- Tristran Tzara, Dada manifesto, 1918
”Dada was a sort of nihilism to which I am still very sympathetic. It was a way to get out of a state of mind – to avoid being influenced by one’s immediate environment or by the past, to get away from clichés –to get free.”
- Marcel Duchamp
“Anti art was just the start”
- X Ray Spex, ‘I Am A Poseur’
So, as seen, Post-Punk borrowed from Modernism as widely as it could grasp. But some movements were more equal than others - and there was a special emphasis on Dada. How do you rip up Rock’s rulebook without writing your own to get lumbered with? The answer lay in its empowering negativity, being inside and against music the way their forebears had with art. Before PiL had been formed or even named, Lydon was already insisting they’d be “anti music of any kind”.
And this wasn’t too surprising. The early Eighties were in many ways similar to the inter-war years when those movements flourished. If we’ve already looked at their similarities to the Sixties, they were perhaps even closer to the Thirties - with a combination of deep recession and a resurgent far right who’d disrupt gigs as often as left/liberal political meetings. Reynolds recounts how Scritti Politti’s squat was but a few doors up from notorious Nazi band Skrewdriver.
There was a sense of utopian dreams not just unmaterialised but actually dashed. Though Reynolds perhaps overplays the importance of the near-simultaneous rightist victories of Thatcher and Reagan (the Labour government had long-since abandoned any progressive aspirations), he’s right that this felt like a momentous shift. Like the Sixties this period was only an echo of the Thirties, but the similarities were striking enough to be noted at the time.
While the actual millennium was a mere marketing squib, it was the early Eighties which actually exemplified the fin de sciele feeling. 23 Skidoo gave their 1983 album the apocalypse-dread title ’The Culling is Coming’. “We did feel we were on the frontline of Babylon,” comments Vivian Goldman. Writing of J.G. Ballard’s influence on Post-Punk, Reynolds notes “the traumatized urban landscape served as the backdrop but also in a sense the main character.” And you could say the same about Reynold’s book itself, which is stuffed with description after description of crumbling post-industrial cities. “There’s something about cities that were once prosperous”, he notes, “the residues of wealth and pride make a rich loam in which bohemia can flourish.”
Though formally unconnected to Punk, David Lynch’s cult film ’Eraserhead’ perfectly captures the same sense of social collapse and everyday life descending into nightmare. (In fact at the time I saw ’Eraserhead’ on so many Punk jackets I initially assumed it must be a band.) A similar example is John Lydon’s intonation “it’s all falling to bits… gloriously!” Everything that we know is going and the future uncertain, but we’re still glad to see the back of it all.
Moreover there was a more direct continuity via Fluxus. Fluxus was to Dada what Hardcore was to Punk, a souped-up pared-down comeback ready for a revenge bout. Consequently it placed an even greater stress on performance and provocation than Dada, and many of these involved anti-music – pieces where the score was determined randomly, or consisted of the opening and closing of a bunch of umbrellas, and the like. Often the audience would arrive and find themselves effectively expected to carry out the performance.
Fluxus made connections to the Sixties underground - but even before then had at times provocatively incorporated rock iconography. For example, in Robin Page’s 1962 ’Guitar Piece’, he held an electric guitar aloft in the standard ‘play’ pose - before kicking it through the auditorium, into the street and around the block. To follow the ‘event’ the audience were forced to give up their seats and chase after him. These sort of disruptive tactics would be highly influential on Post-Punk.
Of course it could be argued that this over–exaggerates the anti-art tendencies in Post-Punk. There’s a tendency in historicising any scene to smooth it into something unified, whereas in fact it’s made up of a multiplicity of often-contradictory elements. The glam-loving Banshees, for example, wanted to purge music of its rockist baggage but hankered for showbiz and had no desire to deconstruct the business of being in a band. Joy Division refused interviews and excelled in mystification. No use checking those sparse Factory records sleeves for phone numbers of pressing plants.
Other bands talked the talk more than they walked the walk. PiL, in many ways the perfect microcosm of Post-Punk, may have insisted they were a multi-media collective but actually delivered on little of this. (A bone of contention with bassist Jah Wobble.) After Throbbing Gristle split up, P.Orrdidge announced he was moving over to television as that was the next battleground for cultural domination. But this meant little more than forming another band named after television – Psychic TV.
It could even be argued that Post-Punk couldn’t actually go any further, that it functioned best as a ‘loyal opposition’ within and against Punk and worst when it tried to take its rhetoric seriously and step outside these limits. It could be argued that anti-music was actually a cross between a provocation and some kind of Zen exercise. Like listening to the sound of one hand clapping, it was never intended to be something you succeeded at.
Reynolds notes how “the character in [Gang of Four] songs often seem to be on the brink of seeing through ‘false consciousness’… but they never quite make it”. It’s a shrewd observation, but maybe it didn’t come out of play-acting, maybe they were simply saying as much as they knew. As the band put it themselves, “avoid the answers” and “no escape from society”. Having staked their camp by having problematised rock from within, how was it possible for them to then move outside of it?
There’s a telling moment in the closing minute of 'Anthrax', where the rest of the track continues orthodoxly as the guitar erupts into screeches and splutters. It’s taking things to the edge of what can be but in a rock song, but fading out before pushing them over. There are many similar moments in other Post-Punk tracks, where an incongruous element is rubbed up against the rest of the song. But is it signalling a wholesale departure from song structures, or is that juxtaposition the very point? Was Post-Punk a signpost, or merely a boundary post?
Gang of Four weren’t too concerned with trying to find out; as Hugo Burnham later recalled “we fucking rocked, rather than stand around in long macs looking miserable”. Conversely, Alternative TV’s ’Alternatives’ was a squirmy-sounding attempt to ‘democratise’ their gigs by handing microphones around the audience, allowing attendees to come up with their alternatives. Reynolds recounts how these “inevitably would degenerate into a farrago of abuse and squabbling”, whereupon Mark Perry would have to step in to “upbraid the crowd” for their un-Punkishness – effectively re-asserting his authority as spokesman.
Perhaps we could even argue that artforms have phases where they need the antidote of anti-art to purge them and keep them fresh? Painting in the Twenties, music in the Eighties. Is anti-art actually merely a corrective, a check to keep everything in balance?
Such arguments are not devoid of merit. But, even to the extent that they have validity, they only serve as a description of Post-Punk not a critique. Many times the tension brought by a contradictory response has made for a more memorable work than a simple manifesto statement. Jean Luc Godard simultaneously hated Hollywood and loved it, and his films are deservedly remembered when much more clearcut and straightforward polemics are forgotten.
Further, they tend to assume radical art exists in a vacuum outside of other social trends. Buzzcocks manager Howard Boon explains they self-released their first single “trying to locate kindred spirits who would get it and respond.” Reynolds’ book might be a great deal thinner if these kindred spirits had been absent. A combination of widespread social change, unemployment (liberating you from the workaday world if also emptying your pockets) and other factors make this period a radical one in general.
Radical art makes many demands upon its audience, but its primary one is for them to stop acting like an audience. As the Pop Group put it, there are no spectators. This was an era characterised by many a fundamentalist can-hurling paleo-Punk but also by many willing to take the bait and act like a non-audience in the face of anti-music.
In short, none of the above should suggest that the limits of Post-Punk are the limits of human possibility. Just as Post-Punk brought Punk in directions previously unimagined, it could then have been replaced by something which, while retaining enough rockist trappings to stay inside its sheep’s clothing, ventured in a much more Fluxus-oriented direction. For example, quite different (and possibly plagiarised) recordings could have been released with exactly the same cover and labels, stopping ‘fans’ from telling them apart. Some could have been recorded by random processes, each instrument’s contribution determined by laws of chance. Some of them might even have been blank, or containing nothing but recordings of absurd Fluxus-like instructions for the purchaser to carry out.
Live events could have done more to break down or sabotage the audience/performer divide. When PiL played New York’s Ritz club in 1981, they appeared only behind video screens. When the crowd became outraged they responded by chanting back “boo, they’re cheating us” until a riot ensued. Though that proved something of a one-off, other similar events could have been staged.
Simultaneously, it could have gone on the attack! Fluxus had already held Actions Against Cultural Imperialism, demonstrating against the ‘serious culture’ held in museums and concert halls. Contemporary with Punk, Italian Autonomist movements had not only picketed but also disrupted rock gigs. (Often run as ‘youth culture events’ by the Communist Party they despised as orthodox, and so labeled as “a provocation to the proletariat”.)
Though of course it should be asked - had any of this happened, so what? Martyn Ware dismisses as “one of the biggest myths ever” the notion “that Pop music changes the world”. Why should Dada art prank disguised as a pop record be any different? Conversely, as Stewart Home argues in ’The Assault on Culture’, capitalism is in part perpetuated by a divide-and-rule tactic played on its challengers - separating them into ‘political’, ‘artistic’ and ‘cultural’ spheres. It therefore follows that “cultural as well as political agitation is required if radical ideas are to have any impact on the repulsive society in which we live”.
A post-Post-Punk neo-Fluxus movement sabotaging gigs would be at best an amusing distraction and quite possibly just an annoyance if working in isolation. But if working in accordance with other more ‘political’ campaigns it may have strengthened the hands of both. But “since western society encourages specialisation, once any given samizdat movement loses its dynamism it tends to be pushed into a single arena of contestation.” Home’s example is Futurism being pushed into being an art movement, but its equally true that Post-Punk became merely music, a back catalogue of CDs to be evaluated and reviewed.
It’s academic anyway, because the actual next step taken was quite different. As we’ll see…
Gang of Four weren’t too concerned with trying to find out; as Hugo Burnham later recalled “we fucking rocked, rather than stand around in long macs looking miserable”. Conversely, Alternative TV’s ’Alternatives’ was a squirmy-sounding attempt to ‘democratise’ their gigs by handing microphones around the audience, allowing attendees to come up with their alternatives. Reynolds recounts how these “inevitably would degenerate into a farrago of abuse and squabbling”, whereupon Mark Perry would have to step in to “upbraid the crowd” for their un-Punkishness – effectively re-asserting his authority as spokesman.
Perhaps we could even argue that artforms have phases where they need the antidote of anti-art to purge them and keep them fresh? Painting in the Twenties, music in the Eighties. Is anti-art actually merely a corrective, a check to keep everything in balance?
Such arguments are not devoid of merit. But, even to the extent that they have validity, they only serve as a description of Post-Punk not a critique. Many times the tension brought by a contradictory response has made for a more memorable work than a simple manifesto statement. Jean Luc Godard simultaneously hated Hollywood and loved it, and his films are deservedly remembered when much more clearcut and straightforward polemics are forgotten.
Further, they tend to assume radical art exists in a vacuum outside of other social trends. Buzzcocks manager Howard Boon explains they self-released their first single “trying to locate kindred spirits who would get it and respond.” Reynolds’ book might be a great deal thinner if these kindred spirits had been absent. A combination of widespread social change, unemployment (liberating you from the workaday world if also emptying your pockets) and other factors make this period a radical one in general.
Radical art makes many demands upon its audience, but its primary one is for them to stop acting like an audience. As the Pop Group put it, there are no spectators. This was an era characterised by many a fundamentalist can-hurling paleo-Punk but also by many willing to take the bait and act like a non-audience in the face of anti-music.
In short, none of the above should suggest that the limits of Post-Punk are the limits of human possibility. Just as Post-Punk brought Punk in directions previously unimagined, it could then have been replaced by something which, while retaining enough rockist trappings to stay inside its sheep’s clothing, ventured in a much more Fluxus-oriented direction. For example, quite different (and possibly plagiarised) recordings could have been released with exactly the same cover and labels, stopping ‘fans’ from telling them apart. Some could have been recorded by random processes, each instrument’s contribution determined by laws of chance. Some of them might even have been blank, or containing nothing but recordings of absurd Fluxus-like instructions for the purchaser to carry out.
Live events could have done more to break down or sabotage the audience/performer divide. When PiL played New York’s Ritz club in 1981, they appeared only behind video screens. When the crowd became outraged they responded by chanting back “boo, they’re cheating us” until a riot ensued. Though that proved something of a one-off, other similar events could have been staged.
Simultaneously, it could have gone on the attack! Fluxus had already held Actions Against Cultural Imperialism, demonstrating against the ‘serious culture’ held in museums and concert halls. Contemporary with Punk, Italian Autonomist movements had not only picketed but also disrupted rock gigs. (Often run as ‘youth culture events’ by the Communist Party they despised as orthodox, and so labeled as “a provocation to the proletariat”.)
Though of course it should be asked - had any of this happened, so what? Martyn Ware dismisses as “one of the biggest myths ever” the notion “that Pop music changes the world”. Why should Dada art prank disguised as a pop record be any different? Conversely, as Stewart Home argues in ’The Assault on Culture’, capitalism is in part perpetuated by a divide-and-rule tactic played on its challengers - separating them into ‘political’, ‘artistic’ and ‘cultural’ spheres. It therefore follows that “cultural as well as political agitation is required if radical ideas are to have any impact on the repulsive society in which we live”.
A post-Post-Punk neo-Fluxus movement sabotaging gigs would be at best an amusing distraction and quite possibly just an annoyance if working in isolation. But if working in accordance with other more ‘political’ campaigns it may have strengthened the hands of both. But “since western society encourages specialisation, once any given samizdat movement loses its dynamism it tends to be pushed into a single arena of contestation.” Home’s example is Futurism being pushed into being an art movement, but its equally true that Post-Punk became merely music, a back catalogue of CDs to be evaluated and reviewed.
It’s academic anyway, because the actual next step taken was quite different. As we’ll see…
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