“Dub is minimalist by definition: Reggae music deconstructed then rebuilt in deep echo and reverb… to emphasise the hypnotic power of its repeating, resounding bass and drum.”
- Chris M. Slawecki
“My own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”
- Samuel Beckett
“The nature of dub was the holes.”
- Mark Stewart of The Pop Group ('The Wire', No. 293)
In short, by ’78 Punk’s leathers had started to feel like a straight-jacket, a form of fundamentalism taking rock back to its foot-stomping origins. This felt like a cop-out, a retreat to the already-trod.
But at the same time much of the suspect Seventies music had been additional, hyphenated… Progressive Rock, Jazz Rock, Rock Operas, concertos for group and orchestra etc… as if Rock was mere meat and potatoes needing extra, more exotic ingredients poured over in order to titivate it. With enemies to the fore and aft, which way to go?
The guide out of this impasse was Dub. Keith Levene latter commented “those Jamaican dub plates fascinated me, because they had nothing to do with accepted structures and formats at that time. Nothing to do with the blues or rock music. Those dubs sounded so strange, like music from another planet…. it takes a real discipline to actually subtract from the spaces rather than add all the time.”
And the last sentence is key. Magically, dub was subtractive without being restrictive. It was quite literally the art of taking things out, stripping elements from a track and occasionally throwing them back in, just to see how it sounded. Or maybe throwing in something from a completely different track, them mangling them all with studio trickery or making up your own elements.
So to Post-Punk ears, Punk’s failure had been to not strip things back far enough, getting to guitar/bass/drums then stopping arbitrarily like a British workman hitting break-time. Confronted by the famous ‘Sniffin’ Glue’ slogan – “here’s a chord, here’s another, now form your own band!” – Throbbing Gristle’s Peter Christopherson complained “but why do you need that many?”
Some took this reductionist approach literally. Plentiful are the songs covered in this book which really did only use one chord. Still others, Throbbing Gristle among them, got by with less. (Not a joke! Not hyperbole! Not an imaginary story!)
But the real point was to apply the Dub sensibility philosophically. As Reynolds says of PiL (perhaps the defining Post-Punk band), they “assimilated… the dub aesthetic of subtraction without ever resorting to obviously dubby production effects like reverb and echo.” Despite Wobble’s rumbling bass, a less than clued-up listener might even have missed the influence entirely.
British Punk had always loved reggae in any form. Before their own records had been released, it was usually Reggae that got played over the PA before the bands came on. But it had been a hopeless unrequited white-boy love, forever behind the beat. Most Punk attempts to play reggae had been both literal and excruciating, for example the Clash’s cod-awful cover of ‘Police and Thieves’ (which Lee Perry detested). This borrowing of a Reggae sensibility was new.
Striving to escape Punk’s genre trap, Post-Punk had no unified sound but a diversity of styles and approaches. Yet underneath these there was a common underlying philosophy of deconstruction, which came through dub reductivism. While the Slits couldn’t have sounded more Dubby if they tried (and doubtless they did), the clipped austerity of Wire and Gang of Four or the gothic howl of the Banshees couldn’t have sounded less Dubby. Yet both bands had started with a quite conscious process of removal and reduction.
“It was a case of us knowing what we didn’t want, throwing out every cliché”, commented Banshee Steve Severin. “Never having a guitar solo, never ending a sound with a loud drum smash.” Wire’s (quite literal) list of ins and outs was assisted by a lucky accident. When the original guitarist was waylaid by a broken leg, the rest found that the same songs simply sounded better without him. “All the fat, all the meander suddenly disappeared,” noted Bruce Gilbert. Colin Newman commented “the idea was not to do Punk [but something] more reduced... How do you get to the next stage? You take elements away.”
Skipping his parts inevitably shortened songs, even from Punk’s two minutes fifty nine. Almost all of their first album comes in under the two-minute mark; too quick, as the paleo-Punks discovered, for pogoing. (So, in a move which would become typical, they took to hurling cans.)
Gang of Four’s Andy Gill commented how they’d replace guitar solos with “anti-solos, where you stopped playing, just left a hole.” What you took out had just as much a presence as what you left in. More generally, Factory’s producer Martin Hannett, in many ways the Phil Spector of Post-Punk, was a big Dub fan who strove to create a sense of space in music – “deserted public places, empty office blocks.”
The other main input Post-Punk transfused from Dub was a playful attitude. Dub always prized the spliff in hand above the masterplan. “Play was very important,” commented Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon. Or as it was put by Captain Beefheart (another Post-Punk touchstone), “I play music. Too many work it.” This sense of play cross-fed with a general (if largely undefined) left-libertarian attitude, with its emphasis on the liberation of desire and disdain for the hairshirt militancy of (the numerous) Trot factions. The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart cited “the French ultra-left, the Situationist International, Artaud and the dissident surrealists, the Dutch Provos, 60s and 70s fringe groups.”
This led to a massive emphasis on spontaneity as the mother of invention, on seizing the moment, on doing something once and moving on. It led to very little emphasis on making sure experiments actually came off, or on creating a back catalogue of lasting worth. In short, you weren’t likely to worry about the risk of failure if you weren’t engaged by the prospect of ‘success’ either.
This may seem odd to some, for Post-Punk now has a reputation for dourness. And it’s true the phrases ‘Joy Division’ and ‘barrel of laughs’ may not immediately feel like natural bedfellows. But ‘playful’ shouldn’t be taken to mean simply ‘entertaining’ or ‘good time’. Watch any child and you’ll soon realise what a serious business play is. Gang of Four sarcastically titled their main album ’Entertainment’, while Fast Product label coined the slogan ‘difficult fun’ – perfectly encapsulating the distinction.
Moreover if, as already said, Post-Punk’s provocation was in part just one great big practical joke, it was one which relied for effect on being delivered deadpan – on leaving the audience edgily unsure of how to take things. My research isn’t exhaustive, but I’m not sure that a single participant ever broke into a smile between 1978 and 1982. Not in public, at any rate.
Further instalments to follow...
No comments:
Post a Comment