Rip It Up and Start Again (3 page)

Postpunk was a period of astonishing experimentation with lyrics and singing. The Fall’s Mark E. Smith invented a kind of Northern English magic realism that mixed industrial grime with the unearthly and uncanny, voiced through a unique, one-note delivery somewhere between amphetamine-spiked rant and alcohol-addled yarn. David Byrne’s flustered, neurotic mannerisms perfectly suited his wry, dry examination of nonrock subjects like animals, bureaucracy, “buildings and food.” The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart yowled imagistic incantations like a cross between Artaud and James Brown. This was also a fertile period for idiosyncratic female expression, the hitherto unheard perspectives and dissonant tones of the Slits, Lydia Lunch, Ludus, and the Raincoats. Other singer-lyricists—Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, Paul Haig of Josef K—were steeped in the shadowy unease and crippling anxiety of Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Conrad, and Beckett. Three-minute mininovels, their songs grappled with classic existentialist quandaries: the struggle and agony of having a “self”; love versus isolation; the absurdity of existence; the human capacity for perversity and spite; the perennial “suicide, why the hell
not
?”

Grappling with these timeless aspects of the human condition, postpunk also tapped into the political zeitgeist. Especially in the three years from 1978–80, the dislocations caused by economic change and geopolitical upheaval generated a tremendous sense of dread and tension. Britain saw a resurgence of far-Right and neofascist parties, both in electoral politics and in the bloody form of street violence. The cold war reached a renewed pitch of frigidity. Britain’s leading music magazine,
New Musical Express,
ran a regular column called “Plutonium Blondes” about the deployment of American cruise missiles in Britain. Singles like Kate Bush’s “Breathing” and UB40’s “The Earth Dies Screaming” brought nuclear anxiety into the Top 20, and countless postpunks, from This Heat on their concept album
Deceit
to Young Marble Giants with their classic single “Final Day,” sang about Armageddon as a real prospect, impending and imminent.

Part of the poignancy of this period of dissident music is its increasingly out-of-sync relationship with the broader culture, which was veering toward the Right. The postpunk period began with the paralysis of an embattled and thwarted Left-liberal politics under the center-left governments of Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan and Democratic president Jimmy Carter. Callaghan and Carter were then almost simultaneously displaced by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, populist (and popular) right-wing leaders who enforced monetarist economic policies that resulted in mass unemployment and widening social divisions.

Ushering in a long period of conservative politics that lasted twelve years in the United States and sixteen years in Britain, Thatcher and Reagan represented a massive backlash against both the countercultural sixties and the permissive seventies. In response, postpunk tried to build an alternative culture with its own independent infrastructure of labels, distribution, and record stores. The need for “complete control” (which the Clash could only sing about bitterly in the song of that name, having ceded it to CBS) led to the birth of pioneering independent labels such as Rough Trade, Mute, Factory, Subterranean, and SST. This do-it-yourself concept proliferated like a virus, spawning a pandemic of samizdat culture, with bands releasing their own records, local promoters organizing gigs, musicians’ collectives creating spaces for bands to play, and small magazines and fanzines taking on the role of an alternative media. Independent labels represented a sort of anticorporate microcapitalism based less on left-wing ideology than the conviction that the major labels were too sluggish, unimaginative, and commerce minded to nurture the most crucial music of the day.

Postpunk was concerned as much with the politics of music itself as with anything in the “real world.” It aimed to sabotage rock’s dream factory, a leisure industry that channeled youth’s energy and idealism into a cultural cul-de-sac while generating huge amounts of revenue for corporate capitalism. Coined by the Liverpool group Wah! Heat, the term “rockism” spread as a shorthand for a whole set of stale routines that restricted creativity and suppressed surprise. The established ways of doing things that postpunkers refused to perpetuate ranged from conventions of production (like the use of reverb to give records a live, big-room sound) to the predictable rituals of touring and performing (some postpunk bands refused to do encores, while others experimented with multimedia and performance art). Aiming to break the trance of rock-business-as-normal and jolt the listener into awareness, postpunk teemed with metamusic critiques and mini-manifestos, songs such as the Television Personalities’ “Part Time Punks” and Subway Sect’s “A Different Story” that addressed punk’s failure or speculated about the future. Some of this acute self-consciousness came from the radically self-critical sensibility that surrounded 1970s conceptual art, in which the discourse around the work was as important as the art objects themselves.

The metamusical nature of much postpunk helps to explain the extraordinary power of the rock press during this period, with some critics actually playing a part in shaping and directing the culture. This expanded role for the music papers began with punk. Because radio and TV largely spurned punk, because the mainstream print media was generally hostile, and because for a while it was hard for punk bands to even get gigs, the U.K. weekly music papers—
New Musical Express (NME), Sounds, Melody Maker,
and
Record Mirror
—took on a huge importance. From 1978 to 1981, the market leader
NME
had a circulation hovering between 200,000 and 270,000, and an actual readership three or four times that size. Punk mobilized a huge audience that was looking for the way forward and ready to be guided. The music press had virtually no rivals for this function. Monthly general-interest magazines such as
Q
or style magazines such as
The Face
didn’t exist yet, and pop coverage in the quality newspapers was meager.

As a result, the music press had enormous influence, and individual writers—the driven ones, those with a messianic complex—enjoyed prestige and power barely imaginable today. By identifying (and exaggerating) the connections between groups and articulating the unwritten manifestos of these fledgling movements and city-based scenes, the critics could actually intensify and accelerate the development of postpunk music. In
Sounds,
from late 1977 onward, Jon Savage championed “New Musick,” the industrial/dystopian science fiction side of postpunk. Paul Morley at
NME
progressed from mythologizing Manchester and Joy Division to dreaming up the concept of New Pop before going on to help invent the groups Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Art of Noise.
Sounds
’s Garry Bushell was the demagogue/ideologue of Oi! This combination of activist critics and musicians whose work was a form of “active criticism” fueled a syndrome of runaway evolution. Trend competed with trend, and each new development was swiftly followed by a backlash or a swerve. All of this contributed to the surging-into-the-future feeling of the period, while simultaneously accelerating the disintegration of punk’s unity into squabbling postpunk factions.

Musicians and journalists fraternized a lot during this period, a kinship related perhaps to a sense of solidarity as comrades in the culture war of postpunk versus Old Wave as well as in the era’s political struggles. Roles shifted around. Some journalists played in bands or made records, and there were musicians who wrote criticism, such as Pere Ubu’s David Thomas (under the pen name Crocus Behemoth), Joy Division’s Steven Morris, and Manicured Noise’s Steve Walsh. Because so many people involved in postpunk were nonmusicians initially or came from other artistic fields, the gap between those who “did” and those who commented wasn’t nearly as wide as in the prepunk era. Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge, for instance, described himself as a writer and thinker first and foremost and not really a musician at all. He even used the word “journalist” as a
positive
descriptive term for TG’s documentarian approach to harsh postindustrial realities.

Changes in the style and methods of rock writing heightened the postpunk sensation of hurtling into a bold new era. Music journalists in the early seventies typically blended traditional critical qualities (objectivity, solid reporting, authoritative knowledge) with a New Journalism–influenced rock ’n’ roll looseness and informality. This jammed-out, chatty style—juiced with “ain’t”s, hep slang, and sly, winking references to drugs and chicks—didn’t suit postpunk. The intellectual underpinnings of this older rock criticism—notions of male misbehavior as rebellion, madness as genius, the cult of street credibility and authenticity—were some of the very things being scrutinized and challenged by the antirockist vanguard. A new generation of music journalists took over whose writing seemed to be made of the same
stuff
as the music they championed. The stark urgency and clean lines of their prose mirrored the light-metal severity of groups like Wire, the Banshees, and Gang of Four, just as the record design aesthetic of the time emphasized a bold, bracing geometry of hard angles and primary-color blocks. The new school of music writing merged puritanism and playfulness in a way that simultaneously undercut the casual tone of the old rock journalism while puncturing its stodgy core of certainty, all those hidden assumptions and taken-for-granted notions about what rock was all about.

What bands and journalists actually talked
about
also contributed to the sense of entering a new era. An interview with a rock band today tends to become a laundry list of musical influences and reference points, such that the story of a band’s life typically gets reduced to a journey through taste. This sort of “record collection rock” didn’t exist in the postpunk era. Bands referred to their musical inspirations, of course, but they had so many other things—politics, cinema, art, books—on their minds, too. Some of the politically committed bands actually felt that it was self-indulgent or trivial to talk about music per se. They felt duty-bound to discuss serious issues, which nowadays sounds somewhat puritanical, but at the time reinforced the sense that pop wasn’t a segmented category insulated from the rest of reality. This lack of interest in discussing musical influences also created a sense of postpunk as an absolute break with tradition. It felt like the culture’s eyes and ears were trained on the future, not the past, with bands engaged in a furious competition to reach the eighties a few years ahead of schedule.

On a mission and fully in the now, postpunk created a thrilling sense of urgency. The new records came thick and fast, classic after classic. Even the incomplete experiments and interesting failures carried a powerful utopian charge and contributed to an exhilarating collective conversation. Certain groups existed more on the level of an idea than a fully realized proposition, but nonetheless made a difference just by existing and talking a good game in the press.

Many groups born in the postpunk period went on to enjoy huge mainstream fame, including New Order, Depeche Mode, the Human League, U2, Talking Heads, Scritti Politti, and Simple Minds. Others who were minor or background figures at the time went on to achieve later success in a different guise, such as Bjork, the KLF, Beastie Boys, Jane’s Addiction, and Sonic Youth. But the history of postpunk is definitely not written by the victors. There are dozens of bands who made landmark albums but never achieved more than an abiding cult status, earning the dubious consolation prize of being an influence and reference point for ’90s alt-rock megabands (Gang of Four begot Red Hot Chili Peppers, Throbbing Gristle sired Nine Inch Nails, Talking Heads even supplied Radiohead with their name). Hundreds more made just one or two amazing singles, then disappeared with barely a trace.

Beyond the musicians, there was a whole cadre of catalysts and culture warriors, enablers and ideologues who started labels, managed bands, became innovative producers, published fanzines, ran hipster record stores, promoted gigs, and organized festivals. True, the prosaic work of creating and maintaining an alternative culture lacks the glamour of punk’s public gestures of outrage and cultural terrorism. Destroying is always more dramatic than building. But postpunk was constructive and forward looking. The very prefix “post-” implied faith in a future that punk had said didn’t exist.

Punk’s simple stance of negation, of being
against,
briefly created unity. But as soon as the question shifted to “What are we actually
for
?” the movement disintegrated and dispersed. Each strand nurtured its own creation myth of what punk meant and pursued its own vision of the way forward. Yet underneath the fractious diaspora of the postpunk years there still remained a common inheritance from the punk moment, namely, a revived belief in the power of the music, along with the feeling of responsibility that came with this conviction, which in turn made the question “Where to now?”
worth
fighting over. The by-product of all this division and disagreement was diversity, a fabulous wealth of sounds and ideas that rivals the sixties as a golden age for music.