“It is the destiny of signs to be torn from their destination, deviated, displaced, diverted, recuperated, seduced. It is their destiny in the sense that this is what always happens to them; it is our destiny in the sense that this is what always happens to us.”
- Baudrillard
So then… Post-Punk was a bold, rigorous programme with a clear plan to liberate music from commodification, unfortunately scuppered when too many practitioners were tempted away by dollar bills? Guess what? No.
In fact to claim there was a ‘real’ Post-Punk scene which then ‘sold out’ by ‘going commercial’ is to fail to grasp the single most fundamental thing about it - that it insisted upon, even paraded, it’s own lack of authenticity. We should take it at its word. If New Pop marked the failure of Post-Punk, the point where its libertarian militancy soured into a Po-Mo world of signs, it was weaknesses and contradictions already present in the Post-Punk scene which allowed it to appear.
First, let’s remember Modernism itself led to, and in fact set itself up for, Post-Modernism. Second, Post-Modernism (prevalent in academia since the early Seventies) was by this point already sending out tentacles into popular culture. Post-Punk therefore became the first Modernist movement after the concept of Post-Modernism had arisen, and so forced to co-exist.
Reynolds describes the era as “the systematic ransacking of twentieth century art and literature”; yet classic Modernist movements did little to cite or reference their brethren. If they did mention them at all, it was almost invariably to highlight their redundancy. This ceaseless referencing of Modernism is actually a feature of Post-Modernism! In other words, Post-Punk was riddled with Post-Modern concepts from the start. SPK’s Graeme Revell was fond of saying annoying things like “today there is no reality, everything is real and everything is unreal” even before he became a Hollywood soundtrack composer. Devo called themselves a “postmodern protest band”.
If Adam Ant drew the ire of the more truculent paleo-Punks, Green fits the bill for anyone who wants to yell ‘sell out’ in a more polysyllabic form. Like a soap villain, like Dali to the Surrealists, he obligingly ticked all the Judas boxes - explicitly moving from an interest in Gramsci and other Marxists into Post-Modernism. (Which mostly involved saying smart-sounding rubbish like “what has meaning is what sells, and what sells is what has meaning”.) In a hilarious image, Reynolds recounts him contemplating his shift while listening to Michael Jackson and reading Derrida. In this way he followed the example of many of the original French and Italian Post-Modernists, ex-Sixties militants who needed a justification for their inaction which was still rooted in ‘radical’ terminology.
But Post-Punk had exploited an ambiguity which in some senses related to the difference between Modernism and Post-Modernism. As Reynolds himself has said “Post-Punk still had a tremendous seriousness, a tremendous conviction that music had power or that it could change the world… it was pre-irony, it was pre-retro culture.” The Fall memorably sang “I still believe in the R+R dream.” Without creating such conundrums, its doubtful Post-Punk would have been successful on any level, as music or as cultural provocation. Nevertheless, by problematising its own statements Post-Punk opened the floodgates to the sea of signs.
Similarly, Post-Punk drank deeply from Conceptual art. As Reynolds says of Throbbing Gristle, “their music was in a sense merely a delivery system for their ideas”, but he could have picked any band from these pages really. Indeed, it’s quite possible many bands saw their main delivery system as ranting to the ’NME’ about prizing Brechtian alienation techniques above guitar solos, but needed to go through the cumbersome process of releasing a record to get the ’NME’ interviewing them in the first place. Conceptualism isn’t the same thing as Post-modernism. It makes art that is more about ideas than about works, which doesn’t necessarily suggest there are now only ideas. But inevitably the concepts blur, and arguably blur more in the popular mind than they do on paper.
Another thing the paleo-puritans like to do is counterpose the ‘independence’ of smaller record labels against the majors, what Reynolds called “a post-socialist micro-capitalism in the face of top-down corporate culture” and Green dubbed “squattage industry”. Again, Green made himself an obliging target for this when he abandoned Rough Trade for Virgin. Reynolds feels inspired by their “rapid response nature, so much more suited to the speedy stylistic fluctuation of the Post-Punk universe”. The small labels and fanzine production system, and the DIY ethic in general, was doubtless important in enabling a lot of material that would never have been conventionally released. But when it is presented in this purist way its tempting to ask a simple question – isn’t micro-capitalism … ahem … just a form of capitalism that’s... er... smaller?
Furthermore, one of the perils of the self-styled avant-garde is being slightly – but only ever slightly – ahead of events. Micro-capitalism and post-Fordism were then becoming vital touchstones of the Thatcherite ‘revolution’ then sweeping Britain. As Jon Savage, the Wise Brothers and so many others have argued, Punk’s DIY ethic fed neatly into the Thatcherite cult of entrepreneurship. For example, Factory gained its name from the preponderance of ‘Factory closing down’ signs they saw around recession-hit Manchester - they thought maybe they should open one. In fact their famous club, the Hacienda, actually replaced an old textile factory. (Now a block of yuppie flats named, with no sense of irony, after the Hacienda.)
But the humour was double-edged; light-weight, flexible, leisure-based, they were one of the ‘new industries’ Thatcher extolled while the slow, lumbering majors worked more like the cumbersome centralised factories. This was successful enough as a business model that many majors were forced into ‘partnership’ with minors, or even to absorb some of their practices.
The electronic bands even became scabs! (In a manner similar to the Wapping strike against new printing technology.) The Musician’s Union had started a ‘Keep Music Live’ campaign and strike at the BBC, concerned they’d collectively lose their jobs to a plug-in box. Ian Craig Marsh of the Human League recollects the mentality as “almost Stalinist”, while the band responded with the slogan ‘Keep Music Dead.’
New management practices extended to within the ‘bands’ themselves. Many abandoned the fixed employment, everyone-on-a-wage structure for a flexible labour model where “a production company could hire (and fire) session musicians on a flat-fee, no royalty basis.” Once Scritti had followed the commune model, where whoever was staying at the squat was in the band. Green defended their new working practices, ironically enough with the same argument that had named Public Image Limited – they’d become “a kind of production company”. Yet PiL’s name had been a provocation, behind which existed (at least in theory) a camaraderie of equals. Green’s corporate-looking Scritti was instead just what it said on the lid.
And crucially, the shopkeeper mentality that was a necessary component of DIY had always contained the seed of such entrepreneurial thinking. Independent labels had been a route to an important end. But to suggest they are inherently ‘outside the system’ is absurd. As Andy Gill argued, defending Gang of Four’s then-controversial decision to sign to EMI: “the point for us was not to be pure… It just wouldn’t be on our agenda to be on a truly independent label, as if such a thing could even exist.”
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