Does Postpunk even actually exist?

But anyway, the punk rock is where all jams are short and fast and buzzy, like the Ramones and Sex Pistols, jah? Chuck Berry plus Sonics plus jaded 70s decadence plus grubby-fingered "working class" rama-lama-fa-fa-fa? Jah?

Jah! Loudfastrules, O.K! We drink beer now! But no sex, please, we're on drugs.

And then the Post-Punk is where all the art school cunts come along and "see the possibilities." The Post-Punk is what happens when people who are "really much more interested in reggae right now" take over. Right?

Post the blog tho'. I'm curious...

Good luck with your self-publicising though.

6:33 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

1~ punk wasn't big enough or interesting enough in 1978 North America to have spawned anything that could be called a postpunk...Punk was obviously big in the UK, but in the US it was basically a bunch of scattered local scenes somewhat connected by DIY labels, zines and regional econoline van tours. These scenes evolved into hardcore and then hardcore (with a few notable exceptions) got pretty boring pretty quick...

2~ all of the bands that are called Postpunk are bascially just a continuation of the Art Rock traditions of velvet underground, pere ube, kraftwerk, roxy music, david bowie, etc. Postpunk bands dont sound like Prog Rock bands but with shorter songs, newer technologys (synthesizers, drum machines) and no gratuious solos...

3~ many of the so-called postpunk bands existed BEFORE punk was big enough to have an influence. How can music be influenced by something that came AFTER it?

1~ punk wasn't big enough or interesting enough in 1978 North America to have spawned anything that could be called a postpunk...Punk was obviously big in the UK, but in the US it was basically a bunch of scattered local scenes somewhat connected by DIY labels, zines and regional econoline van tours. These scenes evolved into hardcore and then hardcore (with a few notable exceptions) got pretty boring pretty quick...

2~ all of the bands that are called Postpunk are bascially just a continuation of the Art Rock traditions of velvet underground, pere ube, kraftwerk, roxy music, david bowie, etc. Postpunk bands sound alot like Prog Rock bands but with shorter songs, newer technologys (synthesizers, drum machines) and no gratuious solos...

3~ many of the so-called postpunk bands existed BEFORE punk was big enough to have an influence. How can music be influenced by something that came AFTER it?

LOL EXISTENCE IS NOT A PREDICATE

yikes!!

I think it's pretty hard to deny that post-punk picked up a lot of the ethos of punk, both in sound and in process: the DIY aesthetics, the recording and instrumental set-ups, and the stance they took in relation to music as a whole. There's also a definite "art" ethos there, too. But between those two things, the bands wound up mostly unlike either punk rock or art rock (and if you asked most people, they'd probably put them closer to punk). The art ethos wasn't the grandness or psychedelia of art-rock and prog-rock; it was more modern and more conceptual, more in stances and attitudes and ideas than in sound.

I think you're right about the way the terms here -- "post-punk" and "new wave" and "New Pop" -- have often been used to fight over ideas about success and "credibility" as much as they have been to talk about music: there are distinctions we make between, say, 80s Scritti Politti and Duran Duran, or Echo and the Bunnymen and A Flock of Seagulls, that have traces of that hanging all around them. I'm not sure this really diminishes the value of the term "post-punk," though. (In Kogan's whole "Superword" terms, it would probably inflate the value -- i.e., "post-punk" must be meaningful if people are bothering to fight over its assignment, to draw lines over who's allowed to be in the club and who isn't.)

xpost
Per Chuck I think we run into a whole bunch of problems with terminology. So far as I understand it, "new wave" was actually first used around 1979, to refer to a bunch of bands we'd probably just call "punk" now -- because they were, haha, the "new wave" of punk. And then later there are issues surrounding "post-punk," which -- through the 1980s themselves -- people seemed to keep extending to mean more and more things. I seem to remember a time when people would talk about bands like the Smiths and Bunnymen as being "post-punk," obviously in a much looser way than we use the term now.

http://mailman.xmission.com/pipermail/zorn-list/2002-December/002896.html

Ha ha, from the Rolling Stone website archives:

Essential Logic Related

Projects
No Projects

Influences
No Influences

Contemporaries
No Contemporaries

Followers
No Followers

Just posting to take one thing back: some of the 1979 bands that got called a "new wave" of punk actually did represent a development toward what we'd currently call "new wave" -- e.g. Klark Kent and the Yachts and stuff. (I suppose you could also think of bands like the Buzzcocks as kind of a development toward those beginnings of new wave, too.)

In that sense punk "existed" with or without any critical commentary on the subject, and it still exists to this day.

Post-punk and new-wave are different. They're purely critical/marketing terms. Bands and fans didn't fly their post-punkness as an identity flag. There was no fixed and clearly understood post-punk sound or agenda.

In this sense, post-punk and new-wave didn't really "exist" in the same sense that punk did. (New-wave moreso, but still...)

That doesn't make the terms meaningless or useless, however, just a good deal more fluid and open to (re)interpretation.

P.S. Yeah, a lot of English "post-punk" bands were clearly just spiking Eno/Roxy/Velvets moves with punk venom and/or reggae bounce.

Why not? If that wasn't real rock--then what was it?

And personally I do not see that much difference between Peter Gabriel era Genesis and the so-called PostPunk bands except for that PostPunk had nw technology at their disposal and their songs were sonically somewhat cleaner. I mean couldn't Peter Gabriel's solo stuff sound basically similar to some PostPunk?

P.E.W., can we confirm that we're all talking about the same bands here? Because this statement seems bizarre to me. Which bands do you have in mind?

the first time I saw it was a poster for a Ramones/Sonic's Rendezvous Band gig at the Second Chance in Ann Arbor in spring 77. "The New Wave of Rock & Roll!" above picture of both bands looking leather-clad and long-hairy, not really anybody's current idea of new wave (esp. the biker-hippie protopunk SRB dudes)

less certain memory -- NME using the term postpunk in 79/80 to describe Rough Trade's Wanna Buy A Bridge compilation

New-wave was an American marketing term for the more pop and audience friendly "punky" bands of the era. Devo, Blondie, Talking Heads, The B-52s, The Cars, eventually the Go-Gos, etc. Eccentric, goofy, nerdy, "colorful" and most of all FUN. New-wave was all about good, clean (slightly subversive) American fun. Lotsa kitchy nods to 50s/60s culture and "Jetsons" futurism.

Post-punk, on the other hand, was an English critical term. A way to talk about the way that art-school bands were expanding out from the deafening cultural explosion of the U.K. movement. Post-punk bands tended to be much darker, drier and artier than their U.S. new-wave bretheren.

nothing more than Art Rock which came from a long line of artsy, more intellectual (academcially speaking) backgrounds

1) is the umbrella meaningless?

2) are there artists unfairly excluded from the shelter of this lovely umbrella?

Youre right! I may have to edit this into my blog now...

nabisco, its been probablly 20 years since I've listend to Peter Gabriel, but if bands like Dexys Midngiht runners and Madness or later Talking Heads, Echo and the Bunnyman, the Cure, Joy Division, New order, Sioxsie & the Banshees are considered PostPunk, then to my ears I dont hear that much difference between them and Peter Gabriel...sonically...

>Post-punk, on the other hand, was an English critical term. <

...which, again, didn't come into use until years AFTER the music it put in that category, right? (we talked about this on another thread a few weeks ago, and that seemed to be the consensus, I believe.)

2) are there artists unfairly excluded from the shelter of this lovely umbrella?

We may have stumbled upon our problem, P.E.W. -- they aren't, necessarily, or at least not as much anymore. I said upthread that "post-punk" used to get applied in a much looser way, top include some of those bands. But these days "post-punk" has been narrowed down to something rather different, more along the lines of some of the bands mentioned upthread: Essential Logic, This Heat, Delta 5, Gang of Four, P.I.L., etc. People talk about the bands you've named in the context of post-punk (appropriately), and often consider them part of the big umbrella, but I think most people's sense of where the umbrella's center is -- where the pole sticks through -- isn't exactly on those acts.

I haven't read through Simon's book, but I get the sense that a lot of what he's doing is to talk about post-punk not as a movement, in which certain bands are included and certain ones aren't, but more as a condition or situation -- like I said upthread about "postmodernism." Therefore all of these acts, including new-wave and New Pop and whatever else, are all built from and responding to the condition of post-punk, and all in very different ways. That's not a matter of saying "these bands all sound alike and so here's a term for them" -- that's a matter of saying "certain things were going on in this particular moment, and here are the various reactions a whole bunch of different people had to that environment.

By the way, I don't entirely buy this dichotomy, since it implies "punk" was *not* a critical or marketing term, when it was both (wasn't it actually first used by Dave Marsh in *Creem*, to describe ? and the Mysterians, after which important punk bands such as Brownsville Station and the Tubes picked it up and made it their own, long before it turned into a "legitimate" culture? Or do I have that chronology slightly wrong?) Also, new wave *did* have its own dress code, at least in 1979! (See aforementioned skinny ties.) So at that moment, in my life, "new wave" WAS as real as "punk." Though sure, its turf has hardly been as vehemently defended in years since.

Reynolds talks a good deal about "Postpunks" rejection of Punk, but I'm not so sure about it showing reverence for. Johnny Rotten basically said he hated punk. Alot of the bands in Ryenolds book (including the Talking Heads) found more exciting things going on in Disco that had gone on in punk. And as for the DIY labels--there had always been DIY labels, especially in regard to blues and jazz. So that was nothing new that punk introduced.
Also Punk music was often just a stripped down version of Rock, that was basically not much different from Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard, etc.

So my question is, what exactly about Punk was so revolutionary?

The safety pins through the noses?

It's like what it meant when the Germs were called "hardcore" in 1980 vs. when hatebreed is called "hardcore" in 2000. But reversed. "Post-punk" narrowed it's sphere while "hardcore" broadened it.

A word describing a nebulous concept becomes bastardized after 20 years. Pick your battles.

apart from Sun Ra's Saturn label, not sure what you're referring to?

xp about altman inventing "punk":

could be; that does sound kind of familiar. but either way, "punk" still starts out as a "critical term" (which, interestingly, was initally used to refer to music not apparently called "punk" when it actually existed. which might even mean that altman or marsh or kaye were the reynoldses of their day. they were revisionists, basically.)

And as to your first point about about the rejection of punk, nabisco was otm earlier with this paragraph:

I think it's pretty hard to deny that post-punk picked up a lot of the ethos of punk, both in sound and in process: the DIY aesthetics, the recording and instrumental set-ups, and the stance they took in relation to music as a whole. There's also a definite "art" ethos there, too. But between those two things, the bands wound up mostly unlike either punk rock or art rock (and if you asked most people, they'd probably put them closer to punk). The art ethos wasn't the grandness or psychedelia of art-rock and prog-rock; it was more modern and more conceptual, more in stances and attitudes and ideas than in sound.

They may not have mouthed their reverence, Paul, but most of the core of post-punk bands did loads of things that were enabled by punk -- they followed on its cues and borrowed its opportunities. If you're looking to late-period Talking Heads to figure that out, you might have some problems -- but look to the earliest core of these bands, and you'll see them taking punk as a kind of starting point, even a rudimentary blank slate onto which they could pile on the stuff they were "more interested in." (And that means not strictly sound but ethos, down to banal things like the labels and clubs they would work through.)

Actually, the more I think about this, the more it seems like you can't really believe in such a thing as "punk" without believing in such a thing as "post-punk." Which is to say that if you claim punk was a "significant social movement," then you're claiming things didn't just go back to normal right afterward -- it would hardly be significant if that were the case. And so you've outlined the conditions of post-punk: there has to be a moment in there where punk has changed things and new artists are emerging into whatever new world punk has changed things into.

(P.S. I think the real issue here is that Paul is thinking of a totally different set of bands as representing "post-punk" as everyone else is.)

Don't buy this, either. PiL and This Heat and Essential Logic et. al. *sounded* arty. That their artiness was inspired by dub and funk and 20th century minimailism (or whatever) rather than by, say, 19th century symphonies might set them apart from most '70s prog bands (though probbaly not from Eno or Can), sure, but I don't know if the differnce is artiness-via-stance vs. artiniess-via-sounds; they just used *different* sounds. (Though I doubt it would be impossible to come up with '70s proggers who were paying attention to reggae or funk or Philip Glass; hell, Pink Floyd may have drawn on all three, for all I know. And who says proggers didn't have attitudes, too? Those Van Der Graf Generator guys sound kinda pissed off sometimes!)

Or, to put it another way, Delta 5 sound "arty." But the artiness of it isn't so much a formal thing -- it's mostly a conceptual thing, having to do with who they are and what they're playing and in what context they're playing it.

(There's an argument hidden in there for why the Cocteau Twins are awesome, actually.)

I have no idea. Heck, didn't King Crimson help invent concept albums? If they didn't, some other '70s prog bands sure did. (And Pink Floyd strike me as *very* conceptual. And, um, Peter Gabriel used to dress up like a flower and stuff.) But I never understand concept albums anyway. Though I do sort of get your guys' point, regardless. (I suppose I'd just say the same thing as I said with sounds -- post-punks were just *differently* conceptual than the prog rock bands. Except in those rare moments when they weren't.)

I sometimes think that post-punk is a belief that musicians and critics hold to because they want to see the long-term importance of punk music and culture as something that has spread out in some sort of intellectual way, not just as another sound that has played well to the masses.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more it seems like you can't really believe in such a thing as "punk" without believing in such a thing as "post-punk." Which is to say that if you claim punk was a "significant social movement," then you're claiming things didn't just go back to normal right afterward -- it would hardly be significant if that were the case. And so you've outlined the conditions of post-punk: there has to be a moment in there where punk has changed things and new artists are emerging into whatever new world punk has changed things into.

(P.S. I think the real issue here is that Paul is thinking of a totally different set of bands as representing "post-punk" as everyone else is.) <

It seems to me that these "postpunk" bands were already doing all the same things that are sited as being part of the "significat social movement" that punk is given credit for. Only punk was tooting its horn the loudest with its safety pin through the nose attention-whoring tactics...

I wish Paul would answer this. Far be it for me to put words in his mouth, but I'm guessing that he didn't really mean "DIY" per se; he probably just meant indepedent labels in general. And one thing I don't think I've ever seen anybody write about in detail (though maybe I just haven't looked around enough) is what, it seems to me, were a plethora of indie, mostly local labels releasing singles and albums by rock bands in the '70s before punk happened. I'm guessing there were hundreds, if not thousands of them. Though sure, they were scattered and diffuse, not a "movement." But does that matter? What is it that Rough Trade did that Gulcher, say, hadn't already done (besides getting way more famous -but that's so unpunk, right?)

conventional wisdom holds that GULCHER and HEARTHAN (Ubu) and MER (Patti's "Piss Factory") and ORK (TV's "Lil Johnny Jewel")were unique and fairly isolated DIY labels in the pre-punk 70s. was BOMP records around then? Man if there ARE hundreds or even thousands of locally produced glamrock and hardrock and protopunk and whatnot records around I'd love to hear em...maybe George or somebody knows the score on this? wait there's guys like Armand Schaubrock (sic) I guess but who else? R Stevie Moore? -- never heard him.

Isn't that pretty much what I just said? The earliest post-punk bands seemed to pick up punk's model of how "having a band" worked, and then set about changing various parts of it. (They didn't start from the Genesis model of how "having a band" worked.)

I'll also repeat what Tim said:

Saying that DIY labels were "nothing new" negates the fact that there was, in fact, an explosion of DIY music making in England and subsequently elsewhere. This was a genuine phenomenon.

In other words, stuff doesn't have to be unprecedented to be significant: the point is that the stuff took off and took on a certain power. And that's important to what I'm calling the "condition" of post-punk -- a lot of these bands were emerging into an environment where certain things (including independent labels and DIY aesthetics) weren't an exception, but rather kind of a viable network unto themselves, and one that had a cultural base behind it.

nabisco, I guess my questuib us did punk really knock down the door for the 'post-punk' bands in regards to DIY labels? Didnt many of the "post-punk" bands start using DIY labels at the same time as the punk bands? Around '77-'78. Couldn't it just have been that postpunk bands were really art rock bands who had access to the materials to create a DIY labels at the same time as the Punk bands. Maybe it was more of a situation that the materials to do a start up were suddenly more available--due to technological advances, cost efficency, or whatever? I really dont know the answer to that--I havent really researched it.

For instance, it was surely "because" of punk that a coherent audience had collected for these bands to play to!

Can we go back to this? I agree that this stuff sounds like, or is at least in the same ballpark as, early Peter Gabriel, which was contemporary. (And at least Joy Division is surely canonical postpunk. I'd consider early Siouxsie postpunk too but I'd probably agree with nabisco about the other bands. [Can't comment on DMR since I've never heard them.]) Your original comment, however, was that you hear little difference between these bands and Gabriel-era Genesis, which is another thing altogether. I do consider melt-era Gabriel postpunk or at least new wave but I certainly don't put "Supper's Ready" in the same category. Do you disagree?

Am I exaggerating? I dunno, maybe I am. But to me it doesn't seem like all that much of a stretch, given, say, all the hard rock and pysch-folk obscurities that've reappeared in the past few years, and all these guys like Todd Tamenend Clark and Gary Wilson who keep appearing out of the wooodwork every few months now. And I mean, go beyond weirdos like Armand Schaubrock and R Stevie Moore (neither of whom I've ever heard either), and think of the (I THINK) homemade albums by powerpoppers like the Scruffs and the Shoes that Christgau liked back then (what was the first Shoes one, before *Black Vinyl Shoes* -- *One in Zion* or something like that??), or hard rock bands like Poobah (Rite Records) or Truth & Janey (Montross Records) or Cain (ASI Records) or Ultra (Ultra Records, a "five copy 100 copy white sleeve pressing") or Negative Space (Castle Records, 1000 copies) that Houston's Monster Records reissued a few years ago and Martin Popoff writes about in his *Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal: The '70s* book (where I just looked up all the labels and info), or those glam-rock obscurities (mostly British, maybe?) compiled on some *Pebbles*-like collection everybody said was so great a couple years ago but that I never heard. And hell, toss in disco, if that counts (and why shouldn't it?), which was released on TONS of indie labels before the punk boom. Do that, and I don't think hundreds or even thousands of labels are such a pipedream. But maybe I'm wrong. (Who did Debris record for? I've never heard them either. Or the Droogs? I bet there old Creem rockaramas on several of these bands.)

(And right, I'm not saying that punk and what came after didn't make the indie-label thing normal. But this is still interesting to me.)

Personally, I'm just not convinced that "Postpunk" was anying more than Art Rock that had evolved. Maybe punk has some influence on how it evolved, but no more influence than ProgRock or Disco. And certainly no more influence that the technological advances in instruments and equipment.

In a fascinating paper I found online by one Paul Rosen, he discusses these statistics: in 1978 Zigzag magazine listed 231 indie labels in their “Small Labels Catalogue. By 1980, this number had raised to 800.

There were plenty of self-released an small indie releases I'm sure, but there was an explosion after the likes of Spiral Scratch or even Smokescreen. The whole "wait, we can do it?". Beyond that, it's worth noting that a lot of these labels at least claimed to prefer to do it themselves then wait to get signed. It was the whole idea of the thing. How many of those little releases listed above were from bands just waiting to get signed? Debris sent their demo to EG among others. If you have the CD you've seen the hilarious response. Something along the lines of "this is horrible, have you met MX-80? They're horrible too, here's their address, you'd probably get along."

And Paul, the point you miss is that a)post-punk is art rock that evolved, BECAUSE of punk rock, and b) a large part of the post-punk "art" aesthethic involves art ideas like amateurism that didn't exist so much in the early art-rock, except for people like Eno and Ono. In an introduction to a talk about No Wave a few months ago, Simon read from a new article about this. It definately simplified things, but was pretty interesting. There were certainly "noise" bands that may have been considered "art-rock", The Godz, Nihilist Spasm Band, Red Crayola etc. But the most defining ideas of art-rock, were mostly revolted against as well. Even This Heat added a "non-musician".

And if Peter Gabriel was New Wave, it was because Gabriel and Robert Fripp were deliberately trying to be New Wave.

The first five songs or so on Joy Division's Substance seem to illustrate the punk-postpunk continuity pretty clearly to me. Punk rock guys start bringing new stuff into the mix but still preserve some punk aesthetics - the stiff unaccented rhythms, the rough and heavily 'accented' vocals, the droney guitars.

-- Whiney G. Weingarten (christophe...), July 10th, 2006 5:59 PM. (whineyg) (later)

what's funny to me is how, in reynolds' book, there's these occasional snipes at hardcore, esp. for being "doctrinaire" or "rigid" or something. somebody maybe forgot to tell him that most of the entire interest in post-punk now has to do with people formerly in hardcore bands/scenes/whathaveyou discovering those old records and aping the styles!

I guess this would be true if all postpunk bands embraced the ideas of amateurism (or other punkrock aesthetics), but not all--or even most--of the bands that Reynolds highlights in his book did.
But let's say that all of the bands did embrace that, then in your opinion, how would that influence be more defining than some of the other influences on "PostPunk"? Influences like new technologies, influences like Disco and ProgRock, etc.

BTW, Adrian Belew would be another example (along with Peter Gabriel) that went from Prog Rock to "PostPunk"...

Ha, that'd theoretically prove his point though, right? "Twenty years later, now that post-punk's doctrinaire, now you get around to it."

"Doctrinaire" and "rigid" might be kinda half-codes (for stuff like "rockist" and "overwhelmingly masculine"), but I can certainly see where they're coming from: I mean, American hardcore was very rule-based, in an almost Puritan way. That didn't stop plenty of it from being good, but even then -- in a way that had to do with carving out its own culture, rather than strictly musical stuff.

Billy Altman founded the first magazine called Punkin 1973.

(I think I'm just...well, surprised at the intensity of this all. Aren't old scores just trying to be settled, again?)

I do think many of the post-punk bands that you'd associate with art-rock did embrace amateurism to a degree, or at least the punk rock simplicity/repetition/aggression. I can think of a few bands that had some proggy chops...the guitarist from Ludus played some licks worthy of discussion in some silly guitar magazine. But even those other influences you talk about, disco, dub, electronics, drove post-punk in directions that I still hear as antithethical to where art-rock was in the 60s/70s, with few exceptions as mentioned above.

maybe it's a "I know it when I see it" thing, but none of my friends had any big debates about what is/isn't post-punk when we discovered the Wanna Buy a Bridge? compilation, which is nothing short of some sort of post-punk bible. Now let's look at that as an example of post-punk. Art-rocks ghosts are certainly strong, in Scritti's contribution and hell, Robert Wyatt makes an appearance. But the point is, they were all punk artists, in attitude, influence, and more or less, sound.

*outside the UK music press

If punk has to be so anti-arty, then why does anyone give the Velvet Underground any credit? Does everyone forget that Richard Hell and Television were part of the same scene as the Ramones and the Dead Boys?

The whole point of punk was that it brought a new emotional and sonic rawness to the vocabulary of rock and roll. If the Joy Division, Gang of Four, and the Birthday Party weren't a direct result of that, then I'm Ian goddamn Curtis. For the love of God, what is the opening bassline of "Disorder" if not punk? I agree that some of the poppier new wave bands ended up losing said emotional and sonic rawness, but as I've always understood it I thought there was some sort of fuzzy line between new wave and post-punk. Maybe Reynolds kinda forgot that , and so his arguement is a little weak.

I think what our dear Paul is trying to argue is that "post-punk" should only be used to describe the forebears of the 70's punk movement in the most narrow sense possible, excluding any and all bands with artful or poetic influences. If so, everyone dig out their copy of "Out Come the Wolves" they bought when they were 16, cause we's gots some post-punk to listen to.

Or, conversely, we might as well listen to anything that has had the word "art-rock" attached to it. That's great, because I've been waiting a long time for Styx to win some hipster cred.

But with a twist. Even as a 13-year-old, I could hear that the Clash and Sex Pistols were doing something that could roughly be considered rock & roll. My first response to the New York Dolls and Never Mind The Bollocks was, "That's it? What's so weird or shocking about this?" "God Save The Queen" was just rock & roll sped up and played sloppily. "Aerosol Burns" and "Read About Seymour" sounded like "punk" songs recorded and beamed in from Mars. Without any knowledge of dub, krautrock or Eno, there absolutely no frame of reference for it. I liked that. I expected "punk" to be something new and different, and there it was.

That said, I don't think postpunk is too misleading a term. Postpunk happened largely (but not entirely) after punk, and punk was a major influence (as was Bowie/Eno/Kraftwerk 'art rock', as was glam rock, as was VU, etc etc). So it's a pretty decent shorthand term.

A lot of interesting musicians in 1979 were living in the shadow of punk (whether they were prime movers like Lydon, influenced like Curtis, or prerequisites like Eno); Siouxsie, Pil, Magazine, Joy Division, The Fall, Bauhaus, Killing Joke, Au Pairs, Go4, The Cure, etc ad nauseum. Hey, why not postpunk? A handy grouping for those goth/punk-funk/art-fucks. How many bands self-identified as "punk" anyway, and how many tried to escape the label as soon as it was stuck on them? Is it a real genre if nobody admits to being a part of it (cf freakfolk today)?

The term doesn't make much sense outside of the UK. Technically no wave bands could be considered postpunk but it would seem odd to describe them as such. And obviously weirdos like VU, Eno, Chrome, and Rocket From The Tombs contained the germs of postpunk before punk was even invented.

What's more, any term prefixed with "neo-" or "post-" buys into the alignment of art movements into tidy steps up and down a chronological ladder - should we be shocked when one don't hold up to close examination?

OTM - I'd been thinking this since the original blog post. separated by a common culture again.

i'm just gonna call everything goth from now on.

> Youre right! I may have to edit this into my blog now...

You might hesitate on that... one of the things about this discussion that sort of stymies me is the use of "art" here as signifying some sort of monolithic and unmoving musical DNA. It may well be true that Gang of Four and Genesis were both "arty," but to imply a musical continuity between them is I think a bit suspect, in the sense that a) they don't sound anything alike and b) they're informed by completely different "art".

Somewhat open-ended, too-easy and hole-ridden theory follows: If anything I think the difference between "art rock" and "post punk" is that to the extent that the latter was arty, it was arty in a way that reflected the contemporary art world, or at least the 20th century art world. Whether it was Dada or brutalist architecture, I can hear a modernism in James Chance or Pylon that is far distant from prog's stabs towards canonization and opus-writing. Add a huge dose of Warhol and you get the B-52's.

Of course this is all kind of blurry, because then you have things like Peter Gabriel working with Laurie Anderson, who belongs in about equal parts to post-punk and the New York performance art scene. (The latter probably moreso.) Gabriel is kind of a weird figure anyway, though, as his "artiness" (= zany costumes) was always a little out to left field even for prog... at least as far as I hear the genre, anyway! YMMV.

If I'm treading really old and well-worn ground here, forgive me. I'm still young on ILM and unfamiliar with these more high-falutin' music critic type conversations, compared to your common man's list threads, side-takers, and hardtack.

I think I disagree. Even just sticking to the best-known bands. without getting into blatantly modernist-derived acts like Henry Cow etc, Yes, Pink Floyd, and King Crimson all had a huge contemporary jazz influence. Certainly at least the first two of those, not to mention the Beatles, Hendrix, and Zeppelin, were at the forefront of electronic music technology, sometimes overtly drawing on musique concrete/sampling. They certainly did draw on influences from pre-modernist art music but so do modernist composers. Mostly, these bands were trying some sort of eclectic fusion of popular culture, classical art music, contemporary avant-garde music, and non-Western music, which is pretty post-modern. Even the idea of arranging Brahms for electronic synthesizers is pretty post-modern, don't you think? I really think Yes sounded more like John McLaughlin or Philip Glass most of the time than any pre-modern composer.

Punk is perceived as being more like modern art because it got rid of the Romanticism and because its rawness and simple conceptuality had real ties to some avant-garde phenomena.

So, I don't know - "prog was very modern" - the thing for me is that it was never MORE modern than psychedelia. I certainly don't see "21st Century Schizoid Man" as being more modern than some crazy garage psych single from '67. Maybe it's more technologically modern, but not more aesthetically modern. In fact, it was more aesthetically backward because it was more rooted in Romanticism.

That's not expressed well. Not necessarily saying that punk had ties to particular avant-garde movements. Just saying that rawness and simple conceptuality were certainly not Romantic traits! But they were traits in dadaism, fluxus, situationism (?), etc., I guess. Also: punk as a general radicalism w/ an agenda.

In art-rock before punk, the "art" ethos involved seems more evocative of modernist visual art (in its more obscure corners) or even pre-modernist ideas of what art is (e.g. Brahms, only on synthesizers).

In post-punk, the "art" ethos involved seems closer to, say, Barbara Kruger.

Moreover, there's music called "Modernist"--Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," for example--because it was created amidst, and with an eye towards, the Modernist movement. Some jazz has been described similarly. Most music made after the development and popularity of rock-n-roll would seem (to me) to be more accurately described as post-modern, if only because it's not jazz or Stravinsky or whatever.

Or are you guys defining "Modernism" and "Romanticism" differently than they are by Lit professors? I suppose you could invent a kind of modern v. romantic dichotomy amidst pop music (ie, KC vs. Go4 or whatever--florditiy vs. angularity) but I still feel like King Crimson and Gang of 4 are, in the end, too similar to really be considered parts of overwhelmingly different movements.

>to describe a piece of music as "Modernist" without examining what modernist tenet it might or might not uphold seems like intellectual quackery<

Just to point out that I did make specific connection to dadaism, fluxus, situationism...radical avant-gardism in general upthread.

Not a bad thought, but is it more or less quackful than describing two pieces of music as "arty" and implying a continuity between the two of them on that basis, without examining what their artiness involves? I think there IS valid work to be done drawing metaphorical relationships between the music a band makes (not to mention how it presents itself) and other things such as visual art, food, historical figures, whatever. It definitely can mean something to say a band is doing in music what Warhol was doing in visual art. (All of this isn't exactly directed at you, max, don't mind me.)

No one said anything about overwhelmingness, though. They're both classifiable as rock music.

I owe this piece of trivia to Martha Bayles. Her own definition of post-punk went something like this

Post-punk: Punk rock after the initial wave that [i]stayed arty[/i] and wasn't overtly political like the Clash or hardcore bands. (I'm probably not doing her definition complete justice here)

New Wave: Punk's sibling that shares much of the same arty background but embraces camp and more traditional forms of pop music, albeit with an "ironic" wink throughout the whole thing. It still follows much of the punk tradition because it retains a focus on Warhol's warped Pop Art. Groups like Roxy Music and Blondie are the missing link between Warhol and the VU and the New Wave bands that would soon emerge. Though Roxy is probably a better example because Blondie achieved their greatest success during the New Wave era.

Just to reiterate: I didn't bring up visual art in order to talk about its tenets. I brought up visual art to talk about its style, in the most superficial sense.

People do this pretty routinely with music. For instance, people are always noting that the Cocteau Twins remind them of certain types of art (pre-Raphaelite, Baroque, Gothic). I think that's meaningful -- not in terms of complicated "tenets," but just in terms of style and aesthetics and how we perceive them and what we compare them to.

The Cocteaus are admittedly a funny example, since they could easily be described as post-punk. But it seems to me perfectly sensible to say that the Cocteau Twins evoke art like pre-Raphaelite paintings, and Delta 5 do not. Equally sensible to say that Delta 5 evoke art like Barbara Kruger's, and the Cocteau Twins do not.

That is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

For quick visual reference, I'm saying you might compare the Cocteau Twins to this:

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/art/holdings/pre_raphaelite/images/rossetti_lilith_small.jpg

And Delta 5 to this:

http://www.broadartfoundation.org/images/artwork/kruger_yourbody_med.jpg

In ways that don't have less to do with their "tenets" and more to do with just, you know, what they sound like and how they feel, even to listeners who aren't thinking super-hard about art.

xpost

Salient point -- tis a major reason I just don't use post-punk or make the grand genre arguments, because whatever argument I can make would be mine and mine alone and could be disproven, refuted, shot down or reshaped by ANYONE!

I take music seriously, but to attach oneself emotionally and SOCIALLY/POLITICALLY to a genre and it's SOMEHOW defined methodology....

"I went into it biased and I'LL BE DAMNED! MY READING WAS AFFECTED BY IT!"

Sorry to be crass, as I don't know the person who wrote it, but....nah.
None of it really rang true for me.

I find Genres and labels limiting outside of use as reference points.
"Well, I'd describe them as this plus that with a side of this and a singer that sounds like that guy."

For example: Leo Kottke.
Well, he's kind of a blues player with a bit of folk and almost a melodic shred thing, but wholly acoustic.
I'd then go into details of his playing style and approach to melodies and rhythms
Current 93.
A formerly techno-industrial band gone completely insane and halfway back as a folk group with eccentric noises, repetetive almost industrial chord progressions and melodies and pre-classical melodic themes and intentionally esoteric lyrics.
It's hard to group either of these artists into a single genre.

So I'd use a couple as REFERENCE points, and then fill in the empty shell of the genre.
A genre is just that. A shell. If you don't fill it in, Hair Metal becomes...Well, I could name 3-4 self-parody hair metal groups with NO substance or songwriting skill and no outside influences, but they all BLUR TOGETHER.
Front Line Assembly: Pure electro-industrial. Bores me to tears, but at least they were kinda the first to just DISTILL that genre down...

chuck OTM!

No, and I doubt Cobain or Francis had that specifically in mind when they did it. It was passed on through performance art and it probably entered rock in the late 1970s when post-punk bands had an obsession with Weimar Germany (ie Pere Ubu, Carbaret Voltaire, Bauhaus) or through Yoko Ono-types in the late 60s.

Classic examples of post-punk outfits include The Fall, Gang of Four, Orange Juice, Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, and Wire. Bands such as Crass and Throbbing Gristle also came within the scope of post-punk, as with several outfits formed in the wake of traditionally punk rock groups: Magazine from Buzzcocks, for instance, or Public Image Ltd. from the Sex Pistols. A list of predecessors to the post-punk genre of music might include Television, whose album Marquee Moon, although released in 1977 (when the punk genre was just forming), is considered definitively post-punk in style. (However, many would argue that bands such as Television, Talking Heads, and the Voidoids were all core punk, as it was the raw originality and diversity of sound and style that was punk.) Other groups, such as The Clash, remained predominantly punk in nature yet inspired and were inspired by elements in the post-punk movement.

Weimar, Schweimar. I like this music better for its black and "groove" influences. How can you talk about "post-punk" without talking about black music? The term just represents a stylistic shift is all, whether people at the time used it or not is irrelevant. I don't like the three-chord crap, I do like music influenced by reggae and funk.

Is this true? I've always assumed they were inspired by actual reggae guys ("Dillinger and Leroy Smart, Delroy Wilson, cool operator"; "Ken Boothe for UK pop reggae with matching band soundsystems" -- I'm getting the lyrics wrong, right?) and rap guys (like Gradmaster Flash, who they opened for) and so on rather than, say, the Slits or the Specials or, uh, Captain Sensible or whoever. (Which came first, "Magnificent Seven" or "Wot"? Which reminds me -- how come Generation X and Ian Dury are never considered post-punk? "Wild Dub" was one of the first dub-inspired punk tracks, if I remember right, and the same goes for "Reasons to Be Cheerful" for rap and "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick" for disco, unless I'm forgetting something, which I probably am, but either way, they came very very early. So they're as post-punk as anybody, right?) (And "I Do the Rock" by Tim Curry was influenced by reggae AND rap I think. But I'm not sure what species of art *The Rocky Horror Picture Show* is.) (Also, where do Flying Lizards fit into this? They *must* be in Simon's book, right? But I bet the Martha and the Muffins aren't.)

also, nobody has discussed this! as in: when did the smart hardcore guys decide they didn't *have* to be acessible and unpretentious anymore? i figure post-hardcore kicks in by 1982 - that's around when *album generic flipper* and *what makes a man start fires* and the first meat puppets album came out, right? and maybe the butthole surfers and husker du around then, too? next thing you knew, the minutemen were more like the gang of four than like sham 69! (as for post-oi!, i'm not sure if that ever happened. maybe i missed it?)

Pre-punk art rock would include not just prog but also psych, Velvets/CBGB's stuff, and Bowie/Roxy stuff, right?

But, nabisco, I see what you meant now. And just to be an asshole, I'll do this:

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drg600/g670/g67029zhy8t.jpg

http://www.innovari.it/blog/love.jpg

(FWIW I like Joy Division more than I like King Crimson, whom I still like OK.)

They were never about anything but making people come to their shows and buy their records. They've admitted they'd to anything short of country/western to accomplish that.

Sounds like your average pop hit factory to me.
They just used cheap electronics.

-- http://www.stanford.edu/group/RCTandHumanities/images/spivak.jpg

Yeah, sure. As long as you admit it's superficial, and therefore don't try to draw any serious conclusions based on that kind of division (i.e.--b/c prog bands were "romantic" they were, let's say, conservative and into nature, and b/c post-punk was "modern" it was forward-thinking and into science, or whatever. not that either of those observations aren't true, but they're not necessarily true either).

I owe this piece of trivia to Martha Bayles.

This seems like a bit of Greil Marcus Jr. clever-clever scholarly nonsense, at least the "large debt" bit. A fairly direct line of influence is more like:

Husker Du -> Dinosaur -> Pixies -> Nirvana

Anybody doing the quiet-loud trick in '88 was influenced by Dinosaur. People forget how huge their impact on the US underground was at the time, and since '85 they'd been doing "the trick" - jangly pop stuff, then stomp the distortion pedal and BLEAGGHHHHH. After that it was just another idea on the loose and I don't think it had anything to do with German acting techniques. Pixies boiled the formula down on "Gigantic" with no small help from Albini, who gave the band Marshall stacks and told them to pretend they were in a metal band (compare the 12" version to hear what it could've sounded like without him). That indie folk would even consider using Marshall amps is likely due to Dinosaur; until they crossed poppy alienation with 70s hard rock, things like wah-wah pedals and Marshall stacks were generally viewed as verboten tools of hard rock dunderheads.

"Gigantic" of course leads directly to "Smells Like Teen Spirit".

Sounds like your average pop hit factory to me.
They just used cheap electronics.

Yeah, they don't have anything else to say. It's 'Barbie' music for girls is all.

Certainly Black Flag has more appeal for, well, a certain narrow-minded and doctrinaire demographic. I lived it in college.

Critics always talk about the subversive intentions of these acts' pop moves, and it's no doubt true (I never read many interviews with them, but I can detect it in their packaging -- throw in Heaven 17 and the Eurythmics and carry it through Pet Shop Boys and Westworld; lots of them seemed to even be *singing* about marketing themselves, if you listened really close, lots of lines about money and shopping at Woolworth's etc, -- and you can trace that all back through M and/or X-Ray Spex if you want), but anyway, what I wonder is, did any significant number of pop listeners ever *hear* these bands as subversive? My guess is that the people buying these groups' hits mostly took them at face value. So I guess that's what Dan means by the subversive element being "bullshit," and if so, I gotta agree.

Well, people's "superficial" impressions of things do kinda tend to tell us a lot about both them and the thing.

Plus, Sundar, that KC album cover is fairly modernist, I'd say. (Not in quite the sense of, like, jazz records putting Greenberg-approved abstract expressionist art on the cover, but still.) But I think you're right about Joy Division's "arty" vibe not being hugely contemporary, in part because I don't think they were interested in stances and concepts like I was saying at the beginning which this side-topic started.

Ha, whereas the New Pop "we decided to go pop" angle was more like Jeff Koons! I think that tack mostly became bullshit after a second -- most people, especially in the U.S., took them as a new breed of pop bands, rather than taking it as some sort of subversive experiment. I think the reason that "subversive" logic was necessary, though, was that punk was kind of puritan about those matters, so some argument needed to be made for why punk could now stop being punk, or why it might be okay for the punk audience to move on into something else -- you can tell there's that logic to it, too, because for some group of fans and artists it seems like there was such a hangover on punk rawness that they eagerly ran to the complete opposite extreme. I don't think it was really about money or success, so much -- maybe a little bit about power, and the suddenly discovery that you could actually be a pop star, but mostly just about the thrill of running to the other end of the spectrum, which, post-punk, probably did feel pretty strange and subversive and exciting.

I mean, it's interesting that within very few years you could have bands going from difficult basement music to glossy chart hits -- lots of bands making that change, and quickly -- and it didn't at all feel like they were just following trends. (Haha: I get the feeling it was just really that boring to listen to punk all the time for a few years.)

http://rateyourmusic.com/album_images/s8545.jpg

http://rateyourmusic.com/album_images/s38232.jpg

http://rateyourmusic.com/album_images/s10143.jpg

Right. I posted it in response to this:

the art in art-rock, before punk, tended to evoke a pre-modernist type of art

-- xhuxk (fakemai...), July 13th, 2006.

I'm not going to argue that Human League were subversive (Culture Club maybe), but can't something still be subversive even when the majority audience takes the message at face value? "Puff The Magic Dragon" can be as subversive as "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" if part of the audience is experiencing the hidden (subverted?) meaning. Related topic: subvertising! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvertising

x-post to Dan - I was responding to ed slanders, not you (I think we were both making similar points).

(cf. orange juice allegedly aiming for chic + vu and duran for chic + sex pistols. also is orange juice post punk or new pop? I assume PIL and Heaven 17/BEF were fluenced by CHIC too, is that right? and how about that robert wyatt cover of "at last i am free"? thats gotta blow Paul's mind!)

Apocryphal? I dunno. utterly implausible on a million levels, for sure.

Chic were a hip name to drop in Britain in the early 80s. That's it.

Then you have the Death Rock bands(TSOL's first-Dance With Me, Christian Death's first-Only Theatre of Pain) and the Batcave bands of the UK like Alien Sex Fiend.
They were much more closely tied with the harder side of the 'post-punk' movement.

All that label means to me is 'band which came after the first big surge of Punk into mainstrean culture and have some roots in it.'

Yeah, I think the only possibly actual subversive pop acts of the past three decades were maybe the Village People and Queen. (I mean, what exactly were ABC and Scritti Politti and Eurythmics and people like that supposedly subverting *with*, again? That's never been especially clear to me. Was the idea something like "Sweet dreams are made of this who am to disagree I've traveled the world and the seven seas everybody's looking for something" was really just "We are all prostitutes everyone has their price and you too will learn to live the lie" in disguise? Something like that. Except with Dolly Parton going number one in 1980 with blatant Commie propaganda that went "It's a rich man's game no matter what they call it and you spend your life puttin' money in his wallet," I'm not sure how thinly veiled whatever-it-was that hardly anybody could decode from all those clever British folks was supposed to be so dangerous.) (Nothing against those British folks, all of whom I basically like. Though that new Scritti Politti album sure is a snooze and a half.)

Chorus:
Crushed by the wheels of industry
Crushed by the wheels of industry
Crushed by the wheels of industry
Crushed by the wheels
Crushed by the wheels of industry
Crushed by the wheels of industry
Crushed by the wheels of industry
Crushed by the wheels
Work now!

Call me in the morning just before the breakfast show
We'll watch TV and analyse the weather
Before we go to work we'll have planned the day ahead
We'll while away the working day together
Work all day or work all night it's all the same
If you want to play
Some are nurses
Some steal purses
Some are workers
Some are not
It is time for a party
Liberation for the nation now!

Chorus

There's a party going on
That's going to change the way we live
But how do we know we've even been invited
Now the invitation's waiting
And the table is reserved
So just play it cool and don't get excited
Work or day or work all night it's all the same
Will we ever change
It's vocation or vacation
Some are workers
Some are not
It is time for a party
Syncopation for the nation now!

Chorus

History will repeat itself
Crisis point we're near the hour
Counterforce will do no good
Hot you ass I feel your power
Hitler proves that funky stuff
Is not for you and me girl
Europe's an unhappy land
They've had their fascist groove thang

Brothers, sisters, we don't need this fascist groove thang

Democrats are out of power
Across that great wide ocean
Reagan's president elect
Fascist god in motion
Generals tell him what to do
Stop your good time dancing
Train their guns on me and you
Fascist thang advancing

Brothers, sisters, we don't need this fascist groove thang

Sisters, brothers lend a hand
Increase our population
Grab that groove thang by the throat
And throw it in the ocean
You're real tonight you move my soul
Let's cruise out of the dance war
Come out your house and dance your dance
Shake that fascist groove thang
(Shake it!)

Anyway, not sure why I didn't think to check this before, but here are some genre descriptions used in reviews in *The New Rolling Stone Record Guide* from 1983. This is sort of interesting, folks!:

ABC: "Well-crafted funk from the industrial wilds of Sheffield in England's extreme north" (this is some import album called *Tears are Not Enough*; I'd always thought *The Lexicon of Love* was their debut, but maybe not?)
Athletico Spizz 80: "POST-PUNK," "British punk/new wave"
Au Pairs: "honed down their primal thrash into an earnest drive of funk and rhythm"
Black Flag: "contemporary L.A. punk" influenced by "1977-style British hard-core punk anger"
Devo: "new wave" (and Dave Marsh really hates them by the way)
Echo and the Bunnymen: "consistent with the dark themes of POST-PUNK rock but championed a much more sophisticated and historically influenced music sense. Along with Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen spearheaded this movement", "soon called (aptly but desceptively) the New Pyschedelia"
Essential Logic: "lyrical obtuseness masquerading as beaknik expressionism"
The Fall: Says they "came out of POST-PUNK spate of experimentation in late-Seventies England"
Gang of Four: no real genre titles used per se', but it says they "sprang up around England's Leeds University community at the same time as such bands as Au Pairs, the Mekons, and Delta 5"
Heaven 17: "electro-pop"
Human Leage: Their "synthesizer-voice interplay has set the style for numerous POST-PUNK bands" (!!)
Mekons: "minimal funk rock then starting to crowd punk out of the British rock audience's limited attention span," "dance-oriented rock"
Lydia Lunch: "This 'punk-funk' screech is just so much avant-garde horseshit."
M: "fusion of new-wave sensibility with a disco beat"
Martha and the Muffins: "new wave"
Mi-Sex: "techno-pop"
New Musik: "rock-disco"
Pere Ubu: "American avant-garde/new-wave rock"
Public Image Ltd: No real genre names, though Dave Marsh does give them a long complimentary and fairly descriptive review until he says *Flowers of Romance* was a turn toward "stuffy art rock."
Raincoats: "British new wave," but "It's also interesting to hear a cat howl for the first time, but *only* the first time," ha ha.
Replacements: "good-humored Minneapolis hard-core punk band" ("hard-core always gets a hyphen in this book, just like "post-punk")
Teardrop Explodes: no genre names
Ultravox: "stark holocaust electro-dance music", "rock-disco with Euro-romantic trappings," "POST-PUNK electro-pop"

So, basically, "post-punk" DID exist in the early '80s, and it meant Atheltico Spizz 80, the Fall, the Human League, Ultravox, and maybe Echo and the Bunnymen, all of whom were British. (I'll look up other bands if/when I think of it. Scritti Polliti, Culture Club, Soft Cell, Cabaret Voltaire, the Contortions, Mars, Pylon, Joy Divison, DNA, the Pop Group, the Delta 5, and lots of other bands of various post-punk ilks are not in the book. And neither *No New York* nor *Wanna Buy a Bridge* is reviewed among the compilations in the back of the book, though *No Wave," an A&M album featuring the Police, Joe Jackson, Klark Kent, the Stranglers, and the Dickies, is, and its bands are identified as "new-wave.")

http://postpunkjunk.com/?p=151

I'm not sure I think "mutant pop" is any more descriptive than "post-punk" really. when I think about the contents of that LP (like, "Where Were You" or "Adult/Ery" for example) it makes more sense to me to say "it's something that came after punk" than to say "it's pop but all mutated". though I agree it has special powers.

I cut out the ad for "Mutant Pop" from Smash Hits and put it on the wall, by my bed. So maybe mutant pop does make more sense...

Dan, it would be perfectly possible to argue that the term 'post punk' was just Paul Morley having fun. The only difference is that the latter caught on, innit?

April Wine: "a delightful teenage punk outfit" (!)
The Bizarros: "came from Akron, along with Devo, to spearhead the first wave of POST-PUNK American art-rock, for which they may be forgiven in some universe, but not in this somewhat harmonious one."
Cowboys International: "the use of dance-oriented drumming, cool synthesizers, and occasionally deadpan vocals presages the new romantic bands of 1981"
R.L. Crutchfield's Dark Day: "minimal pleasures"
Depeche Mode: their "electronic dance music is all robot-pop product."
Material: "avant-funk concept group" with "roots in the contemporary jazz avant-garde"
Original Mirrors" "hard-rocking post-new-wave" (!!!!!!!)
Spandau Ballet: "How did the new romantics become the new funk-salsa explosion in England?" (I have *no idea* what that's in reference to.)
Telex: "Eurodisco synthesizer pop"
Visage: "new romantic honky funk"
Was (Not Was): "pretentious honky funk in the early-Eighties art-rock mold"

"Post-new-wave" is a phrase deserving of revival for sure.

I do, but I couldn't find Mutant Pop on it anywhere. Could be missing an insert though.

when is this going to HAPPEN?

it's a bummer that file-sharing can kill the market potential for some reissues because both the fast product and pop:aural stuff deserve proper re-release w/ bob last receiving his due.

In a New West article dated December 3, 1979, Greil Marcus describes Gang of Four as "an almost unknown English punk group." In another article published two weeks later about Essential Logic, he writes "without a scene to support it or restrict it, punk also became selfconsciously experimental . . . . Punk became an avant-garde, a floating center not only of resistance to mainstream rock but of serious novelty." About five months later, he reviewed PIL's "Second Edition" in Rolling Stone, and wrote "PiL's music . . . . is, as Lydon claims, 'anti-rock 'n' roll'--territory staked out in opposition to what we now accept as rock 'n' roll--but it is also a version. Like disco, or especially the bass-led, out-of-reach rhythms of dub, PiL's sound is at once the rejection of a form and an attempt to follow certain implications hidden within that form to their necessary conclusions." Finally, about two months later, in a July 1980 Rolling Stone article about Rough Trade, he introduces the moniker "postpunk pop avant-garde":

"That was a line I'd thought up in California, after listening to the new music coming out of England." He specifically references Essential Logic, the Raincoats, Gang of Four, Scritti Politti, the Mekons, Delta 5, Au Pairs, and the Red Crayola (?).

So, I'd think that does it for you, Chuck.

Next question: When did people stop calling proto-punk "proto-punk"?

Anyway, you've sold me that (Dinosaur) Rockism does in fact exist. I'd always been a skeptical.

They did? What term has taken its place?