The worst thing about the exchange on postpunk music going on over at Slate is that it’s just so dang short. I definitely want to read Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up, a history of that period in rock that was largely underground in the States. Respondent Stephen Metcalf sums up the book’s argument about the utopian strain of the movement:
The sound was self-consciously new; the attitude, meanwhile, was very anti-hippie, anti-’60s, anti-peace and love (as punk had been), but also anti-’70s druggy malaise. So, what was it? You nail it precisely: "The entire postpunk period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music." Bands borrowed attitudes and words and gestures from absurdism, dada, Brecht, Bauhaus, and Duchamp. But before the reader gets too put off and concludes postpunk was simply the maunderings of overwrought teens, let’s recall that postpunk had two faces. It was, on the one hand, a catalog of all the outrÃ(c) stances of the 20th-century avant-garde. But having cast off the self-serious ’60s, it could also be blissfully fun.
That’s the paradox of course, a musical form based on stripping down popular music to minimal, discordant elements, yet capable as functioning as popular music all the same. Reynolds offer his canon of postpunk songs; mine would avoid the New Romantic, sophistipop direction of postpunk. I won’t bore everyone with more listmaking, other than to say that Pylon and Wire deserve a prominent space in any postpunk canon. The remarkable thing is that even though the period is long over, and was finite in period and scope, I keep discovering fantastic bands, even obscure ones like the Nightingales, Lines or the Scars, who contributed excellent singles.
Along these lines, I’ve been meaning to mention an excellent MP3 blog los amigos de durutti, whose postpunk-loving author contributes music reviews to Bostonist. See, for instance, his post on the Delta 5. One of these days soon I’ll have to update the ol’ blogroll.
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