“The movement was successful in it’s details and a failure in its essentials... Our aim was not to establish a glorious place for ourselves in the annals of art and literature but to change the world. This was our essential purpose and we completely failed.
- Luis Bunel on Surrealism
“We act out all the stereotypes, try to use them as decoys,
As we become shining examples of the system we set out to destroy”
- Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, ‘Famous And Dandy (Like Amos and Andy)’
Stanislaw Lec
“...and he likes ABC!”
The Fall, ‘CREEP’
Just like the Eighties, Reynolds’ book is split in two. And just like the Eighties, the first half makes a whole lot more sense than the second. Though he calls this second section ‘New Pop and New Rock’, he nails his colours to the mast early on. Almost all his examples of New Pop are celebratory, almost all those of New Rock negative. In a (website-only) footnote over inclusion, we’re told the Psychedelic Furs are struck out because they ‘went Rock’. Which they undoubtedly did, but if that retrospectively devalues their earlier albums you can’t help but wondering what would be the result if they’d ‘gone Pop’.
Reynolds’ celebration of New Pop is largely taken from a 1980 ’NME’ article by Paul Morley, which coined the term. Once a Post-Punk champion Morley now came to dismiss it as dour and self-marginalising, in need of transmuting into something bright and enticing - grey must be gold. He talks of heading “towards an overground brightness… no longer is there an acceptance of the cobwebbed corner.” These two sets of antonyms - grey into colour, margins against centre - will recur again and again. And Reynolds becomes captivated by the process through which “pop culture works through a kind of oscillating internal pendulum, swinging back and forth between extremes”.
In this way he literally throws a curveball into his narrative. The first half is linear, concerned with progression and advancement, forging a new art for a new world. Songs themselves are forever being whittled down and sharpened, pointed in about every sense of the word. The second half is cyclic, with music forever seesawing from one point to its opposite and back again. This alone seems pretty uninteresting.
However he adds a twist - portraying New Pop as simultaneously the antithesis and the apotheosis of Post-Punk. He carefully constructs a causal narrative where Post-Punk was the incubator of some wild radical ideas, which New Pop then smuggled into the mainstream under that lick of gold paint. He writes how “they all coated their music in a patina of commercial gloss” in “a strategy of entryism (aka ‘the sugared pill’).”
Handily summarising this second half in the second paragraph of his back cover blurb, Reynolds writes: “The [Post-Punk] spirit of ‘constant change’ continued and mutated with the New Pop of the early Eighties… all of whom originally came out of Punk, but who playfully embraced glamour and video in order to propel their bright ideas into the heart of the mainstream.”
All of whom? Not every New Pop act had started out as Post-Punk, swapping the grey mac for the gold lame jacket. Considerable space is devoted to, for example, ABC. For who that isn’t true at all. Though there are counter-cases, among them the Human League, Scritti Politti and Orange Juice.
But this risks collapsing important differences. For Orange Juice, New Pop was merely a hop, skip and a jump away. But for Scritti Politti rejecting Punk autonomy for chart-friendliness involved a screeching changing of gears. Ironically, this sharp right turn is precisely what makes it a tale to tell. As this seems to be the nub of the book, let’s focus on that.
Reynolds portrays New Pop a way for Post-Punk to escape its anti-Rockist dilemmas. Truth to tell, Post-Punk had always had an ambiguous relationship to Pop. When Lydon had intoned “the cassette played… poptones!” he couldn’t have sounded more scathing. But, for example, the Pop Group were so called partly to provoke and mislead straight rock fans, but also out of a genuine love of pop music. The band had met through being ‘funkateers’ who only later discovered such a thing as Punk. (Stewart later commented “we really thought we were funky, but we couldn’t play very well and we played out of time, so people thought we were avant-garde.”) Pop was also seen as a way to incorporate black music into Punk’s white-boy palette, adding Soul, Funk and (later) Hip-hop.
And New Pop was not just championed by music critics but developed into a doctrine, often called Poptimism. The selling point of which, apart from it’s thrilling ‘newness’ and overlap with the then-similarly-new field of Post-Modernism, was that it seemed to do away with the problems anti-Rockism had uncovered. If Rockism feigned a spurious authenticity Poptimism would celebrate appearance. If Rockism valued spontaneity and self-expression (gathered up under the term “rocking out”), Poptimism celebrated considered gestures and songwriting polish. Art was artifice. How could it be anything else? Goodbye to the Clash, hello to ABC.
But this is not doing away with or resolving anything, it’s merely flipping the coin we already hold. Rockism and Poptimism are merely the two sides of that debased coin, in a currency that no longer feels current. Just as Dada had been anti-art, art against itself, Post-Punk existed to express those dilemmas. It made Rock’s central tenets problematic, while withholding offering any solutions. Its aim was to prick Rock’s naïve self-belief, to instil in it a little necessary self-criticism. Rock was not to be escaped, but attacked.
Besides, dichotomy thinking tends to prove false and Rockism versus Poptimism is a classic example. The Rolling Stones could rock out on stage. But they were also great songwriters. ’You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, as we commonly think of it, is a studio creation not the work of a live band which happened to get recorded.
This narrow focus also ignores other developments, or bends them out of shape to insert them into this framework. Parallel to New Pop, a parallel path opened up that evaded Rock not by progressing past but jumping back before it.
1. GREY TO GOLD (NEW POP REDISCOVERS THE MAINSTREAM)
“I give you bitter pills in sugar coating. The pills are harmless; the poison is in the sugar”Stanislaw Lec
“...and he likes ABC!”
The Fall, ‘CREEP’
Just like the Eighties, Reynolds’ book is split in two. And just like the Eighties, the first half makes a whole lot more sense than the second. Though he calls this second section ‘New Pop and New Rock’, he nails his colours to the mast early on. Almost all his examples of New Pop are celebratory, almost all those of New Rock negative. In a (website-only) footnote over inclusion, we’re told the Psychedelic Furs are struck out because they ‘went Rock’. Which they undoubtedly did, but if that retrospectively devalues their earlier albums you can’t help but wondering what would be the result if they’d ‘gone Pop’.
Reynolds’ celebration of New Pop is largely taken from a 1980 ’NME’ article by Paul Morley, which coined the term. Once a Post-Punk champion Morley now came to dismiss it as dour and self-marginalising, in need of transmuting into something bright and enticing - grey must be gold. He talks of heading “towards an overground brightness… no longer is there an acceptance of the cobwebbed corner.” These two sets of antonyms - grey into colour, margins against centre - will recur again and again. And Reynolds becomes captivated by the process through which “pop culture works through a kind of oscillating internal pendulum, swinging back and forth between extremes”.
In this way he literally throws a curveball into his narrative. The first half is linear, concerned with progression and advancement, forging a new art for a new world. Songs themselves are forever being whittled down and sharpened, pointed in about every sense of the word. The second half is cyclic, with music forever seesawing from one point to its opposite and back again. This alone seems pretty uninteresting.
However he adds a twist - portraying New Pop as simultaneously the antithesis and the apotheosis of Post-Punk. He carefully constructs a causal narrative where Post-Punk was the incubator of some wild radical ideas, which New Pop then smuggled into the mainstream under that lick of gold paint. He writes how “they all coated their music in a patina of commercial gloss” in “a strategy of entryism (aka ‘the sugared pill’).”
Handily summarising this second half in the second paragraph of his back cover blurb, Reynolds writes: “The [Post-Punk] spirit of ‘constant change’ continued and mutated with the New Pop of the early Eighties… all of whom originally came out of Punk, but who playfully embraced glamour and video in order to propel their bright ideas into the heart of the mainstream.”
All of whom? Not every New Pop act had started out as Post-Punk, swapping the grey mac for the gold lame jacket. Considerable space is devoted to, for example, ABC. For who that isn’t true at all. Though there are counter-cases, among them the Human League, Scritti Politti and Orange Juice.
But this risks collapsing important differences. For Orange Juice, New Pop was merely a hop, skip and a jump away. But for Scritti Politti rejecting Punk autonomy for chart-friendliness involved a screeching changing of gears. Ironically, this sharp right turn is precisely what makes it a tale to tell. As this seems to be the nub of the book, let’s focus on that.
Reynolds portrays New Pop a way for Post-Punk to escape its anti-Rockist dilemmas. Truth to tell, Post-Punk had always had an ambiguous relationship to Pop. When Lydon had intoned “the cassette played… poptones!” he couldn’t have sounded more scathing. But, for example, the Pop Group were so called partly to provoke and mislead straight rock fans, but also out of a genuine love of pop music. The band had met through being ‘funkateers’ who only later discovered such a thing as Punk. (Stewart later commented “we really thought we were funky, but we couldn’t play very well and we played out of time, so people thought we were avant-garde.”) Pop was also seen as a way to incorporate black music into Punk’s white-boy palette, adding Soul, Funk and (later) Hip-hop.
And New Pop was not just championed by music critics but developed into a doctrine, often called Poptimism. The selling point of which, apart from it’s thrilling ‘newness’ and overlap with the then-similarly-new field of Post-Modernism, was that it seemed to do away with the problems anti-Rockism had uncovered. If Rockism feigned a spurious authenticity Poptimism would celebrate appearance. If Rockism valued spontaneity and self-expression (gathered up under the term “rocking out”), Poptimism celebrated considered gestures and songwriting polish. Art was artifice. How could it be anything else? Goodbye to the Clash, hello to ABC.
But this is not doing away with or resolving anything, it’s merely flipping the coin we already hold. Rockism and Poptimism are merely the two sides of that debased coin, in a currency that no longer feels current. Just as Dada had been anti-art, art against itself, Post-Punk existed to express those dilemmas. It made Rock’s central tenets problematic, while withholding offering any solutions. Its aim was to prick Rock’s naïve self-belief, to instil in it a little necessary self-criticism. Rock was not to be escaped, but attacked.
Besides, dichotomy thinking tends to prove false and Rockism versus Poptimism is a classic example. The Rolling Stones could rock out on stage. But they were also great songwriters. ’You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, as we commonly think of it, is a studio creation not the work of a live band which happened to get recorded.
This narrow focus also ignores other developments, or bends them out of shape to insert them into this framework. Parallel to New Pop, a parallel path opened up that evaded Rock not by progressing past but jumping back before it.
This was most linked to Post-Punk with the second Subway Sect album, ’Songs For Sale’ (1982) in which the ever-contrary buggers took to lounge suits and Swing. Driving away the grey macs without gaining any other audience, it sank without trace on release. But other iterations had more success. The same year Paul Weller left the Jam, surely one of the tightest and most effective Rock bands of the era, and with the zeal of the converted formed the continentally chic Style Council. He spoke of his “hatred of the rock myth and the rock culture", relabelled gigs ‘Council Meetings’ and exulted the virtues of cappuccino over beer.
The same year also saw the first Everything But the Girl single, the Cole Porter cover ’Night And Day’, and the debut album by Carmel. All this is both more interesting to talk about and more enjoyable to listen to than ABC. But strangely its sidelined by Reynolds.
Though sometimes referred to by the terrible tag Sophisti-Pop, this was in practice often subsumed under New Pop. Yet it was something else. Pop tends to be of the moment, exulting in ephemera, uninterested in history. Classic music was not in the frame. And that was enhanced by the times. There was a sense back then that even hit singles, once they’d inevitably fallen back down the charts simply vanished from memory, replaced by fresher goods, that the latest was inevitably the best.
This didn’t have the same basis. Post-Punk saw Rock as requiring emergency surgery, cut out the cancer and hope enough of the patient was left that he lived. Sophisti-Pop (still hatin’ that name) saw it as a childish thing to put away, alongside Action Man and Lego. All that shouty, chest-beating stuff was inherently adolescent, and it was about time we all grew up and got into something smarter. Step back to leap forward. In that, it was closer to Post-Punk than New Pop.
But, to swing back to the point, if Post-Punkers had ‘gone Pop’, to claim any kind of continuity at all they’d have to be ‘within and against’ Pop in the same way as they had Rock. Whether this is the way it happened, we’ll go on to see…
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