, that it attracted support, and eventually smashed the National Front.

Musicians and grassroots promoters make gigs happen, escalate community, amplify socialist intelligence; moneymen and obsequious journalists manufacture stars, sell crap records and screw everything up. Reynolds is keen that we see things from this ‘other side’, appreciate the ambitions of entrepreneurs like Paul Morley and Trevor Horn, and break with the Left’s ‘guilt-racked puritanism’. This way we can all get a piece of the pie. But, as he admits at the end of Rip It Up, all he’s left with at the end is an overblown and vacuous product like Frankie Goes To Hollywood, a boy-band prototype. Without attention to form, it is impossible to appreciate what is decimated by the commercial ratio: the delirious madness of a musical event, the beauty of unpredictability, the one-off situation. With his orthodox cultural studies agnosticism about musical form, Reynolds can only moralize retrospectively about the fame game. Critical spike crumbles to chatshow falafel.

By the end, as often in counter-revolutions, the ‘theoreticians’ mended the breach (Bob Last, Green Gartside, Trevor Horn, Tony Wilson) and successfully turned post-punk into a viable consumer option. The abysmal reign of New Order, Simple Minds and U2 beckoned. Reynolds notices that in formal terms, post-punk tunes by Wire, Josef K and Joy Division are similar to tunes by Altered Images, but he fails to draw the conclusion that it is the same paltry pabulum tweezed for different niche markets. In 1985, two journalists from the NME with ears alert enough to hear the straitened parameters of its ‘alternative’ – Richard Cook and Graham Lock – tried to introduce post-punk consumers to Free Improvisation. However, Derek Bailey was hardly chart fodder, so they left to join the jazz magazine Wire. The critique of capitalism and class society – so strikingly made by the Sex Pistols – was no longer deemed saleable. Instead it festered underground, until in the United States the grassroots networks built by Bad Brains and other Washington DC hardcore bands exploded at the Seattle protest against the World Trade Organization in 1999. That is a different story of course, but, like Free Improvisation and Harmolodics, simply to mention it reveals the pinched horizons of Reynolds’s tale. Never trust a music writer who calls the Sons of the Pioneers ‘anodyne’.

Reynolds’s obsession with chart placings (abstract knowledge) rather than live gigs and personal response to records (concrete knowledge) explains the failure of Rip It Up. With no negative dialectic, the particular is never given its due, much less used as a critical lever on the general. The writer attempts to speak ‘objectively’ for the mass consumer, but this putative entity is abstract and dominated. However bellettrist it may sound, properly objective cultural criticism needs to start by registering subjective (even disgraceful) responses. When music is treated as social fact rather than potential truth, the past will never make its ‘tiger’s leap’ into the present. This is writing in which nothing ever happens.

Convinced that there is nothing relevant outside the text of the recorded product, Reynolds cannot explain the forces acting on the records he examines. In fact, he cannot interpret the records at all, and – paradoxically for someone who rarely acknowledges quirky, unofficial responses – emerges with something as arbitrary and subjective as ‘taste’. This is because he remains obedient to the priorities and perspectives of the capitalist pop industry, allowing the commodity to dictate what constitutes musical culture. In Rip It Up, there is no appeal to the tribunal of live performance. But this is an essential element in decoding records. You only had to witness the gigs to know the Specials were a real collective – combined, conflictual and uneven – and that Dexy’s Midnight Runners were a contrived charade. Without unrepentant insistence on the subjectivity of musical experience (Adorno hearing the opening of Mahler’s First as ‘the unpleasant whistling of an old steam engine’, for example), pop writing won’t achieve objectivity. It will just be witless and toothless.

he is, however, possibly right.

occasionally it reminded me why i don't like zappa much, or adorno either.