INTENSIFY THE CONTRADICTIONS

(A TREATISE ON POST-PUNK BADLY DISGUISED AS A REVIEW OF SIMON REYNOLD’S ‘RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN: POST-PUNK 1978-1984’)

INTRODUCTION

As the sub-head might suggest, this rant isn’t so much a review of Simon Reynolds’ book as my own parallel spin on events - sailing merrily along on it’s own subjectivity without feeling the need for support or substantiation. While Reynolds delves into specifics, tracking the development of bands and scenes, this is more of a thematic and philosophical overview.

And despite Reynold’s Anglo-Americanism, I intend to concentrate on the UK scene I know best… though I break my own rule as soon as I feel like it. I also won’t bother sourcing quotes much. Unless otherwise attributed assume they come from either Reynolds’ book or his website. Histories of Post-Punk shouldn’t be tidy anyway, should they?

But if you really can’t face it all, here’s a digest version:

Part One: A bunch of scruffy squat-dwelling malcontents find a way to combine their twin hobbies – not liking music, and liking winding people up. (Bluffer's Note: Another term for this is ’Brechtian Alienation Device’.)

Part Two: After a few years of dwelling in dank squats, they discover they like making money more than they like not liking music. 

…and in the unlikely event you’ve never heard any Post-Punk, a playlist I put together lies here.

PART ONE: MINIMUM ROCK ‘N’ ROLL (POST-PUNK ANTI-MUSIC)

“It was like life or death. I’ve never ever come across that intensity, where every gig was the last you were gonna do… or the first you’d ever done.”
- Paul Hanley of The Fall, (G2, 19/01/04)

“We’ve just been waiting for it to fall,
We oppose all rock and roll.”
Subway Sect, ‘Rock & Roll, Even’

1. SONGS TO PROTEST ABOUT

“To me the Pistols were the last rock ’n’ roll band. They weren’t the beginning of anything.” 
- Keith Levine of Public Image Limited

“It was very much our intention to be antagonistic... confronted with audiences full of Sid Vicious lookalikes and skinheads, and thinking ‘Right, you cunts, we’re gonna play a really slow, boring song for ten minutes and really piss you off.’... Just about everyone hated it. We had some terrible reactions, but we used to thrive on it.” 
- Robert Lloyd of The Prefects

I was first drawn to this book by the Orange Juice-quoting title, which seemed to distill the whole Post-Punk spirit down into six pithy words. But if six is still too many for you, let’s lop a full third off and instead quote Mark Perry – “Let’s fuck the rules.” …but more of that anon.

Unlike America or most other countries, in Britain Punk’s underground years were short-lived and it was pretty soon splashing attention-getting expletives on the cover of the tabloids. Which gave it the image of an explosion, big, brash and quickly over.

Now fools will tell you the original moment was the thing, like history’s made of bright but brief big bangs, after which nothing’s left but the clearing up and the cashing in. Yet this is the excuse of the also-ran, blaming his failings on an accident of fate which meant he got there too late to participate. As Reynolds puts it “this book is for – and about – the people who were not there at the right time and place… but who nevertheless refused to believe it was all over and done with before they’d had a chance to join in.” Think about your physics. What really happened after the Big Bang? Everything happened after the Big Bang.

In a similar fashion, hip hop kids wax nostalgic for a “back in the day” they never saw. Now Grandmaster Flash was great, but Public Enemy and Wu Tang Clan were greater. Neither King Tubby nor Lee Perry were there at the dawning days of Reggae, but they never let it hold them back overmuch. Human developments don’t spring fully formed out of the brows of pioneers and innovators. They’re cumulative. As Newton put it, you see further by standing on the shoulders of giants. And in an explosion lots of stuff that initially hangs out together is soon flying out in different directions at accelerating speeds.

Post-Punk, rather than meaning “what happened after Punk” as the name might literally imply, was actually but one of a bewildering array of such flying tangents. (There was New Wave, Anarcho-Punk, Street Punk, Positive Punk and almost certainly others.) But the plain fact is that out of all those tangents it’s the one which traveled furthest.

After the initial explosion, many felt Punk had happily settled down into a ‘new sound’. The next musical fashion had successfully replaced the last, we knew where we were again. But others saw Punk’s apparent success as its failure, it had reinvigorated a music business it had set out to destroy. After the Sixties, major labels had coined slogans like ‘The Man can’t bust our music’ and ‘the revolutionaries are on CBS’, now they were doing the same.

Anarcho-Punk saw the solution to this as doubling down, making music that was more rough-edged and abrasive, more politically charged, but above all more sweary. Crass’ head honcho Penny Rimbaud was wont to straightfacedly claim things like “rock and roll is revolution, it ain’t no entertainment”. The Clash’s problem had been to have too many tunes and not enough swear words. This time we’d be so spiky the system would never be able to digest us.

(Disclaimer: Crass themselves may have been a more complex case. They quite consciously emulated Dada, frequently used song form to taunt their own audience and would only perform under a single 40 watt household bulb – a Brechtian alienation device if ever there was. But with few exceptions their proliferation of disciples dumped the more interesting aspects of their teachings in favour of dogma. More of me ranting about the ranters here.) 

Whereas Post-Punk diagnosed a wider malaise - Punk’s failure was indicative of Rock’s failure. It had trued to revitalise a corpse, and so had only prolonged its lurching zombie existence. Rock’s tired moves and stale gestures may have had some limited success once, when Elvis first went on the TV. Now everyone had long since learnt to expect them. Yet what had long since been subsumed by the entertainment industry was still maintaining the fiction it was the music of outlaws. What had once felt like enabling devices had become a set of stultifying cliches, to be cast off. (And its remarkable how much more true all this than when it was first said, with a rock press that’s principally nostalgic and where bands and tribute bands can be barely separable.)

Rock fans forever fixate on terms like ‘real’ or ‘authentic’, by which they seem to mean something like ‘unmediated’. Rock music supposedly allows for direct expression from the band to the listener, without constraint or diversion through social channels. In the words of the song, direct from my heart to you. And of course this is absurd, expression is mediated by definition. Why pretend otherwise? Why not make music which expressly points this out? Lapses and concessions which Punk had papered over were now to be played up, to (as Reynolds phrases it) “intensify the contradictions”.

So the attitude to rock music became that false friends are the worst enemies. In John Lydon’s now-famous rant: "It's dead. It's a disease. It's a plague. It's been going on for too long. It's history. It's vile. It's not achieving anything, it's just regression. They play rock 'n' roll at airports… It's too limited. It is too much like a structure, a church.” Josef K wouldn’t even talk to their audience during their gigs, as that perpetuated a bogus camaraderie. Instead they used pre-recorded announcements. ’Rockist’ was soon the slur of choice.

If Rock was supposedly about spontaneity and gut instinct, Post-Punk exulted in cerebralism. Richard Hell had written “I hate Rock’n’Roll, I’d rather read a book”, but as a joke, a provocation. The Post-Punks walked the walk, with Talking Heads managing to freak out notorious rockers the Ramones by their habit of reading books on the road. The Human League’s first single had the line “we’re much cleverer than you”, while the Fall opened gigs with the similar taunt “the difference between you and us is that we have brains.” “Stupid” became an almost generic insult from the Psychedelic Furs.

David Byrne, Howard Devoto and all of Devo deliberately cultivated an awkward ‘geek chic’ image, at jerky odds with Rockist notions of ‘coolness’. With references to New Wave Science Fiction, radical political theory and cultural studies, Post-Punk virtually came with a reading list.

And Post-Punk not only rebelled against this fresh conformity, but saw in it the opportunity to piss off a whole new audience – all their former friends. In an off-the-cuff yet era-defining comment, Steve Albini said he saw no challenge in winding up squares - all the fun came from offending hipsters. Before Cabaret Voltaire had played a gig or even come to think of themselves as a band they’d drive round Sheffield, broadcasting their sonic offerings out of the back of a van. “Just to wind people up, really” Richard Kirk commented, “that’s what we started out trying to do.” Julian Cope’s early band A Shallow Madness “didn’t make music at all but just got on other people’s nerves”. Pere Ubu’s David Thomas noted the through-line, observing “we were fundamentally perverse”.

And this contrarianism shouldn’t be seen as ancillary to anything else. The desire to give the customer not what they wanted was front and centre. No less than three Post-Punk tracks work as metaphors for their own reception by likening career suicide to actual death missions, This Heat's 'Not Waving but Drowning', Pere Ubu's 'Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo' and Alternative TV's 'The Good Missionaries'. (“And he died a good death/ But the people were still disappointed/ And disjointed”.)

But none of this had a catchy name until …And The Native Hipsters released their second album, titled ’Songs To Protest About’. Which wasn’t until 2006, and it’s entirely possible they delayed so long just to be annoying.

Yet this driving need to get up people’s noses had been an essential part of Punk from the beginning. In this way the apparently innocuous term ‘Post-Punk’ is a misnomer. A fairer world would see Post-Punk as the continuation of pure Punk spirit, and let every other spoke and blind alley lumber itself with a hyphen. (Here I pretty much lump all the other tribes and tangents together under the label paleo-Punks.)

Hence the two characters who launch this book were two such hastily accelerating particles, who had once seemed key Punk players. Johnny Rotten’s sneer had launched a thousand copycats, but by 1978 he’d grown sick of it, ditched the Pistols, changed his name back to Lydon and formed a brand new band – Public Image Limited. “Be a Punk!” he later taunted. “Join the army!” Trumping him, Howard Devoto upped and left the Buzzcocks on the eve of their fame, within six months of their first gig. “I’m living in this movie”, he penned, “but it doesn’t move me.” And with that he was off.

A perfect microcosm of the way Post-Punk wanted to be heard was Sounds’ review of Nurse With Wound’s debut. Instead of the normal stars system, it was awarded five question marks – the perplexed reviewer aware it was extremely something, yet clueless as to what. Let’s look at those question marks in turn…