The Canonization of Post-Punk
Over at Prefix, I have a feature on the rise of post-punk as a full on cultural force, not simply a realm for the cool kids anymore. Here are some choice passages:
In the first half of the decade, bands such as Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, and the Killers stormed onto the music scene and gained massive popularity. Those who were too young to have heard of Joy Division, Gang of Four, Wire, and Echo and the Bunnymen discovered them through contemporary bands, and slowly started to realize that much of the music of post-punk revivalists bordered on outright plagiarism. It's no coincidence that while the recognition of the original post-punk bands has skyrocketed over the last five years, the revivalists themselves have failed on subsequent releases to maintain the influence they acquired with their initial breakthroughs.
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In fact, that divide speaks to the key development of the approach to post-punk this decade. Post-punk bands have always had their fans, and their influence has done nothing but increase since their formation. What separates the current view is the appreciation of people who weren't even alive when post-punk was still a relatively new movement. For them, post-punk is no different than the French Revolution or the fall of the Roman Empire, a historical era that we can fully appreciate while having no connection to it as a contemporaneous movement.
The full article can be found here. Thoughts?
Comments (7)
I'll read it and get back to you.
I would get David Allen's input for sure. He's around here somewhere...
Great article. The question it puts in my mind is why are these post punk bands able to re-unite and maintain the appeal so much better than some of the older rock bands? How come their music still seems so relevant? How come so many reunions of older bands are more disapointing?
I'm always happy to see post-punk getting any attention. However, the piece gives me the urge to bust out the dreaded green pen (the instrument of death my Pulitzer-owning Journalism prof used to decimate my articles). First of all, what's your source that argues Joy Division to be "considered the first" post-punk band? That's a new one to me.
You are also unclear about what exactly are the conflicting definitions of post-punk. I know that the books by Reynolds and Azzerad don't conflict, but rather address different things, with some overlap with The Minutemen and Mission Of Burma. I highly recommend you read Rip It Up And Start Again (here's my original review), especially the UK version, which includes lots of stuff left out by the U.S. version. It's a pretty colossal and definitive work, and his idea of post-punk is not very contentious. The biggest subjective point he delivers early on, that the 1979-84 era had "a fabulous wealth of sounds and ideas that rivals the sixties as a golden age for music." While I agree, many would certainly argue about that.
Lastly, who exactly are the "post-punk revivalist" bands that failed to "maintain their influence" and why? Perhaps the scope of who you were looking at was too limited. Some bands that I think picked up on the spirit of post-punk even before the perceived post-2001 revival are Life Without Buildings, !!!, The Fire Show, Milemarker, The Faint, The Ex-Models, Erase Errata, Add (N) To X, Six Finger Satellite, Brainiac, Sick Bees, The In Out, Lung Leg, Yummy Fur and Blurt Auburnaires, among many others. Did they all fail? Hellz no. They all succeeded to varying degrees. Since then you've had the likes of Electrelane, Fennesz, The Eternals, Spektrum, Polysics, Animal Collective, 90 Day Men, Bloc Party, Editors, Field Music, LCD Soundsystem, The Books, Colder, Art Brut, Epoxies, CSS, Pit Er Pat, White Rabbits, Mothers and the Addicts, Good Shoes, Parts & Labor, Strategy, the influence never stops.
I'm not sure what he's trying to say here. I'm all for people talking about post-punk. I figured out all of the ones he drops names on in the article when I was a teenager and people are doing it all over again. It's a cycle. It's the bands that aren't as well known that I'm finding more and more about in the last 7 years with all of this revival. I wasn't clear on the "maintain their influence" portion either. I think fastnbulbous hit the hail on the ned there. There's a ton of bands that flourished and are still kicking it. Personally I think there should be more movies. Do I need to wait until Sonic Youth is dead to see a movie? I don't know if DIY is necessarily the connector that you can draw a string with to these bands. Maybe there are a lot of bands that have a DIY ethic but when it comes down to it if your not a part of a major label just about any genre is employing some amount of Do It Yourself. There's a lot of 3rd and 4th world country musicians that can't help but be DIY but I wouldn't necessarily call them punk or post-punk. Also, is he saying that Daniel Johnston is 90's? Am I missing something there? I suppose Half-Japanese is 90's too. Whatever. He says that no one can explain what is so essential about post-punk and I want to know can anyone do that about other genres? Jazz people get all up in arms when they try to pin point it. Blues people do too. So do classical musicians. I say more movies, more people talking about it, more re-releases of out of print albums by obscure bands, and more books written. People have been talking about these bands ever since they started and they'll probably keep on talking as long as some group of people enjoy it.
Oh and I'm a complete douchebag because I just realized that you wrote this TynansAnger. This really had me in a tizzy. For one I think maybe because of the internet it's becoming easier for Post-Punk to become more ubiquitous. I had to search high and low through zines (like Factsheet 5 and others) in the early 90's to hear about these bands. A lot of people I knew were into the local punk of that time and other bands like Scratch Acid and neo-psychedelia like Legendary Pink Dots. My wife and her friends were all up on Joy Division and Echo and The Bunnymen in the 80's but that's because they were all original goth and those bands lent themselves more to that. They didn't have to learn about them way after the fact and even for a college town in Arkansas these bands were getting play. I still think Wire is pretty overlooked even though they're not as talked about these days as the others. As far as the movies go I still like to see the old footage and interviews with the people. Charley Rogulewski today posted an old lost Beatles interview and one part of me says, "who cares! Haven't we heard enough of the Beatles" but the other side of me says, "That's cool!" because it adds more to the story of what they are all about. I don't necessarily feel like we're being overly inundated with all of this old post-punk music. I think it's just the cycle for the era. Right now there's a flood of reissues of old school hip-hop and rap from late 70's early 80's that was very influential that we would've never heard before if there wasn't a newfound interest. Books and movies and albums and all sorts are bringing together hip hop no one has heard of before. Even Alternative Tentacles has reintroduced people to Blow Fly and I don't think that's such a bad idea. It's like Mog posts. You can't read all of them and occasionally you'll pick up on one that probably 10 other people have written about. Even though you missed it it's the one someone was talking about that struck, but if only one person wrote something about it you probably would never hear about it. Anyway that's my two cents. I'm feeling rambly today and sorry if I'm taking such an aggressive tone. I think it's the heat.
Guess I shoulda got here sooner before so many good comments were already made. I think the article starts to make a real important point and pulls back from it - post-punk is to some degree a misnomer, as the whole punk movement encompassed a far wider span than it's often given credit for, but the point I'm about to make it may well contradict itself - the term punk had been simplified by the media to mean a far narrower form of new music than it started with. Blondie was a punk band according to many members of the media. Maybe because punk started as more "anti-the current scene" than as a particular style.
So when "post-punk" came along, there were bands that were contemporaries of the punks (Pere Ubu comes to mind) that would easily fit into the new category. Is it 'Rip It Up And Start Again' that talks about the bands that made the bass a lead instrument? That's the sort of thing that can bring a group of bands together as a genre, and I find it really easy to put Gang of Four and the Minutemen into a really broad category together; I also find it easy to drop that part of the definition and include Wire, a band that otherwise might not retain the same categorization from one album to the next.
I generally prefer cannons to canons, but any reason to celebrate great music of the past is alright by me. And it seems to be the nature of things that the bands that get most popular have toned down the rougher edges of whatever good bands they've listened to. I know there was a lot of talk of DIY in the late-seventies into the eighties, but I really don't remember there being anywhere near as many bands around then as there are now. This may be due to the fact that it's a helluva lot easier to get an mp3 heard than it ever was to get a record out, but when someone like fastnbulbous (whose recommendations I take seriously) drops a list like the one above and I recognize almost none of the bands, it's just another reminder that the ease of releasing music has increased the difficulty of hearing a decent percentage of what gets released. And I don't have the time or energy now that I had when I was 19 to listen to one crappy new record after another just to find that occasional prize.
So here I am glad to be somewhere where people give a shit about this sort of thing, and now I have a new batch of bands to learn about, and fortunately I can still get excited about that. So it doesn't surprise that these young folk today get excited about old bands that deserve it; hell, I'm pretty damn happy with the John Mayall album I just got today (that one would be pre-punk).
I see this has inspired a lot of intense thinking and I'm glad it did. I'd just like to remind everyone that the fact that I came at it as a 22-year-old whose tastes predominantly lie somewhere around 1983 was a big part of the article. I wrote this knowing that there was still a sizable audience who had lived through the era (which I did not) and those who more actively appreciate contemporary incarnations (which I do not). I also realized that no one can agree on what exactly constitutes post-punk, but tried to make some assessments using an extremely loose and admittedly inconsistent use of the term.
Too tired to address each commenter now. I will do so in the morning with more sleep and caffeine.