Rip It Up and Start Again (2 page)

BY THE SUMMER OF 1977,
punk had become a parody of itself. Many of the movement’s original participants felt that something open-ended and full of possibilities had degenerated into a commercial formula. Worse, it had proved a rejuvenating shot in the arm to the established record industry that punks had hoped to overthrow.

It was at this point that the fragile unity that punk had forged between working-class kids and arty middle-class bohemians began to fracture. On one side were the populist “real punks” (later to evolve into the Oi! and hardcore movements) who believed that the music needed to stay accessible and unpretentious, to continue to fill its role as the angry voice of the streets. On the other side was the vanguard that came to be known as postpunk, who saw 1977 not as a return to raw rock ’n’ roll but as a chance to make a break with tradition.

The postpunk vanguard—bands such as PiL, Joy Division, Talking Heads, Throbbing Gristle, Contortions, and Scritti Politti—defined punk as an imperative to constant change. They dedicated themselves to fulfilling punk’s uncompleted musical revolution, exploring new possibilities by embracing electronics, noise, jazz and the classical avant-garde, and the production techniques of dub reggae and disco.

Some accused these experimentalists of merely lapsing back into the art rock elitism that punk originally aimed to destroy. Certainly, it’s true that a high proportion of postpunk musicians had art school backgrounds. The No Wave scene in New York, for instance, was virtually wall-to-wall painters, filmmakers, poets, and performance artists. Gang of Four, Cabaret Voltaire, Wire, and the Raincoats are just a handful of the U.K. bands that were started by fine-art or design graduates. Especially in Britain, art schools have long functioned as a state-subsidized bohemia, where working-class youths too unruly for a life of labor mingle with slumming bourgeois kids too wayward for a middle-management career. After graduation, many turn to pop music as a way to sustain the experimental lifestyle they’d enjoyed at art college while maybe, just maybe, making a living.

Of course, not everyone in postpunk attended art school, or even college. Self-educated in a scattered, omnivorous fashion, figures like John Lydon or Mark E. Smith of the Fall fit the syndrome of the anti-intellectual intellectual, ravenously well read but scornful of academia and suspicious of art in its institutionalized forms. But really, what could be more arty than wanting to destroy art, to smash the boundaries that keep it sealed off from everyday life?

Those postpunk years from 1978 to 1984 saw the systematic ransacking of twentieth-century modernist art and literature. The entire postpunk period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music. Cabaret Voltaire borrowed their name from Dada. Pere Ubu took theirs from Alfred Jarry. Talking Heads turned a Hugo Ball sound poem into a tribal-disco dance track. Gang of Four, inspired by Brecht and Godard’s alienation effects, tried to deconstruct rock even as they rocked hard. Lyricists absorbed the radical science fiction of William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick, and techniques of collage and cut-up were transplanted into the music. Duchamp, mediated by 1960s Fluxus, was the patron saint of No Wave. The record cover artwork of the period matched the neomodernist aspirations of the words and music, with graphic designers like Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville and labels like Factory and Fast Product drawing from constructivism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, John Heartfield, and Die Neue Typographie. This frenzied looting of the archives of modernism culminated with the founding of renegade pop label ZTT—short for Zang Tuum Tumb, a snatch of Italian futurist prose-poetry—and their conceptual group the Art of Noise, named in homage to Luigi Russolo’s manifesto for a futurist music.

Taking the word “modernist” in a less specific sense, the postpunk bands were firmly committed to the idea of making modern music. They were totally confident that there were still places to go with rock, a whole new future to invent. For the postpunk vanguard, punk had failed because it attempted to overthrow rock’s status quo using conventional music (fifties rock ’n’ roll, garage punk, mod) that actually
predated
dinosaur megabands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. The postpunks set forth with the belief that “radical content demands radical form.”

One curious by-product of this conviction that rock ’n’ roll had outlived its usefulness was the mountainous abuse heaped on Chuck Berry. A key source for punk rock via the guitar playing of Johnny Thunders and Steve Jones, Berry became a negative touchstone, endlessly name-checked as a must to avoid. Perhaps the first example of Berry-phobia occurs as early as the Sex Pistols demos exhumed on
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle
. The band begins jamming on “Johnny B. Goode.” Johnny Rotten—the group’s closet aesthete, who’d go on to form the archetypal postpunk outfit Public Image Ltd—halfheartedly jabbers the tune and then groans, “Oh fuck, it’s
awful
. Stop it, I fucking hate it.
Aaarrrgh.”
Rotten’s howl of disgusted exhaustion—he sounds like he’s choking, suffocated by the staleness of the sound—was echoed by scores of postpunk groups. Cabaret Voltaire, for instance, complained that “rock ’n’ roll is not about regurgitating Chuck Berry riffs.”

Rather than rama-lama riffing or bluesy chords, the postpunk pantheon of guitar innovators favored angularity, a clean and brittle spikiness. They shunned solos, apart from brief bursts of lead integrated with more rhythm-oriented playing. Instead of a “fat” sound, players like Talking Heads’ David Byrne, the Fall’s Martin Bramah, and the Slits’ Viv Albertine preferred a “skinny” rhythm guitar style often inspired by reggae or funk. This more compact, scrawny style of guitar playing didn’t fill up every corner of the soundscape, and this allowed the bass to step forward from its usually inconspicuous, supportive role to become the lead instrumental voice, fulfilling a melodic function even as it pushed the groove. In this respect, postpunk bassists were playing catch-up with the innovations of Sly Stone and James Brown, and learning from contemporary roots reggae and dub. Pursuing a militant and aggressively monolithic sound, punk had mostly purged “blackness” from rock, severing the music’s links to R&B while simultaneously rejecting disco as escapist and vapid. By 1978, though, the concept of a dangerous dance music began to circulate in postpunk circles, expressed in terms like “perverted disco” and “avant-funk.”

Along with dance music’s sensuality and swing, punk had also rejected all those compound genres (jazz rock, country rock, folk rock, classical rock, etc.) that proliferated in the early seventies. To punks, this sort of thing smacked of virtuoso showing off, meandering jam sessions, and pious hippie platitudes like “it’s all music, man.” Defining itself against this limp, all-gates-open eclecticism, punk proposed a strident purism. In the late seventies, while “fusion” remained a discredited notion, postpunk ushered in a new phase of looking outside rock’s narrow parameters, to black America and Jamaica, obviously, but also to Africa and other zones of what would later be called world music.

Postpunk also rebuilt bridges with rock’s own past, vast swathes of which had been placed off-limits when punk declared 1976 to be Year Zero. Punk installed a myth that still persists to this day in some quarters, that the prepunk early seventies were a musical wasteland. In actuality, that period was one of the richest and most diverse in rock history. The postpunk groups, tentatively at first (after all, no one wanted to be accused of being a hippie or a progressive rocker in disguise), rediscovered those riches, drawing inspiration from the arty end of glam rock that included David Bowie and Roxy Music, from out-rock eccentrics such as Captain Beefheart, and in some cases the more acute end of prog such as Soft Machine, King Crimson, and even Frank Zappa. In a sense, postpunk
was
progressive rock, but drastically streamlined and reinvigorated, and with a more austere sensibility (no ostentatious virtuosity), not to mention much better haircuts.

The truth is that some of the defining postpunk groups—Devo, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, This Heat—were actually prepunk entities that existed in some form or another for several years before the Ramones’ 1976 debut album. When punk arrived, it threw the record industry into confusion, making the major labels vulnerable to suggestion and fluxing up all the aesthetic rules so that anything abnormal or extreme suddenly had a chance. Through this breach in the wall of business as usual all sorts of obscure freaks broke through and grabbed at opportunities for a bigger audience.

But it was a particular kind of “art rock” that postpunk pledged allegiance to, not prog’s attempt to merge amplified electric guitars with nineteenth-century classical instrumentation and extended compositions, but the minimal-is-maximal lineage that runs from the Velvet Underground through Krautrock and the more intellectual Bowie/Roxy end of glam. For a certain breed of hipster, the music that sustained them through the “wasteland” of the seventies was made by a cluster of kindred spirits—Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Brian Eno—who were united by their descent from or debt to the Velvet Underground, and who collaborated with one another throughout this period in various combinations.

David Bowie in particular had associations with almost all of these people at various points, through either producing their records or otherwise collaborating. He was the connector, rock’s greatest dilettante, forever chasing the next edge, always moving on. More than anyone else, it was Bowie who was the touchstone inspiration for postpunk’s ethos of perpetual change. Nineteen seventy-seven might have been the year of the Clash’s debut and the Pistols’
Never Mind the Bollocks,
but the truth is that postpunk music was far more deeply affected by four Bowie-related albums released that year, his own
Low
and
Heroes,
and Iggy Pop’s
The Idiot
and
Lust for Life,
both of which Bowie produced. Recorded in West Berlin, this astonishing series of LPs hugely impacted listeners who already suspected that punk rock was turning out to be just more of the same old same old. The Bowie and Iggy albums signaled a shift away from America and rock ’n’ roll toward Europe and a cool, controlled sound modeled on the Teutonic “motorik” rhythms of Kraftwerk and Neu!—a sound in which synthesizers played as much of a role as guitars. In interviews, Bowie talked of his move to Berlin as an attempt to extricate himself from America, both musically (in terms of the soul and funk that informed
Young Americans
) and spiritually (an escape from the rock ’n’ roll decadence of Los Angeles). Informed by this willed feat of dislocation and self-alienation,
Low
lived up to the album’s original working title,
New Music Night and Day,
particularly on its astonishing second side, a suite of twilight-gloomy instrumental atmospheres and yearning wordless plainsong.
Low,
said Bowie, was a response to “seeing the East Bloc, how Berlin survives in the midst of it, which was something that I couldn’t express in words. Rather it required
textures
.” Which is why he leaned on Brian Eno, the supreme texturologist, as his mentor and right-hand man during the making of
Low
and
Heroes
. Already influential because of his synth noise in Roxy Music and his proto–New Wave solo albums, Eno, after Bowie’s Berlin albums, became one of the defining producers of the era, documenting the New York No Wave scene and working with Devo, Talking Heads, and U2. “Some bands went to art school,” quipped U2 singer Bono. “We went to Brian Eno.”

Bowie and Eno’s new Europeanism chimed with the postpunk feeling that America—or at least
white
America—was politically and musically reactionary. When it came to contemporary inspiration, postpunk looked to places other than the rock ’n’ roll heartland, among them urban black America, Jamaica, and Europe. For many of the postpunk persuasion, 1977’s most significant singles weren’t “White Riot” or “God Save the Queen,” but “Trans-Europe Express,” a metronomic, metal-on-metal threnody for the industrial era by the German band Kraftwerk, and Donna Summer’s Eurodisco smash “I Feel Love,” made almost entirely from synthetic sounds by producer Giorgio Moroder, an Italian based in Munich. Moroder’s electronic disco and Kraftwerk’s serene synthpop conjured glistening visions of the Neu Europa—modern, forward-looking, and pristinely postrock in the sense of having virtually no debts to American music.

Along with radicalizing rock form with doses of black rhythm and European electronics, postpunk artists were equally committed to radicalizing the content of the musical equation. Punk’s approach to politics—raw rage or agitprop protest—seemed too blunt or too preachy to the postpunk vanguard, and they tried to develop more sophisticated and oblique techniques. Gang of Four and Scritti Politti abandoned tell-it-like-it-is denunciation for lyrics that exposed and dramatized the mechanisms of power in everyday life. “Question everything” was the catchphrase of the day. These bands demonstrated that “the personal is political” by dissecting consumerism, sexual relationships, commonsense notions of what’s natural or obvious, and the ways in which what feel like spontaneous, innermost feelings are actually scripted by larger forces. At the same time, the most acute of these groups captured the way that the political is personal, illustrating the processes by which current events and the actions of government invade everyday life and haunt each individual’s private dreams and nightmares.

When it came to politics in the commonly understood sense—the world of demonstrations, grassroots activism, and organized struggle—postpunk bands were more ambivalent. As bohemian nonconformists, they were usually made uncomfortable by calls to solidarity or toeing the party line. They saw the plainspoken demagoguery of overtly politicized musicians of the era (such as Crass and Tom Robinson) as far too literal and unaesthetic, and found their soapbox sermonizing both condescending to the listener and, most of the time, a pointless exercise in “preaching to the converted.” So while many British postpunk groups participated in the Rock Against Racism tours and festivals of the era, they remained wary of RAR and its sister organization, the Anti Nazi League, suspecting them of being fronts for the militant left-wing Socialist Workers Party, who valued music purely as an instrument for radicalizing and mobilizing youth. At the same time, postpunk inherited punk’s dreams of resuscitating rock music as a force to change, if not the world, then the consciousness of individual listeners. But rather than the music serving as a mere neutral platform for agitprop, this radicalism was manifested equally in both words and sound. Furthermore, the subversive potential of the lyrics resided as much in their formal
aesthetic
properties (how innovative they were on the level of language or narrative) as in the message or critique they delivered.