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“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
- Pablo Picasso
“We hated everything that wasn’t modernist. It was like Cavaliers and Roundheads, total warfare.”
- The Human League’s Martin Ware, (G2 28/11/08)
Reader be afraid, be very afraid, for all this talk of musical influences has been but the warm-up to our main theme – Post-Punk’s chief influence was non-musical, even anti-musical. And it will take two instalments to cover. Post-Punk was at heart a late burst of Modernism. As Reynolds puts it, the era saw “the systematic ransacking of twentieth-century modernist art and literature. The entire period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique”.
It had long been a truism that bands were formed at Art College not Music College. But then suddenly, out of the blue, it was no longer enough to hang around and soak up the bohemian ambience. You now needed to listen to the lectures!
Of course, like Punk, Modernism had set out to shock. Mayakovsky had titled his Futurist manifesto ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ while the Italian Futurists luxuriated in “the pleasure of being booed.” Like Post-Punk provocation was integral to the project, a scream against the shackles of custom.
There isn’t really a sound-bite definition of Modernism, so let’s try two. Sartre said of the Modernist sculptor Giacometti: “He does not recognise such a thing as progress in the fine arts… one must begin again from scratch.” Art history was not a march of progress but a set of shackles to be thrown off. The only way art can be created is to perpetually start again from first principles, what is already laid down is already suspect. And of course this was how Post-Punk saw the history of Rock music.
But also, Brecht described art as “not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” Art was no longer to concern itself with reflecting (and thereby reassuring) it’s surrounding culture, but shocking and challenging it. Agreed notions, even over something so simple or innocuous as what a vase of flowers looks like, were to be overturned. Consequently the artifice of art, the subjective view of the artist, was no longer to be hidden but emphasised, foregrounded.
‘Good’ art as some sort of end in itself was to be torn down. Art was now a cultural intervention, its function (social change) as much a function as with designing any refrigerator or airplane. Aesthetics was now not a comfort zone but a strategy. Manifestos detailing the aims and intentions of the artist became as important as the artwork itself… indeed at it’s most self-parodic Modernism came to feel like a set of provocative manifesto statements with a few artworks cobbled together last-minute in order to illustrate them. Again, the way Post-Punk saw music.
And at the same time it’s ceaseless questioning was also self-questioning, it remained ever-alert to the possibility it’s own methods were insufficiently radical. This perhaps reached an apogee with Duchamp’s anti-art, which was intended to be self-sabotaging as a means to take the rest of art down with it.
Unlike the multi-media approach, this was not something borrowed from the Sixties. The art styles filtered through hippy culture were Art Nouveau and perhaps some light Surrealism. Hippy ‘happenings’ were influenced by Fluxus ‘events’ (as we’ll see), but without the conscious emulation of Dada. Post-Punk stole from the Sixties Underground and from Modernism, but with two separate hands.
Prog, meanwhile, inclined to a Victorian Romanticism which itself looked back to Greek myths, medieval heraldry and the like. Their sleeves composed scenes and landscapes depicted illustrationally. Post-Punk could then react as strongly as Modernists had to the original Romanticism, and in much the same way.
True, Jaime Reid had been designing Dada-influenced sleeves before the Pistols even split. But Punk had always hidden such ‘arty’ elements under a bushel of feigned anti-intellectualism and cartoon yobbery. Needless to say, this only made the Post-Punks more keen to emphasise their Modernist influences. It proved the perfect opportunity to filch the library card carefully hidden inside Punk’s leather jacket, hold it aloft and ask to borrow it.
The chief influence in this was of course Krautrock, the prior music scene which had been most Modernist influenced. Kraftwerk, for example, openly acknowledged their inheritance from the Bauhaus, Faust from Dada. But these were two of many Modernist movements to have had a German base. It was something already there, something you could take to organically. Whereas Post-Punk took it up more overtly. Krautrock hadn’t come with a reading list, Post-Punk emphatically did.
The accepted wisdom had been that rock music supplanted visual art as the dominant form of youth expression. The electric guitar was so much more immediate, more kinetic, more modern that it made the paint brush redundant.
Post-Punk’s trick was to reverse all that by parading its Modernist influences. With its flag-waving for book-smarts, it held itself not only against Punk but even its two main musical influences. With Reggae you’re supposed to feel the force of Jah, not be won over by theological arguments concerning his existence. This tendency was more exacerbated with Dub, which lacked even Roots’ ‘conscious’ lyrics. Dub saw words as but another sound-source, to be played with even if that meant pulling them out of any coherent order. Dub was at heart spiritual music.
As this allowed a way out of Rock, it’s perhaps significant that music forms of Modernism (for example Futurist noise works or Satie’s piano works) were not particularly taken up by Post-Punks. Non-musical influences seemed a positive advantage, a way of dodging the now-familiar traps. (Similarly, a great many bands named themselves after a book, film or painting, from the Fall to Joseph K. Significantly, many bands today are more wont to puppyishly name themselves after terms already used by previous bands, such as Radiohead.)
You could even come to see Post-Punk’s internal divisions all coming from the factions picking one Modernist strand or other and then running with it. The Slits and the Pop Group were the Fauvists, banging their drum to slip the shaping shackles of ‘civilisation’ and rediscover some long-lost essential self – disrupting the normal to get back to the natural. (Or projecting this ideal onto some feral love object, as in the Pop Group’s ‘She’s Beyond Good and Evil’ with lines like “Western values mean nothing to her”.) The Slits smeared themselves with mud on their debut cover, in a literal bid to get ‘back to the earth’.
Gang of Four, Magazine and Devo took almost the opposite tack. Latter-day Dadaists, they ridiculed any claim that art was some automatic escape route out of culture. Their art was self-consciously conscious, anti-instinctive, always trying to draw attention to it’s own artifice. Magazine ridiculed such Fauvist notions in ’Back to Nature’, Devoto sneering the line “I couldn’t act naturally if I wanted to.” An early Gang of Four track crosstracked standard love-song devotions with a list of trivial details of the recording process.
Pere Ubu and Talking Heads were the Surrealists. Punk had kept Rock’s earnest notion that the lyrics to songs were ‘important’, they’d merely moved from meaningful pontifications to street-corner rabble-rousing. Throwing a spanner into this, they’d sing any nonsense with such conviction that the listener could still be fooled that it all must still mean something somehow. But, as Talking Heads put it, “Facts don’t do what I want them to.”
PiL, though their antics kept a foot in the Dada camp, were primarily Expressionists, creating soundscapes for psychic states. As Wobble said later: “PiL are expressionist, like Jackson Pollock... we were like those New York loft dudes in the 1950s.” Reynolds’ comparison of their seminal ’Death Disco’ to Munch’s painting ‘The Scream’ is a good one. In fact, the cover of ’Second Edition’ (‘Metal Box’s reissue), features the bands’ faces distorted in fairground-mirror echoes of the Scream. Lydon’s old sneering stabs and jibes were replaced by strings of impressionist inward-looking images – from jeers to wails, from Gillray to Munch. The similarly Expressionist Banshees even called their first album ’The Scream.’
The Human League and Heaven 17 were Futurists, in fact the Human League’s original name had been the Future! Though by the height of their fame they played pure Pop, they originally celebrated the white heat of the technology that was taking us into a bold machine-built tomorrow. (They sang on ’Blind Youth’ “Take hope… your time is due, big fun coming soon… now is calling.”)
Industrialists like Throbbing Gristle and Neubaten were yang to their yin. They took Futurism or, more often, Constructivism but unlike other factions they inverted it. Constructivism had embraced the link between man and machine and collapsed the distinction between artist, architect and engineer. But to the Industrialists things were no longer being built but just wearing down. The very term ‘industrial’ was ironic, a reference to recession-hit Britain’s ‘post-industrial’ status. Test Dept in particular were keen to play up Constructivism’s worker fetish and its shady links to totalitarianism. During the first Gulf War, they performed beneath a giant portrait of Saddam Hussein.
The only rule was not to be so obvious as to name yourselves after the strand you were most in sympathy with. That would be like turning up for a gig in the same band’s T-shirt. Hence the all-too-obvious Future had to change their name to the Human League. Cabaret Voltaire had their Dada elements, but despite the name were more of the anti-Constructivist camp. Bauhaus were, as Reynolds notes, not of the Bauhaus school at all but Expressionists. Only gormless Johnny-come-latelies Art of Noise gave away their copyism by naming themselves after a Futurist term. (Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto… but you knew that already, right?)
And we are not, in fact, done with Modernism just yet…
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