‘A COMPLETE UNKNOWN’

(Another in a series of not-proper reviews of films)

“I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”
- Cocteau

’A Complete Unknown’ works well, if taken just as a film. It rips along, tells its story well. I’ve no idea if early Sixties Greenwich Village was anything like the way its shown, but it feels like a real place captured. From the little I know about the main characters (Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Stand-In Suze), they were pretty much as depicted here. 

But of course its not just a film. Its a dramatisation. ’A Complete Unknown’ is completely known to us, that is what attracts us. And therein lies the problem.

Dylan essentially mythologised himself, not only in his music. In interviews and general behaviour, he was a character played by the method actor Robert Zimmerman. Or more accurately, a series of characters. He built an elaborate mythology, but that’s long since condensed down to a single legend - the Judas incident, the Bob-goes-electric saga at Newport. This has become as much What Dylan Is About as any song he ever wrote.

It’s been raked over enough what degree of truth there is in this. (Go here or here if you hadn’t already.) But the point isn’t that what actually happened wasn’t much like its shown here. The point is that this is what people want to believe happened. They believe it the way other people believe Boris Johnson saved us from Covid.

And to be believed myths need to be re-recited. Just like Church-goers can’t only attend once and tick salvation off the to-do list, believers need to be fed more documentaries and dramatisations like this. The first draft of history, that didn’t work out quite the way it should, so now we need a reconstruction to correct.

I’m not a great fan of biopics, and this may be partly why. The advantage of fiction is… well, it's fictional nature. You can devise and arrange incidents and symbols as you choose, to convey what you’re conveying. Your imagination can go free range. Conforming to actual events pens it in. But also, real lives are never so neat as to compress into the required running time. So biopics tend to reach for the myth just because it's more manageable, while at the same time feigning authenticity.

Let’s remember Dylan gave his approval. Someone who never approves of anything much. It’s true that when Baez calls him “kind of an asshole” and “completely full of shit”, the film more-or-less backs her up. Yet his assholeness is considered necessary. You can either please other people or be yourself. Its an either/or choice, like the acoustic and electric guitars which get repeatedly held out for him.

In perhaps the most telling exchange, he contradicts Stand-In Suze about the Bette Davis film they just watched. “She didn’t ‘find herself’, like a lost shoe. She made herself into something different, what she wanted to be in that moment.”

Later, walking away from… well, you know what, an infuriated Lomax yells at him: “Do you even remember folk music, Bob?” He snaps back “no, what’s that?” It’s not just a put-down. It means, I am no longer the person you think you are talking to. I have moved on to my next me. Your call cannot be redirected.

Significantly, he never seems to have his own place. He crashes on Seeger’s couch, he stays in Stand-In Suze’s apartment, bangs on the door of Joan Baez’s hotel room… the nearest we get is his own motel room at Newport. Literally on the move.

So, instead of being examined, the myth is fed. The offered acoustic vs. electric guitar becomes something like the blue and red pill in ’The Matrix’, uncritical conformity versus you becoming you. It’s simultaneously a straight choice and an evolutionary path. Electric trumps acoustic, right? It’s more modern, and anyway its louder and stuff.

Electric Dylan fans tend to believe that when he gave up protest music he actually made better protest music. He went from the particular to the general, not tackling wrongs one-on-one but as a bunch. And by then there were too many wrongs to do things any other way. The film essentially sides with this, though it places most of it in the mouths of his associates. It’s silly stuff, better alluded to than spelt out. It is, to drag up a term from my day, Rockist.

Rockism comes down to the notion that all other music forms are fake, tainted by commercialism, confined by genre rules, while Rock is real - free, unmediated expression. As that doesn’t sound like the sort of thing likely to be brought to you by corporate conglomerates, in place of arguing for it they fetishise aspects of Rock. Chief among which is the electric guitar. In other words, it bestows the same talismanic significance as Folk purists do to the acoustic. (The other signifier he dons are a permanently affixed pair of sunglasses. Which arguably mean something slightly different. While the electric guitar’s an avowal, they’re a deflection of scrutiny.)

And this explains the standard stopping of the story here. Because it conveniently ignores an obvious fact - within the next few years he did the same thing again, this time burning his bridges to his Rock fans, and for pretty much the same reasons.

’I’m Not There’ (2007) was a much less literal take, featuring multiple Dylans all running round at once, with no interest in one another. Which was much more effective because it was explicitly about the Dylan myth, examining rather than regurgitating it. I said at the time, “the film actually feels like a Dylan song rather than some prosaic account of events surrounding its recording. It feels like one of his sprawling mid-Sixties electric numbers, packed with hallucinogenic images and allusions.”

It would be neat to now say this film is like one of the more literal acoustic songs, the ones it claimed got so gazzumped. Perhaps one of the more auto-biographical ones like ’Ballad In Plain D’. But to the degree that’s true, its like one of those songs played by somebody else.

Let’s remember that, when Blues guys went electric, they saw no big deal in it. Some had already played electric at Newport. Others, realising the money came from white folk purists, had by then switched back. (For which I don’t blame them.) Whereas Dylan did see the deal, had the same values as Lomax. They were just arguing about which way up they went. His credo of change prefigured the Beatles and Bowie. Its taken that he didn’t just change into a Rock star, because Rock music is held to embody change.

But 1965, that was a white ago now. How on earth can this still be held to, sixty years down the road? This is the general problem with Rock now, it hasn't done much a-changin' lately. Elements which had once been attached to some purpose are being kept around out of habit. Dylan’s was a time of greater social conformity, a jobs-for-life culture where your future lay between tramlines ahead of you. You deciding on you derailed the tram. Now we live with a volatile jobs marked which involves regularly reinventing yourself just to stay fed and housed. Tom Peters gave the following life coaching:

“Starting today you are a brand. You're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favourite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different?”

Another way of saying this is – there are multiple yous, but in none of them do you get to actually be you. Its no longer enough to sell your labour, now you need to sell your self into the bargain. Of course its true that Dylan rebranded himself not to get hired but precisely to get fired, to burn his bridges to one set of fans so that another could be built. But this isn’t the distinction you might think. How will we learn this lesson, us non-geniuses, us regular beings? Thinking “my brand isn’t Pepsi but Bob Dylan” doesn’t help you, it just rephrases the problem.

The film ends with Joan Baez left standing as Dylan motorbikes off. She never abandoned either the Folk world or the notion of music associating itself to movements for social change. Perhaps its time we switched this story round. In a world which has since filled itself with Bob Dylans, be a Joan Baez. She wasn’t such as asshole. 

THE FIRST FESTIVE FIFTY! (AND ALSO THE TWENTY-FIFTH)

First drafts of history are never neat.

Take for example the first John Peel Festive Fifty. (Where listeners chose their favourite numbers.) Though ending the auspicious year of ’76, it contains not one single Punk track. Rather than ’Anarchy in the UK’ topping the list, its ’Stairway To Heaven’. It’s like one of those alt futures where we never escaped the servitude of the Roman Empire, except instead it’s listening to the guitar solo from ’Free Bird’. 

Peel himself seemed less than impressed. The following year he decided he was picking all the tracks himself.

Perhaps more unexpectedly, listeners took the all-time request seriously. So the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, Dylan and Hendrix all show up. (Tho’ nothing from before the Sixties.) And even when it does go Prog, the more bloated excesses (Rush, ELP) are happily absent. Yes creep in at No. 50 with ’And You And I’, probably one of their least proggy moments. (King Crimson may be the most curious absence.) For me, it was the more the AOR and classic rock stuff which was the obstacle. Jackson Browne and Poco were soon skipped.

But overall, as a snapshot of music up to ’76, it actually makes for a pretty good playlist. Sure its strange hearing ’No Woman No Cry’ segue into ’Supper’s Ready’. But not in a bad way.

Okay, British Punk was only just getting going at this point. The Pistols (for example) had released one single, ’Anarchy in the UK’. If it could conceivably have headered the list, there was no possibility of Punk packing it. But perhaps more conspicuous by their absence are the two biggest influences on British Punk.

You know the story of how, prior to forming the Buzzcocks, Shelley and Devoto took a trip to London to see the Pistols without having heard them? Because they played Stooges songs? And yet, you guessed it, no Stooges here. In fact American Punk appears only once, with Jonathan Richman’s ’Roadrunner’. 

And mid-Sixties Powerpop, that shows up not at all. (‘My Generation’ made the 1979 and 1980 lists, but nothing in ’76.) Those lies John Lydon liked to tell, about British Punk supposedly having no influences (despite playing Stooges songs)… it looks like, at the time, people swallowed them wholesale.

As you might expect, subsequent years saw a slow decline in votes for ’Stairway to Heaven’ and a growth in Punk and Post-Punk. 1982 saw both an all-time and a year-only list, everything went year-only from then on.

Then, as a one-off for the momentous year of 2000, the all-time list was brought back. And it looks back as far as the original, some tracks make it from the early Nineties - roughly the same time lag.

But this time out its much more Eurocentric; almost half of ’76 had been American, this time precisely five Yanks make the cut. Despite many American acts not just being played but getting sessions on the show. And that with the simultaneous disappearance of Prog, which had always been a highly Europeanscene.

Remarkably, a mere three tracks from ’76 reappear, with two falling down the list. Take Hendrix’s ’All Along the Watchtower’, once no. 5, now to be found at no. 37. Dylan’s ’Visons Of Johanna’ fares similarly. Only Beefheart’s ’Big Eyed Beans From Venus’ moves up. And the early Seventies disappears almost entirely. (The Beefheart track is from ’72, but he was more a Sixties artist.)

But perhaps more significantly, a number of older tracks which could have been on the ’76 list suddenly show up. Tim Buckley’s ’Song To The Siren’ can perhaps be explained by This Mortal Coil’s cover, scoring much higher. But the Velvet Underground and Nick Drake? While the Beatles, who had been represented by three tracks, now switch to a new entry - ’I Am The Walrus’. (Still, surprisingly, no Stooges.)

Of course, you never hear music from the past directly. It cannot do other than come through the filter of the present. Perhaps, had there been another Festive Fifty two or three years earlier than ‘76, ’Tarkus’ and ’Tales From Topographic Oceans’ would have proudly reared their gatefold heads. Perhaps ’Kashmir’ and ’Supper’s Ready’ did suddenly sound bad in the context of the late Seventies, only to reach today and get good all over again.

But more, some songs go up like a firework and leaves a stain in the sky, while others have a slow-burning fuse. It takes a while for people to catch on to them.

Slightly bizarrely, this even takes in the world’s best-selling band. ’Walrus’ was one of the most radical-sounding Beatles songs. (Alongside ’Tomorrow Never Knows’, which stays inexplicably absent.)

Stories about the Velvets being shunned in their day get a little mythologised. In their time, their sound got slowly less extreme and their audience correspondingly increased. Plus their resurgence happened sooner than this might imply. Post-Punk openly owed them a debt, and by the time I was getting into music (early Eighties) they were already on the must-hear list. Had the all-time lists continued past ’82, I’d guessed they’d have shown up pretty soon.

Curiously, it was the much sweeter-sounding Folk-hued Nick Drake who took the slower lane. A press release from his own label proudly announced his new release wouldn’t be shifting any units either, but they were putting it out anyway because they liked it. After playing the track, Peel speculated about how Drake might feel about the change in response to his music.

Given which, supposing another all-time list could somehow be compiled now? Another quarter-century down the road?

Certainly, some things seem to take longer still to take. Krautrock’s era was roughly ’68 to ’75. But, despite being so big an influence on Post-Punk, it shows up not once. That would doubtless be different now. Maybe even… finally… the Stooges.

The premise of Peel’s show was the present. All-time lists stand out because they were a slightly counter-intuitive thing to do. Today, music seems to have gone the other way, with the past raked over at the expense of the present. There can be little left now that needs digging up, but still the slew of re-releases. So I’d expect a lot more leaning into the past and - most of all - much less of a difference in sound between bands of then and now.

THE FOOTPRINTS OF PHANTOMS (LUCID FRENZY PLAYLIST)

Our next Lucid Frenzy playlist on Spotify steps out with Lankum’s characteristically existential take on Irish folk, which shapeshifts into a bleak Philip Glass midway. Angels Of Light (Michael Gira’s non-Swans outfit) cast a sardonic eye over the penetrating effects of mass media. Rev JM Gates keeps the Gospel tradition alive, Tom Waits washes up on foreign shores, Burd Ellen bewitch and beguile with some Scottish folk (returning from Faerieland is at your own risk), Bardo Pond… well soar is really the only word for it, and both Page & Plant and Jah Wobble revisit and rework some classics. All in under an hour! (Okay, in just over an hour…)

The title comes from the old movie serial ’The Phantom Creeps’, while the illo's the Ernst painting ’Angel of the Hearth’. 

Lankum: The Granite Gaze
Nina Nastasia: You’re a Holy Man
The Angels of Light: Promise Of Water
Rev. J. M. Gates: Must Be Born Again
Tom Waits: Shore Leave
Current 93: Cuckoo
Burd Ellen: The High Priestess & The Hierophant
Bardo Pond: My Eyes Out
Popol Vuh: Wo Bist Du?
Jimmy Page & Robert Plant: Four Sticks
Hawkwind: Magnu
Jah Wobble: Albatross

“Now they live in your head and they travel your veins
Every word that you speak is a word they have made”

“SO LET US STOP TALKING FALSELY NOW”: BOB DYLAN’S ‘ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER’

(A sequel of sorts to my take on ‘Visions Of Johanna.’)

’All Along the Watchtower’ (from ’John Wesley Harding’) is is one of those Bob Dylan songs that has a general theory attached to it. It's held to be about his declining relationship with his then-manager, Albert Grossman. The Joker and Thief are them, respectively. So we’re told.

Well, there may well be other songs from this period which that explanation works for. (Dylan himself, who normally resisted analysis like his livelihood depended on it, said he hadn’t been thinking of any of that when he wrote ’Dear Landlord’, but okay, it did seem to fit.)

But does it work for this song? No, not at all.

In fact I suspect people just get as far as the word ‘Thief’ and cry “aha, he’s calling Grossman a thief, also some Biblical stuff to fancy it up.” David Stubbs, who perhaps propagated this theory the most, describes their relationship as “a stand-off.” Yet in the song they seem to get along. And, provided we accept the (more likely) theory that Dylan sings the verses in the wrong order, the Thief gets the last word. Which isn’t snake-oil spiel, in fact it sounds like sage advice. We, who have been through so much, can outlast this.

Let’s look somewhere else, then.

Was anything else on curly-locks’ mind at the time? There was, something pretty big in fact. He'd change his sound with the regularity others changed their sheets. But this time there had been something more to it…

He’d grown sick of being taken as a spokesman for a generation, or some kind of prophet whose every utterance required the utmost scrutiny. (Pithily epitomised by a scene from the 2007 film ‘I’m Not There’ where everybody, from music journalists to the Black Panthers, is desperately trying to figure out who Mr. Jones is.) Not being a job you could just quit, he decided he had to get himself fired.

It’s like trying to rid yourself of overstaying guests by putting on the music they most dislike. Except in this case he had to write that music. So be it. He’d make records so removed from anything his fan base wanted to hear that they’d desert him in droves, and finally he’d be left in peace.

All this is well enough known. But just in case that wasn’t enough sometimes he’d even spell it out in the lyrics.

Bluffer’s tip, when someone as egocentric as Dylan writes two characters into a song - assume they’re both him. He said of himself: “when I used words like 'he' and 'it' and 'they,' I was really talking about nobody but me.” But this comes with a twist. The Joker is Old Dylan, still looking for some way out of the situation he’s in. “Businessmen they drink my wine” may well be a reference to Grossman, though probably more a collective noun for music industry types. But “ploughmen dig my earth” sounds much more about those self-professed Dylanologists who’d scour his lyrics for buried meanings, sometimes literally rifting through his trash, naturally enough missing “what any of this was worth”.

While New Dylan tells the hipster nihilist that, while he might once have thought life is but a joke, they have now been through that - they can see the other side. In a song dripping with religious imagery, it’s about revelation.

(For this reason, I think the talk about the track being ‘circular’ sails past the point. Yes, what should be the first verse comes last. Yes, earlier songs like ’Stuck Inside Of Mobile’ or - for that matter - ’Visions Of Johanna’ had been about entrapment. Here the song is more a roadmap outta here. I’d guess rather than being up to anything clever Dylan just reordered the verses because that gave the song a better opening line. (If so he was right, most people must know it by now.)

Often analysts of the song reflect on how Biblical the imagery is, particularly the Book of Isiah. But this is almost entirely confined to the third verse (as sung). Few seem to consider how this relates to the song as a whole. Let’s detour into it…

One of the most annoying aspects of the “Dylan’s a poet” business is that actually he was a songwriter. There’s fairly strong evidence, in fact, that he recorded some of those songs. And a songwriter combines words and music for an overall effect. (Dylan himself was often frustrated his music was so overlooked.)

And the point these two come together most clearly is in the singer’s voice. And New Dylan even sounded different, dropping the nasal jeer famously liked by Bowie to “sand and glue”. For something quieter, more plainspeaking.

Elsewhere on the album, such as ’Frankie Lee And Judas Priest’ he strikes a conversational tone. But here he does something different. Truly grand things you don’t intone like a Hollywood voice-over, you have to speak of them softly, in a kind of hush. And the music does something very similar. The sound’s so ominous because it suggests at impending events that could only be alluded to, never fully described. (Those who only know the bigger sound of the Hendrix cover are often surprised by the original.)

I can remember being taught at school that, shortly after the crucifixion, many believed Jesus would return soon and usher in the end times. Which made for strange heady days to walk through, where each step might be your last. It’s something that has stayed in my head all my life. And this song has a similar mood of quiet apocalypse.

It’s known Dylan regularly read the Bible through this time. Solipsistic as ever, he seems to have associated his plan to remake himself with a parallel tumultuous change to the world. And, this being the late Sixties, there was plenty of evidence for that if you were to go looking. This quite possibly borders on a personality disorder. But it made for a good song.

Let’s go a bit more nitty-gritty…

You can see why the Joker might be called the Joker. He’s a Dadaish figure, not just writing songs without literal meaning but furiously denying there is a meaning to things. But why is the Thief the Thief? What’s he nicking exactly? Other song titles on the album mention a Drifter, a Hobo and an Immigrant, while the title track’s about a folklore outlaw. We’re on outsider to society here. Was Thief just the next line in the Thesaurus?

Perhaps, but let’s remember a slightly earlier song, ’Tears Of Rage’, had the repeated line “why must I always be the Thief?” If ’Watchtower’ flirts with confusion by being sung in the wrong order, this one gives us two characters without telling us. To the point that many simply didn’t notice. The only clue is in the use of ‘We’ and ‘I’, given to verses and choruses respectively. (Disclaimer: I seem to be the only person in the world who thinks this.)

‘We’ would seem to be parents vexed by a child asserting their independence. As many have been quick to point out, Dylan was by this time a parent. And it may be that he wouldn’t have written this song had he not been. But it isn’t credible that it’s *about* his experiences as a parent. The oldest, his step-daughter Maria, was six at the time. A little young for that sort of thing.

Instead I’d suspect ‘We’ to be those troublesome fans and Dylanologists, cast in the guise of controlling parents, sternly admonishing their charge over his change in direction. (“It was all pointed out the way to go’ means something like “What’s this? A country album? You are so grounded!”) And Dylan as the less-than-dutiful daughter, unwilling to conform to the plans made for her. What the ‘Thief’ is stealing is her own agency.

And like ‘why a thief’, we might want to ask ‘why a daughter?’ Why not a son? Dylan firmly associated himself with artistic genius stereotypes, which are highly gendered as male, and was effectively a misogynist. Why associate with a female character here? It may be because a daughter’s rebellion is seen as more a betrayal than a son’s. But also, ‘daughter’… it may simply have scanned better.

So to summarise, ’All Along the Watchtower’ by Bob Dylan isn’t about Albert Grossman. No, like many Bob Dylan songs it’s all about Bob Dylan. Have a great day!

(Those of an unusually obsessive nature may want to know I wrote something about the whole ‘John Wesley Harding’ album a while ago.)

“WHAT SALVATION MUST BE LIKE AFTER A WHILE”: BOB DYLAN'S 'VISIONS OF JOHANNA'

“Johanna may not even be real. But she is an addiction”
- Rolling Stone

The finest songs are not always the most immediate. I doubt if anyone in 1966, on first hearing Bob Dylan's new album  'Blonde On Blonde’, thought of 'Visions of Johanna' as the stand-out track.

First you needed to cope with yet another of Dylan's turns of direction, from the abrasive electric sound and venomous in-your-face surrealism of the previous year's 'Highway 61 Revisited'. That had been definitively Northern – urgent, brimming with attitude – while the Nashville-recorded 'Blonde' could not have sounded any more Southern, languid and brooding. Some tracks even gave woozy New Orleans jazz a look in.

But even then 'Johanna' must have sounded strangely closely to the country station it disparaginly describes, the one that “plays soft, but there's nothing really nothing to turn off”. It couldn't be any further from the epic swoops and rolls of the next number 'Sooner Or Later', the only track on the album to have survived from the original New York sessions. And yet what didn't arrive with a fanfare lingered, and is now one of Dylan's most celebrated songs. 

Perhaps that could be something to do with the air of mystery which Dylan characteristically stirs up. “Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial”; “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule.” You could probably throw a dart at the lyric sheet and come up with something similar. It all sounds so vivid, like it should mean something, but trying to figure out precisely what can result in a whole load of headscratching.

Perhaps to try and pin down the cascade of images is a kind of category error. Robert Shelton wrote in his Dylan bio ’No Direction Home’ “the nonsequential visions are like a swivelling camera recording a fractured consciousness”, and he went on to quote Fowlie on Rimbaud, on a poet “bent upon subordinating words to their sounds and colours”. Dylan himself had earlier written: “To understand you know too soon/ There is no sense in trying” and was scornful of those who thought themselves able to interpret him.

Would the facts help any? Dylan almost certainly wrote the song while on honeymoon with Sarah Lownds in New York in the winter of 1965/66. And yet this isn’t exactly a love song. Which has tempted some to speculate that he wrote it pining for an earlier paramour, Joan Baez. The present Louise in the song thereby becomes a stand-in for Sara, contrasted against the absent but longed-for Johanna, aka Baez. (Though some claim the earlier ’Like A Rolling Stone’ was a put-down of Baez.)

Of course I have no more idea than anyone else whether this is true or not, but there may well be something in it. Firstly, when you hear sections of Dylan fandom hating on Baez so badly, in a manner reminiscent of Beatles fans on Yoko, you almost want to take it up just to spite them. But more importantly, Norman Mailer's theory of Picasso was structured around his relationships, embarking on new styles to capture each new lover, then all over again to decry them as he tired of them. And Dylan is in many ways the Picasso of music. For example, his earlier break into his trademark 'protest songs' came at least in part through the influence of an earlier girlfriend, Suze Rotolo. (Pictured with him on the cover of the 'Freewheelin' album of 1963, which launched that style.)

Except, as ever, the main problem with this biographical reading is that its just that – a biographical reading. Your interest flickers to hear the line “the ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face” after finding out that New York had that winter suffered a power blackout. Or that the song was originally called <i>'Freeze Out'</i>. But really, where does it take you? It's a bit like finding out where a film director used for a location shoot, or an artist for a painting. At most you're describing the impetus of a work, rather than the work itself. Ultimately, reducing “the ghost of electricity” to a power cut seems... well... reductive. 

As Andrew Rilstone has said “I don't think that Bob set out to tell a naturalistic story... but decided, for some reason, to present the story in the form of a riddle.” To which we might add, when Dylan had earlier broken up with Suze Rotolo he didn't think himself as above writing a perfectly straightforward account of the whole affair in 'Ballad in Plain D'. (Much to the disdain of her sister, who'd been savaged while virtually named outright.)

Okay, you might well ask, so what is going on?

A common theme of the album was 'strandedness', referred to specifically in many tracks such as 'Temporary Like Achilles' or 'Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again', and ever-present in the more languidly paced music. But the theme is perhaps at its most developed here. Note the two separate references to keys, jangling uselessly in this inescapable situation. Note the second line “we sit here stranded, though we're all doing our best to deny it”.

“All” makes it seem a crowded song. But, befitting the feeling of confinement, I contend there's only three characters to the story – and one of those is conspicuous by her absence. All the others – the ladies and the watchmen, the pedlar and the countess – merely collapse in on one another, like alter egos invented to distract you from your loneliness. (Or perhaps bystanders, a watchman seen through the window who has a character projected onto him. It scarcely matters which.)

Before we get to Louise and Johanna, let's start with the third-named character:

”Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously 
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously”

Remind you of anybody? Little Boy Lost is starting to sound like a straw-man parody of Dylan himself. And after slagging off pretty much everybody he knew, plus a fair few innocent bystanders, why not give himself a turn?

Now the alert reader at this point is probably thinking there's a fourth character in the song.I f Little Boy Lost is Dylan, then just who is the unnamed narrator? And I'll concede things might seem that way.

”Just Louise and her lover so entwined 
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind”

Then again, perhaps not. Little Boy Lost most likely is the lover getting it on with Louise. But I'm suggesting Dylan is simultaneously the body entwined with Louise and the mind thinking of the absent Johanna. He feels so disconnected from the picture he's in that he conceives of himself as two entities – the present body and the removed, preoccupied mind.

Johanna is a religious name – it means the grace of God. If you look Louise up, it means warrior. But you might as well go and forget that second part, for it's not really got much to do with the song. I suspect Dylan just picked the most regular and the most out-of-ordinary names he could think of. I must have met many Louises in my time, I'm not sure I've known one Johanna.

And the distinction between them is all there in that early line...

”Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near... 
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna’s not here”

Something many people seem to miss is that, unlike many a Dylan song, he's not actually disparaging about Louise. “She’s alright... she's delicate and seems like the mirror.” He quotes her saying “Ya can’t look at much, can ya man?” as if she's being perceptive. But the point about Louise is that she's merely present, just as Johanna is defined by her absence. They divide much as Little Boy Lost and the narrator are split.

Clinton Heylin has suggested that Dylan, suffering from writer's block at this point, has made Johanna his absent muse. And lines about Mona Lisa with “the highway blues” would seem to go along with that. But this seems only marginally less prosaic than the earlier romantic triangle notion. Dylan may have got there through cold feet about a marriage, or deciding to write a song about not being able to write a song. In the end, the how of it doesn't really matter.

In a word, it's purgatorial. The song is about separation, about the body being exiled from the spirit. At the end of the song, rather than having Johanna show up, everything else goes away – leaving only her absence.

”And Madonna, she still has not showed 
We see this empty cage now corrode...
...the harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain”

Coming soon! While we're on the subject of Dylan...

THE SELECTION ACCUMULATOR (LUCID FRENZY PLAYLIST)

The next Lucid Frenzy playlist starts off with the one song-based team-up of John Cale and Terry Riley. The platters that matter then include Current 93 lamenting the passing of the dead (as is their wont), Nina Nastasia telling us how it is, …and The Native Hipsters making musical Dada while the Delgados use a semi-colon in their track title; surely the most Delgadoish moment of all. And New Order still sound like the future, if unfortunately not the one we got.

Muddy Waters either needs no introduction or whoever you’re introducing him to is unworthy of the honour. Hawkwind go all JG Ballad and dystopian, but get to admire the view. King Crimson see red (and in the process inventing alt.metal years early). Brainticket combine psychedelic soul with Krautrock into one heady brew.

(The title is from the counter they had in juke boxes, when plays were included in chart placement)

John Cale & Terry Riley: The Soul of Patrick Lee
Current 93: There Is No Zodiac
Nina Nastasia: This Is What It Is
The Angels Of Light: The Man With The Silver Tongue
New Order: The Him
...And The Native Hipsters: Flowers R Machines As Well
The Delgados: Tempered; Not Tamed
Jeffrey Lewis: It Only Takes a Moment
Bert Jansch: The Black Swan
Muddy Waters: Rock Me
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee: Southern Train
Hawkwind: High Rise
King Crimson: Red
Brainticket: Like A Place In The Sun

“There is no-one here, Just photographs of the gone”

THE CROSSROADS OF INFINITY (LUCID FRENZY PLAYLIST)

Click here for a playlist of longer, spacier and less vocal-based tracks.

Kicking off with Popul Vuh chanting their way out of consensus reality, then working upwards. Also achieving orbit are one but two numbers from Godspeed stablemates, Esmerine taking on a Turkish sound and HRSTA making Morse-code riffs happen. Swans go surprisingly ambient after falling into the good company of improvising Australian trio the Necks. Manchester nosiemonsters Gnod… well, make some noise, as is their wont. And then there’s Lankum. Because you can never have enough existential Irish folk, am I right?

The title and illo’s from a Jack Kirby ‘Fantastic Four’ strip. No, I’ve no idea what it means either. But it felt appropriate.

Popol Vuh : Agape-Agape
Esmerine: Translator’s Clos
HRSTA: Swallow’s Tail
Labradford: New Listening
Swans (with the Necks): The Nub
Gnod: 5th Sun (Chaudelande Version)
Hey Colossus: Lagos Atom
Lankum: The Pride Of Petravore

“Secrets behind the grading
Vortex in the ether
Voices crackle in the air”

POSTSCRIPT: TIME IS NOW

('Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk and New Pop via Simon Reynolds' 'Rip It Up', which started over there, ends here.)

“I had high ideals and crazy dreams, 
And they came to this.”
- Mark Stewart & the Mafia, ‘High Ideals and Crazy Dreams’

“Now it’s your turn!”
- The Desperate Bicycles

Reynolds concludes by commenting on the rise of a new wave of Post-Punk sound, which was emerging whilst he was writing this book. (It was first published in ’05.) Yet, as we’ve seen, it had arisen in quite a specific context, and ended with unusual neatness when that context was over. So this might seem strange, maybe even suspicious. While some of the original bands have reformed in the wake of this (such as Gang of Four), others have been more dismissive of such nostalgism.

Mark E Smith said, “I see a lot of bands influenced by us but I don’t see them getting the core spirit of it… there’s no belief in what they’re doing. The motives are suspicious. It’s like they just want a career in music.” He’s right, of course. History repeats itself, but only as farce. It’s notable for example that the new groups are rarely as political and still less tend to any anti-rockist sentiment.

Hang on, is he right? Of course what he’s saying should be right, in that it’s the most appropriate thing for Post-Punk’s self-mythologising. But isn’t the real point that we’re now in a very different era to then? Say the same thing in a different context and it’s like you said something else. Just like Dada, Post-Punk was a product of and response to its era, and attempts to reproduce its strategies and devices outside of that will only make for museum pieces. Make a collage today out of old bus tickets in order to be ‘anti-bourgeois’ and you’ll be a laughing stock. (The same thing goes for fanzines and ransom lettering, though alas it doesn’t stop them.) If Post-Punk’s sound has long since been reduced to mere music, why not play it as music? Wouldn’t it be worse if all that rhetoric were reproduced faithfully but emptily?

If in 1978 Rock felt stale, anti-Rock was something fresh and challenging. The insistence that bands were but business entities operating within an entertainment industry was meant as part-provocation, part-warning. Nowadays Rock (even Punk rock) is fully mainstream, selling more to the middle-aged than the young and even the Fall have their music set to car adverts. For a decade from 1997, Britain was presided over by a Prime Minister who (in between sending young men out to die in money-grabbing wars) boasted of having been in bands and revelled in being photographed with rock stars. Buying records and going to gigs and doesn’t change the world. To say it now is a banality, an exercise in the obvious.

Post-Punk’s “resolutely modernist obsess[ion] with innovation” and clamour for constant change, once unshackled from the original debate with the paleo-Punks, soon soured not just into Pop’s insatiable need for novelty but also Blair’s sound-bite crusades against “forces of conservatism”. Similarly Gang of Four’s alienation devices sound different when even adverts take on an ironic ‘metafictional’ tone (“don’t ask me, I’m just an actor!”) in an attempt to butter up their audience through flattering their intelligence.

Perhaps you could even argue that Post-Punk, which sought to liberate us from the confines of music, actually liberated music itself. The concept of music as the default medium of dissidence was once deeply ingrained, to the point where it hard to imagine a defiant youth doing anything else. Maybe music needed to free itself of such cultural baggage, to get back to just being itself. Being anti-rockist freed Rock of rockism.

You can list the way something similar has happened to all other Post-Punk strategies... In a push-button internet age, Industrial’s fixation with the ‘transgressive’ has long since become just another consumer option. The TV is forever showing seasons of the ‘banned’, ‘extreme’ or ‘forbidden’, in ever-escalating hyperbole in order to bring in viewers. In the late Seventies the first mass-produced plug-in-and-play synthesizers were only just becoming available, and their liberating effects carried the shock of the new. This has since been blunted by our celebrity-obsessed culture, which no longer even pretends that stars get their status from actually doing anything.

Not just the internet but the wider rock media have also infected Post-Punk’s focus on de-mystification. Music used to arrive in mysteriously symbolic covers, with scant information. It might stretch to a track listing, if you were lucky tell you who was in the band. Nowadays there’s a website, a magazine feature and a booklet with the CD reissue to spell out all the lyrics, detail the recording process, provide demo tracks and alternate versions, and sport a couple of dozen explanations of what it might ‘all mean’. Music has been historicised, catalogued - and with it neutered. These days a more meaningful plan might be to put all that mysticism back in…

More widely, it has often amused me how marginal figures see their ideas taken up by the mainstream, and assume they must have been so threatening they must now be defused - like some cultural bomb squad at work. Of course its often opposite. The mainstream needs the fringes and alternatives to incubate the concepts it could never think of itself. The alternative to this is to imagine corporate executives somehow coming up with their own ideas. See the problem there?

A classic example of this is Post-Punks’ interest in film and multi-media. As Reynolds shows, not only did this pioneer video but led to bands like Devo and Talking Heads fuelling MTV and using it as their platform – at the time the channel had little else to show, making it “almost inadvertently radical.” But of course, the accompanying video soon became a stock component of the pop release, and MTV very thankfully showed Devo the door. (Similarly, Sontag’s theories of syanethesis have been absorbed into the cross-marketing campaigns of corporations, where films must now also have video games, single tie-ins and other memorabilia.)

However, as the earlier quote from Stuart Home made clear, this doesn’t mean the inevitable fate of any idea is corporate take-up. Any form of radical art, unleashed upon a money economy, will in some form, at some point, become mere product. But a large part of the appeal of Post-Punk was that it never suggested differently. Instead of claiming authenticity it deliberately intensified, exposed and projected the contradictions of ‘militant entertainment’.

Simultaneously, even genuinely radical movements can only be absorbed by first smashing their homogeneity into digestible pieces. This happened to Post-Punk but over time, and as less favourable social conditions came along to make its inner glue less durable. If the money economy is always present, this does not mean its presence is always uncontested. 

In short, if Post-Punk’s strategies no longer work as the best way to ask awkward questions that doesn’t mean that no workable strategies exist. Reynolds wrote his book largely against the dismissive notion that the Punk spirit ended abruptly in ’78, so how absurd and futile would it be to just fast-forward this date by a few more years? Those who constantly bemoan the fact that Punk hasn’t “happened again” miss the most basic and vital point of Post-Punk, that it went ahead and did something new. 

It’s participants had no magic powers which allowed them to do this, any more than we live today under some sinister spell that prevents us. In fact the opposite is true, their struggles and experiments empower us by providing lessons from which we can learn. But we should take from Post-Punk what they took from Dub. We might appreciate the thing in and of itself. But we mustn’t mimic, we need to appropriate for what works in our own circumstances.

“So flower power failed,” said Lennon, early in the Seventies. “So what? We start again.”

Is it time to rip it up and start again?

That’s always the time.

QUIT WHILE YOU’RE BEHIND

(...almost concluding 'Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk and New Pop via Simon Reynolds' 'Rip It Up', first part here.)

“The show is over. The audience get up to grab their coats to go home. No more coats and no more home.”
- Vasily Vasileyevich Rozanoiv, ’The Apocalypse of Our Time’

Okay, so if Post-Punk shouldn’t have gone New Pop what should it have done? Just give up? The short answer is yes. Half Man Half Biscuit were a band from a slightly later era, but when they split in ’86 over “musical similarities” it makes you ponder how richer life would be should every band call it quits as soon as that one crops up. (Disclaimer: They got back together. No-one’s perfect.)

If Post-Punk was the successor to British Punk and Dada, let’s remember both were short-lived movements in themselves. Marcel Duchamp famously gave up Dada to play chess, and things would have worked out better if less Post-Punkers had become pop stars and more had become postmen, college lecturers and Underground train announcers.

Many bands did this anyway - Wire, Gang of Four and the Slits among them. While natural wastage is always high with bands, many seem to have set out to split up, as if starting was just a necessary evil which allowed them to stop again, as if sabotaging their own careers might by some kind of sympathetic magic sabotage Rock music as a whole. Josef K, for example, announced they’d only ever release one album. Throbbing Gristle announced their “mission terminated”, as if they were a commando squad formed for ends now achieved. Scritti’s Green revealed later he wished he’d just stayed in bed. Caught in the very trap they’d set themselves, pressing for radical social change while simultaneously insisting on it’s impossibility, no wonder so many sought to escape this bind.

Of course, some bands did survive without turning New Pop (what Reynolds calls “exceptions to the rule of entropy”), but they most achieved this by becoming essentially different bands. The Mekons did this the most extremely, moving to America and becoming a Country outfit - even recording an album called ’Rock and Roll’. The Banshees almost literally became another band, losing two members at a stroke and coming back with something strong in itself but nearer to a conventional rock sound. (In the process they invented Goth. But we don’t hold it against them.)

The Fall incorporated Smith’s new wife, the American Brix, in the team - and with her came a more businesslike, get-go attitude. Less wayward, skeletal and ramshackle, their sound became more orderly, more streamlined, at times almost machine-like – more like a band! Smith even stopped scribbling over their album cover and the band that had once seen advertising a new release as too showbiz chalked up a few minor hits! The notion that you could be inside the music business while at the same time against it, that seemed less and less viable. The game you now played was theirs.

The reason for this is a simple one – the times they had a’changed. The early Eighties recession was over, the economic boom had begun and their second electoral victory had cemented the Tories free market turn. The once-decaying factories on which Post-Punk had bloomed, like some mind-expanding slime-mould, were now being tarted up and turned into leisure centres. Many were now caught between what Aufheben called “the ‘stick’ of dole squeezes and the ‘carrot’ of new-found social affluence”. There were more-or-less simultaneous bids to cut student grants, to make courses more ‘vocational’ and career-oriented, and clampdowns on the squatting and free festival scenes.

Post-Punk was fast losing both its squatted stage and its radical audience, quite possibly hemorrhaging them. As Reynolds mentions, average sales of independent singles halved between ’80 and ’85. It’s hard to escape the notion that 1985 came down like a guillotine.

In short, Post-Punk didn’t go New Pop because of any inherent qualities coming to the fore, but because at that point *everything* had come back to Pop. By the mid-decade, the Eighties as commonly imagined had begun and commercial was the new cool. Attempts to smuggle more radical notions into the mainstream ran into a dividing line as solid as the Berlin Wall. You were now either a winner, with the hit singles and wads of cash, or an outsider.

Rather than being Post-Punk’s next step, this happened to pretty much every musical genre of the day. (Excepting Anarcho Punk, where any attempt to turn New Pop would have faced logistical difficulties.) It was common for once-popular bands to split in two. The Specials for example broke into the chart-friendly Fun Boy Three and the more political, less chart-friendly Special AKA. Even Subway Sect spawned the chart-friendly Jo Boxers.

From that point on, the world was inverted and it would be the bourgeoisie’s turn to shock the avant-garde. Quite simply, suicide had become the grandest gesture.

We’ve already noted Post-Punk’s debt to both the late Sixties and Dadaist Twenties. Its worth nothing that these were also radical eras swiftly followed by turncoatism and conservatism. Fascism had fixated its antagonism to Modernist ‘decadent’ art but also took on many pseudo-radical elements.

However, if Post-Punk degenerated into chart fodder instead of stopping, at least it didn’t do the worst thing which it could – go on. Its focus on change and innovation precluded it doing what most movements do the moment they stop moving – ossify into a set of rituals, pat ‘anti-Rockist’ gestures to overlay the ‘Rockist’ ones they’d set out to destroy.

And if you want to know what that looks like, try looking over to the museum-piece called Anarcho-Punk. Anarcho’s fundamentalist strictures were always nearer to Rock’s unthinking rituals than to Post-Punk, but as the Eighties wore on they aligned more and more. Crass split in the auspicious year of ’84, handing the Crown Prince of Anarcho role to the tiresome Conflict. In a now familiar phrase, when pressed by radical demands regimes respond with ‘the change that is no change’. Conflict offered the perfect corollary, threat that was no threat. Just as New Pop acts flattered the audience that they must be sophisticates for appreciating this quality stuff, Conflict told their eager fans they were part of an “ungovernable force”. They had as much potential to reshape society as ABC, and ABC had better tunes. Let us pause a moment and give thanks that the Pop Group never turned into Conflict.

POST-PUNK’S FRACTURE LINES (SHOPKEEPER THINKING IN A SEA OF SIGNS)

...continuing 'Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk and New Pop via Simon Reynolds' 'Rip It Up', first part here.)

“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.”

CONFORM TO DEFORM? (CRITIQUING CULTURAL ENTRYISM)

(...continuing 'Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk and New Pop via Simon Reynolds' 'Rip It Up', first part here.)

“You talk a lot, but you’re not saying anything” 
- Talking Heads, ‘Psycho Killer’ 

“Being clever, how’s that working out for you?”
- Tyler Durden, 'Fight Club’ 

Of course some throw their purist hands up at the very idea of cultural entryism. (We generally call those people “Crass fans”.) But, truth to tell, it can be a valid pursuit. Beatles fans returning their copies of ’Revolver’ because something had “gone wrong” with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the ITV switchboard jamming with complaints after the fabled last episode of ’The Prisoner’, the furore the Pistols caused on the Grundy show – rupture points in the normal are to be celebrated, and the world needs more of them.

The problem is not with the concept, but the fact that Reynold’s chronology works better in reverse. The real era of cultural entryism was Post-Punk itself. The New Pop acts either defused what had been smuggled in, or simply threw straight back out again. Arguably, while Anarcho had been obsessive over building ‘alternatives’ outside of society (with Crass boasting of being “outside the machine”) Post-Punk had always aimed to undermine as much as it did confront.

Mark Stewart explained The Pop Group’s chosen name; “The whole idea was to be a pop group – an explosion in the heart of the commodity... If you wanted to get an idea across, you wanted to put it across in a big way.” Stevo of Some Bizarre perhaps more pithily summed up this spirit with slogans like ‘conform to deform’ and ‘use the music industry before it uses you’. He got the scarcely mainstream Throbbing Gristle offshoot Psychic TV signed to WEA via, among other tactics, sending them dildos etched with the legend ‘Psychic TV Fuck the Record Industry’. 

Band mainstay Genesis P. Orridge commented “I want to be part of popular culture, involved with everyday life and responses; not an intellectual artist in an ivory tower, thinking I am special, revered and monumental.” (Remarks ironically made while on trial for obscenity!)

As ever, Reynolds provides much of the evidence for this himself. For example, he says “Punk threw the record industry into confusion, making the majors vulnerable to suggestion, and fluxing up all the aesthetic rules so that anything abnormal or extreme suddenly had a chance.” Much of this was down to the clueless majors being unable to recognise Punk for what most of it was – traditional Rock and Roll played a little faster and a whole lot worse – but the result was the same. “You could hear the Fall and Joy Division on national radio and… groups as extreme as PiL had Top Twenty hits which… were beamed into ten million households.”

Of course, there was something wider at work than just hoodwinking a major. Chart placement was a tactic for some, of no interest to others. An early manager of Pere Ubu warned them they needed to smooth out their sound or, while they would continue to release records, they’d never transcend cult status. “Our eyes lit up,” remembers Thomas. “That sounds pretty good.” Yet not just Ubu but even more obstinate and esoteric ends of Post-Punk could shift surprising amounts of units, with the alternative charts of then often outselling today’s mainstream. And all this from a gang of bedroom operators who couldn’t tell a business plan from a signing-on day.

Of course New Pop sold better – but so what? Cultural entryism is about something of quality cutting through against the odds, and can’t be measured merely quantatively, by the mere accountancy logic of units sold. Scritti’s ’4 A Sides’ only hit the alternative charts while the later ’Cupid and Psyche’ won a gold record, but the former’s sales were still the bigger achievement.

It may help clarify if we compare Post-Punk to a music scene with no interest in cultural entryism. (And without Anarcho’s politicking.) Again, Reynolds does this for us! Comparing LA Post-Punk to its neighbouring free impro scene, he writes: “at a time when Punk had opened up the possibility for weird shit to sell substantial amounts this indicated a striking lack of ambition… [a] sub-cultural backwater.” He’s still with the cash registers, but here he’s close to striking the nail.

Scenes like free impro can have weaknesses. It isn’t that they’re too culty, too highbrow or commercially unsuccessful. It’s that they tend to operate in isolation, and so become insular and self-congratulatory. Post-Punk was to do with popular music, and popular culture is something to do with all of us. You may not be expected to like every popular music genre, but you are expected to get it. Just by being so labelled, it’s become a part of your world. 

Cult status is only bad when it becomes a closed system, with predictable releases selling only to a pre-set audience. Post-Punk was Cabaret Voltaire touring Sheffield in their van, insistently playing on the high street whether anyone wanted to hear it or not. Free impro by comparison was being played inside a room with an ‘invite only’ sign on the door.

In short, the true measure of cultural entryism lies not in aesthetics or any innate qualities, but in its effects. It’s significant, then, that in his second half Reynolds tends to sidestep such questions and retreats more into the standard mode of the ‘cultural commentator’, reading a significance into trivial details where it doesn’t belong.

On his website Reynolds exults that a bottlecap included on the photocopied cover of the first Scritti EP is reprised on the New Pop ’Anomie and Bonhomie’, but this time as an “ultra-glossy, hyper-realist painting”. This to Reynolds is a sign of ‘continuity’, that Scritti kept their early allegiances but just went about them in a different way. It’s like a cross between an evangelist finding a crucifix on the lapel of a lapsed believer, and a man diving into a po-mo soup of self-referentialism - a hermetic world made only of signs, which only ever point to each other and never to the world around them.

The point is not the bottlecap, and it never was. There is no point in treating a bottlecap like it’s some rich repository of symbolism, and that is precisely why it was used. The point of the first cover isn’t its content but its aesthetic, and the random accumulation of objects enhances the DIY nature of this aesthetic. (Green readily admits he used it purely because it was lying around.) The sleeve exists as, in Reynold’s own phrase while still in Mode A, “a snapshot of a lifestyle.” Fixating upon it as a bottlecap is like trying to understand Kurt Schwitters’ Dada collages through studying the history of bus ticket production.

But even supposing Reynolds was right, that all these signs and secret codes were in place and set to transmit just what he says - so what? It’s a tenet of Post-Modern thought that we live in a ‘post-ironic’ world where everybody is equipped with the correct antennae to decode all these signs. But to most people, Pop music is simply the soundtrack to an evening out. Upon such a crowd, what effect is “I’m only wearing this suit ironically” likely to have?

Of all the New Pop acts, only Gary Numan had any real right wing convictions. (And those rarely rose explicitly in his music.) The least Punk outfit of them all, Wham, played benefits for the striking miners and later effectively boycotted the music industry in its entirety. Yet none of that stopped New Pop becoming a soundtrack to the ‘aspirational’ Thatcherite Eighties, where everyone was free to feel good. Even pointing this out feels redundant, like re-iterating a painfully obvious cliché. If it was ever recognised at all, the clever phrases and name-dropping were just taken as a vague sign of classiness – like designer clothes, lines from art cinema or wine bottle labels.

Billy Childish famously said of BritArt that it successfully reflected its era, and that was its grant failure. It was smart-sounding but superficial and mercantile, just like its times. And the same is true of New Pop. Good art will challenge its times, not tell its viewers they are the fairest of them all.

At other points the pop-plugger places a very rockist stress on the importance of lyrics. When he starts venerating Depeche Mode’s anti-bigotry doggerels you half-expect him to drag in Culture Club’s ‘War is Stupid’ while he’s at it. This is not only absurd but also a refutation of a central tenet of Post-Punk, that radical talk crammed into the form of conventional music was meaningless. (“Wave your arms in the air if you’re against racism!” etc.)

Reynolds’ biases are again showing when he happily slates rock bands who went in for this (particularly targetting the Tom Robinson Band), yet praises Pop acts when they do the same! (And while TRB’s rouse-that-rabble rhetoric was often excruciating, at least it had slightly more content than “hey, let’s be nice!” Give me Wolfie Smith over Michael Jackson any day.)

Of course I don’t actually care about any of this, in the sense that I have no moralist objections. I’d rather they became Pop stars than New Labour ministers. And whingeing about alternative middle class people reverting to careerism is like complaining about the prices going up at Christmas. It’s simply that our intelligence is being insulted by the paucity of excuses on offer.

Green wrote endless screeds on why Scritti should ‘go Pop’, but like most people who talk too much he was actually avoiding saying something simple – he was sick of living in a run-down squat without a bathroom. I used to live in a run-down squat without a bathroom, so my most immediate reaction is to sympathise. I just wish he’d either cut the crap about it, or learn to lie more convincingly. At least John Lydon’s later career was honest (“I’m going over to the other side, Happy to have, not to have not”), but that’s something which gets him sidelined from the second half of this book.

Another of New Pop’s inheritances from Post-Punk which Reynolds is keen to stress is its wit and cerebrallism. He writes of how Kid Creole and the Coconuts “tried to bring to disco the sort of panache and sophistication last seen in popular music during the Forties”. New Pop may have the sweetest melodies, but from Post-Punk it gained the tang of irony, filling it with Wildean quips.

Yet the Coconuts are another band with no Post-Punk inheritance. And besides, mostly that stuff just plain got in the way. Julian Cope found the quote marks in Scritti’s ‘The “Sweetest Girl”’ “annoying” and “clever-clever”, and he was right. The smartness of Post-Punk was devised as an antidote to rock’s self-mythologising about “keeping it real”, a put-down, a heckle. But by the Eighties Pop was so blatantly inauthentic and manufactured it counted for little to point this out, it was something you were better off suspending disbelief about. An ingredient in Post-Punk that had meant to defuse Rock, to draw out and pillory its unspoken rules, had ended up adding something – making music that, in exposing the clichés, escaped them. Similar notions were intended to enhance New Pop, to give it an extra coat of cleverness. Paradoxically, they just took away, with a neither-nor result that even as Pop music isn’t particularly memorable.

Reynolds often suggests Abba set the bar on New Pop, and perhaps they did. But Abba’s achievement was taking all their songwriting craft and sheathing it inside something that sounded shimmeringly simple and fresh. They don’t sound accomplished, they sound good. New Pop just reversed the equation, rapping about Jacques Derrida and feigning a ‘sophistication’ they rarely possessed, not that it would have mattered if they had it. What New Pop number can be said to rival, for example, the soaring majesty of ‘Dancing Queen’? 

The closest contenders were the ones who shed their Post-Punk baggage the quickest. Yet again, Reynolds tells us all this himself. The Human League uncoupled themselves from their “smarter-than-you” schtick by splitting with Heaven 17, and were then free to go all-out for Pop like it was the only thing on their minds. ‘Don’t You Want Me’ is quite simply a song about someone not wanting someone any more, with Derrida conspicuous only by his absence. The same is true for all the other better New Pop acts. Orange Juice, Aztec Camera and Soft Cell were the least cerebral, the most fresh-faced and the most willing to sing like they meant it.

FUTURES NEVER LAST

(...beginning Part Two of 'Intensify the Contradictions', moving on from Post-Punk itself to its influence on New Pop. First part starts here.)

“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)’ 

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…