What is post-punk? : genre and identity in avant-garde popular music, 1977-82

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What Is Post-­P unk?

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What Is Post-­Punk? Genre and Identity in Avant-­Garde Popular Music, 1977–­82

Mimi Haddon

University of Michigan Press  •  Ann Arbor

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Copyright © 2020 by Mimi Haddon All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-­free paper First published February 2020 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-­0-­472-­13182-­2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-­0-­472-­12655-­2 (ebook)

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Dedication For Mum and Linus

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Acknowledgments

This book started life as my doctoral thesis, as a way, perhaps, to stay connected to my northern British roots during the six years that I lived in Montreal, Canada and studied at McGill University. It was during the long winters in that city that I watched and rewatched British television programs such as The Young Ones, Bottom, and Shameless in an attempt to capture the feeling of a motherland that I missed but about which I often felt ambivalent. I recall it was my advisor David Brackett who encouraged me to pursue post-­punk since he sensed, maybe, my personal investment in its occasionally melancholy aesthetics. His unwavering belief in my intellectual abilities is really the foundation of this project, so thanks first of all to David Brackett. I would also like to thank other members of the faculty at the Schulich School of Music and its affiliates for providing the theoretical scaffolding for much of this book, particularly Lisa Barg, Georgina Born, Bernard Gendron, Steven Huebner, Will Straw, and Chip Whitesell. In addition to the McGill faculty who helped me during those formative years, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues from that time, with whom I shared many of this book’s early ideas—­specifically Mel Backstrom, Leah Batstone, Di Belzil, Vanessa Blais-­ Tremblay, Dana Gorzelany-­ Mostak, Daniel Grigsby, Alix Haywood, Jessica Allison Holmes, Sean Lorre, Rory McCluckie, Eric Smialek, Harry Thorrington, and especially Farley Miller for his patience and belief in this particular project. Special thanks to Mary Francis at the University of Michigan Press for steering me along with this, my first book; to Susan Cronin for her help with the practical matters; and to my anonymous reviewers for their very detailed feedback, which was incredibly helpful when I was revising the manuscript. For kindly granting me permission to reprint the Raincoats’

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viii  Acknowledgments

music I would like to thank Shirley Collins, manager of the Raincoats; Janette Beckman for the cover image, Russ Greeno; Mark Pringle at Rock’s Backpages; Graham Andrews; Pete Frame; and Kris Needs for helping me secure the rights for the ZigZag images. On returning home to the UK from Montreal in July 2015 I was fortunate enough to connect with David Hesmondhalgh, whom I would like to thank for his kindness while I was between jobs. In my current role at the University of Sussex, I’m lucky to have such friendly colleagues in the Department of Music as Dylan Beattie, Danny Bright, Martin Butler, Alice Eldridge, Evelyn Ficarra, Ed Hughes, Chris Kiefer, Thor Magnusson, Nick Till, and Joe Watson. Thanks especially to Ed and Joe for checking the transcriptions, and to Joe for his comments on chapter 5. In addition to my music department colleagues, I’d like to thank my Brighton family for so warmly adopting me when I was new to the city, so thank you Gavin Butt, Seb Franklin, Bramble Kane, Daniel Kane, Eleftheria Lekakis, Jenny Lund, J. D. Rhodes, Arabella Stanger for her comments on chapter 3, and Michael Lawrence for showing up at the right time. Thanks also to my friends Katy “Wedding” Bull, Amy Dickinson, Tim Dickinson, T. J. Gerlach, Jessica Holland, Matilda James, and Emma Weatherill for their continued support, and thanks especially to Jessica Lehmann for her sofa and for proving the strength of friendship after years of unintended estrangement. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their curiosity, their humor, their resilience, and their constant questioning of the status quo. Those qualities are, I hope, at the heart of this project. Thank you to Grandpa and Pat, Omi, Kate and Phil, Jayne, Mike, Mark, Nazanin, Paul, Stanley, Babak, and the original Mexborough crew, Mum and Linus, to whom this book is dedicated.

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Contents

Introduction  

1

1. Dividing the New Wave: Emergence, Genealogy, and Signification 

21

2. Dub Is the New Black and the Post-­Colonial Politics of Sonic Space 

56

3. Post-­Punk or Death Disco? Dance, Rhythm, and White Masculinity 

78

4. Post-­Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism 

100

5. Between Flesh and Machines: “Modern” Music and the “Industrial” Sound of Post-­Punk’s Regional Cities 

132

Epilogue: The “Post” in Post-­Punk 

159

Notes 

167

Bibliography 

199

Index 

217

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9824609

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Introduction

In episode five , series one of the British sit-­com The Young Ones, first aired on December 7, 1982, the four students of Scumbag College throw a party. In preparation, Neil the hippy has made a henna dip, Vyvyan has vacuumed the floors and made the punch, Rick the anarchist manqué has apparently spent hours cleaning the house, and Mike “the cool person” has appropriately done nothing. Running throughout the episode’s characteristic jumble of slapstick violence, puppetry, and self-­consciously low-­quality gags are an abundance of musical references, each attached to the distinctive identities of the four main characters and their party invitees, producing a snapshot of post-­1960s British popular music culture. The sleazy sociology professor, who arrives as Rick’s only guest and makes himself comfortable among the party’s female contingent, shares the same name as the “king of orgasmic rock,” Jim Morrison. Neil gets high and his hallucinogenic trip to outer space prompts a reference to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Mike is dressed in the style of Adam and the Ants, and Vyvyan wears studs, bovver boots, and what appears to be a T-­shirt of the South Yorkshire heavy-­metal band Saxon. His metal friends drink heavily and speak with Birmingham and Scottish accents, aligning the metal genre with an implicitly working class, hard-­living male demographic. Rick, who likes to think of himself as the most on-­trend of all the characters, introduces two instances of diegetic music that are contemporary with the series: he plays a Human League record, which is promptly smashed to pieces by the “pigs,” and the band Rip Rig + Panic perform live in the house.1 This episode of The Young Ones captures two of the intersecting challenges with which this book is concerned. First, the episode shows the way categories of popular music are related to categories of people, as

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2  what is post-punk?

illustrated by the series writers’ decision to use musical references to bring the characters to life. Second, the music in the episode illustrates the stylistic diversity of a category of popular music that has come to be known as post-­punk. Regarding the first challenge, connections between genres of music and categories of social identification hinge in part on the identities and social positions of the musicians themselves, particularly the way individual musicians participate in larger social formations such as those of race and gender. Categories of musical genre also refract and produce the identities of the differentiated audiences that cohere or constellate around certain genres of music as well as individual artefacts, such as songs or albums. As David Brackett notes, popular music’s genre labels “denote social identity” more than those in classical music. He adds, “genres indicate a tacit and contingent collective agreement about the ‘proper’ place for different types of music and the social groups associated with them.”2 Concerning the second challenge, that of post-­punk as a stylistically diverse, retroactive grouping that describes nonmainstream, Anglo-­ American popular music from the late 1970s and to the early 1980s,3 the two musical examples in the episode—­the Human League’s “The Things that Dreams are Made Of” (1981) and Rip Rig + Panic’s “You’re My Kind of Climate” (1982)—­are quite different. At one end is the Human League song, an electropop dance number characterized by multiple synthesizer lines, cyborg-­style vocals, and a synthesized drumbeat. At the other end is Rip Rig + Panic’s performance, which represents musical and social eclecticism and the kind of borrowing from black-­associated genres that in some ways also characterizes post-­punk.4 Indeed, in the scene from The Young Ones, the trouserless tenor saxophone player wears an African-­looking mask, perhaps alluding to the so-­called “tribal” aesthetic associated with affiliated post-­punk groups like the Pop Group,5 presaging the early-­1980s vogue for so-­called World Music. Thus, as these two songs illustrate, post-­punk’s stylistic diversity makes defining the genre according to musical characteristics alone almost impossible. In fact, this problem of stylistic diversity was the kernel for this book: if post-­punk has no consistent sonic characteristics, is it still a genre? In light of this inconsistency in terms of musical style, then, and the importance of a genre’s social connotations, this book is a study of the historical usage of post-­punk and its gradual stabilization as a genre label. But it is as much about asking who or what is not post-­punk as it is about positively identifying post-­punk’s characteristics. Taking post-­punk as a case study, I consider musical genre to have a mirage-­like quality.

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Introduction  3

On the one hand, post-­punk is a communicable and identifiable entity; it is possible to say that one enjoys post-­punk but doesn’t care for punk and have that statement mean something. But on the other hand, the closer one gets to the historical context in which post-­punk was situated, the more a clear definition of the genre becomes elusive. The communicable aspect of genre seems thus to rely on the momentary suspension of the complexities—­or Foucauldian “dispersions”—­of nondiachronic history, a smoothing over of historical contradictions in order for a clear narrative to emerge.6 In this introductory chapter I outline and problematize some of the main ways post-­punk has been defined to date. I then discuss the particular approaches to the theorization of both identity in music and genre that I employ throughout this book to tackle the post-­punk challenge. In the third section I set out my main claims and objectives, emphasizing the notion of genre-­as-­discourse in particular. I close with summaries of the chapters.

Defining Post-­Punk The term “post-­ punk” is now widely accepted among scholars and journalists as a category of popular music, and it is possible to identify some of its defining characteristics from the available literature. Simon Reynolds’s book, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-­Punk 1978–­1984, published first in the UK in 2005, has become a central and influential text on the topic. Reynolds presents the genre as stylistically diverse yet stresses its cohesion as a musical movement driven by radicalism and stylistic eclecticism.7 The writers Mark Fisher and Dave Laing similarly claim post-­punk as a quasimodernist genre motivated by experimentation and an inclination toward the new.8 More recently, the sociologist Nick Crossley has made claims on behalf of post-­punk’s simultaneous heterogeneity and coherence, but he roots the category’s origins more firmly in social networks of primarily British musicians. Like Reynolds and others, Crossley characterizes post-­punk as more experimental than punk, in some ways a response to the mainstreaming of punk, and he credits the British journalist Paul Morley with coining and popularizing the term itself.9 Most scholars and journalists also agree on post-­punk’s periodization; Gavin Butt suggests that “post-­punk is normally characterized as existing from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s, usually from 1978, which is the year that the Sex Pistols split up, to 1984 or 1985.”10 In addition to post-­punk’s time frame, its social networks, and a

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4  what is post-punk?

prevailing sense of experimentation, other writers identify further important characteristics. In his work on Joy Division and Holocaust imagery, for example, Matthew Boswell argues that post-­punk musicians turned away from the self-­consciously simplistic song-­writing style that had come to characterize punk, and turned toward the “musicianship” of rock from earlier in the 1970s.11 This shift from punk simplicity to post-­punk musicianship may coincide with or be related to what Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan consider post-­punk’s turn toward “theatricality,” a throwing off of the “authenticity” of punk and cultivating instead a “dehumanized inauthenticity.”12 The notion of “musicianship” also speaks to Goddard and Halligan’s suggestion that to be post-­punk meant to hang up one’s leather jackets and bin the safety pins, “music as lifestyle option replaced by music as a critical, philosophical engagement with the world around.”13 From these accounts it is therefore possible to identify some important aspects of post-­punk. To summarize, the current discourse includes the following threads: post-­punk is coherent as a movement or genre but is nevertheless stylistically diverse and hybrid. The music is oriented toward the radical, the new, and the experimental. It is not as mainstream as punk. The movement began in about 1978 and came to an end in 1985. And the genre displayed more “musicianship” than punk, and assumed a kind of “mature theatricality.” In addition to these tendencies, we might also think of post-­punk in terms of its sonic characteristics. Some core characteristics include dour (male) vocals with erudite or self-­conscious lyrics, accompanied by metallic-­sounding, distorted electric guitars playing texturally, not melodically; an accelerated disco beat or dance groove; a melodic bass line; and echoing sound effects borrowed from dub-­reggae.14 Groups such as Gang of Four, Joy Division, PiL, and A Certain Ratio exemplify this style. In fact, more-­contemporary groups such as the Futureheads, Interpol, or Bloc Party are categorized as post-­punk (or post-­punk revival), presumably with reference to these sonic characteristics. However, while these tendencies and characteristics may serve as positive identifiers, most of them present a number of problems. Regarding the musical characteristics, not all post-­punk bands reflect the musical ideas listed above. Indeed, as Brackett notes, “no listing of semantic or stylistic content can account for all texts that might be branded by a particular label.”15 Furthermore, several post-­punk bands predate the 1978 watershed, and the notion that post-­punk was more diverse or sophisticated than punk depends on a narrowing of the definition of punk,

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Introduction  5

and doesn’t account for or sufficiently problematize the multifariousness that characterized punk from the beginning. Looking more closely, we might also ask, are there particular “rules” that govern post-­punk’s stylistic hybridity? What lies behind word such as “radical” and “experimental? And crucially, what of social identity? These problems or issues emerge particularly as we start to feel around post-­punk’s borders. For example, a number of groups from the late 1970s display some post-­punk characteristics but do not qualify as post-­punk according to present-­day accounts such as those proffered by Reynolds. For example, groups such as the Police and the Clash borrowed from dub-­reggae just as several post-­punk acts did, but both are absent from Reynolds’s study. This suggests several points: tacitly, that there is a “wrong” and “right” way to borrow from dub, that the rule of musical hybridity in post-­punk isn’t as straightforward as it seems, and that cultural gatekeepers manage generic borders in sophisticated ways. One way to understand the status of dub-­reggae in post-­punk is to examine these comments from the journalist Greg Whitfield looking back some thirty years later at John Lydon’s love of reggae, as illustrated by his famously eclectic Capital Radio playlist of July 1977. In praising Lydon’s reggae knowledge, Whitfield derides the Clash as “reggae fakers” via a mention of their song “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” (1977): this list is a rare insight into John Lydon’s (and PiL’s) much discussed love of reggae; and deserves to be documented. It’s hard to imagine any of the punk/reggae fakers coming up with anything like this. . . . This ain’t no white man in Hammersmith.16

So, what’s “fake” about “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais”? How does this “fakeness” affect the Clash’s status as (not) post-­punk as formulated by Reynolds and noted by writers such as Fisher, and when compared to bands such as PiL?17 Put simply, the Police and the Clash might just be too pop(ular) to be post-­punk. But there’s something else going on here. Whitfield’s dismissal of the Clash, compared to Lydon’s “rare insight,” suggests there’s a lack of sophistication in “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais.” Explicitly juxtaposing reggae with rock, as the Clash does in that song, is perhaps too explicit or inauthentic an incorporation to be considered appropriate to what in this book I describe as post-­punk’s aura of sophistication, associated with bands such as PiL and Joy Division. But who decides on the “right” way to incorporate reggae, and how

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6  what is post-punk?

does that influence questions of generic belonging or exclusion? This is largely the work of critics and the musicians themselves, but more recent work by Reynolds, Crossley, and others has been influential in defining post-­punk ex post facto. In short, what we’re dealing with here is a question of symbolic capital; post-­punk garners more critical acclaim than its closest neighbors.18 “The musical label,” writes popular music scholar Simon Frith, “acts as a condensed sociological and ideological argument.” It is a sign that signifies “what people like and why they like it.”19 Will Straw makes a similar argument with his discussion of the idea of musical scenes and communities. Straw defines the differences between alternative rock audiences and those who enjoy dance music. Rock followers cohere owing to their valorization of canons and stability (for example, the Velvet Underground serves as a recurrent touchstone for those often male “white bohemians” who have extensive record collections). For dance music audiences (notably black teenagers, urban club-­ goers, and young girls), ideas such as novelty and internationalization override the valorization of canons.20 Related to this question of borders and exclusion, current conversations don’t quite account for the complexity of the genre’s identity politics or the “collective agreement about the ‘proper’ place for different types of music” and their social groups.21 Most post-­punk groups were white (aside from some exceptions, such as drummer Donald Johnson in A Certain Ratio, and Andrea Oliver and Neneh Cherry in Rip Rig + Panic) and male. Nevertheless, compared to genres of rock that preceded it, post-­punk has a comparatively more inclusive identity politics. The accepted academic narrative, as I discuss in more detail in chapter 4, is that punk’s DIY ethos encouraged women musicians, who had previously been excluded from the male-­dominated genre of rock, to either join rock groups or start their own. The Slits, the Raincoats, Delta 5, Siouxsie Sioux, and LiLiPut are all staples of the post-­punk canon even though groups such as the Slits predate the post-­punk 1978 cutoff, and therefore might just as easily be placed in the punk canon. I suggest that the inclusion of women musicians in retrospective post-­punk accounts, as well as the genre’s incorporation of certain black-­associated musical influences such as reggae and disco, may be related to the meaning of the word “post” in post-­punk. Given that many punk, post-­punk, and new-­wave acts were coterminous, and the difference between these three genres was not especially clear at the time of the music’s emergence, it seems to me that the “post” in post-­punk means more than simply “after,” especially in terms of the categories of people with whom it is identified. It stands for “beyond” or “surpassing” the punk

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Introduction  7

genre, by both including women and opening a dialogue with other, previously maligned genres, such as disco. In other words, the “post” stands more for the privileging of marginal others who had previously been excluded by rock’s differentiation from dominant pop culture, rather than simply indicating the period after punk. This idea presents two problems, however, both of which I address in more detail at various points in the book. The first concerns how this definition of post-­punk as a more “progressive” or inclusive genre than punk depends on a narrow view of both punk (as in the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Ramones) and its neighbor new wave (as in the Stranglers, the Police, Elvis Costello), and supposes that post-­punk, punk, and new wave can be clearly differentiated. The second problem, which I address in the most detail in chapter 3, concerns the construction of a particular kind of post-­punk masculinity. In certain areas of the rock media, especially in reviews of white male groups, and in some scholarship on this period, the kind of white masculinity articulated by post-­punk is implicitly defined according to its essential difference from other categories of identity, especially blackness. There emerges thus a contradictory tension between post-­punk’s diversity and how it simultaneously forges a white masculinity. Furthermore, if the critics of the post-­punk era are as integral to a definition of the genre as its musicians, as I suggest later, the identities of these critics also problematize this image of post-­punk as more socially inclusive than previous genres of rock. Almost all of the critics associated with the post-­punk moment were male and white. In making this observation I am keen not to erase the female voices who participated as critics, such as Mary Harron and Vivien Goldman, but nevertheless find it significant that post-­punk discourse was still a product of male criticism—­not unlike in most other genres of music. Furthermore, it could be argued that post-­punk’s relative esotericism (compared to more mainstream, classic rock) means that post-­punk is and continues to be a critics’ genre. Rock connoisseurship is in many ways characterized by the knowledge and reiteration of certain musical genealogies or canons, a bohemian refusal of hegemonic commercial genres, and the mobilization of diversity as a kind of capital.22

Genre and Identity Given the problems posed by post-­punk in terms of its stylistic inconsistency, its uncertain temporal frame, its inseparability from punk, its

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8  what is post-punk?

unspoken rules, and its complex identity politics, one may ask whether it is identifiable as a genre at all. To work through the question of post-­ punk as a genre, then, I draw on a number of key theorists of music, genre, and musical scenes, and will use the following space to outline the main frameworks and ideas that I employ throughout this book. To begin, my thoughts on the relationship between music and identity derive not only from the work of Brackett, but from the four-­planed model developed by Georgina Born in her and David Hesmondhalgh’s introduction to Western Music and Its Others. Here, Born acknowledges that music is not restricted to simply reflecting its social environs or communities but is capable of both reflecting and producing identities, as well as forging modes of identification that take place between these two opposing poles. The four planes of identity formation that Born therefore describes are not mutually exclusive but can instead intersect with each other. Identification may also vary between the individual level and the group level.23 The first kind of identity formation that Born outlines is the purely imaginary mode, which she describes as “an imaginary figuration of sociocultural identities, with no intent to actualize those identities: a kind of psychic tourism.” This is the identification that one would most likely associate with musical exoticism: a group or individual may incorporate or appropriate the music of a community or individual whose otherness is not subsumed by a shared interest or point of identification. The second kind of identity formation Born presents is the prefiguring of emergent social identities that I refer to as an “emergent” identification at several points in this book. This kind of identification occurs when music contributes to the “re-­forming” of existing identities. This “emergent” mode is particularly useful when exploring issues of borrowing, influence, and appropriation between two musical scenes or genres that retain a sense of difference from one another but are nonetheless subsumed by a larger social formation. The third mode of identity in music is the homology model, when the linkages between music and identity serve to reinforce or reflect existing kinds of identity. An example of this third mode would be the kind of one-­to-­one correspondence cultivated by the music industry throughout much of the earlier twentieth century, where categories such as “black music” are thought to appeal exclusively to black listeners. The fourth and final of Born’s modes of identification is the “macrohistorical,” which describes “how musics become subject to inevitable historical reinterpretation and then reinsertion into the changing sociocultural formation—­a kind of discursive and

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Introduction  9

practical reflexivity around music.” This mode refers to the retroactive interpretation of the identities with which a particular musical culture is associated.24 It is the second mode in particular, music as emergent identification, that I mobilize most in this book, particularly in chapter 2 in my discussion of post-­punk’s relationship to dub-­reggae. However, this mode, as well as the fourth, are perhaps the most significant when considering post-­punk as a whole; these two modes—­or planes—­account for the post-­punk’s ambiguous identity politics, and the way a genre such as post-­ punk emerges through often retroactive discursive reflexivity and the gradual stabilization of post-­punk’s genre-­identity connection. Turning now to genre theory more specifically, in another illustration of the importance of the link between identity and genre, I borrow the term “constellate” from the work of film theorist Rick Altman, beginning with his observations about audiences. Altman remarks that when commentators describe watching a film they often use words such as “audience,” “one,” or “we.” But Altman asks, who constitutes the “we” thus evoked? Far from representing society at large, or American society as a whole, or even all filmgoers, this “we” stands for a different group in the case of each separate genre. Everyone knows that audiences for women’s prison films are radically different from those for folk musicals, yet standard generalizing terminology tends to hide this difference.25

Altman suggests therefore that an audience is a specific social group brought together by its love of a particular genre, even though such audience members might be demographically and geographically diffuse. The idea, then, is that of a “constellated community” and is not unlike Lawrence Grossberg’s notion of the “affective alliance.”26 To quote Altman, Isolated from each other, reduced to imaging the larger group on the basis of a few faint sightings, generic communities constitute what I call constellated communities, for like a group of stars their members cohere only through repeated acts of imagination.27

The “repeated acts of imagination” that hold constellated communities together might include, in the case of post-­punk, reading weekly or monthly music papers with contents shaped by a distinct group of voices, or attending concerts, or more recently, communing on internet

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10  what is post-punk?

forums. Altman’s “repeated acts of imagination” may refer not only to the idea of imagining oneself as part of a genre-­or constellated community, but to the kinds of alliances that hold these sometimes-­diverse social groups together. Like Altman, Straw highlights the nonhomogeneity of cinema’s audiences but argues that the “correlation between tastes and consumption patterns with categories of social identity” is an even “more explicit and resonant component of the sense music fans make of their own involvement in the culture of popular music” (my emphasis).28 I would argue, furthermore, that an audience is also held together by the positions individuals occupy in the social world. I am not suggesting that the post-­punk audience is a homogenous entity, or that the identity of an audience remains constant over time—­categorization of music changes with the introduction of new genres and the aging of others, and in the absence of concrete ethnographic data it is of course impossible to say anything definitive about the demographics of the post-­punk audience. Nevertheless, based on what we know about the genre regarding factors such as the time of its emergence, the visual evidence of images from the period, the kinds of venues in which post-­punk concerts took place, and the ways in which it has been presented (that is, as an inclusive, “radical” genre affiliated with movements such as Rock Against Racism), it is likely that post-­punk groups played for their art-­college peers and for audiences who shared similar ideological views. Delineating post-­punk’s demographic today is more difficult, however, owing to the way digital technologies have extended (post-­punk) music’s reach in such that its audiences are no doubt spread across the globe, even more than they would have been in the late 1970s. Furthermore, post-­punk musicians and their peers have aged, and new generations are no doubt post-­punk enthusiasts, spurred by texts such as Reynolds’s book and rereleases of post-­punk staples such as the 2005 rerecordings by Gang of Four titled Return the Gift and compilations such as Rhino’s Post-­Punk Chronicles. The changing audiences for a genre such as post-­ punk might therefore be understood through Straw’s idea of an artefact’s “lifecycle.” Straw notes how cultural commodities, such as records, “circulate within their appropriate markets and cultural terrains”; this circulation, Straw continues, “is organized as a lifecycle, in the course of which both the degree and basis of their appeal is likely to change.”29 During its lifecycle, then, a genre may pass through a variety of different audiences and demographics. In addition to the ways in which genre links to categories of identity,

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Introduction  11

this project is guided by the idea of genre as a process of differentiation. As Frith notes, genres such as women’s music and indie (independent) music exist in opposition to other categories and other categories’ attendant political values, such as the kinds of normative values associated with the so-­called mainstream.30 Thus, two theoretical propositions on genre as a system of differentiation inform this book. The first is Derrida’s often-­quoted passage from his 1980 essay, “The Law of Genre”: a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre, there is no genreless text; there is always genre and genres. Every text participates in one or several genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.31

Responding to Derrida, I propose that there are several “texts” (songs, albums, bands, etc.) in the post-­punk canon that participate in genres other than post-­punk, but do not belong to them. The opposite is also true. “Texts” from genres such as new wave and punk may participate in post-­punk but do not belong to post-­punk according to present-­day accounts. What, then, is the crux of Derrida’s distinction between participation and belonging? The answer seems to be located in a question of exclusivity. To “belong” to a genre implies belonging to it exclusively. But for a text to “participate” in a genre, it does not have to participate in just one. Participation is in turn something of a relative system; texts do not participate in all genres equally. This is where issues of identity and ideology complicate factors such as musical (i.e. “purely textual”) generic hybridity. One is more likely to say, for example, that post-­punk participates more in rock than in disco, even though post-­punk participates in both since its musical style draws from both genres. However, post-­punk is genealogically connected to rock, and its social identity profile, broadly speaking, fits the white male paradigm of rock. Furthermore, “participating” emphasizes the temporal, transient aspect of categorization, whereas “belonging” implies that genres are reified. Using the idea of “neighboring genres,” as elaborated by Thomas O. Beebee after Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” can further clarify the nuances differentiating participation and belonging.32 In his book The Ideology of Genre, Beebee proposes that the recognizability of a genre relies on an “anaphoric” or “deictic” process. That is to say, genres implicitly refer to the other genres that surround them, and that is how they achieve their comprehensibility; a genre is a “foregrounding against the background of its neighboring genres.”

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12  what is post-punk?

Or, to put it differently, drawing from Ferdinand de Saussure, genres can be defined negatively according to what they are not.33 I focus on understanding post-­punk’s position in relation to the other genres that surround it, then, including its closest neighbors—­punk, new wave, and industrial—­as in chapter 5. I look also at post-­punk’s more distant neighbors, disco and dub-­reggae, which might be more accurately construed as post-­punk’s “others” rather than its neighbors due to the significant black and black/queer identities associated with reggae and disco, respectively. These strategies for reading a genre with reference to the other genres that surround it cut across all facets of the musical “text” in question—­its musical, social, and ideological facets. As Frith notes, genre not only acts as a shorthand for signaling the social groups to whom a particular kind of music communicates, it indicates the kinds of significances that are important to or shared by such social groups. Furthermore, Frith proposes that genre labeling is “at the heart of pop value judgements” (emphasis mine).34 Decisions as to whether a song or group is placed in the post-­punk category, the new-­wave category, or any category for that matter, are therefore informed not only by musical-­stylistic criteria and/or the identities associated with a particular sound or group, but also by the values or politics of the critics and fans, and the values or politics assumed to be embodied by a given genre. A particularly prevalent manifestation of genre shorthand is the canon, or more latterly and in nonacademic circles in particular, the genre playlist. Canons are a good representation of the interconnection between genre as musical sound, genre as social signifier, and genre as a set of values or a shorthand for valorization. Canons are also closely involved in the process of genre formation over longer stretches of time. As collections or bodies of artists and works (in this case, songs, albums, and groups), canons act as a “spinal cord” of exemplars. Musicologists have for some time questioned the validity of constructing musical canons and musical periods. Historians have more recently favored a critical historiographical approach, that is, the writing of histories that provides a space for the simultaneity of contrasting musical events. Scholars in popular music have employed this kind of critical approach to reveal the extent to which canons of popular music have been constructed according to prevailing systems of power. For example, rock canons of the 1960s and 1970s have been criticized for their Anglo-­American male-­ centricity.35 The critique of musical canons also gives rise to examinations of how different kinds of canon interact or interrelate, such as the mainstream-­alternative dichotomy, or the boundary between heavy met-

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Introduction  13

al and punk, as in work by Steve Waksman. Critiques of musical canons likewise engage processes of legitimization that take place in the music press, and how these depend on values and interests, as demonstrated by Bernard Gendron and Keir Keightley.36 The idea that histories and objects such as canons are the products of dominant bodies of power also pervades the work of Foucault, another influential voice in this book. Foucault stressed the closeness of the relationship between knowledge and power, demonstrating how the presence or absence of particular histories depends on the prevailing interests of the dominant and those who police and define the boundaries of knowledge. His discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on the ideas of “emergence,” “descent,” and “origin” prioritizes historical contractions, accidents, and the margins of knowledge, stressing that the formation of all knowledge (including classifying systems, read: genre categories) gives rise to oppression in some form.37 By exposing the systems of power that have contributed to the construction of historical narratives, musical canons, and categories of musical genre, one can expose the holes in what, at first glance, appear to be tight, hermetic formations. Furthermore, by understanding genre as epistemology (rather than ontology) formed through discourse, as I discuss in more detail below, it becomes possible to challenge the idea that musical genres are definite entities that exist “out there,” a quasiclassical idea that recent work in the fields of music information retrieval and computerized analyses of musical genre risks affirming. The notion of genre as an apparatus of power also takes us back to the social constituencies who have historically participated in and contributed to the formation of musical genres. Those who have policed genres’ boundaries are marked by their own social positions. I am therefore invested in the idea of uncovering some of the implicit prejudices or values or politics that hold post-­punk together.

Post-­Punk as Discourse In addition to grappling with post-­punk’s mirage-­like quality and the intertwining of sound with the social, and of genre with identity, one of the main claims of this book is to suggest that post-­punk might best be understood as a field of discourse; it is a genre that makes sense as a conversation, as an expression of shared affective interests that circulated in the music press of the era. The particularity of the post-­punk “conversation” is one that musicians, audiences, critics, and scholars all contribute to, and one that—­in spite of its celebration or valorization of diversity—­

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14  what is post-punk?

tends to have been dominated by the larger social formation of predominantly male white bohemia. By bohemia, I am referring to what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “proletaroid intelligentsia”—­the journalists, the art school students, and those who value symbolic capital.38 This focus on post-­punk-­as-­discourse contributes to the fields of both genre theory and post-­punk scholarship in important ways. It might in fact be considered a counterpoint to the work of Crossley, who presents post-­punk as a series of social networks. Though he does not analyze the music press as I do here, Crossley notes its importance. “The discourses and understandings that shape meaning in a music world,” he writes, “may be generated in face-­to-­face interaction[,] but publications,” including the music press and fanzines, are crucial too.39 Further supporting my focus on discourse analysis is the idea, stemming from the writing of Mark Fisher, that the music press occupied an exceptional position in the history of popular music during the late 1970s and early 1980s owing to journalists’ engagement with ideas borrowed from theory and philosophy.40 My main sources for this book are therefore the British weekly music papers Melody Maker and the NME, which have histories dating back to the jazz era and both covered an array of musical genres; the British weekly Sounds, which began in 1970; and the British monthly ZigZag, founded at the end of the 1960s. ZigZag in particular and its editor at the time, Kris Needs, seem to have been at the forefront of promoting unusual or “avant-­garde” music.41 In addition to the British music press, I draw on US publications, particularly the Village Voice, Creem, New York Rocker, and Trouser Press. These publications are not only important when analyzing the discourse surrounding bands from the US, they give a sense of post-­punk as a transatlantic dialogue and demonstrate how the available generic terms of the era—­ such as new wave, avant-­garde, and punk—­slipped and mutated in UK-­US translation. I have focused on the music press discourse as opposed to accounts in fanzines and accounts from the musicians themselves because I am interested in, and hope to demonstrate, how press discourse shapes dominant perceptions about both categories of music and music cultures more generally. In this regard, one might argue that I’m responding to Crossley’s (after DiMaggio) employment of a “commercial classification” with regard to post-­punk—­that is, the way certain musics are grouped for commercial purposes, by labels but also by the music press.42 However, for my own part, this approach is drawn from the practice of discourse analysis and an interest in archaeologically unpacking the language used

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Introduction  15

by cultural gatekeepers. Furthermore, I have tried to be consistently critical of journalists’ essentialism and the way their own political views or tastes permeate their critiques of post-­punk bands. Nevertheless, music critics’ writing and decisions are a historical record of how categories of genre were both produced and represented. They also perform an important mediatory function. Their statements are often addressed to an audience with whom they are in dialogue. The magazines’ editors make decisions about who and what to publish based on the anticipation of the discursive boundaries their readers will accept. This is an illustration of what Brackett, after Bakhtin, refers to as “addressivity.”43 One of the crucial contributions of this work, then, is the notion that a genre of popular music is produced in part by an identifiable, nameable group of critical voices who entered the rock journalism field after rock had already been legitimized as a serious genre in the mid-­1960s. Their tastes and critical reflections represent an interest in post-­punk qua rock as a genre defined by artistic, symbolic capital, rather than a genre that garners prestige based on economic gain. As such, the journalists Jon Savage, Paul Morley, Kris Needs, Paul Rambali, Vivien Goldman, Mary Harron, Ian Penman, Charles de Walley, Andy Gill, Chris Bohn, Paul Morley, Chris Brazier, and others are as integral to an understanding of post-­punk as groups such as Public Image Ltd. (PiL), Joy Division, Gang of Four, the Raincoats, or Pere Ubu. Another important use of this journalistic discourse is to take the critics seriously, and try to hear what they heard and how they heard it. Using musical analyses and some transcriptions, I am able to describe and demonstrate—­in as precise a way as possible—­how journalistic discourse and categories of musical genre are closely related to the organization of musical sounds. With musical examples, I am able to demonstrate how other genres, such as dub and disco, were incorporated into post-­punk even when obvious generic signifiers are missing from the songs in question. To expand this central claim to post-­punk as discourse I therefore consider post-­punk as a genre held together by particular discursive themes. These themes include post-­punk music’s incorporation of musical and social others, namely black-­associated musics and women musicians; the incorporation of, or aspirations toward, fine art practices; and the post-­ modern refraction of post-­industrial sound and imagery. But rather than present these discursive themes as post-­punk’s objective criteria—­since they manifest in other genres—­I suggest that these are the themes that the late-­1970s music press drew on to make sense of post-­punk music, and as such, they can be interpreted as reflecting and sustaining the

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16  what is post-punk?

values and interests of this bohemian milieu. Post-­punk musicians’ identification with rock’s others (via reggae, disco, and women musicians), as well as their incorporation of fine art and political rhetoric, and the critical framing thereof, may be interpreted as marking post-­punk as a leftist intellectual genre, which paradoxically perpetuated one of rock music’s paradigms, that of rejuvenation through lateral borrowing. These themes are not necessarily post-­punk’s only characteristics. We might also look to queer performance art and the role of institutions for other characteristics and conditions of emergence, for example.44 Nevertheless, I examine the extent to which these themes were and were not identifiable during the time of the music’s emergence, with a view to restoring some of the tensions and complexities that characterized the period. I therefore envision genre, particularly as the concept pertains to post-­punk music of the late 1970s, not as an unencumbered, stable entity that exists “out there.” Rather, I propose treating the genre as a field of discourse in which individual musical texts and their producers shift, like the tumbling glass beads of a kaleidoscope, to form clusters that accord with the biases, interests, and social positions of intermediaries including music critics, scholars, fans, and the musicians themselves. To be clear, my focus on the discursive aspect of post-­punk is not intended to prioritize it over other ways we conceptualize musical genre. Genres or categories as social networks or as entities in which musical style plays a vital role are important ways to understand genre, too. Indeed, one of the main contributions of this book is to demonstrate the intertwinement of language and discourse with both social identity and musical sound. It might therefore be productive to think of this kind of historiography or discourse analysis in terms of levels of mediation. While writers such as Tim Lawrence have effectively demonstrated the lack of generic boundaries between genres at a “grassroots” level, as in the New York dance scene,45 I demonstrate here how boundaries do emerge in parallel with such generic fluidity, and over diachronic time. But these boundaries exist at other levels of mediation, as in the music press, in different levels of music industry discourse, and in everyday conversations among fans and musicians. Matthew Worley’s work on punk fanzines offers valuable insights into how punk differed at the fan level compared to that of the music press. Worley notes, for example, that the authors of the first issue of Sniffin’ Glue (in the summer of 1976) found the mid-­70s music weeklies “so far away from the kids” as to be without value, or, more aggressively in the ’zine Cobalt Haze, “bullshit ridden.”46 I should also note that this book is not an origin story per se,

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Introduction  17

though I do tackle the discursive emergence of post-­punk’s delineation in the first chapter. Nor is it a comprehensive tour through every post-­ punk band; there are many bands, and books already exist that cover this material. Rather, this book focuses on the idea of post-­punk as a genre that emerges and solidifies through discursive connections. This stems from my long-­standing interest in language’s ability to signify both excessively and inadequately, and relatedly, in music’s ability to signify through connotation and metaphor. Two final points about my contribution to the field of punk or post-­ punk studies are worth mentioning before I briefly address questions of methodology. First is my effort to problematize the idea of post-­punk as a “radical” and “progressive” genre and, therefore, to challenge the process according to which genres of music acquire legitimation. Second, contrary to recent attempts to canonize post-­punk as a coherent and contained genre, I claim that the construction of post-­punk as a genre unto itself has been largely retroactive; the boundaries between the different categories of punk, new wave, and post-­punk were more fluid and porous at the time than they are seen today by both writers and fans. What Is Post-­Punk? is therefore as much about post-­punk as it is about generic coherence, discourse analysis, and historiography in popular music. I draw on a variety of approaches, analyzing musical style and print media discourse, scrutinizing dates and issues of periodization, and attending to the social significations of musical gestures and how they express Born’s “social formations,” specifically those of race and gender. I conclude the book not with a definitive picture of post-­punk—­what it is and where it came from—­as though it were a stable, identifiable thing, but with an understanding of post-­punk that takes into account the properties of genre that may be considered not unlike an autostereogram: a dizzying mess of historical details that, when looked at from the correct angle, or with the “right” set of predilections, transforms into a tangible and communicable, if loosely structured, entity. The focus on the years 1977–­1982 draws in part from Reynold’s notion of the “post-­punk vanguard,”47 but it is also a practical decision. With easily accessible primary sources in the form of both print media and online resources, it is almost impossible to provide in one book the kind of detailed, focused analysis I have produced here for a longer period of time. It is my hope, therefore, that some of the frameworks I establish might be applied, tested, or contested with reference to music labeled “post-­punk” from after 1982. Another reason for the focus on these years is that it allows us to look laterally and visualize the period spatially, rather than as a

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18  what is post-punk?

succession of events. As such, I often place post-­punk within the broader field of popular music at the end of the 1970s, as opposed to seeing the punk stream (punk, new wave, post-­punk) as a closed, isolated entity.

Chapter Outline Chapter 1 deals specifically with the genealogy of the category now known as post-­punk. I juxtapose present-­day interpretations of the genre with the historical discourse. I look specifically at the development of the genre’s names from 1977 to 1979. I situate the new-­wave field in its broadest sense in the context of the popular music of the era as a whole by analyzing polls in ZigZag and Village Voice in the UK and the US, respectively. For music-­stylistic analysis, I look at the London group Wire and their album Chairs Missing (1978) as a band that straddled the categories of punk, new wave, and post-­punk. I conclude with some thoughts on the stabilization of the post-­punk sound toward 1980, and how this in turn may have signaled a shift in the generic terrain, especially from the critics’ perspective. Overall, my aim with this chapter is to elucidate how the term “post-­punk” was not in circulation at the time of this music’s emergence with anywhere near the kind of exactness with which we use it today. Rather, historical accounts of this period demonstrate the instability of different genre labels and show how fluid movement among different genres was permitted. Chapter 2 is the first of three chapters to look at post-­punk as defined according to its hybridity and social otherness, in this case in terms of its interaction with dub-­reggae. I explore the kinds of music-­stylistic ramifications that resulted from post-­punk’s musical borrowings from dub-­ reggae, and how over time this has become a stylistic marker of the difference between post-­punk and its most immediate neighbors. I examine how the connection between post-­punk’s white musicians and Britain’s Jamaican migrants (the dub-­reggae musicians) signified at a wider social and racial level. I draw specifically on Paul Gilroy, and employ Born and Hesmondhalgh’s identification typology outlined above, to illuminate the kinds of interactions that took place between the punk/post-­punk genre and the dub-­reggae genre. My aims here are (1) to suggest that the way certain musicians interacted with dub-­reggae has informed their generic position (whether punk, new wave, or post-­punk), and (2) to question the extent to which this moment of white borrowing from black music echoes other appropriative practices or whether it points to a new identificatory mode.

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Introduction  19

Chapter 3 offers another perspective on post-­punk in relation to one of its social others, turning this time to disco. Taking PiL’s song title “Death Disco” as my point of departure, I employ both discourse analysis and musical analysis to argue that post-­punk has come to signify a particular kind of white masculinity. I suggest that post-­punk whiteness gains its meaning through an implicit comparison with historically accrued assumptions about blackness, queerness, and the mainstream. I posit in this chapter that post-­punk might be considered a proto-­white-­identified dance music in which the male body functions as a site onto which critics mapped racialized significations. Chapter 4 examines the role of female musicians in the post-­punk genre. My point of departure is the general academic consensus that the punk movement opened the hitherto male-­dominated rock field to women musicians owing to its emphasis on and celebration of amateur aesthetics and nonvirtuosity. To both critique and enhance this existing narrative in relation to post-­punk (or the new-­wave field), I analyze a number of performances and changes in personnel by post-­punk groups with female members, particularly the Slits, the Raincoats, Lora Logic, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. I also compare the Slits’ and the Raincoats’ articulations of “femininity” with the music of their female contemporaries. I conclude by suggesting that the punk and post-­punk did not open the field of rock to women musicians because of their essential, gendered musical incompetence, but that the discourse of amateurism provided an important discursive space in which women musicians could resist the historical disciplining of the female body. Chapter 5 untangles the connection between post-­punk as protoindustrial music and its so-­called avant-­garde aspects. Here I juxtapose more contemporary generic divisions that separate the bands Pere Ubu, Devo, and Cabaret Voltaire into new wave, post-­punk, and industrial, correspondingly, with the historical discourse, which tended to tie all three bands together according to their origins in former industrial cities and their art-­school kudos. Like my other chapters, this close analysis elucidates the assumptions and values that lurk behind processes of categorization; I therefore question in this chapter the use of the word “modern” and how it might further mutate into a sign of legitimization that consecrates certain popular musics but excludes others. In the epilogue, rather than close with a definition of post-­punk, I suggest that the aim of this project has been to illuminate some of the criteria according to which post-­punk has been delineated. As I suggested at the beginning of this introduction, my aim is to suspend the forms

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20  what is post-punk?

of continuity that hold post-­punk together as a means of restoring “the statement to the specificity of its occurrence,” as Foucault put it.48 I thus attempt to question the constancy (or continuity) of post-­punk as an object/genre and expose the interplay of rules that have made the appearance of post-­punk possible. Critical gatekeepers carve genres out of otherwise unclear, unstable, or inchoate masses of artifacts of all kinds—­ songs, albums, articles, musicians, critics, listeners. In my final analysis, I suggest that the “post” in post-­punk might be an indicator of stylistic hybridity that emblematizes the symbolic capital that other genres of popular music, including punk, are seen to lack.

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one

| Dividing the New Wave Emergence, Genealogy, and Signification

Within just a year of its christening in 1976, punk in the UK was already rumored to be losing steam, and the London newspaper the Standard declared it officially dead in early February 1978.1 But according to the music writer Dave Laing, punk’s “spirit” lived on in a new genre known as post-­punk. For Laing, groups such as PiL, Joy Division, Gang of Four, and Siouxsie and the Banshees revived punk’s aggressive energy, its air of experimentation, and its anti-­industry ethos.2 Reynolds presents a similar narrative in his brimming post-­punk chronicle, focusing on punk’s various offshoots. In contrast to the more working-­class-­ associated genre known as Oi! (sometimes referred to as “real punk”), Reynolds argues that post-­punk (or what he calls specifically the “postpunk vanguard”) comprised those musicians who saw the punk period “not as a return to raw rock ‘n’ roll,” as other punks did, “but as a chance to break with tradition.” He suggests that the “prime years” for this tradition-­breaking “vanguard” were 1978 and 1982. Even though Reynolds’s “postpunk vanguard” includes stylistically diverse acts, he insists that these bands cohere because they all 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.3 Some material from this chapter appears in Haddon, “From ‘New Music(k) to “WHITE MUSIC”: Artiness, Wire, and the Emergence of Post-­Punk, 1977–­ 1979,” in Music and Genre: New Directions, eds. Georgina Born and David Brackett (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 21 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/24/2021 6:57 AM via UNIV OF CHICAGO AN: 2331093 ; Mimi Haddon.; What Is Post-Punk? : Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 Account: s8989984

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22  what is post-punk?

Thus, like Laing, Reynolds sees post-­punk as a continuation of punk’s unfinished business, a resuscitation of punk’s energy and revolutionary spirit, and distinct from “real punk” or Oi!. Post-­punk was a “counterculture” of musicians, Reynolds writes, who “shared a common belief that music could change the world.”4 Indeed, crucial to both Laing and Reynolds is the idea of a “revolutionary spirit,” a sense that music could “change the world.” This same vision of post-­punk’s (and punk’s) capacity for ideological critique echoes almost verbatim what Greil Marcus wrote about punk in the late 1980s.5 Reynolds, Laing, and Marcus therefore betray what we might tentatively call a “quasi-­modernist” sensibility in delineating punk and post-­punk—­that is, an allegiance to progress and a tendency to elevate only certain aspects of popular culture to the exclusion of others.6 More explicitly along these lines, Mark Fisher saw post-­punk as an example of what he called “popular modernism,” which he described as a resistance to repetition. Fisher wrote, “post-­punk was driven by a principle of difference and self-­cancellation; a constant orientation towards the new, and a hostility towards the outmoded.”7 In addition to notions of post-­punk as “revolutionary,” “radical,” or even quasi-­modernist, Reynolds suggests that post-­punk musicians revitalized punk by borrowing “new” musical “possibilities” from other, nonpunk and nonrock genres.8 Importantly, some of the genres from which post-­punk musicians drew these revitalizing or “new” elements, such as dub-­reggae and disco, were marked by social as well as musical difference. These genres also stood outside of the anticommercial ethos associated with the rock genre more broadly. In this regard, dub-­reggae and disco might be considered resources from which post-­punk musicians borrowed to sustain the punk movement, or to invigorate its “revolutionary” momentum.9 The key themes for these writers are that post-­punk not only took punk’s revolutionary spirit, it also actively cultivated an outlook toward the new by borrowing laterally from other genres and styles. Both Reynolds and Laing therefore describe post-­punk’s emergence as a result of punk splintering into three—­real punk/Oi!, new wave, and post-­punk. Another version of this splinter model appears in the work of Theo Cateforis. Echoing Reynolds’s narrative regarding punk’s offshoots Oi! and post-­punk, as well as Laing’s suggestion that post-­punk took on the mantle of punk, Cateforis proposes that punk broke off into distinct factions after it collapsed. He writes, The three main splinters that had appeared in the wake of punk’s collapse at the dawn of 1978—­new wave, new musick (or post-­punk, as it would soon be called), and real punk—­would all continue to grow

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Dividing the New Wave  23

and prosper well into the 1980s. But of these three, only new wave would take hold as a viable commercial entity.10

Indeed, Cateforis argues that the term “new wave” referred to those musicians who were commercially successful (“a viable commercial entity”), who purveyed a “futurist pop” aesthetic, and whose careers began in the mid-­1970s and continued into the early 1980s. For Cateforis, new wave is characterized by the prevalence of kitsch, camp, synthesizers, and the detritus of contemporary culture—­elements that he describes as “modern.” With the exception of Gary Numan, most of Cateforis’s musical examples of what constitutes new wave are drawn from the United States and include bands such as Devo, Talking Heads, and the B-­52s.11 Indeed, such a new-­wave grouping can be found in Ian Birch’s review of the B-­52s’ first London performance in July 1979. Toward the end of his review, Birch writes, The new breed of American pop seems to concentrate around this multi-­media cartoon attack. Blondie, for instance, have hit on a brilliantly commercial synthetic aesthetic, while the Cramps have resurrected the vitality of trash pop. Indeed, over the water, our very own Undertones and Buzzcocks have breathed new life into age-­old teenage obsessions.12

These characteristics—­cartoon attack, synthetic aesthetic, trash pop, and the idea of breathing new life into old obsessions—­indeed produce a cluster of sense along the lines of Cateforis’s definition of new wave. However, this particular definition is more in line with what Bernard Gendron refers to as the “second wave” of new wave, which emerged in 1978 and ran until approximately 1980.13 According to Gendron the term “new wave” was first used in London only a few months after the word “punk” was taken up, and around mid-­decade, new wave started to be used interchangeably with punk, especially on the scene associated with the New York club CBGBs. By the end of 1977, Gendron suggests, the term “new wave” “had definitely triumphed in the United Kingdom as the proper label for the then-­contemporary underground music,” and was used to categorize the groups Ultravox, the Adverts, and Generation X specifically. Importantly, Gendron notes that the term “new wave” served to “capture in punk bands what the designator ‘punk’ left out—­ the arty, avant-­gardish, studied and ironic dimension that accompanied the streetwise, working-­class, and raucously ‘vulgar’ dimension.”14 Thus, from these accounts—­Laing, Reynolds, Cateforis, and Gen­

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24  what is post-punk?

dron—­three categories emerge after punk’s disintegration in early 1978: real punk (or Oi!), new wave, and post-­punk. Furthermore, all of these accounts indicate a necessity at the time for a genre label that could accommodate the more obviously arty aspects of punk or what came after punk, as exemplified by groups such as Talking Heads or PiL, for example. But while in some ways this three-­splinter model is tenable, few writers have paid close attention to the confusion and uncertainty regarding these three musical categories from the end of 1977 into 1979. And, even without digging into the historical discourse, several issues with this punk-­to-­post-­punk model are worth thinking about first. In spite of what the London tabloid media claimed at the time, and despite the number of industry-­styled punk imitators who emerged after the Sex Pistols disbanded in early 1978, to suggest that punk died at all is somewhat misleading, or at least it reflects an investment in punk that was not shared by mainstream audiences or even the grassroots fans themselves.15 In addition to the newer “new-­wave” groups who emerged toward the end of 1977 (such as Elvis Costello and the Jam), some holdovers from the punk period (including the Adverts, the Clash, Buzzcocks, Vibrators, Television, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, the Patti Smith Group, and X-­Ray Spex) had Top 40 singles in the UK in 1978. One might then argue that punk’s mainstream success signified its death. But this is also problematic, since “God Save the Queen”—­the quintessential punk song—­reached no. 2 in the UK singles chart during the Queen’s Jubilee month in 1977, which suggests that from its beginnings punk in the UK was a mainstream movement as much as it was a critics’ genre.16 Secondly, as Reynolds notes, multiple bands that are considered part of post-­punk actually predate the 1978 watershed, such as Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Talking Heads, and Devo.17 The name “post”-­ punk is therefore misleading, since it implies a straight line of descent from one genre to the next, and therefore glosses over the lack of clarity in rock music categorization in the wake of, and even during, the punk/new-­wave era. In actual fact, rock media trialed multiple names for the kinds of music that emerged from late 1977 onward before the now-­accepted trajectory of punk to post-­punk solidified and the three-­ splinter model prevailed. These recent attempts to fix post-­punk tend to obscure the intricacies involved in its emergence as a genre that is or was distinct from new wave and punk. Therefore, with a view to explaining the complex way in which post-­punk came to be understood as a genre or category unto itself, the rest of this chapter describes some of the unsteadiness and un-

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Dividing the New Wave  25

certainty regarding popular music categorization in the late 1970s, with a focus on what we might understand as the new-­wave field as a whole. I do so not only to illuminate the instability of post-­punk as a genre, but to demonstrate how the emergence of a genre or category of music can be as much a discursive process as one rooted in social networks and/or sonic characteristics. For what remains, my arguments unfold in three main phases. First, I analyze a debate in the music press that began in late 1977 concerning the now-­forgotten categories of “New Musick” and “power pop,” to illuminate how punk was contested territory and how this contestation holds the key to post-­punk. Secondly, I situate the three generic neighbors of punk, new wave, and post-­punk in the context of the late-­1970s popular music field more broadly. Finally, I evaluate cases of presentist inclusion in and exclusion from post-­punk, mapping such arguments onto the historical discourse from the time. For this final section I analyze Wire’s place in the genre, and then look to a cluster of acts that emerged in late 1979, specifically Echo and the Bunnymen, U2, and the Sound to evaluate their positions in the post-­punk canon.

From New Musick to Post-­Punk When’s the last time you saw a new waver wearing a sweater? —­Chris Brazier, Melody Maker, December 1977

Both Reynolds and Cateforis cite the “New Musick” editions of Sounds magazine from November 26 and December 3, 1977, as the starting point for the emergence of post-­punk.18 The cover of the issue is a bleak-­ looking photograph of Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider from the group Kraftwerk standing in front of a misty bridge with the fitting subtitle “New Musick: The Cold Wave.” The writers Jane Suck and Jon Savage penned the introduction to the issue, which included articles on Brian Eno, Devo, Throbbing Gristle, the Residents, and Kraftwerk in part one; also covered were Siouxsie and the Banshees, MX-­80 Sound, the Pop Group, and dub (specifically King Tubby and Dennis Bovell). An article on disco focused on Giorgio Moroder. Some important themes that come out of these two issues are worth noting. The combined characteristics of New Musick outlined by both Suck and Savage in their introduction contribute to the cluster of traits that has become “post-­punk.” They emphasize its racial and sonic characteristics as “the white equivalent of dub,” the effect of “barbiturates that don’t let you sleep, just give you pleasant nightmares,” a closet out of which ice cubes tumble, and while

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26  what is post-punk?

disco “was sex. New Musick is iron petting and coitus interruptus.” Suck also alludes to New Musick’s alternative or symbolic capital with a brief reference to Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” writing, “Chuck out the charts and you’ll see that something is happening here, Mr. Jones, even if you don’t know what it is.” Adding to Suck’s characterization of New Musick as pleasantly nightmarish white experimentalism that is both frigidly sexless and resists the mainstream, Savage’s robotic prose emphasizes the nascent genre’s computerized nature: Program: present data suggest punk saturation/obsolescence in its present form. Stagnation. Shock tactics used to gain space/attention now redundant. Projex: post-­punk projections, contrails. Print-­out as follows.

Savage also informs us that this music is emerging from regional cities in both the UK and the US, and importantly, that it doesn’t have a “unified audience” (read: style) but rather, there are “several strands” that “will be able to co-­exist happily.”19 In addition to these descriptions of New Musick, both Suck and Savage list the genre’s precursors, influential figures, and texts: Kraftwerk, the Velvet Underground, David Bowie’s album Low, Amon Düül, Can, Faust, and Nico. The interest in German bands such as Kraftwerk, Faust, Amon Düül, and even Nico is a theme that recurs in Vivien Goldman’s writing about Brian Eno the week after the New Musick specials on December 10, 1977. Goldman described Eno as a musician who had “won his battle to make thought-­provoking, surprise New Musick a Western rock reality.”20 Goldman’s use of the word “Western” in the phrase “Western rock reality” in her description of Eno’s music perhaps gives us some insight into the origin of, or associations with, the term “New Musick” in late 1977. With “Western,” Goldman may have been alluding to one of the main politico-­ geographic preoccupations of the late 1970s, the Cold War,21 specifically the division of Germany into East and West.22 Eno is well known for his involvement in two-­thirds of David Bowie’s so-­called “Berlin Trilogy” (“Heroes,” Low, and Lodger), two of which (alongside Iggy Pop’s The Idiot and Lust for Life) were either produced or recorded in Berlin’s Hansa Studio. According to Reynolds, these Berlin-­associated albums signaled a shift away from America and rock ’n’ roll toward Europe and a cool, controlled sound modelled on the Teutonic “motorik”

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Dividing the New Wave  27

rhythms of Kraftwerk and Neu!—­a sound in which synthesizers played as much of a role as guitars.23

This penchant for all things cold, calculated, and “Teutonic” in opposition to “American and rock ’n’ roll” may have inspired the quasi-­ Germanic spelling of “Musick,” which is close to Musik, as well as the quasi-­Germanic capitalization of the words. Likewise, this music’s purportedly “ice cube” character evokes both the imagined bleakness that lay beyond the Iron Curtain, and Reynolds’s references to technology (synthesizers and “motorik” rhythm) reinforce stereotypes about people from Germany and their alleged rigid, robotic disposition. This would also explain the inclusion of the German group Kraftwerk in Savage’s New Musick editorial, alongside Throbbing Gristle and Siouxsie and the Banshees, UK bands known for their experimentation with Nazi imagery. In winter 1977, then, did the New Musick category signify a casually xenophobic amalgam of the Third Reich, Eastern Bloc chic, and Kosmische Musik, united under an image of clichéd Germanic severity, austerity, and technophilia?24 The creation of the New Musick category at the end of 1977 did not occur without rebuff. Some months later, in spring 1978, the editor of ZigZag magazine, Kris Needs, mockingly remarked that the New Musick label only “kept its momentum for about a week before power pop wimped in.”25 Indeed, journalists invoked the term “New Musick” as a joke throughout most of 1978 to refer to the passing fad invented by the writers at Sounds. As Needs suggested, the label “power pop” circulated a few months after the appearance of New Musick, and significantly, several writers drew comparisons between the two. It was in Sounds again that a two-­part special on power pop appeared in February 18, 1978. Chas (Charles) de Whalley wrote the first instalment and Savage wrote the second, but both writers had a decidedly different take on what constituted power pop.26 In his article, “Power Pop Part 1: Suddenly, Everything is Power Pop!,” de Whalley categorized the bands in the 1978 new wave according to the extent to which they did or did not project an artistic, intellectual sensibility. Those who qualified as power pop were from the New York punk scene, such as Jonathan Richman, Blondie, the Ramones, and the Dead Boys, as well as the UK musician Elvis Costello. For de Whalley, power pop was “all about hooks and excitement,” and these New York bands had Power Pop potential because [they] all make the sort of music that could/can so easily turn up a three-­minute classic Pop song light

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28  what is post-punk?

years closer to the realities of the late Seventies than any ChinniChap ballroom blitz.27

For de Whalley, then, a group could qualify as power pop if it boasted “pop” elements such as short songs and a singable chorus. He also saw power pop as a continuation of the movement started by the punks who, for him, simultaneously expanded the music-­listening horizons of the mainstream while maintaining accessibility in what could be considered a kind of “crossover” appeal: The Pistols, the Stranglers, the Clash and the Damned all had chart hits with their first singles and the ears of the suburban studs and the doe-­eyed shop girls were opened for the first time in years to sounds that came from way outside the ruling coalition of 10cc/Queen/The Stylistics/Stevie Wonder/Boz Scaggs and the other Adult Orientated rock medicine shows.

Significantly, de Whalley also described power pop in contrast to New Musick. He argued that the “New Musickites”—­Devo, Pere Ubu, the Pop Group, and Siouxsie and the Banshees—­could only join in the revelry of power pop if they “leave their library books by the door and laugh and joke with us lesser mortals.” But if these New Musick groups could not produce the kind of music that the “kids” demanded, de Whalley argued, they would do nothing more than “[foster] the same kind-­of [sic] musical elitism that deprived the people of their own medium of expression back in 1967.” Therefore, in addition to the cold, stereotypically “German” connotations of New Musick from Sounds in late 1977, this subcategory of the new wave also connoted artiness. And thus, de Whalley staged the distinction between power pop and New Musick as one of hooks versus art, as one of pop/commercial appeal versus elitism and pretension.28 For Savage, however, writing one week later in the same publication, power pop meant something different. For him, power pop was ’60s-­ redolent, “nice” in a way that punk was not, and it referred to bands such as the aptly named Pleasers and the Boyfriends. According to Savage, who often deployed the familiar binary between rock-­as-­entertainment and rock-­as-­authentic, these bands were only in it for the money.29 The Pleasers were, effectively, a Beatles-­imitation group complete with mop-­ top haircuts and a lively early 1960s-­style sound exemplified by songs such as “Billy,” which appeared on the 1978 new-­wave compilation Hope

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Dividing the New Wave  29

and Anchor Front Row Festival.30 The Boyfriends were perhaps a little edgier, with a sound more similar to Elvis Costello (especially on songs such as “Last Bus Home” and “Saturday Night”), and they adopted a Costello-­ esque 1950s and 1960s retro sensibility in line with a wider tendency toward revival that characterized some parts of the new wave. According to Savage, groups such as the Pleasers were hyped (unconvincingly for him) as the next “post-­punk thing.”31 Reflecting his view that music has the capacity to enact social change (and thus foreshadowing both Marcus’s and Reynolds’s “music-­ to-­ change-­the-­world” credo), Savage’s article on power pop criticized the very idea of dividing music into genres. He suggested that categorization only serves to make music and musicians more malleable and amenable to the interests of the music industry. Categorization, he suggested, also limits audiences’ access to what he perceived as “interesting” music. Nevertheless, in place of power pop (represented by the Pleasers and the Boyfriends), Savage proposed that de Whalley’s “New Musickites”—­ Devo, Pere Ubu, and Magazine—­might generate the next wave of musical excitement after punk. According to Savage, the music that these groups made was more than just “esoterica,” but actually had potential for popular appeal. In Savage’s mind, these groups could deliver the “substance” that was “needed” after the “shock” of punk had dismantled the rock ’n’ roll paradigm, which for him was characterized by a subtle blend of misogyny and hedonism: “I mean [rock ’n’ roll is] all about fun ’n’ barfing, eh, schoolgirls (corrrr!) and a piss up, innit?” Quoting the Manchester punk-­poet John Cooper Clarke, whose words appeared in the NME earlier that year, Savage endorsed the imagination, artistic aspirations and contemporaneity of what Cooper Clarke called “new wave” groups: (The new wave) is the nearest thing there’s ever been to the working classes going into areas like surrealism and Dada. . . . I think people in the new wave have done the smart thing and walked into those areas. . . . I don’t think I’ve ever seen a punk group that didn’t have something imaginative about it.32

For Savage in Sounds magazine in early 1978, then, power pop comprised cynical early-­1960s throwbacks, spawned to exploit the audiences left hungry following the crash of punk. In his characteristically idealistic way, and foreshadowing more recent discourse on punk and post-­punk, Savage perceived the first wave of punk as having had the potential for

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30  what is post-punk?

some kind of social revolution: it cleaned up rock’s misogyny and hedonism, and with its alleged connection to surrealism and/or Dada, had the potential to become art. From Savage’s perspective it was now up to bands such as Devo, Pere Ubu, and Buzzcocks-­offshoot Magazine (who de Whalley had categorized as New Musick) to bring “substance” to the new wave. But de Whalley’s pronouncement was different. Only musicians who wrote unpretentious three-­minute songs, like the New York set, could be considered the new incarnation of the punk spirit. Devo and Siouxsie, with their “library books” in tow, took themselves too seriously, and therefore did not qualify as the logical continuation of the movement associated with the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. These differences between Savage and de Whalley regarding who belongs where and who should inherit punk’s spirit demonstrate a number of important points that to some degree problematize more recent discussions of the new wave. The articles on New Musick and power pop illustrate that punk/new wave was fractured from as early as February 1978, and its fractures appeared along the lines of its critics’ own interests; de Whalley did not care for punk’s artistic sensibility, but Savage did, for example.33 The debate highlights, therefore, how punk and/ or the new wave was not a single entity but a heterogeneous category that accommodated a variety of styles and aesthetic dispositions, and its lack of singularity from the beginning is the foundation from which the more reified versions of its offshoots or “splinters” emerged. Some of the main fault lines along which punk and/or the new wave split included degrees of accessibility, authenticity, artiness, and retro sensibility. A major concern for these two critics was whether the arty sensibility of the new new wave would enlighten audiences or alienate them in the way 1960s rock had done.34 This tension between artiness and accessibility is important to the extent that it foreshadows recent writers’ observations of the “need” in the late 1970s for a label that could capture punk’s artiness.35 Furthermore, this tension preempts the more recent exclusion of popular acts from the post-­punk canon, as I discuss in the final part of this chapter. The idea that punk, or as I have referred to it, the new-­wave field, was fracturing along its own “arty” fault lines is further evidenced in the music press outside of the New Musick/power-­pop debate. Writing for Melody Maker on December 31, 1977, one month after Sounds’s New Musick special, Chris Brazier interviewed the Manchester band the Fall. The tagline underneath an image of the band midperformance read, “THE FALL: taking the repetition and monotonous vocals which have

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Dividing the New Wave  31

flooded the country in the past year and developing them into something positive and exciting.” To his ears, not only did the Fall’s music sound more “exciting” than the “repetition and monotonous vocals” of punk, but Brazier also highlighted that the Fall’s music was “clever.” The band shared a similar kind of “intelligence and readiness” to those purveying “art-­rock,” and the band’s members were seen as more intellectual than “sub-­Ramones” imitators. Even in the Fall’s fashion sense Brazier detected something that made the band conspicuous. Their clothes were “nondescript,” unlike those worn by punks. “When’s the last time you saw a new waver wearing a sweater?” Brazier asks the reader.36 The sweater, in its humble normalcy, was discordant with the torn T-­shirts and bondage gear, now a cliché of punk regalia and associated primarily with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s famous King’s Road clothing shop, Seditionaries/Sex. Furthermore, perhaps the sweater suggested the library-­going intellectualism and artiness that critics such as de Whalley and Savage detected in the Fall’s contemporaries.37 The conspicuous wearing of a sweater was not the only tension in the punk–­new-­wave discourse at the turn of 1977–­78. Significantly, at roughly the same time as the appearance of the power-­pop articles, in Sounds in February 1978, Charles Shaar Murray at the NME used the term “post-­punk.” Murray used the term to refer to the group Magazine, specifically their performance of their single “Shot by Both Sides” on the British television chart show Top of the Pops. Murray referred to Magazine as “the most convincing post-­punk band so far,” suggesting there had already been numerous unconvincing post-­punk bands before the arrival of Magazine, and that punk’s replacement was being sought only a matter of weeks after the Sex Pistols’ disbandment in January 1978. Furthermore, Murray’s description of Magazine’s performance on Top of the Pops captures an important change in punk/new-­wave aesthetics: the darkly powerful “Shot By Both Sides”—­thunderous, melodramatic, richly textured, naggingly memorable, paranoiac, self-­important, an adolescent fantasy captured and expressed with adult power—­ bam, a first hit and a curiously unimpressive and unexpressive Top Of The Pops where Devoto appeared too static and sluggish behind rather silly eye make-­up.38

Murray described “Shot by Both Sides” with a sense of maturing and reorienting in the new-­wave aesthetic; the song is dark and melodramatic rather than nihilistic and aggressive. His reference to self-­importance

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32  what is post-punk?

and adulthood recalls Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan’s description of post-­punk as a “hanging up of the leather jackets” and a turn toward “critical, philosophical engagement with the world around,”39 as well as, perhaps, de Whalley and Savage’s dispute over the bookishness of New Musick. Regarding Devoto’s performance, Murray’s reference to Devoto’s “silly eye make-­up” and “static” pose could be interpreted in several ways. It could suggest that Devoto’s new look gestured toward the kind of gender play and cross-­dressing theatrics that defined groups such as the New York Dolls, who were one of several punk progenitors. In this light, Devoto’s performance was still within the punk and proto-­ punk remit. When watching Devoto’s performance and observing his appearance, however, one thinks immediately of Brian Eno, which would reinforce Reynolds’s argument that post-­punk musicians reached back to a time before punk in search of inspiration, and emulated groups such as Roxy Music in terms of both musical and visual style.40 I hazard, however, that Murray’s comments on Devoto’s appearance were also intended as a criticism of what he perceived as pretentiousness or artiness, bringing us back to the fraught status of “artiness” as debated between Savage and de Whalley. The idea that the new-­wave field was a battleground between art and pop held strong into the following year of 1979. For example, in her interview with Gang of Four titled “Dialectics Meets Disco,” Mary Harron described punk as having been “an attack on privilege,” which manifested in the rejection of “the avant-­garde as elitist, and disco as a symbol of record company power.” However, the kind of music that Gang of Four were making differed from punk in significant ways. Harron wrote, Today punk is dead, the avant-­garde has emerged as a powerful force and disco is considered the music of the people. Socialism has replaced anarchy, and theory is no longer despised: “structure” and “ideology” have replaced “frustration” and “energy” as the most over-­ used words in the rock press.41

Harron’s observation regarding the fusion of the “avant-­garde” and disco in the music of the Gang of Four, as well as her note about the change in politics and theoretical language, capture some of the central characteristics of the shift from punk to post-­punk. Summarizing some of the debates in the music press so far, then, as we move from 1977 to 1979, we move from anti-­art to art, from aggression to melancholy, from adolescence to adulthood, from anarchy to socialism, and from energy

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Dividing the New Wave  33

to ideology—­all significantly bounded by a “revolutionary” or what we might call a quasimodernist sensibility. Importantly, however, these contrasting characteristics between punk and what we now call post-­punk emerged not so much after punk but were central to that genre’s original heterogeneity. Furthermore, these are the discursive themes and ideas employed by the predominantly British music press to describe the musical and aesthetic shifts they were hearing and seeing. They should not be taken as hard-­and-­fast criteria for post-­punk because, as I hope I have demonstrated and continue to demonstrate throughout this book, genre exists as a process of negotiation that was and is shaped by the predilections of interested parties. While such processes of negotiation are ongoing there are nevertheless moments of apparent generic stability in the emergence of post-­ punk. By June 1979, more than a year after Murray’s comments on “Shot by Both Sides” and only a month after Harron set out post-­punk’s dialectical stakes, Garry Bushell in Sounds not only used post-­punk as a category but went so far as to describe what the label actually meant. The band in question was again the Gang of Four, and Bushell wrote, within the vague boundaries of what is loosely termed after or post punk—­ music being made in the void left after punk has generally been deemed to have run up the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible—­ the Gang number amongst the most impressive rock bands currently doing the rounds. [my emphasis]42

Here, post-­punk was “music being made in the void left” by the death of punk, and Gang of Four represented one of these groups. Of course, all kinds of music appeared after January/February 1978, so Bushell’s description should be interpreted with the understanding that post-­punk music had to have some kind of connection to punk, whether that was a musical connection or a social connection, or, as I’m demonstrating here, part of the same discursive field. Perhaps consciously blending the available generic terms of new wave and post-­punk, in a separate article in the publication Trouser Press, Bushell highlighted the musical variety that characterized what he called “the new post-­punk wave.” Bushell suggested this genre included “groups as important and diverse as the Gang of Four and the Human League.” Gang of Four were a guitar-­based four-­piece whose lyrics drew heavily from the kinds of Marxist critical theory two of the members were exposed to while studying in the fine arts department at the University

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34  what is post-punk?

of Leeds, whereas the Human League were, as I indicated in the introduction, more of an electropop band. Bushell’s 1979 observation that this genre was musically “diverse” therefore supports my suggestion that post-­punk is a genre that cannot be defined according to a strict set of sonic characteristics alone.43 From the turbulence of late 1977 and early 1978, then, when the rock media seemed to be grappling for generic terms and identifying new movements or changes in the new-­wave field, into the summer of 1979 when the term “post-­punk” started to acquire meaning, a number of recurrent themes or characteristics start to coalesce around a cluster of bands from both the UK and the US. These bands included Gang of Four, the Human League, Magazine, Devo, Pere Ubu, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Fall, and the recurrent themes were darkness, melodrama, bookish intellectualism and political leanings, some loosely artistic or avant-­garde practices, and, with the Gang of Four in particular, an emergent relation to the mainstream in the form of disco. Significantly, at the center of the divisions within the new wave was the question of whether or not you were arty and/or intellectual, and willing to risk the pretentiousness that saw the end of rock in the late 1960s. I shall return to this idea later and at different moments throughout the book, but for now I want to pull away from this detailed, close analysis concerning the fractures in the new wave and look at how these genres can be understood just as meaningfully as part of the new wave within the broader context of the late-­1970s popular music field as a whole.

Post-­Punk in the Broader Pop Field In the same month as Sounds’s New Musick special, in November 1977, Melody Maker ran a three-­page feature on the success of the British new wave in the United States. The writer’s description of the genre’s traction in the United States is significant since it offers an outside perspective; the new wave is seen from afar as a whole, thus glossing over the internal fractures outlined above. Within the category of the new wave the writers at Melody Maker included the Jam, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, Elvis Costello, the Rezillos, Generation X, and the Stranglers—­groups that have more recently been broken up into at least two smaller categories. The writers considered the UK’s economic hardship and some of the musicians’ propensity toward ideological critique and class-­related preoccupations as characteristics of the British new wave, and thus distinct from the US branch. For example, the article’s writer noted how

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Dividing the New Wave  35

Paul Weller’s decision to stay in a New York hotel overlooking Central Park for forty pounds a night was “not at all in line with the new wave code of conduct.” After spending two weeks in the US, the article’s writer was also unimpressed with the fact that no new wave was ever played on FM radio, writing, “The heavies, from Peter Frampton to Fleetwood Mac to Led Zeppelin, still carry all the weight, and American kids seem content with that.” The bands Boston and Kansas were more attractive to American young people than the new wave. According to Melody Maker, bands such as Television and Talking Heads were considered in the US to be part of a “sophisticated clique,” whereas the Ramones and Blondie were just “hip pop” bands. Indeed, this opposition between new-­wave and middle-­of-­the-­road (MOR) rock on US FM radio ties in with de Whalley’s criticism that punk/new wave was the only genre so far to challenge the “ruling coalition” of disco and MOR rock in his power-­pop article.44 One exception to the lack of new-­wave music on US radio was Elvis Costello, who managed to straddle both the mainstream and the new wave across the Atlantic. He apparently received the most FM radio play “of any import record in history” at that time with his 1977 album, My Aim Is True.45 Costello’s lasting success among critics in the US was confirmed roughly a year after the 1977 moment when the British new wave went stateside. His image appeared on the front cover of the Village Voice when they announced the results of their 1978 Annual Pazz and Jop Critics’ Poll on January 22, 1979, with a headline that announced the “Triumph of the New Wave.” With an analysis and debrief written by the Village Voice’s resident music critic Robert Christgau, the Pazz and Jop poll comprised the votes of ninety-­seven music critics from US publications such as Stereo Review, High Fidelity, Circus, and Crawdaddy!. According to Christgau, the 1978 poll was “overwhelmed by a post-­punk sweep” with sixteen of the thirty “finishers” belonging to the new-­wave genre, which, I should stress, he distinguished from punk in his opening sentence, but elided with what we would now call post-­punk. The sixteen Christgau referred to included Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, the Clash, Talking Heads, Ramones, Ian Dury, Patti Smith Group, Television, Devo, Blondie, Pere Ubu, Wire, and Generation X. All of these groups are musically diverse and all of them have more recently been divided into the subgenres of punk, new wave, and post-­punk. Indeed, as in the British music press during the same era, there were allusions to such smaller divisions within Christgau’s analysis, but these were allusions at best and not thoroughly systematized. He noted, for example, how the

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36  what is post-punk?

more “conservative critics” were enamored with Costello and Nick Lowe, but that “new wavers” had moved onto Pere Ubu and the Contortions, which suggests that for Christgau “new wave” signified the edgier, artier faction, whereas popular musicians such as Costello occupied a different sphere; new wave was post-­punk, but the more popular branch, what we now consider new wave, did not have a name or was associated with “conservative” listeners.46 On the whole, however, and perhaps more significantly, Christgau pitted new wave’s success against more strongly differentiated, surrounding, or what Thomas O. Beebee calls “neighboring genres.”47 Much to his own chagrin about becoming what he calls a “cultist” and recalling Melody Maker’s disappointment with US radio fare when the UK new wave set off for the US, Christgau’s analysis highlights the widening gap between music that is popular in the mainstream and music that was popular among his ninety-­seven critics. For example, Christgau singles out the film Grease (and presumably its soundtrack), as well as hard rock, as mainstream successes of which he did not approve: The rock that has become America’s popular music is rotten from Olivia Newton-­John [star of Grease] all the way to Kansas. Good art and/or worthy entertainment will continue to be created within its various genres, but as forms they’re moribund.48

Christgau did not condemn all mainstream music, noting with a rather rockist defense that “some disco records do more than just succeed on their own terms, as dance music—­some of them are wonderful rock and roll.” But what this mainstream-­critical split indicates is the way the music in the new wave (new wave/punk/post-­punk) held more symbolic capital than mainstream pop or MOR rock. That is to say, if we were to situate new wave/post-­punk/punk in a Bourdieu-­style “field of cultural production,” it would occupy the intellectual/bohemian part of the field, the space designated for artists whose work is popular with small, young audiences, and who acquire prestige via the endorsement of fellow artists and critics. Disco and MOR rock, on the other hand, would be closer to the lower market end of the field, as they were more “dominant” musical genres with a mass audience and mass-­market-­oriented music.49 In addition to defending disco as “wonderful rock and roll,” Christgau condemned the homophobia and racism behind the “Disco Sucks” movement, and from here, Christgau raised one of the main

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Dividing the New Wave  37

problems with his critics’ poll: black music was almost entirely missing. Only Funkadelic’s One Nation Under A Groove and Al Green’s Truth ’n’ Time made it into the critics’ top 30. Partly owing to its “forced” and “frantic” nature, which suggests a mapping of identity stereotypes onto racially marked musical genres, Christgau suggests that new wave and his critics’ favorite music “isn’t just (blues-­based) white music—­it’s White Music, or maybe even WHITE MUSIC.” Christgau added, Racial balance proved even more difficult to come by. Our informants were useless, and consultation with black journalists around here yielded few new names. Finally, around New Year’s, I resorted to record company publicists specializing in black music, but most of the 30 or so invitations that resulted went out so late that I got only 11 back in time.50

Not only was new wave on the bohemian end of the late-­1970s popular music field, but Christgau’s comments also indicate that popular music’s legitimation, that which carries symbolic capital, has historically been bound to exclusions at the level of race as well. Rather than concentrate on detailed distinctions within the new-­wave field as I did in the previous section, which saw New Musick opposed to power pop and “library books” as not strictly punk, it seemed more meaningful to Christgau (and presumably his US readers) to draw attention to how new wave was defined according to the racial identities of those who produced and consumed it, and how this could be “heard” in the musical sound. However, while Christgau addresses race in his analysis of the Critics’ Poll, he doesn’t mention gender. Of the top thirty records chosen in the 1978 poll, only two featured female performers: Blondie’s Parallel Lines and the Patti Smith Group’s Easter. Furthermore, of the ninety-­seven critics who participated in the poll approximately twelve were female. While I am hesitant to impose presentist identity politics onto a publication from early 1979, it is important to recognize these social connotations of genre, especially during a time (the 1970s) and in a musical field (the new wave) where second-­wave feminism and female musicianship and criticism are often located and celebrated. Thus, from Christgau’s Pazz and Jop Poll of 1978, new wave, and post-­punk as it was nascently buried therein, were not unencumbered musical styles or genres floating in the mid-­to late-­70s ether; rather, they were shaped according to unspoken rules of inclusion and exclusion along the lines of race and gender: no black music, few women.

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38  what is post-punk?

A UK parallel to the Pazz and Jop poll in the Village Voice was the ZigZag poll and the “Faves of 1978” section. Both appeared the July 1978 issue and comprised the magazine contributors’ annual picks. As in the Village Voice, white, new-­wave acts seemed to dominate, and the most favored albums are those made by the Clash, Flamin Groovies, the Ramones, Johnny Thunders, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Dave Edmunds, Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones (Some Girls), and Brian Eno. One of the main dismissals in the ZigZag poll was Robin Banks’s choice for “Wankers of the Year,” for which he’d listed Devo.51 This band is also maligned in the editor’s review of Siouxsie and the Banshees in a way that relates back to the status of newness and potential pretentiousness in the New Musick debate earlier in the year. Needs wrote, “It’s real hard to try and get a new sound and not sound contrived, indulgent or plain silly (um, stand up Devo, XTC, some of you New Musicknesses), not to mention BORING.”52 One key difference between the polls in the US and those in the UK, however, was the inclusion of more black-­Atlantic music. Reggae was crucial to the UK new wave. For example, in the 1978 poll, the ZigZag critics list the following reggae artists as some of their favorites: Poet and the Roots (Linton Kwesi Johnson), Burning Spear, the Arabs (Prince Far I), Keith Hudson, Skatalites, and Ranking Joe & the Steppers. The particularity of the relationship between new wave and reggae in the UK has been well documented, and as I argue in chapter 2, is significant for the way it represents a moment of potential racial unity and a productive site for reading the creation of Britain’s emergent post-­colonial identities. But it was also a moment that was not sustained, and it was largely unidirectional, white-­associated music borrowing from black-­associated music. Or, to put it another way and perhaps more simply, reggae and dub musicians participated in UK new wave, but reggae and dub still belonged to their own genres.53 Thus, in the critics’ polls for the Village Voice and ZigZag in 1978, finer distinctions within new wave and the disagreements regarding who belonged where remained in play. However, these distinctions were to some degree superseded by the overall image that an end-­of-­year poll necessarily presents. As Simon Frith notes, the readers’ poll as a concept is a “key ideological moment” in the sense that it “serves as a public display of the magazine’s success in forging a community out of its disparate consumers.”54 Thus, the collective identity or community forged in ZigZag’s poll and in the Village Voice critics’ poll focused on white, predominantly male new-­wave acts to the exclusion of almost all other

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Dividing the New Wave  39

genres of popular music, apart from dub and reggae in the UK. And, furthermore, this taste community was governed by predominantly male writers and critics. The ZigZag Readers’ Poll for the following year, 1979, presents an image of the late-­’70s musical field that resembles that seen in the 1978 poll and the Village Voice critics’ poll, especially regarding the divisions among musicians that both critics and fans deemed meaningful. Like the Village Voice, ZigZag in 1979 did not distinguish between punk, new wave, and post-­punk. Like the Village Voice poll, ZigZag in 1979 did not distinguish between punk, new wave, and post-punk, and almost all of the selections were a blend of new-­wave acts such as the Clash, Siouxsie and the Banshees, PiL, and the Jam, with the Slits, the Raincoats, and Gang of Four all tipped to be 1980’s next big thing. Futhermore, all of these musicians were white. Unlike the Village Voice, however, the ZigZag 1979 Readers’ Poll included more female musicians. Although there is no way to know the predominant gender of ZigZag’s poll contributors with certainty, it seems telling that of the ten candidates for “Sexiest Person,” seven were women, and there was one transgender person (Wayne/Jayne County), bassist Paul Simonon of the Clash, and Needs (ZigZag’s editor). Based on the fact that most of the candidates on the “Sexiest Person” list were female for two years running, it is possible to suggest that ZigZag had a predominantly heterosexual male readership.55 As illustrated by Ralf Von Appen and André Doehring, producers of lists of this kind are usually white males aged between twenty and forty who position their musical tastes in opposition to the mainstream.56 And while a similar pattern is in evidence in all of the above polls, an important nuance is the inclusion of more women among the musicians themselves. This explicit inclusion of women in the ZigZag 1979 poll in particular points to an increase in the number of rock bands with female musicians, running parallel with second-­wave feminism as well as the political (or “ideological”) interests of those in the post-­punk/new-­wave community. Recalling Savage’s ideas that punk challenged classic rock misogyny, or Marcus and Reynolds’s insistence on punk and post-­punk’s capacity to “change the world,” it would appear as though a more inclusive gender politics was important to the post-­punk/new-­wave community. This is nevertheless made ambiguous by the discourse of objectification inherent in having an almost exclusively all-­female “Sexiest Person” category (see figure 1). In yet another example of resonance between the Village Voice critics’ poll and the ZigZag readers’ poll of the previous year, one of ZigZag read-

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40  what is post-punk?

Figure 1. The 1979 ZigZag Readers’ Poll listing the most hated people and the sexiest people. ZigZag, July 19, 1979, 22.

ers’ most hated people is not Olivia Newton-­John but her costar in Grease and the star of Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta. Coming in at number four (of ten), Travolta is positioned below two right-­wing politicians (“Maggie” Thatcher and Martin Webster) and radio DJ Tony Blackburn. Other hated musicians were Billy Idol (a punk known for displaying his love of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones too conspicuously), as well as Bob Geldof and Rod Stewart.57 These lists of names are neither arbitrary nor insignificant because, through their affiliations, they point to the important exclusions that help define this particular musical genre or category. John Travolta represented disco at its most whitewashed and commercially successful in Saturday Night Fever, and also the commodification of white 1950s nostalgia exemplified by Grease—­both films and

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Dividing the New Wave  41

their soundtracks were tremendously popular in 1978. Idol, as I already suggested, was too in thrall to the Beatles and the Stones to be considered a real punk, and Blackburn would soon dole out the mainstream chart every week on his BBC Radio 1 show. Both Stewart and Geldof recur as targets in other areas of the post-­punk press, as I discuss in the next section. By analyzing the critics’ and readers’ polls from both the US in the Village Voice in 1978 and ZigZag in the UK in both 1978 and 1979, the smaller distinctions between categories appear to evaporate. What emerges is that the taste community governing the new-­wave field as a whole had an identifiable identity: white, predominantly male, with a positive gender and racial politics that can be read as paradoxically “revolutionary” (which would be Reynolds’s perspective) and entrenched, owing to the objectification of its female participants, the niche scope of its black music inclusions, and the anxiety of contamination from the “wrong” kinds of pop. With reference to the latter, other meaningful distinctions according to which this field might be defined were the differences between the new-­wave field and its closest enemies: commercial disco, a kind of 1950s and 1960s nostalgia (perhaps with the exclusion of mod culture), the weekly Top 40, and the long-­haired rock of Boston and Kansas. Thus, the rock discourse of the mid-­and late-­1970s print media presents a nascent version of post-­punk as it is defined today. As we saw in the previous section, some critics identified aspects of the genre’s aesthetic criteria that are now taken as given, such as its “artiness” and the musicians’ incorporation of critical theoretical ideas. Some identified its influences, such as disco, and other commentators, such as Bushell discussing Gang of Four, used the term “post-­punk” to describe the genre’s diverse sonic characteristics. Generally speaking, however, what we now consider to be post-­punk was mixed in with the broader new-­wave and/ or punk category. New wave/punk was in turn nested within the wider popular music field of the mid-­to late-­1970s and was positioned against more commercial genres such as MOR-­rock and disco. Importantly, this broader new-­wave/punk category derived much of its meaning as a genre from the social identities of its producers, critics, and consumers. In this confusing world of musical categorization, where present-­day commentators have divided the new-­wave field into subcategories, and historical commentators didn’t agree about who went where or for what reason, two final questions arise. First, how much of a long-­lasting influence have the post-­punk print media had on today’s conceptualization of these closely enmeshed genres? Second, what is the status of sonic

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42  what is post-punk?

characteristics in these debates? I answer these two questions in this last section, turning to two case studies: the London act Wire, a band that sits on the cusp between punk and post-­punk, and the a cluster of acts that emerged in the latter half of 1979 and gained popular appeal in 1980, who are considered to be post-­punk by fans but occupy a more ambiguous territory with critics. These bands are Echo and the Bunnymen, U2, and the Sound.

Wire: Not Your “Standard Punk Band”58 Like many other groups from the new-­wave field, the London group Wire did not have a homogenous musical style. Critics often pointed to ideas of “minimalism” or “starkness” to describe Wire’s music, which recalls the criteria for New Musick (“coldness” and “harshness”) and Gendron’s description of punk as “minimalist.”59 At the time of their emergence, Wire was regarded as part of the punk scene. Critics such as Andy Gill noted that the band had “emerged at the time of the punk scene” and shared punk’s “ethos of nonvirtuosity.”60 In addition to being connected with the punk scene, Wire was also described by the press as a “Roxy band,” presumably in light of their appearance on a live album made at the Roxy club in London’s Covent Garden, The Roxy London WC2, which included punk staples such as the Buzzcocks, Sham 69, Slaughter and the Dogs, and X-­Ray Spex. The same critic who called them a “Roxy band,” Paul Rambali, also referred to Wire as “the first punk band to actually try to stick to the letter of the credo as propagated by Rotten and Perry.”61 While some in the rock press labeled Wire as punk, others saw them as “rock’s new music vanguard,”62 one of the “first new wave studio band[s],”63 and the “most progressive of all the bands coming out of the new wave” (emphasis mine).64 For critics situating Wire according to the available terms of the era, then, it appears as though punk and new wave were the most fitting and most readily available. Even if Wire was considered to be doing something different within those genres (which is repeatedly expressed by critics’ insistence that they were different from other kinds of “rock ’n’ roll,” e.g., “rock’s new music vanguard”), they were not seen to be part of an altogether new genre. If we accept the present-­day distinction between punk and new wave, which necessarily relies on the narrowing of both of those terms, then in many respects Wire’s Chairs Missing (1978) participated in both the punk and new-­wave genres. Punk in this instance designates short songs, power-­chord-­based patterns, and fast tempi and aggression; new wave designates a clearer sense of melody, the use of vocal harmonies, more

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Dividing the New Wave  43

adventurous chord progressions, and varied musical textures. The punk characteristics on Chairs Missing include the instrumentation (drums, bass, two guitars, male vocals) and the brevity of the songs, many of which do not exceed the two-­minute mark. More specifically, Wire’s participation in the punk genre is discernible in a couple of songs on the album, especially “Sand in My Joints,” which is a power-­chord thrash. The vocalist, Colin Newman, sings in an untrained-­sounding way, with a thick southern British accent reminiscent of the Johnny Rotten-­esque punk style. A brief, raucous guitar solo is the only moment in the song in which there is any kind of variety in texture.65 But Chairs Missing in fact shows a greater variety of texture, tempi, and groove than an album such as the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks (1977). In other words, the sonic characteristics of “Sand in My Joints” are not representative of the whole album. In many of their songs, Wire pursues the kind of “simplicity” that punk musicians favored, but steers this simplicity in unexpected, nonpunk directions, which relates to Rambali’s idea that Wire “stuck to the letter of the” punk credo.66 Like many other musicians in popular music, the members of Wire were all self-­taught, and the opening song on Chairs Missing seems to explicitly draw attention to their instrumental apprenticeship. The song is aptly titled “Practice Makes Perfect” and may be interpreted as a self-­conscious comment on the education of a punk guitarist, which often consists of spending long hours spent jamming on the low E string of the guitar.67 The song’s tempo is slower than that of most punk songs, and its rhythms are aggressive and straight to an exaggerated degree in a caricature of the regimented discipline associated with practicing or learning musical instruments—­practice makes perfect. But rather than jamming on power chords as in “Sand in My Joints,” the song’s two-­chord harmonic framework revolves, unusually for punk, around the chords Cm and F# major. The opening guitar intro also has an unusual flavor. Its eerie semitone oscillation is not easy to place stylistically, although it could be heard as representing a kind of musical “darkness,” thus resonating with the “melancholy” sound of Magazine noted by Murray in February 1978, and even the “coldness” of New Musick. In fact, the tritone (F#–­C in this case) is almost a universal musical symbol for “darkness.” After perusing the fingerboard, it becomes clear that the riff was created by moving one’s fingers very minimally between E and A strings in the second fret. The riff thus has the minimalism and simplicity of the punk style, even if the line doesn’t sound like a stereotypical punk riff (see example 1). The texture for “Practice Makes Perfect” thickens from this opening guitar riff. The drums and rhythm guitar enter with an aggressively

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44  what is post-punk?

Example 1. The opening bass guitar riff for Wire’s song “Practice Makes Perfect”

on-­beat militancy followed by a second, heavily overdriven guitar playing an arpeggiated Cm chord. The song’s lyrics begin with the doctrine “Practice makes perfect,” but quickly drift into a more surreal and gothic evocation of an escort service that somehow involves nineteenth-­century actress Sarah Bernhardt’s hand, eventually dissolving into echoing laughter. Thus, recalling Gill’s suggestion that Wire drew on the “ethos” of punk, “Practice Makes Perfect” wears its do-­it-­yourself characteristics on its sleeve, especially in terms of its titular lyrics and its easy-­to-­play opening riff. Indeed, in early February 1980, the band A Certain Ratio reflected on Wire’s influence on their own music in a way that suggests this unconventional take on punk’s amateur aesthetic. “Wire’s first LP was so simple,” says Simon Topping. “Knowing that they couldn’t play then, we thought we could get up, too and play what we liked.”68 However, Wire employed harmonic vocabulary, tempo, groove, lyrics, and texture that cannot easily be categorized as punk, at least not according to its narrowest definition, encapsulated by the rough-­hewn musical language of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. The references to Sarah Bernhardt alone seem to call for a designator that encompasses the song’s “artiness” in a way that punk does not, as Gendron suggests with regard to the different significations of the terms “punk” and “new wave,” and as we saw with the New Musick/power-­pop debate and Harron’s assertion that the avant-­garde was now the thing.69 Some of the other songs on Chairs Missing have different stylistic affiliations. The song “Another the Letter” features accelerated disco drumming and a synthesizer part characteristic of some Kosmische Musik. At other times, Chairs Missing can be heard as participating in new wave as well, to the extent that it includes songs with more pop-­oriented melodies. The power chord dirge in “French Film Blurred,” for example, suddenly breaks into a melodious chorus, and the single from Chairs Missing, “Outdoor Miner,” has a pop-­like structure, singable hook, and wistful piano solo that point to more commercial terrain. The song indeed made it as high as no. 51 in the UK singles charts. The historical critical discourse concerning Chairs Missing and its sonic characteristics suggest that the album therefore participated in multiple subgenres of

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Dividing the New Wave  45

the new wave. Its sonic characteristics can be interpreted as having participated in punk and new wave, and critics described the album as punk, rock, and new wave. The point is that the distinction among these generic neighbors that now seems clear does not reflect the historical situation, and Wire’s historical position as participating in several genres at once is dissonant with the present moment, in which stricter distinctions between categories have been created. Having said that, there is historical evidence that Wire’s music stepped outside of the conventions that audiences expected to hear at a punk/new-­wave concert. When Wire performed at the Roxy, the audience probably expected a punk or reggae band, since the generic orientation of the Roxy club was as a punk venue whose Rasta DJ Don Letts played reggae records interspersed with punk. What the audience heard did not accord with their expectations, did not restrict itself to punk or reggae conventions. Indeed, journalist Needs noted how Wire was often greeted with “stunned silence” from the audience because “Wire did not turn out to be the anticipated standard punk band.”70 In his theorization of genre in popular film, Stephen Neale has suggested that genres are not “forms of textual codifications,” but rather are “systems of orientations, expectations and conventions that circulate between industry, text, and subject.” The Roxy audience was therefore oriented toward a particular set of punk conventions and were disappointed when Wire’s performance did not follow them. It did not comprise any “exclusive elements,” elements particular to one genre. With guitars, bass, drums, and vocals, they shared instrumental elements with punk, but also with the broader umbrella genre, rock. Their identity as an all-­white male four-­piece also placed them within the conventions of rock and punk. Having said that, Wire articulated these conventions differently than a more traditional punk band or, to use Neale’s formulation, Wire used a “particular combination” of the punk and new-­wave elements. Therefore, Wire “weighted” the elements differently than a punk band would have; they made a “different articulation” of certain staple elements and thus signaled a “shift in the regime” of punk and rock convention, one that was discussed in the music press as reflecting several musical categories.71 Furthermore, the album’s use of studio “tricks and techniques”—such as echoing laughter, sonic space, and the enhanced role of the producer—might contribute to the album’s retroactive status as post-­punk. As I indicate later in this chapter and in chapter 4, the use of the studio as a creative space versus the live-band aesthetic might also be considered a post-­

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46  what is post-punk?

punk characteristic; as critic Harry Doherty suggested, Wire was one of new wave’s first “studio bands.”72 In this regard it is therefore tempting to call Chairs Missing a post-­punk record in that it was a simultaneous participation in and rearticulation of punk.

Post-­Futurama: “. . . It’s Traditionalist, But It’s Honest”73 Returning to Reynolds’s book as my point of departure for the final section of this chapter, it is worth noting that he distinguishes between the late-­1970s post-­punk “vanguard” (to which Wire belong) and the rest of post-­punk, which he refers to as New Pop and New Rock. Echoing Marcus’s claim that punk had a world-­changing agenda, Reynolds uses a revolutionary theme to tie together the otherwise heterogeneous moment right after punk, ascribing notions of “progressiveness” and “radical-­ness” to bands such as Wire, Joy Division, Gang of Four, and PiL. However, this revolutionary theme wanes as post-­punk gives way to New Pop and New Rock from the end of 1979 into the 1980s. As such, bands that emerged in the latter half of 1979, such as the Sound, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes, U2, and others, are siphoned off from the core of the 1978–­79 “revolution,” and so-­called New Rock takes us from the “post-­punk experimentalism” of the vanguard into what eventually becomes goth via Bauhaus, the Birthday Party, and Killing Joke.74 One reason Reynolds siphons off the “vanguard” from New Pop/ New Rock is perhaps because of his argument that post-­punk did not “flourish” in Liverpool, the hometown of two key bands, Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes. It seems that for Reynolds, implicitly, the post-­punk flourishing or post-­punk revolution was defined by intergeneric hybridity characterized by the kinds of racial politics I discuss in chapters 2 and 3, in particular with reference to dub-­reggae and disco respectively. He suggests that these Liverpool bands did not explore “the kind of experimental sounds that came out of London, Sheffield, and Leeds, such as industrial synth noise, avant-­funk, and apocalyptic dub.”75 And, indeed, bands from Liverpool seemed self-­conscious about that city’s scene at the time. Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes told Melody Maker in October 1980, “It’s become a hip thing to deny that there’s a Liverpool scene but there is.”76 But what is particularly interesting about this division between the vanguard and New Rock is the way it is at odds with fan discourses. Online fan discourses tend to place groups such Echo and the Bunnymen and

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Dividing the New Wave  47

the Teardrop Explodes, as well as the Sound and U2, within the post-­ punk canon, whereas Reynolds relegates these bands to a next phase of post-­punk, out of the vanguard and into New Rock/New Pop.77 Of course, Reynolds’s book is only one node in a much bigger conversation. Arguably the internet has become the dominant arena in which contemporary ideas of genre are shaped, at least from a lay or fan perspective. Wikipedia, Allmusic, and YouTube are just a sample of the most general (i.e., not genre-­specific) sites that present different definitions of a given musical genre. The articulations of genre that exist in these forums are, furthermore, not always presented in a descriptive way, but usually exist in the form of lists generated by fans or online aggregation systems, which function as shorthand articulations of more in-­depth aesthetic values, ideas, and allegiances.78 The value of these websites for discussions about popular music genres lies in what they can tell us about contemporary processes of knowledge formation and acquisition. They also demonstrate the extent to which formations of musical genre are ongoing processes. Our present-­day understandings of what constitutes a category of popular music are substantially mediated by the internet, and therefore informed by neither an actual nor an entirely imagined community, but by a virtual community of scholars, journalists, casual researchers, fans, and trolls.79 In other words, in the realm of popular music classification and discourse, online information aggregations have added another generating and circulating discourse for musical genres; they act as another node in the discursive field. Online lists or catalogs of recordings labeled “post-­punk” simultaneously contribute to the reification of the genre, while keeping a degree of flexibility that is informed principally by individual tastes or opinions; such lists and catalogs are in turn policed, often aggressively, by fellow fans. This may be understood as an example of what Jason Toynbee describes as shared yet simultaneously diverse experiences of genre.80 Thus, bands that might for Reynolds belong to “New Pop and New Rock”—­Echo and the Bunnymen, U2, and the Sound—­also appear to be core components in post-­punk fan lists and the online world of post-­punk. I want to suggest several reasons why there is a disparity between the critical perspective on these post-­punk acts and their status in fan accounts. First, there is the simple passage of time. By the second half of 1979, new acts had emerged that borrowed from but didn’t sound identical to the bands of 1978 and early 1979. Hence, perhaps, the need for a new subcategory—­New Rock, etc. Second, and perhaps more im-

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48  what is post-punk?

portantly, critics of the time appear to have been wary of acts on the Liverpool-­based Zoo label such as Echo and the Bunnymen and other bands to whom they were compared, such as the Teardrop Explodes and Wah! Heat. This wariness was rooted in three interlocking concerns: critics were skeptical of conventional “rock” and its connotations; certain critics distrusted the past; and there seems to have been some critical anxiety about enjoying music that was “honest.” Thus, rock, the past, and “honesty” surface as problems in the music press discourse in the second half of 1979. These are perhaps some of the reasons why accounts such as Reynolds’s, heavily influenced by the press discourse of the time, have separated the late-­1979 acts from the “revolutionary” core. Examples of the antirock, antinostalgia criticism emerge in reviews of two festivals that took place in the UK at the end of 1979. In late August of that year, the labels Zoo (Liverpool) and Factory (Manchester) joined together to present the Leigh Valley Rock Festival in Lancashire (sometimes referred to as “Zoo Meets Factory Half Way”). According to Mick Middles’s description of the event in Sounds magazine, this was a post-­ punk festival avant la lettre. Summing up the eclecticism of post-­punk as a “movement,” Mick Middles wrote, Finally, the partially underground side of the rock scene has produced a movement with no name, no fixed mode of dress and certainly no stereotyped sound. A large number of bands relying more on their own invention than on image or musical (in)competence.81

Thus, Middles’s introduction to the Leigh festival suggests a genre of sorts—­a “movement” in his words. However, looking closely at his comments on two of the Liverpool acts (Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen), the specters of both rock and the past present themselves as problems. To Middles these groups sounded too conventional. He described Teardrop Explodes as having “an orthodox basic sound” to which the band “add ideas,” and he described Echo and the Bunnymen as “worrying” him for their “lack of variation” and their tendency to revel to music in their own “Velvets-­inspired mystique.” What emerges in Middles’s account, then, is a suspicion of the musical past, particularly in this case “rock convention” and the style of the Velvet Underground. Middles’s comments are somewhat in line with what Fisher wrote more recently about how post-­punk is characterized by its active (rather than passive) relationship to the past: “you couldn’t repeat things, you couldn’t use forms that had become kitsch.”82 In other

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Dividing the New Wave  49

words, this is what we might call a “quasimodernist” sensibility, which I discussed with reference to Reynolds and Marcus, and what Fisher called “popular modernism.” I shall return to the idea of a “quasimodernist” sensibility shortly. But first, it is worth noting that critics other than Middles at the Leigh festival mentioned the creep of conventional rock in Echo and the Bunnymen. Introducing the term “new pop,” Ian Penman wrote about Echo and the Bunnymen at the Futurama Festival in Leeds in September of the same year, noting that he “couldn’t raise much interest in their respective music-­ makings as they stand. The regularity and pace put me in mind of a brass band, the leaky cheap organ frills lead back to other Doors,” and while playing, they “have to sound less like it’s their hobby; those peaches and cream ‘new pop’ lines don’t mean much to me, not hard enough, no definition.”83 Thus in a similar vein to Middles, Penman was put off by Echo and the Bunnymen’s retro 1960s flavor (their similarity to the Doors) and their “regularity,” for which he may have meant rock conventionality. Echo and the Bunnymen were just one of several new bands to appear at these two festivals, but they function as an important node because critics often referred to them and drew comparisons between them and other acts at this time. Alongside Echo and the Bunnymen, the Futurama Festival also featured “vanguard” bands such PiL, Joy Division, Delta 5, and A Certain Ratio as well as newer acts such as U2. For its mercilessness alone, it is worth quoting Gill’s review of U2 at length, but also for the way it highlights the “problems” with these newer acts along the lines discussed with reference to Middles and Penman. Gill describes U2 as “basically little more than nonsense, or perhaps the new Boomtown Rats.” “This four-­piece Irish group,” Gill wrote, are nothing more than a very traditional hard rock outfit with a singer—­ one Bono by name—­who’d love to be Rod Stewart, in imitation of whom he moves much of the time, when he isn’t busy imitating the inevitable Iggy, of course. He also delivers Bob Geldolf raps. [my emphasis]84

In criticizing U2, Gill drew on four main ideas. First, as I suggested with reference to Echo and the Bunnymen above, there is a skepticism toward rock convention and tradition—­U2 are bad because they’re “a very traditional hard rock outfit.” Second, Gill brings in pop star Rod Stewart, a choice for most-­hated in the ZigZag polls of previous years. Thirdly, Gill considers Bono’s borrowing from Iggy Pop as passé and

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50  what is post-punk?

predictable. This is not unlike Echo’s borrowing from the Velvet Underground and the Doors, since it displays a similarly incorrect use of the past. Finally, Gill compares Bono to pop new-­wave star Bob Geldof, another victim of the more underground punk/post-­punk sensibility, as exemplified in the ZigZag polls. What we see from Middles, Penman, and Gill with reference to Echo and the Bunnymen and U2 is, therefore, a resistance to rock, a resistance to the past, and a resistance to the mainstream or popular strand of new wave in the form of Rod Stewart and Bob Geldof. Gill’s critique of U2 intertwines in intriguing ways with the music press’s reviews of another band cast out from the post-­punk canon: the Sound. Furthermore, when tracking the criticism and comparisons between U2 and the Sound, an important chain of signification or cluster of sense connects these two bands to aesthetic ideas of honesty, simplicity, and lack of adornment. But where some critics celebrated the Sound for their rock ’n’ roll appeal, others found this conventionality problematic. For example, in a review of their debut album Jeopardy, released in November 1980, Steve Sutherland in Melody Maker wrote that the album “has got more spirit, more soul and more downright honesty about it than any other record I’ve heard this year.” Furthermore, In attempting to cut through all the craft and tradition of rock ’n’ roll, to aim straight for its heart, The Sound seem to have disregarded all normal studio techniques, tricks and embellishments and have gone for a no-­nonsense, totally open representation of their live sound.85

In Sutherland’s opinion, the Sound’s lack of “embellishments” was something to be celebrated. Furthermore, “downright honesty” in this case seems to be connected to the band’s ability to minimize the difference between their live sound and their recorded sound, and hence to the fact that they sounded as though they’d cut straight to the “heart” of the “tradition of rock ’n’ roll.” This is quite a departure from the buzz that Wire attracted in early 1978; they were one of the first “new wave studio bands,” and as I discuss in later chapters, studio techniques and tricks were important to the experimentation that defines other post-­ punk bands such as the Slits and acts from the Factory label. Indeed, as Goldman noted in her article on King Tubby for the Sounds special issue, musique concrète is a core, innovative component in both dub and its white equivalent, New Musick:

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Dividing the New Wave  51

Any sound—­a dog fight outside the studio window, door-­bells ringing, the uncanny squeal of tape re-­winding in the studio, a stranger cursing as he stumbles into the studio by mistake—­incorporates easily into dub.86

But, in addition to the way a lack of studio trickery may connote “downright honesty” in the case of the Sound, “honesty” is a curious word for the way it discursively bound the Sound to U2. For example, although Sutherland found the Sound spirited, soulful, and honest, he also wrote how he felt “embarrassed” to call them “an honest band” and, furthermore, to “lumber them with a journalistic albatross to carry around their necks the way U2 wear passionate hearts on their sleeves.”87 This comparison with U2 is noteworthy because the press indeed seemed wary of what they perceived as an earnestness or honesty in U2’s music. For example, Lynden Barber in Melody Maker wrote, “I suppose [their debut album Boy] will attract sneers, but what the hell—­the music here is enough to make you cry. Welcome to the new Eighties.”88 Similarly, Paul Morley felt embarrassed by his liking for U2 and the extent to which he found them “touching.” He noted how others had “dismissed [U2] as a slipshod and plain post-­Boomtown punk group on the verge of a turgid HM excess,” and the key words in Morley’s review of Boy come at the very end: “It’s not radical, in many ways it’s traditionalist, but it’s honest, direct and distinctive communication” (my emphasis).89 Honest, traditionalist, and with hearts on sleeves. This is how the music press heard both the Sound and U2 toward the end of 1980. In her essay on context and meaning in U2’s music, Susan Fast describes the band’s tendency to use black and white in their album art, as we see with Boy, as “a metaphor for simplicity, directness (honesty); color, after all complicates things, offering range and choice.”90 Fast locates U2’s “honesty” in their political engagement and sincere social activism associated with songs such as “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1983). What is curious, however, is that Barber, Morley, Sutherland and, to some extent, Gill, appear troubled by U2’s “honesty” on Boy, which predates U2’s more explicitly “political” music. What is it, then, about U2 that made them sound too “honest” from the beginning, even before they engaged in earnest social activism? In part, it might be the somewhat sentimental, if at times abstract, lyrics in the tracks on Boy. Barber suggested that U2’s music would “make you cry,” perhaps just like the boy in the album’s opening track, “I Will Follow,” who “tries hard to be a man” as “His mother takes

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52  what is post-punk?

him by the hand.” The entire album is, in fact, threaded with themes of boyhood or childhood and preoccupied with coming-­of-­age narratives, with picture books and comic strips in tracks such as “Stories for Boys,” as well as the potentially more menacing figure of the old man in tracks such as “Twilight.” In addition to this sentimentality and nostalgic mourning for lost boyhood, the lyric content of Boy is somewhat plain. There are no bizarre allusions to obscure nineteenth-­century figures as in Wire’s “Practice Makes Perfect,” nor is there any loosely deployed “ideology” as with Gang of Four. An effective way to illustrate the directness and simplicity of what the critics heard, and begrudgingly liked in Boy, is to map a track such “Twilight” onto music by U2’s early heroes, Joy Division, particularly their song “Shadowplay.” I have chosen these two tracks for what I hear as a similarity in the language used and, more obviously, U2’s interest in Joy Division.91 Mapping “Twilight” from Boy onto “Shadowplay” from Unknown Pleasures in a palimpsestic way perhaps illustrates the critical differences between, in the critics’ words, what is traditional and radical, and what constitutes simple honesty versus complex insight. In terms of hermeneutics, I’m interested first in the similarity between twilight and shadow, as liminal zones between light and dark, which indeed links back to Fast’s observation about U2 (and Joy Division’s) use of black and white in their album art as a “metaphor for simplicity, directness (honesty).” But, more specifically, I’m also interested in the bridge-­like section of “Twilight” that we hear first at approximately 1’ 30” where Bono repeats “In the shadow, boy meets man” four times. This bridge-­like section recalls, in an anaphoric sort of way, Joy Division’s line “In the shadowplay, acting out your own death, knowing no more” from “Shadowplay.” Both lines are indefinite in terms of meaning, but Curtis’s lyrics are darker, denser, and more detailed, and in a straightforward sense, there are more of them. Both songs also share the lyric theme of searching; but where Bono opts for a kind of flat minimalism, Curtis moves horizontally and vertically across spaces (the city/the ocean/a room), and Bono’s rhymes in the chorus (day/way/day/way) sound like clichés against Curtis’s epiphora in the first verse (waiting for you/searching for you/ waiting for you), especially given that the contents of Curtis’s first three lines are so different from each other. Furthermore, the three-­note bass riff in the bridge-­like section of “Twilight” over two measures is perhaps one moment where the critics mistook U2’s music as being “on the verge of turgid HM,” and there’s a stylistically pop-­like quality to the bright

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Dividing the New Wave  53

burst of a major chord and the singsong melody that accompanies the words “In the shadow, boy meets man.” With the directness, simplicity, and “honesty” of U2 and the Sound, the uncritical adoption of the past by Echo and the Bunnymen, and the overall tendency toward tradition or conventionality here, we return in some ways to the New Musick vs. power-­pop debate from earlier in the chapter. That is to say, there seems to be a fine line between—­and a preoccupation with—­what is cutting edge and what is pretentious, what is somehow authentic and what is just traditional rock ’n’ roll. While New Musick vs. power pop concerned the shifting value of “art,” critics in the post-­Futurama days appear concerned with being too earnest and not radical enough. The critical strain that allies itself with what I have referred to as a “quasi-­modernism,” that is, a preoccupation with experimentation, newness, “progression,” anti-­pop, anti–­old rock, and anti-­old seems to be the key to post-­punk’s retroactive constitution as a genre distinct from other acts in punk and new wave. Post-­punk, from a critical perspective, is the music from the new-­wave field that acquired the most symbolic capital along these quasimodernist lines. However, having identified what seems to be the thrust of post-­punk from a critical perspective, we see a tension emerging when we look at fan lists, since they tend to forge post-­punk according to musical characteristics. Furthermore, so-­called post-­punk revival acts of the early 2000s such as Maxïmo Park, Bloc Party, and LCD Soundsystem are categorized as such owing more to their musical characteristics than to the extent to which they fulfill the critical criteria of radicalism, experimentalism, and so forth. The continuity between critically acclaimed post-­punk bands and those on popular lists is what Danny Weizmann in the LA punk rock fanzine Flipside referred to in 1981 as “British guitar disco.”92 The emphasis on establishing a rhythmic groove, layering melodic and syncopated guitar textures over an eighth-­note bass-­line pulse, the songs’ metallic textures, and (male) voices intoning some “serious” lyrics are all characteristics of most of the acts discussed in this chapter, including Gang of Four, Joy Division, the Sound, and U2. The latter two may be said to have “popularized” this approach to the extent that they are central to fan notions of post-­punk, but as I’ve demonstrated, they lack the symbolic capital to be considered post-­punk by critics. Furthermore, in borrowing the groove-­based approach from Joy Division and the like, the bands to emerge in late 1979–­’80 reflect the sonic and racial hybridity that characterized the “vanguard,” only it comes second-­hand and is, therefore, perhaps not as “radical.”

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54  what is post-punk?

Conclusion Through a close reading of the rock print media from November 1977 to the end of 1980 with the Sound’s album Jeopardy and the critical anxiety surrounding U2, it would appear that the emergence of post-­punk followed a more convoluted path than a simple genre-­to-­genre relay from punk to post-­punk, or indeed a clear “splintering” of punk into three. Rather, at the time of post-­punk’s emergence, much slippage existed among the terms “punk,” “new wave,” and “post-­punk.” Definitions of these terms and their criteria had not ossified as much as they have in more recent accounts. Indeed, from our present-­day perspective, where the new-­wave field has been divided into neater categories, snapshots of the late-­1970s musical field offered by the Village Voice and ZigZag polls show it to have been somewhat chaotic, and the broad categories “new wave” and “rock” sufficed to accommodate the musical language explored by a group such as Wire. Thus, coherence in the late-­1970s could be found in punk/new wave’s opposition to more distant genres such as MOR rock and disco and, subsequently, in larger-­scale identity formations, particularly those of race and gender. Indeed, for critics such as Robert Christgau the phrase “white music” was enough to make sense of most of this musical activity. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify themes in the music press of this period that have since come to be seen as more concrete criteria for post-­punk. Critical accounts of groups such as Wire, Pere Ubu, the Fall, and Siouxsie and the Banshees hinted at divergence from new wave as a whole with an emphasis on artiness, eruditeness, or a “new” musical language. In the case of Wire in particular, their sonic experiments strove harmonically, lyrically, and structurally outside of punk’s most limited musical parameters, and critics identified this difference by referring to them as part of a “vanguard” or as rock’s “new” thing. These nascent discursive ideas, then, set the boundaries of present-­day understandings of post-­punk, which have been the basis for extracting these groups from the broader new-­wave field, excising them from generic neighbors or field competitors such as the Jam and Elvis Costello, who fared better with the public. Furthermore, even though writers such as Reynolds and Crossley have repeatedly stressed the stylistic incoherence of post-­ punk, themes of “progressive-­ness” or “radicalness” seem important to Reynolds’s account in particular. This “radicalness” is founded on an investment in stylistic (and identity) hybridity and a quasimodernist investment in “the new,” and is rooted very much in the discourse of the

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Dividing the New Wave  55

time. While some critics enjoyed the earnest acts that entered the fray in late 1979, such as the Sound and U2, others were embarrassed or wary of their sentimentality, their “traditionalism,” their rock simplicity, and their nascent popular appeal. At this juncture, it seems as though what constitutes “post-­punk” points in two directions. On the one hand, extrapolating from the historical discourse, and adding in present-­day critical accounts, post-­punk is/was seen as the artier faction of punk and new wave. On the other hand, according to fans and revival acts, post-­punk is/was guitar-­based dance music, heavily inspired by groups such as Joy Division and picked up predominantly by white male acts from 1979 on, such as the Sound and U2. What this suggests more broadly is that a category such as post-­ punk can be as much a question of discourse and ideological policing as a question of stylistic criteria.

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two

| Dub Is the New Black and the Post-­Colonial Politics of Sonic Space

In an interview with Chris Bohn for NME in July 1980, Keith Levene, the guitarist with Public Image Ltd. (PiL), stated the following: Funny thing was that I never realized [at] first that rock—­The Rolling Stones—­all came from black music, the blues. And I really came to hate all those 50s Chuck Berry riffs. I love it for what it was, but all the rock and rollers . . . [make] me ill. They are all so into that and think that it’s so important—­if only they’d fucking get away from it, into something that is important.1

Running contrary to rock’s history of imitating and idolizing musicians such as Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, and Jimi Hendrix, emergent post-­ punk artists such as Levene avoided playing blues-­derived music: My personal thing has never come from black music, and I’d hate to be involved with the blues or anything. I never get the blues. I might get down, but the blues haven’t got anything to do with me, right? When I left The Clash, I joined a band called The Quick Spurts and I told them that if I could amputate their little fingers I would stay with them, because I hate all that twelve-­bar shit, you know?2 An earlier version of this chapter is available as a journal article. See Haddon, “Dub Is the New Black: Modes of Identification and Tendencies of Appropriation in Late-­1970s Post-­Punk,” Popular Music 36, no. 2 (2017): 283–­301. 56 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/24/2021 6:57 AM via UNIV OF CHICAGO AN: 2331093 ; Mimi Haddon.; What Is Post-Punk? : Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 Account: s8989984

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Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space  57

Bohn was careful to point out, however, that Levene’s “distrust of rock and roll” and blues-­derived music was not “directed at the originals.” Rather, Levene’s distaste was directed at musicians who continued to imitate rhythm and blues well into the 1970s: he loved the blues “for what it was, but all the rock and rollers” made him “ill.” This distinction between the “originals” and the “imitators” here is racially marked. Levene’s problem is not with African American musicians, but rather with white appropriators, and Levene’s feelings toward the imitators whose “little fingers” he’d like to “amputate” may be interpreted in several interconnected ways. First, Levene’s “distrust” of rock heroes such as the Rolling Stones is characteristic of punk’s rejection of the perceived overinflated egoism of rock more broadly.3 Second, PiL had recently returned from an unsuccessful tour of the United States, which may have compounded Levene’s feeling of estrangement from US-­associated music. Third, and perhaps most importantly for this chapter, Levene seems to be expressing discomfort with the very foundation of 1960s blues-­ rock: young white British musicians such as the Rolling Stones singing about places to which they had never been, experiences they had never had, and racial identities they had never lived (“the blues haven’t got anything to do with me, right?”). Levene’s recommendation that people instead “get away from it” thus invited readers and musicians to cultivate alternative, nonblues areas of interest that were more “important” or, indeed, relevant to their own personal or immediate experiences.4 But for the readers of NME who were familiar with the music and press coverage concerning PiL there was perhaps something odd about Levene’s statement “My personal thing has never come from black music,” and throughout the entire interview, neither Levene nor Bohn mentions dub, a “black music” that is an audible influence on PiL’s 1979 album Metal Box. All three of the regular members of PiL (Keith Levene, John Lydon, and Jah Wobble) not only shared an affinity for dub, but Levene would later be directly involved with dub as a session musician in the early 1980s for Adrian Sherwood’s project, On-­U Sound.5 Thus, despite Levene’s insistence that his “personal thing” never came “from black music,” one of PiL’s central sources of inspiration was black music, in the form of both dub and disco; it’s just that “black music” in this context meant something else.6 Significantly, the ideas expressed by Levene in this interview were not specific to him but appeared in other interviews and articles during the punk and post-­punk period. From as early as September 1977, Vivien Goldman in Sounds observed how rhythm and blues was no longer in

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58  what is post-punk?

favor, but Jamaican music was.7 In a January 1978 interview, Brian Eno, a musician from whom Levene says he took inspiration, also expressed a dislike of blues-­based genres. When criticizing music that had a “bluesy feel,” Eno singled out the same culprits as Levene, criticizing the Rolling Stones for their blues-­derived style. In contrast, Eno planned to collaborate with reggae musicians Aswad, and he praised his own music for its forward-­looking aesthetic; it was forward-­looking, perhaps, because it did not derive from “old” African American models. In a subtle allusion to the assumed essential eroticism of blackness, furthermore, Eno derides the “it’s-­all-­felt” aesthetic of blues-­based music and suggests his own music does not have the same kind of “warmth.”8 This late-­1970s reorientation away from blues-­derived music and toward both reggae and dub would seem to establish a helpful chronological narrative: mid-­1970s punk dropped blues-­rock and moved toward reggae, and late-­’70s post-­punk continued to eschew blues-­based rock and borrowed some dub techniques. But such a linear progression not only oversimplifies the distinctions between punk, new wave, and post-­punk, as I discussed in the previous chapter, but even enemies of “modern music” such as the Rolling Stones experimented with reggae on “Cherry Oh Baby” on their aptly titled album, Black and Blue (1976). Furthermore, there are plenty of so-­called post-­punk tracks with blues influences, as heard in music by the Fall and the Birthday Party. It is perhaps more helpful, then, to consider the particularity of post-­punk’s identification with dub-­reggae, and what this has come to signify in terms of post-­punk’s characterization. In what follows I focus on the UK bands PiL, Joy Division, Gang of Four, and the Durutti Column to explore the multivalence of UK post-­punk’s interconnection with dub-­reggae, and to consider what this signifies at the levels of both identity and generic belonging.

Dub-­Reggae, a More “Important” Genre For the likes of Levene, it seems that borrowing from “black music” qua African American music was passé, inauthentic, and demonstrated the dubious appropriation of the experiences of a national and racial other, whereas borrowing from “black music” qua Jamaican and British black music such as dub and reggae was somehow more acceptable, even desirable. One explanation for this shift in cross-­cultural identification would be the kinship that writers have noted emerging between punks and Rastafarians in Britain, especially from the mid-­1970s onward. While

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Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space  59

Dick Hebdige suggested that an alliance with reggae, with Britain’s “other within,” offered punk another weapon in its anarchic arsenal,9 the narrative adopted by music journalists at the time was to emphasize similarities between these two sociomusical cultures. Writers such as Goldman and Jon Savage noted a sense of kinship between the two worlds. Following a Rock Against Racism (RAR) concert in September 1977, Goldman described the connection between punks and Rastafarians as the “new wave sympathy for their black peer group.” Goldman argued that it was their shared status as victims of an oppressive culture that brought punks and Rastafarians together. She wrote, when you get right down to it, punks and dreadlocks are on the same side of the fence. Bluntly, who gets picked up in the street by the police? Answer: those natty dreads and crazy bald heads.

Goldman was keen not to depict this identification between punks and Rastafarians in too idealistic a light, however. In the same article she cited instances where young white people had been struck by beer bottles hurled by young black people. Nonetheless, Goldman also quoted DJ Don Letts to support her argument in favor of a shared cause for the two communities. Regarding punk, Letts said that it was the “first white movement that he could relate to as a black man” without being made to feel as though he was participating in a minstrel show.10 Indeed, Letts’s comments were integral to Goldman’s argument, so as to avoid charges of unidirectional borrowing and appropriation. In addition to writing about this shared feeling of marginalization, Goldman and writers such as Penny Reel regularly contributed reggae columns to publications such as Sounds and NME, respectively, and this prevalence of dub-­reggae in the punk-­music press represents an exception to its almost exclusively white content.11 Indeed, in August 1977, ZigZag went so far as to dispense with its “No Black Music policy” to publish more reggae articles. This further illustrates the kind of maligning of black-­associated music in punk discourse of the kind we saw with Levene.12 Indeed, the fact that Rock Against Racism began as a response to Eric Clapton’s racist outbursts and support for Enoch Powell at a Birmingham concert in 1976 is important for helping to contextualize Levene’s dismissal of black-­associated genres and their white imitators.13 In stark contrast to the music of black America, Jamaican migrants and musicians lived and performed in close proximity to the musicians in the punk scene. Indeed, what better way to send an antiracist message

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60  what is post-punk?

(to someone who had spent their career playing black-­associated music) than to embrace a more localized black music? By demurring from associating with blues-­based genres but developing a connection with Jamaican music, punk and post-­punk artists were able to distance themselves from what may have been perceived as the colonialist enterprise of appropriating remote-­seeming black music. The literal proximity of reggae and punk, and the emergence of new British identities, result in large part from Jamaica’s history of subjection under British colonial rule and the shifts in migration associated with the Windrush generation. According to the Times of London, on June 22, 1948, the SS Empire Windrush ferried approximately 492 Jamaican migrant workers—­including “singers, students, boxers, pianists, and a complete dance band” as well as those willing to work in the coal mines—­to Tilbury docks on the Thames estuary.14 West Indian migrants continued to travel to the UK throughout the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to fill the labor shortage that Britain had been experiencing since the end of World War II. One of the central features of musical life that arrived with the Windrush generation was the sound-­system sessions that began in Jamaica in the 1950s. Sometimes known as dance halls or “blues” parties, a sound-­system session was an outdoor party with a DJ playing primarily American rhythm-­and-­blues records. This movement of people and musical practices, then, meant that the UK developed its own vibrant sound-­ system culture, especially among the UK’s new Jamaican communities. The DJ Duke Vin is cited as one of the first UK “sound-­system men,” if not the first, having introduced the sound-­system session to Britain as early as 1955.15 DJ Metro was also an important figure in the development of the UK sound-­system scene. Metro had been apprentice to DJ Duke Reid in Kingston, Jamaica, and arrived in England in 1958, having apparently spun records during the ship’s crossing to keep the passengers entertained. Using his skills as an electrician, DJ Metro built his own sound system in the 1960s, named the “Metro Downbeat” (after “Sir Coxone’s Downbeat”), and he played sets at the Flamingo Club in central London’s Soho and the Metro Club in Ladbroke Grove—­a venue where DJ and producer Bovell also had a residency in the 1970s. The growing importance of the UK sound systems has been expressed by Metro in his recollection of the “fierceness” of the competition between rival systems in the UK. Metro stated that “nobody talked about Jamaica,” because “it was happening here [in the UK] now.”16 The process of relocating a musical practice such as the sound-­

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Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space  61

system party from one place to another illustrates what Susan Stanford Friedman has called “indigenization,” the process of “making native or indigenous” a cultural practice from elsewhere. According to Friedman, this process relies on particularly favorable conditions to facilitate transplantation, such as a positive relationship between the place of origin and the new location.17 While by no means “positive,” the history of Britain’s colonization of Jamaica fostered the “transplantation” of sound systems from Jamaica to Britain. The crucial point is that Britain had its own sound-­system scene that was almost as old, alive, and thriving as the one in Jamaica. Such forms of Jamaican musical practice are an important part of Britain’s cultural history, and therefore may have contributed to post-­punk musicians’ feeling of kinship with dub-­ reggae in reaction against the previous generation’s imitation African American blues-­based music. In addition to thinking of dub as an indigenized UK genre, Paul Gilroy’s “black Atlantic” is also key; dub is a musical genre not bounded by one nation; rather, it is defined by the exchange and circulation of sound among Jamaica, the UK, and the United States.18 Locating dub in this way, and linking in more explicitly to its post-­colonial context, calls up Levene’s comments; he and his contemporaries sought music that was more “important,” contemporary, relevant, urgent, and even literally closer to home, than comparatively remote-­seeming African American music. Beyond the figurative walls of the UK’s Jamaican communities, the avenues through which Britain’s white subcultural followers came into contact with sound systems, dub, reggae, and its musicians were myriad. These included the circulation of dub records in music stores and clubs frequented by punks; punk-­identified individuals attending sound-­system sessions in the UK; the alternating coverage of punk/post-­ punk and dub/reggae in music magazines; the sharing of concert bills between dub musicians and punk musicians at political-­activist events such as RAR; and the particular exchange-­facilitating roles played by individual artists in both genres. Letts is of particular interest here. Born in London to Jamaican parents in 1957, Letts was one of the main intermediaries between reggae and punk. He was DJ at a club called the Roxy, formerly a gay disco, located in central London’s Covent Garden. According to Christopher Partridge, those who frequented Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop, Sex, were likely to attend Letts’s DJ sets at the Roxy. Even though the club was only open for a short period (from January to April in 1977), it was, in Partridge’s words,

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62  what is post-punk?

“a powerhouse of punk creativity.” Letts also played dub-­reggae records at Acme Attractions, a shop that rivalled Sex and also attracted members of the punk scene.19 By early 1978, the reggae influence on punk and emergent post-­punk was fully underway, and journalists made a point of noting the cross-­ racial connection being forged. In January 1978, for example, the Slits played a concert at their singer Ari Up’s former secondary school in London’s Holland Park. In his review of this concert, ZigZag editor Kris Needs pointed out that the Slits were “surrounded by a sea of ecstatic black faces.”20 Was Needs assuming that, “naturally,” black schoolgirls would be excited by hearing the Slits’ incorporation of reggae into their music? Or were the young women simply excited by the punk display? Later that year, in October 1978, the post-­punk groups the Pop Group and Cabaret Voltaire, and former Velvet Underground member Nico, appeared alongside the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson at an Amnesty International Benefit Concert. The reviewer for the concert, Richard Williams, remarked in Melody Maker that most of the audience members “swaying” to Johnson’s prose were white.21 Thus, the message offered by the music press seemed to be that black kids were into punk as much as white kids dug reggae. Outside of London, the UK’s regional cities also fostered a connection between punk/post-­punk and dub-­reggae. In February 1978 the journalist Charles Shaar Murray in NME described the live music venue the “F” Club in Leeds as “a reggae/punk crossover no-­man’s-­land” that “[played] music compounded of equal parts of reggae, New Wave and David Bowie.”22 Likewise in Manchester, the Factory record label released a reggae song by local band X-­O-­Dus on one of its compilations. X-­O-­Dus’s song, “English Black Boys,” was produced by Bovell. Factory described X-­O-­Dus’s music as “progressive” reggae in that it was intended for both black and white listeners.23 This self-­conscious articulation of the racial identity of the audience for a group like X-­O-­Dus points to an awareness of how musical genres are often divided according to race. Furthermore, by including X-­O-­Dus on the compilation, Factory attempted to foster an alliance between reggae and punk, and between black and white music fans; significantly, Factory interpreted what they were doing as “progressive.” This sense of alliance, proximity, and unification against the rock old guard, then, seems to account for Levene and PiL’s contradictory rejection of “black music” and embrace of dub-­reggae. Drawing from Georgina Born’s model of the four kinds of musically articulated modes

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Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space  63

of identification, we might say that by allying themselves with and borrowing from dub-­reggae, post-­punk musicians articulated what Born describes as an “emergent” mode of identification—­that is, identification between different social categories at a musical level that “prefigures” actual engagement at a social level.24 According to Born’s typology, punk and post-­punk musicians’ endorsement of dub-­reggae may have thus been an attempt to bring about, or “potentialize” through music, a “real [form] of sociocultural  .  .  . alliance” between black and white in the UK25—­one that surpassed the seemingly contradictory views of Clapton, who had both criticized Britain’s immigration policy and covered Bob Marley’s song “I Shot the Sheriff” (1974). Post-­punk’s identification with dub-­reggae enacted a partial subsuming of racial difference under a shared British national identity, in contrast to the purely imaginary or appropriative mode that some post-­punk musicians and commentators perceived to be characteristic of late-­1960s blues-­rock; hence, this was “progressive,” “modern,” or “new.” However, even though the identification between the post-­ punk scene and the dub-­reggae scene can be framed as “emergent,” this does not necessarily presuppose bidirectional borrowing between the two scenes. On the one hand, certain dub-­reggae musicians (primarily those in Britain) did voice an affinity with punk and post-­punk, and participated in making post-­punk records. West Indian–­born musician Dennis Bovell, for example, produced albums by the Slits and the Pop Group, and Rasta DJ Letts famously introduced Bob Marley to punk.26 More often than not, however, white punk/post-­punk musicians enhanced the musical vocabulary of punk by borrowing from dub-­reggae.27 The peculiarity of this historical moment, then, with its unidirectional musical borrowing, its bidirectional cooperation in political and recreational spheres, and the literal proximity between two racially different social categories, makes post-­punk’s racial politics a complicated matter.

John Lydon, Reggae Connoisseur Among the many different contexts in which dub-­ reggae and post-­ punk came into contact, musician John Lydon’s personal enthusiasm for dub-­reggae is a well-­documented and frequently deployed example of the interconnection between these two sociomusical worlds. Along with Levene and Jah Wobble, Lydon was a member of PiL, the group whose second album Metal Box, released in 1979, displayed a debt to both dub and disco despite Levene’s eschewal of “black music.” Previously,

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64  what is post-punk?

however, Lydon had been lead singer of the Sex Pistols. With “Johnny Rotten” as his nom de guerre, Lydon was perhaps most famous for having used expletives on British daytime television, and for having desecrated the Queen and several other similarly hallowed English institutions. Therefore, although Lydon’s interest in dub was not exceptional as we’ve seen from the examples of the Slits, Factory, and others, Lydon’s prominence at the time as an iconoclast and leader of alternative trends meant that his post-­Pistols activity attracted intrigue and media attention. And consequently, so did his enthusiasm for dub-­reggae. Reynolds cites four events that demonstrate Lydon’s love of reggae, and they also serve to depict post-­punk as a genre that sought to diversify the musical language of punk. These events include (1) Lydon’s appearance on Capital Radio, where he was interviewed by Tommy Vance on a program titled “The Punk and His Music” on July 16, 1977; (2) another radio interview, this time in Birmingham; (3) Lydon’s letter to a fan, which exhibited his in-­ depth knowledge of reggae sometime between 1978 and 1980; and (4) Lydon’s trip to Jamaica with Virgin Records boss Richard Branson, DJ Letts, and journalist Goldman.28 Reynolds cites the two radio interviews primarily to demonstrate the depth and breadth of Lydon’s tastes beyond punk and to illustrate his particularly strong affinity for dub-­reggae, in addition to other genres such as progressive rock. During the Capital program, Lydon played dub and reggae musicians such as Augustus Pablo, Fred Locks, Culture, Dr. Alimentado, and Peter Tosh. Lydon told the interviewer he had always enjoyed reggae and was attracted to dub-­reggae musicians’ love of sound as a phenomenon distinct from music. Vance in turn noted he had “never, ever, seen anybody with a big pile of reggae records, who’s in, ostensibly a white band.” Lydon explained his tastes by invoking his upbringing in London’s Islington and his early socializing with skinheads (a British subculture that modeled its look and attitude on Jamaican rude boys). Lydon also frequented clubs such as the Four Aces,29 a nightclub in Dalston, London, opened by Jamaican émigré Newton Dunbar.30 The list of reggae recommendations to a fan, from between 1978 and 1980, further exemplifies Lydon’s depth of knowledge; according to journalist Greg Whitfield, Lydon “ain’t no white man in Hammersmith.” While the records Lydon recommended are today fairly easy to purchase owing to the reggae-­reissue industry, and they’re also widely available on the internet, in the late 1970s the selections demonstrated “very esoteric knowledge and tastes.”31 In the same year that the Sex Pistols disbanded, Lydon gave his first

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Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space  65

television interview since 1976, with journalist Janet Street-­Porter for London Weekend Television. The tenor of the conversation between Lydon and Street-­Porter conveys the intrigue and anticipation that surrounded Lydon’s post-­Pistols career, and, importantly, explores his reggae interests. Lydon’s status as a media curiosity is visually signaled by the fact Lydon and Street-­Porter are followed through London’s Covent Garden by a gang of curious youths. In the interview, Street-­Porter asks Lydon what he had been doing with his time since he left the Sex Pistols, whether he had been rehearsing, and whether he was already with a new band. Street-­Porter then probes Lydon about which musical genre he intended to pursue with his new band, asking, “a lot of people think that maybe your first record is going to be a reggae record.” Toward the end of the interview Street-­Porter remarked that Lydon is not the only musician to show an enthusiasm for reggae, that it is indeed an “interest that has been shared by many new wave [musicians].”32 That same year, on Christmas Day and Boxing Day 1978 at the Rainbow Theatre in London, Lydon’s new project PiL had its debut. Echoing the hybrid billing of the Amnesty concert only two months earlier as well as the ethos of RAR, not only did PiL appear alongside poet Kwesi Johnson, but punk-­reggae fusion band Basement 5 had their debut at this concert and Letts appeared on the bill. The reggae writer and fan Penny Reel at NME was one of the journalists covering PiL’s debut, and his review of the concert stressed how significant a figure Lydon was to the UK’s subcultural scene at that moment. Reel described Lydon as “the face of the decade” and as someone who had almost single-­handedly been the “catalyst for all that [had] happened in rock music since the Pistols arrived on the scene” (emphasis original).33 Needless to say, the audience at the Rainbow Theatre was feverishly keen to hear Lydon’s brand new project, and importantly, in Reel’s account of the concert, it was reggae, not punk, that “ruled the day.” PiL took to the stage last and emerged to a reggae soundtrack. In Reel’s imitation Jamaican script, this was PiL’s “first ever public appearance inna inglan, inna dis yah time, yaah!” The band started with their song “Theme,” the opening song to their first album, Public Image: First Issue. The song comprises a repeated bass line, a drumbeat, sound effects, and improvised-­sounding vocals. The basic groove of the “Theme” suggests slow-­tempo hard rock, and Wobble’s bass line is conspicuous for its use of a (presumably forbidden) bluesy flat 7th and its adherence to a blues-­esque alternation between areas I and IV, though lacking the move to V that would complete a blues progression. However, by virtue of its prominent bass-­and-­drums texture, as

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66  what is post-punk?

well as its languorous bass groove, the band’s overall emphasis on timbre, Lydon’s meandering vocal performance, and the band’s evasion of verse-­chorus form, “Theme” suggests the influence of dub, and certainly departs from the kind of music made by the “rock and rollers” of the previous generation.

Imaginary Spaces and the Melodica Given Lydon’s status in the punk narrative, his post-­Pistols re-­emergence onto the scene with his new band PiL might be read as the musical culmination of punk or new wave’s emergent identification with dub-­reggae. With PiL’s Christmas concerts, Lydon mobilizes his love of dub-­reggae to transform punk into post-­punk. But, as I discussed above, PiL were not the only white band of the late 1970s to venture into reggae. In addition to the Rolling Stones, band such as the Clash and the Police borrowed from reggae, and punk bands such as Generation X were exploring the possibilities of dub’s echo techniques from as early as 1977 with tracks such as “Wild Dub.” One generic “rule” of post-­punk cannot therefore simply be the adoption of dub-­reggae techniques and an emergent sociopolitical identification therewith; something else must be at play. I argue in this next section that the particular way the bands Gang of Four, Joy Division, and the Durutti Column interacted with dub-­derived sounds afforded them the symbolic capital that allows them to retroactively qualify as post-­punk. These three bands borrowed obliquely from dub-­reggae in a way that was arguably subtler than those of some of their contemporaries. Rather than adopt the offbeat reggae “skank”—­in the way that the Clash did with “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” (1977) or the Police in “Can’t Stand Losing You” (1978)—­Joy Division and Gang of Four adopted the melodica in homage to Jamaican musician Augustus Pablo, and Joy Division and the Durutti Column adopted some of dub’s atmospheric effects and its creation of reverberant sonic spaces. In doing so, these three acts perhaps circumvented the essentialist problematic of so-­called “black rhythm” by rejecting the skank technique, and thus acquired more symbolic capital, distinguishing them as post-­punk in the punk/new-­wave field.34 In an interview with Bert van de Kamp first published in the Dutch magazine Muziekkrant Oor in September 1981, the producer Martin Hannett, who worked with both Joy Division and the Durutti Column, described his fondness for dub. Van de Kamp remarked, too, that Hannett’s unique production style was identifiable because of the “[dub] techniques, delayed reverb,

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Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space  67

elastic drums and other special effects” that he used on his records. Van de Kamp gives Closer by Joy Division (1980) as an example of Hannett’s dub-­ influenced production style. Hannett mentions in the same interview that he had listened to a lot of music produced by reggae producer Joe Gibbs, even if he was not always able to identify exactly how Gibbs had achieved a particular sound effect.35 In a different interview with Max Bell for NME in 1980, Hannett suggests that his interest in reverberant effects stems from his fondness for CBS recordings from the mid-­1960s and recordings created by pop/country artist Lee Hazlewood. But here too Hannett says he was especially fond of echo and syn-­drums in reggae: I was indoctrinated into that stuff by [DJ] Roger Eagle. I’d go around to his gaff around midnight and stay ’til dawn listening to his million reggae albums and they were all great dance records. Plus he tended to have blow.36

In addition to these written accounts, in a filmed interview with Tony Wilson (manager of Factory records, the label to which Joy Division and the Durutti Column were signed), Hannett discusses and demonstrates his methods at the mixing desk in a way that alludes to his dub influences.37 Redolent of Michael Veal’s description of the “spatial” dimension that echo can lend to a dub recording,38 Wilson asks Hannett whether he is using “exotic electronics” in his recordings “to create an imaginary room.”39 Though it is likely that Wilson was referring more to the unusual quality of Hannett’s equipment rather than to its signification as, perhaps, Jamaican-­associated, the “exotic-­ness” of reverb is not without significance since there appears to be a loose connection between echoic mixes and the discourse of otherness. In relation to the 1981 albums Dream Theory in Malaya by Jon Hassell and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne, for example, John Corbett suggests, “All these projects use an exotic-­sounding, echoey mix, a long-­standing trope of sonic Orientalism, usually linked to the ‘mysteries of the East’ mentality.”40 Concerning Joy Division in particular, Reynolds notes their creation of the sound of “cavernous space” in their records, which he links explicitly to dub, albeit the kind to emerge from “the Lake District or the steppes of Siberia.”41 I am curious, then, about what seems to be a discursive convergence between the creation of imaginary, cavernous spaces in musical recordings as a kind of avant-­garde technique and connotations of the exotic, and how this relates to notions of generic belonging and symbolic capital.

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68  what is post-punk?

The track “Sketch for Summer,” released in the UK on the Factory records label in January 1980 on The Return of the Durutti Column, presents an interesting case study.42 According to Steve Taylor in Melody Maker, the song was composed in the studio “in response to Hannett’s synthesized seagull cries,” which we hear at the beginning of the track, and Taylor describes the Durutti Column’s music as “ambient” and notes guitarist Vini Reilly’s “emotional” use of harmony.43 The song’s “ambient” quality can perhaps be attributed to the fact it is purely instrumental and foregrounds Reilly’s guitar playing, accompanied by only a drum machine loop and bird-­like sound effects. According to Mark Prendergast, Reilly’s desire was to make music that was not influenced by rock ’n’ roll, but music that was “new” and, intriguingly, inspired by Fats Waller, Art Tatum, and Benjamin Britten.44 The Return of the Durutti Column is therefore a record he describes as “nine classically-­structured guitar pieces put through echoplex.”45 Apparently Hannett understood that Reilly did not want a “horrible distorted, usual electric guitar sound,” and the Echoplex—­a tape delay machine designed by Don Dixon and Mike Battle in 195946—­was a response to this desire for a new timbre.47 Reilly’s desire to make music that did not have a distorted electric guitar sound and that was not like conventional rock ’n’ roll recalls Levene’s rejection of blues music and rock ’n’ rollers and the fact that Levene’s photograph for the Bohn interview shows him behind a Roland System 100M and a tangle of wires, but, pointedly, with no guitar in sight. Even though “rock heroes” used the Echoplex, and it is just one kind of tape-­echo unit that became available in the early 1960s for reproducing the “sound, space and feel of the hard rock ’n’ roll and R&B canons,”48 “Sketch for Summer” seems not to belong to the rock canon. The sonic characteristics of “Sketch for Summer” are such that they obliterate any aesthetic connections to punk in its narrowest sense, relating rather more closely to early-­80s pop, and perhaps even to funk or jazz. Furthermore, the bird effects coupled with the echoing, glissando guitar engage a kind of “acoustic otherness” that is both dubby and, perhaps, approaches the Hawaiian steel guitar. Peter Doyle argues that the exotic connotations of the Hawaiian steel guitar have historically been deployed in contexts where its actual “Hawaiian” associations are loose, shifting, hazy, and of dubious authenticity. Doyle also contends that spatial effects throughout the 1960s “would be used to cross-­refer between separate recording and performing domains: the recording studio musicians and producers used devices to invoke the great outside, while live performers used echo and reverb to invoke the residual connotative power of

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Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space  69

the entire twentieth-­century recording tradition.”49 This multiplicity of signification takes place in “Sketch for Summer”: its bird sounds, guitar, glissandi, and evocation of “other” places trace an oblique history of twentieth-­century popular music recording from, perhaps, Sol Hoopii, Martin Denny, and Hazlewood’s Nancy & Lee (1968). The languorous, haunting sound with its introductory “birds of paradise” offers a sketch, a vague idea of summer.50 Given their stylistic nonparticipation in punk, then, the Durutti Column’s connection to punk and post-­punk is on the one hand social and economic; they’re in the post-­punk “network” with Wilson, Hannett, and Factory. But on the other hand, we might also say it’s aesthetic. The following features become additional criteria for their post-­punk belonging ex post facto: the adoption of echoic sonic space as an experimental technique, stylistic eclecticism, a rejection of rock instrumentation, and the creation of imaginary sonic spaces. Indeed, the creation of cavernous spaces in musical recordings and connotations of otherness or otherworldliness in tracks such as this produce the kind of haunted aesthetic that Fisher threads throughout his work on “lost futures” in post-­punk music. For Fisher, dub emptied out a song to reveal both the dimensions of the space that contained it and sound’s materialities.51 The plaintive qualities of “Sketch for Summer” (or tracks such as “Decades” from Joy Division’s Closer) evoke the melancholy of abandoned or imaginary spaces that are perhaps additional markers of the “movement no name” that we now call post-­punk.52 Hannett wasn’t the only Factory associate interested in the sound world of dub-­reggae. There is also evidence that members of Joy Division explored the genre’s possibilities. According to his widow Deborah Curtis, Joy Division’s singer Ian Curtis regularly frequented a record store in the Moss Side district of Manchester in search of the latest music in that style. In her words, “Ian became obsessed with a lifestyle different from his own. He began to infiltrate the places where white people didn’t usually go.”53 Like PiL with their 1979 album Metal Box, Joy Division entertained the idea of releasing their single “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (backed with “The Sound of Music” and “These Days”) as a twelve-­inch record, a format popular with both dub and disco DJs, favored for its accommodation of longer mixes and better sound quality. Indeed, Curtis thought Metal Box, was “superb,” save only for the fact that he had to “put various amounts of weights on [his] stylus to stop the thing jumping.”54 A possible reason why Curtis’s stylus would be jumping while playing Metal Box may be the bass frequencies on the record.

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70  what is post-punk?

Determined to approximate the kind of powerful “bass culture” heard in dub, PiL mixed their record in such a way that Wobble’s bass sound may have overwhelmed Curtis’s home hi-­fi equipment. At £7.45, some considered Metal Box outrageously expensive, but its expense was due in part to its format: three twelve-­inch records playing at forty-­five rpm, encased in a metal tin.55 But the creation of a sense of space on their records, and an interest in experiments with sound and format, were not the only dub-­related techniques that Joy Division employed. The melodica, an instrument popularized at the time by Augustus Pablo, one that can be heard in earlier ska records such as those by Delroy Wilson and the Soulettes, also worked its way into a number of Joy Division recordings. According to fan discourse, the band’s melodica belonged to Curtis, and he introduced it to the band and used it in the songs “Decades” and “In A Lonely Place.”56 However, the understated use of the melodica in these recordings contributes to the overall obliqueness of post-­punk’s dub borrowings. Even though in the late 1970s the melodica was strongly associated with Pablo, its actual sound is arguably not as obvious a dub-­reggae signifier as a “skank” rhythm or rim-­shot introduction. Rather, the timbral qualities of the melodica are more easily absorbed into the kinds of synthesizer sounds that post-­punk musicians were experimenting with, almost mistakable for the ARP Omni-­2 synthesizer that is so characteristic of Joy Division’s recordings. In the song “In a Lonely Place,” for example, the melodica responds to the melodic phrase started by the synthesizer on the song’s instrumental hook (shown here in example 2) in such a way that the melodica sounds like an echo of the synthesizer.

Example 2. The melodic hook in Joy Division/New Order’s “In a Lonely Place”

Returning to the chapter’s central discussion of cross-­cultural identification in post-­punk music, then, could it be argued that the semantic slipperiness of the melodica, as a synthesizer masquerade, makes for a subtler form of appropriation? Given the stereotypical, culturally inscribed association between black identity and rhythm,57 in choosing to blend a dub timbre into their songs rather than dub rhythm, Joy Division arguably circumvent the crudest kind of appropriation and projected

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Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space  71

more of a “connoisseur’s” appreciation of dub in line with Lydon’s specialist knowledge of the genre. This further supports my claim that symbolic capital differentiates post-­punk from punk/new wave. Like Joy Division, Gang of Four also used the melodica both in their live performances and in their recordings, notably on their 1979 record Entertainment!. Gang of Four’s debt to Augustus Pablo here was noted both at the time and in more recent accounts. Following a concert on March 25, 1979 at the Lyceum Theatre in London, journalist Charles Chaar Murray described the band’s incorporation of the melodica as “an earnest approximation” of Pablo.58 In an interview from 2009, Reynolds asked Gang of Four’s guitarist Andy Gill whether the band “got the idea of using melodica on some of the songs from Augustus Pablo?,” to which Gill responded, “We’d put our hands up and admit that one!”59 Unlike Joy Division, Gang of Four’s use of the instrument seems to have less to do with timbre and more to do with the childlike, no-­frills, amateur aesthetic of punk. In fact, its seeming simplicity can be read as a rejection of the overblown virtuosity of 1970s supergroups, much in the manner of the one-­finger-­style synthesizer playing of electropop musician Gary Numan.60 On the album’s opening song, “Ether,” Gang of Four introduce the melodica approximately two-­thirds of the way in, during the instrumental break. The melodica takes part in an antiphonal dialogue with the electric guitar, providing minimal single-­ note and then single-­ chord responses. Toward the end of the instrumental break, the guitar and melodica alternate playing dissonant chords on the downbeat, eventually collapsing together and no longer playing antiphonally, as their rhythmic diminutions propel the song forward toward its main riff. The melodica-­guitar duo in this song might therefore be heard as a punk antisolo since both instruments play minimal, nonmelodic parts where one would usually expect to find some virtuosic noodling. However, as punk as this section of the song is, with all its minimalist clanging, we might also hear it as the dub section. Recalling Fisher’s comments about the way dub emptied songs to reveal their inner space, there’s a sense in the melodica section of “Ether” that the song has been emptied out and rock time has been suspended. What is interesting is that Gang of Four’s approach to song form in “Ether” is not dissimilar to the Police’s in “Can’t Stand Losing You.” In the latter, after the second verse and a second go at the chorus, at around 1’ 33”, the band empty out for a dub-­style middle eight. Therefore, despite the obliqueness with which Gang of Four have

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72  what is post-punk?

incorporated dub here, this similarity in form between these two songs—­ with riff-­based guitar music bookending a dub section—­further muddies clear distinctions between punk, new wave, and post-­punk.

Neither Local nor Exotic In the same section of Reynolds’s book where he discusses what he hears as the most obviously dub-­inflected parts of the post-­punk discography, he forges a link between the kind of exotica dub-­reggae offered to post-­ punk musicians who were in search of inspiration and “newness,” and the artwork in which these groups clothed their albums. Reynolds highlights the similarity between the cover for the Slits’ Cut (1979) and the image of the Mud People of Papua New Guinea on the cover of the Pop Group’s Y (1979). He also describes how the Pop Group’s singer, Mark Stewart, longed for “a lost wholeness that they imagined existed before civilization’s debilitating effects.”61 Therefore, on the one hand, post-­ punk’s turn away from conventional rock towards dub-­reggae might be seen as an attempt to foster a more “real” identification with musicians who were simultaneously local and other (British and black-­Caribbean). And yet, on the other hand, this musical borrowing was escapist and idealized, especially in its more generalized evocations of the exotic or of an “elsewhere,” as we see in the artwork Reynolds discusses. Thus, what could be described as the Pop Group’s “primitivism”—­their simultaneous idealization, representation, and containment of non-­Western cultures deployed to criticize life in the UK, which extended beyond using dub-­reggae sounds into a more generalized image of “other” cultures—­ participates in the familiar asymmetrical dialogue that has taken place between much Western music and its others.62 But there is nevertheless an interesting point of convergence where the worlds of dub-­reggae and (post-­) punk appear to have been interested in the representation or creation of alternate (sonic) spaces. What it is striking is that the Pop Group’s utopian vision of “pre-­civilized society” echoes the kind of “exotic” signifiers employed in dub-­reggae itself. I do not intend to suggest that the evocations of otherness employed by post-­punks such as the Pop Group and the Slits, or even the otherworldliness produced by Joy Division, were the same as dub-­reggae’s own approach, the power dynamics and priorities are undoubtedly different. For Rastafarians and dub-­reggae musicians, retaining an image or a memory of “Africa,” whether actual or retained through collective consciousness, is a way to articulate and challenge the horror of forced

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Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space  73

migration.63 As Gilroy suggests, dub-­reggae might be understood as a “counterculture of modernity.” That is, dub-­reggae positions “the world as it is against the world as the racially subordinated other would like it to be.”64 To better imagine these layers of idealized sonic space, we might say that post-­punk borrowed from dub to create “new” alternate musical spaces, but dub created new musical spaces and imaginary locales to expose the failures of so-­called “civilization.” Thus, post-­punk musicians and dub artists participated in the production of alternative spaces, be that Ethiopia, Abyssinia, Zion, the non-­West in the case of dub, or a more generalized, sometimes problematically “primitive” utopian or “lost” space in the case of post-­punk. The difference in musical styles between punk and reggae, and dub-­ reggae’s attachment to the evocation of home in the form of Zion, Africa, Ethiopia, and elsewhere, made dub-­reggae a rich genre from which to borrow or, indeed, plunder. Reynolds summarizes this sense of difference as follows: [Compared] to the miragelike unreality of reggae production—­all glimmering reverb haze, disorienting effects, and flickering ectoplasmic wisps—­most punk records sounded retarded, stuck in the monochromatic and mono midsixties.65

Reynolds’s language here employs the familiar modernist trope of looking to the “other”—­or the counterculture—­in search of newness, in search of something to revivify a dying movement. Dub-­reggae’s seemingly distant origins and different techniques of musical production gave it its “miragelike unreality,” as well as an attractive freshness after the drudgery of punk, and a change from the overripe sound and dubious politics of blues-­rock. At the same time, dub-­reggae’s proximity to the punk scene, in terms of both its politics and physical space (cross-­over venues and local immigrant populations), gave it enough of a “local” character to mitigate possible charges of appropriation on the part of punks and post-­punks that might otherwise mirror white rock musicians’ appropriation of blues-­based genres. With the exception of Letts and Bovell, however, almost all of my examples pertaining to the identification between white post-­punk musicians and dub-­reggae musicians so far have centered on white British voices. But understanding the role played by Jamaican musicians with regard to self-­representation and their creation of sonic utopian spaces is important because it illuminates the shift in signification as a musi-

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74  what is post-punk?

cal technique belonging to one genre moves into the world of another. Augustus Pablo, from whom both Joy Division and Gang of Four claimed they borrowed their idea to use the melodica, coined what he referred to as the “Far East sound” as part of his own conceptualization of Africa-­ as-­utopia. The writer Jon Pareles describes Pablo’s “Far East sound” as “minor-­key tunes with sparse lines for melodica floating above deep bass lines and echoing keyboards.” For Pareles, the sound is exemplified on Pablo’s 1972 song “Java” and his 1977 album East of the River Nile.66 According to Veal’s work on dub, Pablo modeled this “Far East sound” on 1960s recordings made by the likes of Don Drummond, Dizzy Moore, Jackie Mittoo, and Tommy McCook, all of whom made music designed to represent Africa or Asia. Pablo’s personal articulation of the “political and spiritual dimensions of his Rastafarian faith” was through his creation of what Veal refers to as a “devotional genre of reggae exotica.”67 Pablo’s song “Java” was a collaboration between Pablo, producer Clive Chin, and engineer Errol Thompson, and was recorded at Randy’s studio in Jamaica. The song comprises a characteristically reggae-­style “skank” rhythm guitar part, plus lead-­guitar melodies, bass, the distinctive “rim shot” snare sound on the drums at the beginning, and a delay effect on the minimal vocals (the word “Java”). The song’s main melody is dominated by Pablo’s melodica. Although Pablo was perhaps the best-­ known melodica player in the dub-­reggae genre at the time, the instrument was quite common in Jamaican music from as early as the 1960s. Musicians such as Danny McFarland and Delroy Wilson, Soul Brothers, and the Soulettes, in songs such as “King Street,” also featured the melodica. Indeed, the sound of the instrument’s distinctively eerie buzz and decay can perhaps be understood as a signifier of the reggae genre, since by the time of “Java” in 1972, the instrument had already established a unique role in the genre’s history.68 With regard to Veal’s suggestion that Pablo developed a “devotional genre of reggae exotica,” then, one of the most striking aspects of “Java” is the fact that it opens with what is perhaps the archetypal musical referent for the exotic or the “East:” the melody from “The Streets of Cairo,” or “The Poor Little Country Maid.” Originally an American vaudeville song by American composer James Thornton from 1895, “The Streets of Cairo” was written to ridicule the authenticity of the “Egyptian dancing girls” who performed at the World’s Fair in Chicago two years earlier, and who were more likely to have been from France.69 In “Java” the unmistakable melody is picked out on an electric guitar, over which Pablo

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Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space  75

intones, “From the West . . . From the East . . . Hail . . . Java.” Pablo’s lyrics, minimal though they are, summon the Rastafarian imagery of, and reverence for, “soon come” elsewhere. What is interesting, however is that Pablo has replaced Africa with the generalized, nonspecific “elsewhere”—­in this case, the island of Java. The song unfolds as a series of improvisations on the melodica accompanied by a simple two-­ chord alternation. Even though the melody from “The Streets of Cairo” appears only at the very beginning of the song, it functions as a key component in Pablo’s creation of the “Far East sound” since it frames the entire song. Furthermore, it is not uncommon in other genres of black popular music for the opening reference (whether a sample or quotation) to be signification-­heavy. Pablo’s reference to “The Streets of Cairo” might even be interpreted as a kitschy, ironic, and yet utopian instrumental toast. The quotation of “The Streets of Cairo” at the beginning of “Java” might thus be understood as an Orientalist semiotic. That is to say, in “Java,” Pablo communicates the idea of Rastafarian repatriation—­the return to what Sarah Daynes calls “elsewhere”—­by borrowing a generalized image of Said’s “Orient,” a “unified racial, geographical, political cultural zone of the world.”70 Pablo’s image of Java is not only exotic, but also utopian and spiritual since he conflates Java with devotional notions at the beginning of the song: “Hail.” What is significant is that Pablo takes this image of Java/elsewhere from colonial power: a fin-­de-­ siècle American voice satirizing the sound of the Middle East. This image or symbol of the “East,” as represented by this eight-­measure melody, had thus acquired such circulation and semiotic power that Pablo, who stands othered by white-­dominated society, borrowed it for its capacity to represent the utopianism integral to Rastafarian thought. To put it simply, Pablo-­as-­dominated has reappropriated dominating culture as part of his “devotional exoticist” project; he borrows the stereotypical image of the Orient or, as Doyle describes it, “received pictorial Orientalism,”71 to represent his utopian “elsewhere.”

Conclusion My analysis of Pablo’s “Far East Sound” may seem like a tangent in a discussion that primarily concerns the nature and attendant sociopolitics of post-­punk’s borrowing from dub-­reggae. However, for a number of reasons I think a discussion of a dub work is essential here. First, it raises

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76  what is post-punk?

questions about the way the meaning of a musical technique changes when it moves from its “home” genre and into another. The sonic spaces created in dub-­reggae were political, and relate in part to the tradition of Afro-­utopianism in black (post-­)modernisms. As Mikhail Bakhtin noted in his work on speech genres, “Where there is style there is genre,” and transferring style “from one genre to another not only alters the way a style sounds, under conditions of a genre unnatural to it, but also violates or renews the given genre.”72 What happens, then, when this technique, the creation of a politicized sonic space, moves into a “foreign” genre? The adoption of dub’s reverberant spaces in music by Joy Division and the Durutti Column (perhaps borrowed also from Lee Hazlewood and mid-­1960s CBS recordings) produces abandoned and melancholy sonic spaces that seem to mourn the loss of unrealized futures; such sonic listlessness is the “insight,” perhaps, that Paul Morley felt was so lacking with the new set of post-­punk bands at the end of 1980.73 In tracks by Gang of Four and the Police, however, these dub techniques are deployed to “renew” the middle eight, a staple component of the rock formula. To return finally to the conceptualization of post-­punk as a genre and its criteria, the “right” kind of response to black-­associated music appears to be key to its definition. As we saw with Levene at the beginning, the blues was outmoded owing to its connection to rock ’n’ roll, but dub-­reggae was obviously important. We might use this splitting of black music, then, to consider other instances of post-­blues black identification in post-­punk. What of Blondie, for example, with “The Tide Is High” or the turn to rap in “Rapture”? What role does their identification with black music play in their categorization? Was hip-­hop another resource from which to borrow to renew rock? Is “Rapture” an instance of black-­white rapprochement? Or, to what extent do African-­American Rasta artists such as Bad Brains accord with or problematize the analysis I have presented here? In addition to tackling these transformations in sonic and generic signification as techniques move across genres, I have deliberately created space in this chapter to analyze Pablo in order to challenge the critical tendency to frame post-­punk as quasimodernist, and thus to challenge critics’ claims to post-­ punk’s “progressiveness,” since that “progressiveness” depends on conceptualizing black music as a resource from which to borrow: dub “renews” (or violates) the genre to which it is transferred. Black music functions in this quasimodernist framework as a form of cultural capital used to revivify a predominantly white genre, just as “great” midcentury rock was founded on borrowing from the blues.

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Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space  77

This framing of post-­punk as quasimodernist also upholds the power of the (white) critic to bestow status accordingly. Therefore, rather than say that post-­punk is progressive because it borrows from black music, since white rock has a long history of doing so, perhaps we might conceptualize the new wave, including dub-­reggae, as an era and site of competing or simultaneously “progressive” musical and sonic experiments.

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three | Post-­Punk or Death Disco? Dance, Rhythm, and White Masculinity Disco, at least, was sex. New Musick is iron petting and coitus interruptus. —­Jane Suck, Sounds, November 26, 1977, 23 The male lust for death had always been a subtext in rock, but before Joy Division it had been smuggled into rock under libidinous pretexts, a black dog in wolf’s clothing. —­Mark Fisher, 20131

In his description of “Death Disco” by Public Image Ltd.

(PiL), released on June 29, 1979, Simon Reynolds proposes that the song was “arguably the most radical single ever to penetrate the UK Top 20.” This radicalism is perhaps due to the way the song bridges two opposed generic worlds: the nihilistic, angry, predominantly white world of punk, and the hedonistic, mainstream, and black and queer associations of disco. Indeed, Reynolds argues that the very pairing of the words “death” and “disco” was “just as radical” as the song’s generic hybridity,2 and he finds the pairing of the words so effective that he uses “death-­disco” as a synonym for post-­punk in some of his work on the topic.3 In this chapter I unpack the significance of this so-­called “radical” pairing of the words “death” and “disco.” I do so in relation not only to PiL’s song but to post-­punk more generally. In chapter 2, I suggested that post-­ punk’s musical borrowing from dub-­reggae ought to be understood as a response to and participation in the formation of Britain’s post-­colonial identities. Similarly, in this chapter, I call for an interpretation of the 78 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/24/2021 6:57 AM via UNIV OF CHICAGO AN: 2331093 ; Mimi Haddon.; What Is Post-Punk? : Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 Account: s8989984

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Post-Punk or Death Disco?  79

racialized symbols that surround punk’s borrowing from disco in a way that complicates the paradigms of black-­white or mainstream-­alternative hybridity. On the one hand, the words “death-­disco” evoke post-­punk’s generic plurality and suggest a move toward the potential dissolution of fixed categories of musical style or genre. But on the other hand, the word “death” in conjunction with disco, as well as images related to nonnormative physicality and “madness,” signal a generic cleavage between punk and disco cultures. In short, “death” and images of madness and nonnormative physicality function in this context as racial code. I begin by exploring the extramusical connotations of disco in the rock and punk press from the mid to late 1970s to give a sense of how rock and punk critics held disco in low esteem owing to its mainstream, commercial, and—­somewhat contradictorily—­racial and queer associations. Second, I provide musical examples that demonstrate how post-­punk musicians incorporated disco techniques into their songs and adapted them according to the punk style. The final two sections of the chapter explore the forging of white (masculine) identities through post-­punk’s relationship to disco.

Mid-­’70s Precedents: Disco as Rhythm, Rhythm as Disease In his impressive work on New York City’s dance cultures of the 1970s and ’80s, Tim Lawrence frames disco as a grassroots, hybrid scene where distinctions between the genres of punk, new wave, and disco were inchoate at best. Indeed, Lawrence resists naming or fixing such categories throughout his work and allows the generic fluidity and complexity of the city’s nightlife to speak for itself.4 However, it is worth exploring in more detail what I referred to in the opening of this book as levels of mediation. While at ground level the New York City dance scene was hybrid, the music press on the outside expressed and circulated the sense that these genres were separate, as were the people who participated in them. These often-­competing versions of history—­from ground level to the media to people from outside of New York City and the United States—­are important for the way they shape presentist and persistent narratives and understandings of musical genre. Therefore, to grasp the significance of post-­punk as disco’s deathly cousin, it is important to understand what disco signified to rock and punk enthusiasts in the mid to late 1970s, to those who experienced the decade’s music away from the vibrancy and polysemy of the New York dance floor. Certain rock and punk commentators held disco in low regard for (at

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80  what is post-punk?

least) two somewhat contradictory reasons. First, disco was perceived to be a capitalist genre with a mainstream following, garnering economic capital rather than symbolic capital.5 Second, disco was associated with a particular kind of sexualized otherness; even though disco was eventually transformed and co-­opted by predominantly white musicians with a suburban fan base, disco’s origins in New York’s black, gay, and Latino subcultures marked it as morally suspect and racially other. For the rock and punk circle these two facets of disco merged to give rise to a perception of the genre as something consumerist and normative, but also suspiciously hedonistic and alien. In an NME review of the Ramones’ self-­titled debut record from 1976, both the band and the reviewer, Nick Kent, express disdain for disco in a way that articulates its status as a black/queer-­subculture-­cum-­ mainstream phenomenon. Kent praised the Ramones, writing, “punk rock hasn’t sounded this good since disco-­death-­rot-­music set in and started calling the shots on your gams.” Furthermore, Kent argued that because groups such as the Rolling Stones had been too busy trying to achieve “blacknuss” (sic) by looking to genres such as reggae for inspiration, audiences needed the Ramones so that the “loser white-­kids,” including Kent himself, could reconnect with their “roots.”6 Thus, Kent’s article is particularly striking for the way it combines many of the threads and themes pertaining to rock/punk perceptions of disco. First, Kent explicitly connects disco with the idea or image of death (“disco-­death-­rot”), meaning, in this instance, death as a cold, artificial, un-­emoting, and therefore (via a leap of quasi-­Adornian imagination) an “inauthentic” musical genre. With the words “death-­disco-­rot,” Kent implied that disco lacked the kind of human quality—­the live musicians, the auteur-­ship, the rough “grain”—­assumed to characterize rock. Similarly, the word “rot” suggests disease, decay, and moral decline into decadence, presaging journalist Andrew Kopkind’s observation three years later that disco embodied the “end of humanism and decline of the West” for the “beleaguered partisans of rock.”7 Furthermore, Kent not only referred to disco as “death” and “rot,” alluding to mass culture’s connotations of inhumanness qua the industrial machine, but he also calls attention to disco’s coercive effect on the body. For Kent, disco forces the reluctant body to dance against its will; this music “calls the shots” on your body.8 Further on in his article Kent suggested that different musical genres are, and should remain, separate according to race. In a self-­deprecating fashion, he expressed his low regard for white musicians who try to perform genres such as reggae, for example, call-

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Post-Punk or Death Disco?  81

ing for an “instant ungodly death to white reggae.” Importantly, Kent suggested that the most salient distinguishing difference between black and white music is rhythm; he observed, for example, that the average white drummer cannot play “on beat.”9 Thus, the main ideas in Kent’s article are that (1) disco is commercial music that forces the body to dance, and (2) white musicians cannot play certain kinds of rhythmic patterns in the way that black musicians can, and furthermore they should not try. Suspicious of the kind of physical expression and dancing associated with disco, and embarrassed by white attempts to play reggae, Kent’s article projects what Tavia Nyong’o refers to as the “aggressive shyness” characteristic of the broader late-­ 1970s backlash against disco, as well as a kind of inferiority complex on behalf of white rock purveyors.10 Kent’s decision to align ideas of dance, blackness, and rhythm in his review of the Ramones’ record also reinforces what Paul Gilroy refers to as the “pernicious metaphysical dualism” whereby the black body is assumed to have a monopoly on certain kinds of physicality in accordance with colonial racial stereotypes and fantasies of primitivism, whereas the white man’s domain is the mind.11 In the same year as Kent’s article, toward the end of 1976, the former Velvet Underground musician Lou Reed described both black music and disco in similar terms. In an interview with Creem in December of that year, Reed commented on the dominance of black music in the mid-­’70s charts. Like Kent, Reed referred specifically to disco and highlighted its rhythmic character by asking interviewer John Morthland, “have you ever noticed that when there’s nothing happening, nigger music—­pardon me—­soul brothers and their turbulent rhythm kinda takes over. . . . It gets called disco.”12 Reed’s striking use of a racial slur is not the only racist element in his statement. Both his tongue-­in-­cheek self-­ correction (“pardon me—­ soul brothers”) and the idea that the rhythmic character of black music is not simply popular, but that it “takes over,” are racially loaded. Reed was widely recognized as a provocateur, and it is not clear whether his racism in this article was satirical. But the lyrics to his rhythm-­ and-­blues-­style song “I Wanna Be Black,” released later in 1978 but performed from as early as 1976, drew on similar stereotypes of black musicians’ rhythmic adeptness and fantasies of black sexual prowess, further demonstrating how the semiotic constellation of blackness, rhythm, disease, and sexuality held sway in mid-­1970s rock discourse. As Morthland observed in the Creem article, the song contains lines such as “I wanna be black and have natural rhythm, and shoot off twenty feet of jism.”

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82  what is post-punk?

The UK critics’ perspective on this was that the song was ironic. In 1978, Jon Savage called the song an example of “inverse racism,” particularly the lines, “I wanna be black, I don’t wanna be a fucked up middle-­class college student anymore.”13 Peter Silverton called both the song and Reed’s accompanying minstrel-­style dancing “utterly offensive, tasteless and wonderful,” noting how, during a 1979 performance at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, Reed played “his I Wanna Be Black role up to the hilt—­flapping his arms, trying to imagine he was really testifying but, as usual, looking like a total geek trying to do the funky chicken—­ sublime.”14 Whether or not Reed’s comments in the Creem interview or his lyrics and minstrelsy in “I Wanna Be Black” were ironic, they demonstrate the kinds of racist stereotypes circulating in the (predominantly white) rock and punk scene of the mid-­1970s in both the US and the UK. Furthermore, they demonstrate musicians’ and journalists’ anxieties about their own complicity in such racism. Both Savage and Silverton rescued Reed by suggesting that his song was a critique of what it’s like to be a white (middle-­class) man, echoing the same kind of embarrassment and self-­deprecating humor evident in Kent’s celebration of the Ramones in May 1976. Perhaps unsure of or nervous about the kinds of boundaries that Reed was overstepping in his “I Wanna Be Black” performance, these critics decided to critique—­and perhaps position themselves within—­the white male, (middle-­class) milieu, with its attendant self-­stereotypes of sexual inadequacy and awkward movement.15 As illustrated by the work of both Sander Gilman and Ronald Radano, numerous cultural and political contexts across the twentieth century have engaged these same associations between racial otherness, rhythm, sexuality, and disease. Gilman writes, “[during] the rise of modernism, from the fin de siècle to the collapse of the Nazi state (and beyond), the black, whether male or female, came to represent the genitalia through a series of analogies.” Gilman also notes how at the turn of the century black sexuality was “classed as a disease” in a way that “articulated many of the publicly repressed sexual fantasies at the turn of the century.”16 Thus, as Gilman illustrates, the black subject has a long history of representing both the sexualized and diseased other. The stereotypes that pervaded the rock/punk press with regard to disco participated in this historical and cultural trend, contributing to assumptions and essentialisms about black masculinity and black music-­making, specifically in opposition to white music-­making with reference to virility, penis sizes,

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Post-Punk or Death Disco?  83

disco as music that “takes over” the charts like a virus, and rhythm as a form of control. The particular way rock/punk critics expressed such fantasies and anxieties in conjunction with rhythm specifically also has historical precedents. Musicologist Radano suggests that “[references] to the bodily affecting power of black rhythm” was a point of fascination for critics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the dissemination of “bodily affecting” rhythm became a metaphor for libidinous excess and the spread of disease. As Radano writes, “rhythm as infection not only concretized fears of an immigrant menace but identified a metaphor for its transmission as well, as if sound’s recognition would bring into the white body the ‘hot blood’ of foreign populations and African-­ Americans.”17 While the kinds of racialized language employed by rock/ punk critics in the 1970s does not quite express the same terror about coming into contact with immigrant “hot blood,” one notices how similar themes pervaded this discourse: disco rhythms made by black musicians were “taking over” and were coercing unwilling bodies into succumbing to its infectious power. Not only do the mid-­’70s examples prolong such assumptions about race, music, and the body, but importantly, they do so in a self-­deprecating manner where the white musician, the white critic, and the white fan emerge as hopelessly repressed, middle-­class, and rhythmically inept.

The Late 1970s: Disco as Dominant Culture In contrast to the voices of Kent and to some degree Reed, the critic Richard Dyer celebrates disco’s physicality in his often-­cited 1979 article “In Defense of Disco.” Dyer also highlights the historical tendency that I have described regarding the constellation of blackness, rhythm, and sexuality: Typically, black music was thought of by white culture as being both more primitive and more “authentically” erotic. Infusions of black music were always seen as (and often condemned as) sexual and physical. The use of insistent black rhythms in disco music, recognizable by the closeness of the style to soul and reinforced by such characteristic features of black music as the repeated chant phrase and the use of various African percussion instruments, means that it inescapably signifies (in this white context) physicality.

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84  what is post-punk?

Furthermore, Dyer argues that disco’s “whole body” eroticism contrasts to white-­coded rock; unlike the “expressive, sinuous movement” of disco, rock is a “mixture of awkwardness and thrust.”18 For Dyer it is this eroticism that redeems disco from its capitalist connotations. He states, “[it’s] not just that people whose politics I broadly share don’t like disco, they manage to imply that it is politically beyond the pale to like it.” Dyer refers to disco as the “dominant culture” and suggests that the genre’s radical potential could be found in the way it had been subversively reappropriated in gay clubs, exemplifying “contrary use of what the dominant culture provides.”19 The context for Dyer’s understanding of disco as dominant culture can be illustrated in journalist Andrew Kopkind’s article on the topic, also from the summer of 1979. Kopkind suggested that disco, a $4 billion industry at the time, not only saturated the popular music charts, but infiltrated other mass media, such as film and theater, and had inaugurated a “new attitude towards party going.”20 The mainstream sound of disco at the end of the 1970s is best exemplified by the Bee Gees, the Village People, and the music featured in John Badham’s 1977 film, Saturday Night Fever.21 Studio 54, a Manhattan club peopled by fashionistas and the celebrity elite, with an exclusive entrance policy, also played a significant role in the realignment of disco from subculture to mass culture. Furthermore, during the genre’s lifespan, not only did disco’s audience, participants, and ideological significance change, but so did some of its musical characteristics. According to Craig Werner, the “standardized production style,” the metronomic beat, and the decreased use of polyrhythmic patterns and live drummers in the second half of the 1970s was another shift that helped give disco “its bad name,”22 and we might add, its deathly connotations. This commercial success of disco and its connotations of superficiality attracted criticism from cultural arbiters, particularly among “beleaguered partisans of rock, punk, or jazz,” who, according to Kopkind, framed disco as “a metaphor for the end of humanism and the decline of the West.” Many rock purveyors also disapproved of disco’s so-­called centralization (the fact that disco musicians moved to big cities to take advantage of particular recording studios) because it was perceived as anathema to rock’s decentralized ideal—­that is, the idea of four musicians thriving on local, small-­budget music scenes without the aid of high-­profile studios, producers, and promoters. Kopkind noted that just as rock in the 1960s signified a threat to the status quo, disco in the 1970s was a “revolt against rock,” challenging the latter’s aspirations toward au-

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Post-Punk or Death Disco?  85

thenticity with artifice, fashion, frivolity, urbanity, and commercialism.23 In 1977, the patriarch of rock criticism, Lester Bangs, suggested that all his friends disliked disco for these very reasons: it was commercial and vacuous, it was “bright wallpaper” and banal.24 And there is concrete evidence of “post-­punk” musicians’ hostility toward the mainstream branch of disco. In an interview with A Certain Ratio in 1980, Jeremy Kerr stated, When [disco] becomes commercial and gets processed through the media, then anything artistic gets lost. “Saturday Night Fever” was a big jump from George Benson, things like that. It just totally commercialised it, though the film itself wasn’t bad.25

In addition to attacking disco’s commercial appeal and perceived lack of authenticity, some rock figures later in the decade expressed covert and overt homophobia and racism toward the genre. One writer who exemplified punk’s hatred of disco at its most toxic was the New York–­based writer Legs McNeil, who according to Reynolds “believed that disco was the putrid sonic progeny of an unholy union of blacks and gays.”26 The event known as “Disco Demolition Night,” organized by DJ Steve Dahl during a Chicago White Sox vs. Detroit Tigers game in Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979 (notably only two weeks after the release of PiL’s “Death Disco”), is often cited as the moment when antidisco sentiments reached their apex. According to Gillian Frank, “the events leading up to the Disco Demolition saw the assignment of homosexual definitions to disco and heterosexual definitions to rock music.”27 But, according to Nyong’o, Dahl’s “Disco Demolition Night” was a reaction not only against disco’s artificiality and its connotations of gendered, racial, and queer difference, but it was also an attack on the kind of white male heterosexuality portrayed by mainstream disco icons such as the Bee Gees and Tony Manero (John Travolta) in Saturday Night Fever. This idea is key to the kinds of white masculinity forged in parallel in the punk and post-­punk worlds. Nyong’o writes that Travolta’s white suit and flamboyant dancing, and the Bee Gees’ high vocal registers, “[usurped] the disco diva and the gay man” and thus presented an alternative version of white male sexuality that positioned the white male as object, and thus provoked “an aggressive shyness” and a “demand to return to the position of the gazer” on the part of white heterosexual males. Disco therefore posed a threat to white rock not only because of its connotations of difference (as an “unholy union of blacks and gays”), but because it tapped into anxieties surrounding how performances and

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86  what is post-punk?

representations of racial and queer difference might affect the formation of white masculinities.28

Enter PiL’s “Death Disco” If post-­punk is part of the punk genealogy and therefore connected to the discourse that disavowed disco’s commercialism and panicked about its connotations of otherness, the fact that post-­punk musicians adopted disco-­like rhythms and bass line patterns does on the one hand seem “radical,” or at least an attempt to flout the restrictions imposed by the rules of both genre and identity. On the other hand, in a similar vein to post-­punk/new wave’s incorporation of dub-­reggae, post-­punk’s incorporation of disco’s musical ideas may be part of what Will Straw refers to as post-­punk’s “lateral borrowing,” the temporary and one-­sided interaction between post-­punk and its neighboring genres, which Straw argues may have been an attempt to “rejuvenate” or “sustain” the “cultural space of punk.”29 Indeed, some historical commentary that suggests PiL’s borrowing from disco registered differently compared to their contemporaries. For example, comparing “Death Disco” to “Heart of Glass” by Blondie in late 1979, Chris Bohn wrote: [“Death Disco”] is the one dance single of the year to define its own style, without shaping someone else’s to suit its own needs (which is what Blondie did with “Heart of Glass”).30

Thus, while Bohn saw Blondie’s lateral borrowing as appropriative, he saw PiL as generating a new musical style. Bohn’s reading resonates with both Fisher’s and Reynolds’s suggestions that post-­punk’s relation to the musical past was a generative, forward-­looking one, what I in chapter 1 referred to as a quasimodernism. Analyzing the music of “Death Disco” offers one way to examine the mechanics of this alleged new style. The band PiL was of course the brainchild former Sex Pistol John Lydon, who was something of a luminary for the punk “loser white kids.” Therefore, the actual sound and musical characteristics of “Death Disco” perhaps came as a surprise to some rock press commentators. For example, journalist Danny Baker’s comments indicate that critics expected PiL to release a song that criticized disco. Baker wrote: The new Public Image single will be “Death Disco,” and not, as somewhat hopefully reported in another paper, “Death to Disco.” In fact

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Post-Punk or Death Disco?  87

Wobble believes disco music to be the closest sound to what PiL are doing. Certainly, and believe me, I’d have no bones about stating otherwise were it the case, “Death Disco” has one of the most powerful backlines to be heard this side of Chic.31

Rather than trashing disco, then, these former punk musicians paid homage. Baker’s reference to “another paper” suggests that the song may have been erroneously listed as “Death to Disco” in another publication. This erroneous listing could be an example of antidisco rockism, or it might be connected to the track “Death to Disco” released on a promotional antidisco record by a Los Angeles radio station around that time.32 Regardless, the incorrect listing demonstrates the strength of assumed alliances and conflicts between the genres (post-­)punk and disco, and the strength of the bond between the words “Death (to) Disco.” Baker’s comments also highlight the fact that PiL’s bass player, Jah Wobble, strove to play a disco-­style line in this song, and Baker goes so far as to compare the “backline” (presumably meaning bass line) to the “powerful” kind heard in disco numbers by the group Chic, famous for songs such as “Good Times,” “Le Freak,” and “I Want Your Love.”33 In addition to expressing an affinity for disco, PiL also endorsed dancing, an activity hitherto maligned by rockists. Lydon stated that he quite liked “a lot of disco music,” primarily because “you can dance to [it],” and stressed that he was aiming for a similar danceability with PiL.34 Lydon’s love of disco thus signaled a departure from what Reynolds calls the “standard punk stance . . . that disco sucked,”35 and PiL’s “Death Disco” to some degree contradicted the expectations that audiences and critics might have about a band that stemmed from rock and punk. In fact, Baker was not the only critic to draw attention to the significance of the disco elements in PiL’s songs. In a way comparable to Reynolds’ adoption of the name “death-­disco” for post-­punk, in June 1979 Jon Savage described PiL’s music as “downer disco,” compared their music to 1970s German-­rock musicians such as Neu! and Can, and noted how PiL added a “heavy disco propulsion” to their songs.36 Even though “Death Disco” was, according to Lydon, intended for the dance floor and critics such as Baker praised the funkiness of its bass line, the song is still rather different from songs by Chic and the like. The song indeed has a disco-­inspired drum pattern and a repeated two-­ measure bass riff that recalls certain disco ideas, as I discuss shortly. But it also includes other genre signifiers and extramusical connotations that make it distinct from disco, such as the reggae scratches on rhythm guitar, a lead guitar line based on Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a half-­screamed

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88  what is post-punk?

vocal line that sometimes concurs with the lead guitar line, and lyrics that were, according to Reynolds, partly inspired by the deaths of both Lydon’s mother and former Sex Pistol Sid Vicious in 1979.37 If we take Baker’s comments seriously, that “Death Disco” resembles a song by Chic, then “I Want Your Love” is a good place to start. Released in January of the same year, “I Want Your Love” has a bass line that is a four-­measure phrase beginning with two eighth-­notes on the down beat of measures one and three, with chromatic flourishes toward the end of measure three and into measure four. The opening rhythm in the bass in “I Want Your Love” is somewhat echoed in the bass line to “Death Disco” (example 4). While the PiL song lacks the sixteenth-­note nuances played by Chic, the two eighths followed by a dotted rhythm, as well as the sixteenth-­note pickups into the two eighths (example 3), has a disco funkiness, and both tunes presage Queen’s disco homage “Another One Bites the Dust,” released a year later in 1980. The drum part in “Death Disco” also uses a disco pattern: the eighth-­note closed-­open hi-­hat pattern with the open hi-­hat coming on the offbeat, “four on the floor” in the bass drum, and snare accents on beats two and four. Crucially, however, without the syncopated nuances played in “I Want Your Love,” the bass line in “Death Disco” doesn’t “move” in the same way. Rather, PiL’s bass line sounds more like a one-­measure repeated loop and an abbreviated version of Chic’s line, rather than a four-­measure phrase. Furthermore, the tempo in “Death Disco” is slightly faster than it is in “I Want Your Love,” which contributes to its frantic sound. The cumulative effect of these features—­the abbreviated bass riff, the shorter distance between movement and repose in the bass line, and the slightly faster tempo—­recalls the skipping of a vinyl record. This comparison between “Death Disco” and “I Want Your Love” demonstrates not only how PiL have borrowed certain rhythmic ideas from disco, but also how the band transformed such ideas by omitting the rhythmic complexity and the fullness of the phrase in Chic’s bass line, thereby creating a more aggressive loop. Furthermore, PiL juxtaposes disco ideas in the rhythm section with musical and lyrical materials that are anathema to the perception of disco as a commercial culture with a sexual, rhythmic vibrancy: Lydon screeches his vocals, the guitars are abrasive, and the lyrics are mysterious but discernibly gloomy. Lydon sings, “Watch her slowly die / Saw it in her eyes / Choking on a bed / Flowers rotting dead”; but Chic sings “I want your love, I need your love / Just like the birds need the sky above / I’ll share my dreams and make you see.” “Death Disco” therefore sounds

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Post-Punk or Death Disco?  89

like more of a commentary on the purported compulsory positivity and carefree connotations associated with mainstream disco. At the same time, however, even though PiL’s reconfiguration of disco-­genre signifiers lends them a punk flavor, the rhythmic character of the song remains recognizably disco, and perhaps more importantly, you can dance to the song, albeit awkwardly, and thus in dialogue with the formations of white masculinity that emerge from the pro-­and antidisco discourse: a “mixture of awkwardness and thrust.”38

Example 3. The bass line in “I Want Your Love” by Chic

Example 4. The bass line in “Death Disco” by PiL

PiL’s “Death Disco” is not the only example of a post-­punk song that borrows its rhythmic character from disco. Several post-­punk bands used a combination of a disco rhythm section with noise guitars and other punk and/or reggae musical signifiers, such as distortion and echo, as well as political, “arty,” or somber lyrics. This confluence of styles is exemplified in songs by PiL, but also Joy Division, Gang of Four, A Certain Ratio, Josef K, and others. Indeed, Fisher argues that both Joy Division and the Fall “were ‘black’ in the priorities and economies of their sound: bass-­heavy and rhythm-­driven.”39 In February 1980, Bohn referred to this blend as having an “element of black funk and the post-­punk modern.”40 It is perhaps for this reason that Reynolds takes the song title “Death Disco” as the genre label for some of the music made during the period from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the coupling of death with disco (or dance) was thus not limited to PiL. In another example of “deathliness” as a discursive disavowal of disco’s physical and mainstream connotations, Martin Hannett described Joy Division’s music as “dancing music with Gothic overtones” (emphasis mine).41 This again suggests a cleavage between social dancing to mainstream popular music and what these post-­punk musicians were doing, a cleavage with potentially racialized overtones. As for “black funk” meets “post-­punk modern,” Joy Division dabbled with soul music in their early recordings. According to the writer Jake Kennedy, the band worked on a

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90  what is post-punk?

version of the Nolan Porter song “Keep On Keepin’ On” (1972) during their 1978 demo session with RCA, which—­echoing Reynolds’s praise for PiL’s hybridity—­was designed to fuse the “disparate worlds of new wave and soul” in order to “[double] audience figures.”42 But several of Joy Division’s actual releases demonstrate more concretely the hybridity between disco (or dance) and punk. Indeed, the emphasis on “groove”—­a term not regularly used to discuss punk—­is audible in a song such as “Dead Souls” from the album Still (1981). Here the band uses more than two minutes at the beginning of the song to focus on the purely instrumental parts without vocals. The absence of lyrics and emphasis on the rhythmic counterpoint in this example has a strong dance-­music flavor, presaging their later formation as New Order. An analysis of their song “She’s Lost Control” demonstrates another way in which the band created a more disco-­or dance-­music-­associated sound through their rhythm section. Unlike PiL, however, the group did not necessarily incorporate obvious disco gestures into their song-­writing style, but modified certain punk gestures such that they began to sound more akin to disco or to have an overall affect more conducive to dancing. In the bass line to the archetypical punk song “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols, for example, there are very few instances of syncopation. When they occur, they come in the form of the tied eighth notes at the ends of phrases. In “She’s Lost Control,” however, these tied eighth notes become melodic features of the bass riff, occurring early on as a lead-­in to the second half of the phrase (measure 5 in example 5). Both the syncopation in the bass part and the way the bass enters with a quarter note (measure 4) as opposed to eighth notes further highlight the syn–­drum pad punches on beats two and four. This is especially the case since, in measures five and seven, the bass accent falls an eighth note after beat two, creating a kind of polyrhythmic counterpoint more characteristic of disco and black dance musics. The unusually high pitch and the stepwise movement in “She’s Lost Control” also make the bass line serve as more of a melody line, compared to the comparatively monotonous riff for “God Save the Queen,” for example. Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” therefore diverges from the stereotypical punk bass line by making the bass line more melodic, and by extrapolating the moments of syncopation present in punk bass lines and playing them in dialogue with a rhythmically independent drum part, thus creating kinds of polyrhythmic sound more characteristic of disco than punk.43 This could be what prompted Savage to call Unknown Pleasures “one of the best, white, English, debut LPs of the year.”44

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Post-Punk or Death Disco?  91

Example 5. The opening drum part and bass line in “She’s Lost Control” by Joy Division, mm. 1–­7

White Men Can’t Dance To an extent, post-­punk musicians’ incorporation of disco characteristics signaled a departure from the previously dominant punk/rock logic that insisted that both social dancing of the disco kind and disco’s syncopated rhythmic propulsion were exclusive to commercial and black-­ associated genres, best exemplified by Kent’s reference to the kind of disco music that “[calls] the shots on your gams,”45 or Reed’s descriptions of “soul brothers[’]” disco and its “turbulent rhythm.”46 In this regard, post-­punk’s challenge to the rules of genre presents a challenge to what Gilroy refers to as the “pernicious metaphysical dualism that identifies blacks with the body and whites with the mind” by reintroducing both the body and dance into rock and white-­identified music—­a kind of dance that was not necessarily the same as the body work of white punk men such as Iggy Pop.47 However, the language critics of the period used to describe post-­punk’s physicality and rhythm, in light of this borrowing from disco, frequently contained images of death (or in Hannett’s case, the attendant “gothic”), which may be read as racial code for “white.” In addition, images of mental illness and nonnormative physicality and/or resistance to systemic power—­more often than not, the machinations of advanced capitalism—­also appeared in critics’ comments and were used to make sense of punk’s borrowing from disco.48 The following examples illustrate how numerous critics who attended Joy Division’s concerts represented their music and performances using madness or illness as their frame, focusing specifically on Curtis as lead singer. In

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92  what is post-punk?

November 1978, at a live performance, Mick Middles in Sounds described Curtis’s dancing style as someone “waving his right hand in epileptic fashion.”49 Middles’s comments are striking for the fact that Curtis’s epilepsy was not yet public knowledge; it was not until his eventual suicide at the age of twenty-­three on May 18, 1980, that fans and critics would learn of Curtis’s experience with that illness. Using similar language almost a year later, in June 1979, Jon Savage wrote, “Live, [Curtis] appears possessed by demons, dancing spastically and with lightning speed, unwinding and winding as the rigid metal music folds and unfolds over him.”50 Two months later, Paul Rambali at NME remarked that Curtis’s “body shakes, rocks and palpitates, a mad dervish of motion and movement all caught in that one mad spotlight.” Ramabli also provided an account of the audience’s physical response to the “irresistible motion” of Joy Division’s music, emphasizing furiousness, lurching, jerking, crawling, flapping, and madness: Heads that start to bob furiously at the first pulse of streamlined rhythm, attached to bodies that lurch back and forth, attached to legs that jerk up and down at the knee and arms that swing in a loose crawl or elbows that flap madly. It’s the modern dance that everybody will be doing in the coming months.

In the same review, Rambali added that Joy Division’s performances were “sorrowful, painful and sometimes deeply sad” with “harrowing glimpses of confusion and alienation,”51 and thus far from the commercial stereotypes of disco as the dominant dance music of the era. In February 1980, similar images prevail. Seemingly inspired by the 1979 film, Apocalypse Now, Chris Bohn in Melody Maker suggested that Joy Division initiated a “new dance” led by “the demented Brando figure,” and that “frustration” and “tight, uneasy rhythms” lie behind their music. Echoing Rambali, as well as Hannett’s comments about “dancing with Gothic overtones,” Bohn described Joy Division as “masters of . . . gothic gloom.”52 Attending the same performance as Bohn, Paul Morley described Curtis’s dancing style as that of a “comical trapped butterfly flapping” and as a visual representation of the “struggle inherent in Joy Division’s music,” which expresses “the violence of breakdown, inhibition, failure.”53 Not only did rock critics choose these images to describe Joy Division’s live performances, but similar ideas appeared in descriptions of the feeling of listening to Joy Division’s music. In July 1979, Max Bell wrote that listening to Joy Division is “uncomfortably claustropho-

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Post-Punk or Death Disco?  93

bic,” “memorably psychotic,” and with “dialogues of schizophrenia.” Bell went so far as to evoke the image of a mental institution, describing the band’s music as something that “[brought] to mind endless corridors where doors clank open and shut on an infinite emotional obstacle course.”54 There are several ways to interpret this discourse. Returning to Gilroy’s assertion about the “pernicious” binary between the black body and white mind, and drawing on Radano, Gilman, and Frantz Fanon’s discussions of the black body as the locus of sexual fear and desire,55 the rock critics’ observations of the dysfunction of the white body in these performances could be interpreted as a result of the “spreading” of black rhythm. Since post-­punk musicians such as Joy Division incorporated disco and dance-­driven syncopation into their music, it’s as though they have “caught the disease,” and their white bodies, not built for such unfamiliar eroticism, are cracking under the pressure. It might also be argued that post-­punk’s jerky performances are less about spreading rhythm from body to body and more about the romanticization and prestige of “madness.” Indeed, Western culture has a history of bestowing a special status or prestige on mental illness. As Gilman demonstrates, cultural commentators have often assumed that there is a connection between mental illness (or “craziness”), and race and/or creative genius. Gilman draws attention to the work of psychiatrists R. D. Laing and Joe Berke, who argued that “madness” was a “creative response to an untenable world . . . those who society labels as insane are only responding to the craziness that surrounds them by creatively reworking it.”56 Such ideas have recurred throughout Western thought but became noticeably prevalent during and after the nineteenth century, and indeed certain avant-­garde artists used madness as a form of capital to present themselves as the “antithesis of the established order.”57 In light of the historical trends, post-­punk critics’ depiction of “madness” in Joy Division’s performances can be situated according to the modernist tendency to aspire toward authenticity and legitimacy by looking to antirationality. Furthermore, critics participated in and contributed to the formation of long-­standing ideas about white physicality and creativity in opposition to black physicality and creativity. In short, through metaphors and coded and subtly racialized language, the white artist remains/becomes reified and legitimized as the tortured genius with the frail body, while the black artist is the all-­body disseminator of captivating rhythms. As such, critics’ language begins to legitimize or even turn (Curtis’s) “awkward” movement into a vocabulary; his dance

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94  what is post-punk?

transforms awkward white-associated movement into a new idiom and, therefore, rescues it from the “white guys can’t dance” stereotype. The combined work of Joy Division and its critics thus fosters or, to borrow from the musicologist Robert Walser, forges a notion of white-male dance as a dance that registers both the physiological disturbances and the economic-­cultural disturbances of late capitalism (in the form of pop/ disco).58 Thus, this “modern dance” might be read as a mind dance rather than a physical dance like that of disco, which has erotic and/or commercial connotations.59 This significantly named “modern dance” is visible in video footage of their live performances, particularly the performances of “She’s Lost Control” on September 15, 1979, on the UK television programme Watch Something Else and their performance of “Transmission” on The Wedge, another UK television programme. Joy Division’s performance of “She’s Lost Control” on Watch Something Else is filmed from the waist up, making it difficult to see what Curtis is doing with his lower body. But this seems significant; in line with cultural constructions of whiteness, Curtis is alienated from his lower half, his symbolically sexual self. Curtis’s wild dancing is even more pronounced in the Joy Division’s performance of “Transmission.” During the section where the lyrics state “dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio,” Curtis jerks as though compelled to dance by his own incantation. As Fisher writes (in relation to their track “She’s Lost Control”), “Here the organic is slave to the mechanical rhythms of the inorganic; the inanimate calls the tune, as it always does with Joy Division.”60 “Transmission” is also notable for the constant sixteenth-­note hi-­hat subdivision of the drummer, a disco reference, albeit at a faster tempo than you would probably find in a disco number.61 Thus this moment is almost a realization of a Marxist critique of advanced capitalism: the machine of the commercial music industry (the disco on the radio) compels audiences to move against their will, as though taken over by an all-­consuming force. In addition, the implication that this disease—­the dancing disease and its bodily contortions—­is caught from synthetic music recalls Kent’s notion of disco, which, allied to symbolic blackness, “[calls] the shots on your gams.” Alternatively, we might situate Curtis’s movements in the genealogy of mixed-­race British dancing of the 1970s associated with both disco and Northern Soul. For example, the footage of UK dance floors from the 1970s to the 1990s in Mark Leckey’s 1999 collage-­film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore recalls Curtis’s dancing body. Furthermore, Leckey’s strategic recontextualization of the

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Post-Punk or Death Disco?  95

bodies in this film, which he achieves through the use of non-­diegetic music and sound, illuminates the “mad” look of social dancing. During the instrumental breaks in “Transmission” and “She’s Lost Control” the cameras tend to pan away from Curtis and toward the other musicians. While this is a somewhat conventional way of editing popular music footage, it might also have been because Curtis’s dancing was too bizarre or too disturbing for those watching at home. A disconnect between audience and performer is visible at the end of the performance of “She’s Lost Control.” Here there is a brief shot of the almost exclusively white audience and significantly, nobody appears to be moving. Curtis’s response to the music is incongruent with the audience’s response. This juxtaposition can be interpreted in two ways. First, this juxtaposition re-­inscribes the assumption proposed by Dyer that rock fans (white bodies) either dance awkwardly or do not dance at all. Second, Curtis’s wild abandon and its incongruousness with the audience’s response reinforce his image as a romantic genius, one whose “madness” allows him to commune on an otherwise inaccessible plane. Despite the cult-­like attention Curtis’s dancing, music, and biography have attracted, especially after his death, his on-­stage performance style was not altogether unique. Other post-­punk musicians performed in a way that might elicit similar descriptions of madness, awkwardness, and/ or sexually repressed anxiousness. Indeed, Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke deliberately cultivated a “mad” stage persona and his possessed-­seeming performance of “Unspeakable” on Belgian television in 1981 illustrates this well, and is all the more pertinent given his use of all-­over-­the-­body dark paint.62 Another example that perhaps presages the type of stylized bodily repression that would merge with mid-­’80s British indie bands like the Smiths is in the music video for “Sorry for Laughing” (1981), in which Scottish group Josef K’s movements bear no relation to the funkiness of the music. Singer Paul Haig’s suit gives him an air of stiffness or repressed-­ness. Haig’s only physical movement throughout the whole performance is his awkward straddling of a life-­size cushion toy that resembles one of the band members (or just a suited man). Like Curtis’s waist-­less-­ness in the televised Joy Division performances, Haig is similarly alienated from an obvious symbolization of sexuality or virility in the video. During most of the performance he demonstrates immobility by tapping one foot with one hand plunged shyly into his pocket. Haig also occasionally hugs himself defensively, or voluntarily straitjackets himself, as though psychologically unfit or too embarrassed to be out in public.

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96  what is post-punk?

But Haig’s overall rigidity makes for an unusual juxtaposition against the images of a kind of green gunge being massaged on what looks like a person’s abdomen.63 In many ways, Haig’s performance accords with Mary Harron’s brilliant words about post-­punk as unerotic. The new music appearing in the northwest of England at this time, she wrote, “is the second part of a cycle that began in 1976. It is carried by the momentum left over from punk, and tends to be sexless, introverted and complex.”64 Thus, while post-­punk musicians such as PiL, Joy Division, Killing Joke, and Josef K brought disco or dance music into the foreign generic space of punk, they also (re)introduced a kind of physicality that may be interpreted as an articulation of white masculinity. The disco ideas and syncopated rhythmic patterns in songs such as “She’s Lost Control” and “Sorry for Laughing” invite bodily expression that diverts from what Dyer refers to as “awkward thrusting.” The press’s reviews of some of these performances, however, maintained the commercial and racial bifurcation that had hitherto ruled the impasse between rock/punk and disco, choosing to frame this generic hybridity with images of madness or death. Such images served to illustrate that post-­punk was white, but also stood outside of dominant culture. As such, discourse around post-­ punk’s incorporation of disco helped sustain two assumptions that pervade many cultural conversations, not just those germane to popular music: first, that madness is a form of subcultural capital in opposition to the economic capital of commercial musics such as disco,65 and second, that white creativity is different from black creativity, and manifests in post-­punk’s mind-­dance rather than disco’s body-­dance.

From Post-­Punk to Goth? The image of the white body as suffering and malfunctioning under the strain of disco rhythm, giving rise to the “modern dance,”66 has been employed elsewhere, particularly in Theo Cateforis’s analysis of David Byrne’s performance and dancing in Talking Heads’ 1984 video Stop Making Sense. In many ways Cateforis’s analysis resembles my analysis of Joy Division and their contemporaries, since he too emphasizes images of physical awkwardness and psychological ailments as important aesthetic components in new-­wave music. Indeed, Cateforis proposes that nervous disorders in general are ailments that have been historically coded white. Because most new-­wave musicians were both white and middle class, “[new wave] itself connoted whiteness.” Nervousness, Cateforis argues, became synonymous with “white new-­ wave mascu-

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Post-Punk or Death Disco?  97

linity” because it offered one way to articulate what it felt like to be alienated from inside a middle-­class habitus.67 By framing Byrne’s performance within the history of neurasthenia in North America—­as an illness brought about by modernized living conditions and technology, and one that affects white people almost exclusively—­Cateforis contextualizes his interpretation of Byrne’s performance in Stop Making Sense as one of quintessential whiteness. While I agree that the nervousness or awkwardness in Byrne’s performance can be considered part of the cultural construction of whiteness, I think it is important to consider why and how aspects of madness, physical awkwardness, and even death have been meaningful articulations of some white music-­making for both artists and critics. For the final section in this discussion of post-­punk’s vocabulary of rhythm/dance, madness, and white awkwardness, then, I want to return to the “radical” pairing of “death” and “disco” to suggest that language related to death may have enabled self-­conscious musicians and critics across the post-­punk era to negotiate an asymmetrical power dynamic: the history of white appropriations of black music.68 Post-­ punk’s death-­ related language extended beyond PiL’s “Death Disco.” Other tracks on Metal Box included titles such as “Chant” (which is part of a longer track) and “Graveyard”; while the latter is explicitly deathly, the former evokes images of ritual and perhaps the mystical and religious connotations of the gothic. “Graveyard” is purely instrumental, and like “Death Disco,” uses a disco-­based drumbeat with an abrasive guitar line and dub-­influenced echoic sounds. In Reynolds’s description of the track, he describes it as “disco music for a skeleton’s ball,” and crucially, he also frames disco as black when he writes that “[it] really sounds like dem bones doing the shake, rattle, ’n’ roll.”69 Thus, Reynolds delineates disco and post-­punk according to racial identity, but significantly uses language that evokes minstrelsy in a way that makes the potential racial essentialisms of generic belonging all the more vivid and problematic. Notably, A Certain Ratio’s first album of 1979 is titled, The Graveyard and the Ballroom, which neatly unites an obvious reference to death with dancing as well as recreation and leisure time, nodding toward Graveyard Studios and the Electric Ballroom. Furthermore, song titles from A Certain Radio include “Crippled Child” and “The Thin Boys,” both of which participate in the aestheticization of nonnormative body types or physical frailty in a way that resonates with a romanticization of Curtis as authentic and/or “modern.” Indeed, these track and album titles, as well as the language of the music press, can be understood in relation to “goth” as a genre unto

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98  what is post-punk?

itself. In his discussion of the definition of the gothic genre, Joshua Gunn suggests that by 1980 the distinctions made between what we now call post-punk and punk “gave way to gothic.” Gunn places punk/post-­ punk bands Joy Division, the Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, the Damned, and Siouxsie and the Banshees under this new category. Significantly, Gunn argues that even though music has its own technical vocabulary, the adjective is still “the primary representative unit the listener uses to describe music to herself and others,” and he identifies some musical-­ lyrical characteristics that are common to these punk/post-­punk acts that may have attracted the descriptor “gothic.” These include themes of “death, destruction, and darkness,” “electronic sounds and dance-­beats,” “minor chords, sparse, minimalist rhythms,” and a “recognisably ‘eerie’ or ‘gloomy’ texture.”70 But as much as these characteristics may elicit references to, or signify, gothic-­ness, they do not account for other contingencies that come into play when choosing the adjective that best describes the music. As Brackett has argued, genre labels in popular music discourse are rarely chosen “innocently.”71 Thus, descriptions of post-­punk and gothic music as dark or gloomy—­ and even as intelligent, introspective, or interior—­may function as codes for whiteness just as much as they describe the sonic and lyrical content of individual songs. Indeed, Dyer’s final chapter in his book White focuses on this relationship between whiteness and images of death, and as he summarizes the images of whiteness that have pervaded his book, he includes the words “taut, tight, rigid, upright, straight (not curved), on the beat (not syncopated), controlled and controlling.”72 Thus, the usage of notions of “death”—­broadly construed—­gave post-­punk critics, and perhaps the musicians, a way to both borrow from and disavow pop, disco, and their myriad connotations.

Conclusion By the end of the 1970s, musicians such as those in PiL, Joy Division, A Certain Ratio, and others inclined away from earlier styles of rock and punk, perhaps, to paraphrase Elvis Costello, because these styles offered only two “bankrupt” kinds of masculinity: aggressive machismo or fake sensitivity.73 One way post-­punk musicians departed from these established rock and punk masculinities was via the incorporation of black-­ (and queer-­and pop-­) associated musics. But post-­punk musicians’ incorporation of disco differed from that of their white contemporaries: it was not the kind of sexualized white funk purveyed by number-­ten

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Post-Punk or Death Disco?  99

most-­hated Rod Stewart, nor did it have the mainstream appeal of the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever. Rather, post-­punk borrowed disco’s groove, but brought disco’s “eroticism” into contact with punk aggression and awkwardness. In doing so, post-­punk and its surrounding discourse generated and legitimized a new vocabulary of whiteness and white masculinity in popular music, forging a notion of white male sound and movement that registers both physiological and psychological disturbances, and the economic-­cultural disturbances of late capitalism. In short, the words “death-­disco” not only communicate how (post-­) punk incorporated disco, but how such seemingly “innocent” generic terms are matrixes of social, political, and sonic connotations.

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four | Post-­Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism

At the Hammersmith Odeon , at the end of October 1976, New York punk poet Patti Smith gave her second London performance. In her review of the concert for Melody Maker, journalist Maureen Paton observed how Smith’s performance was especially captivating for the female members of the audience: A lot of women present clearly got off on the idea of having someone up there to identify with (an attitude with which I have a great deal of sympathy), and there were more yells of encouragement from women than I’ve ever heard at any other concerts.1

The fact that there were “more yells of encouragement from women” in the audience demonstrates how exceptional Smith’s performance must have seemed. Here was a woman who derived her stage persona from channelling male icons such as Doors singer Jim Morrison and poet Arthur Rimbaud, and who was not only participating in the hitherto male-­ dominated field of rock but was actually leading a rock group. Smith was, in other words, a rock musician with whom the women attending the Hammersmith concert could finally identify. In the rest of her review, however, Paton wrote scathingly about the way Smith seemed to be relying too much on her exceptional status as a woman in rock, in lieu of displaying any kind of musical skill: A version of this chapter is available as an article. See Haddon, “Not Playing Properly: Amateurism as Generic Choice in Three Post-­Punk Case Studies,” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 23 (2019, forthcoming). 100 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/24/2021 6:59 AM via UNIV OF CHICAGO AN: 2331093 ; Mimi Haddon.; What Is Post-Punk? : Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 Account: s8989984

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  101

But it’s precisely this kind of freak originality that Smith exploits so mercilessly by playing the rock and roll hero. The guitar that she hadn’t even bothered to learn to play properly was toted around the stage as a symbol, nothing more. And that just isn’t good enough. [emphasis mine]2

By criticizing Smith’s “freak originality” Paton implied that Smith was using her gender, her exceptional status in the rock field, as her primary means of winning approval, rather than showcasing her musicianship or achieving recognition based on musical skill; she “hadn’t even bothered to learn” the guitar she was holding. As such, Paton judged Smith according to classic rock criteria, in which notions of virtuosity and skill were prized, and does not appear to have been au fait with the emerging punk trend and its self-­consciously amateurish, DIY approach.3 It is not uncommon to encounter opinions such as Paton’s in mid-­to late-­1970s rock discourse. As I shall discuss, journalists often implied that it wasn’t “good enough” for a female musician just to be on stage, making music, and participating in the new-­wave/punk moment, but she had to be able to “play properly” or “play hard” as well. Significantly, the rock media’s anxiety about whether female musicians had managed to surpass their predetermined position as sex objects and become instrumentalists who could “play properly” appears to contradict the argument concerning women’s contribution to punk and post-­punk that numerous commentators have made more recently. Scholars such as Mavis Bayton, Helen Reddington, and Caroline O’Meara have suggested that it was precisely punk’s ethos of antivirtuosity and its irreverence for conventional playing styles that opened the field of rock to women artists in the first place.4 Musicians such as Smith, the Slits, the Raincoats, Nina Hagen, and Siouxsie Sioux are some of the best-­known women of the punk and post-­punk era, but they by no means represent the extent of women’s involvement in these genres, which was significantly greater than in previous eras.5 According to Bayton, punk challenged “a whole range of existing rock conventions” and subsequently “opened up a space in which women could play.”6 Punk challenged rock’s conventions in part by presenting alternative masculinities (as discussed in chapter 3) and by not partaking in rock’s most ostentatious forms of misogyny. Bayton argues that punk’s celebration of musical ugliness encouraged women who may have previously lacked confidence or had no prior experience playing a musical instrument to believe that they too could be in a band.7

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102  what is post-punk?

This chapter offers a critique of the idea of “amateurism” in the discourse on women’s participation in punk and post-­punk. I explore the different ways in which the intertwinement of women musicians with notions of amateurism relates to my broader discussion concerning the definition of post-­punk as a genre. I begin by revisiting some of the relevant literature on the role of women in punk, focusing specifically on the different positions and modes of musical expression available to women prior to and during the punk and post-­punk eras. Then, with reference to rock’s pre-­punk musical conventions and assumptions about women’s ability to play and compose, I analyze music by three post-­punk female groups/artists—­the Slits, the Raincoats, and Lora Logic. Rather than suggest that the Slits, the Raincoats, and Lora Logic epitomize an integral representation of female identity because of the way they “resisted” rock’s conventional idioms, I argue in favor of a genre-­based reading of these complex issues wherein the generic spaces of punk and post-­punk provided a new position for the expression of alternative (female) identities.

New Positions and Second-­Wave Feminism Either in spite of or perhaps because of what Paton referred to as her “freak originality,” Patti Smith inspired some of post-­punk’s best-­known female participants. For Ana da Silva, vocalist in the London-­based group the Raincoats, Smith’s first London performance at the Roundhouse in May 1976 was particularly captivating. According to Zoë Street Howe (biographer of the Raincoats’ contemporaries, the Slits), Smith’s performance was on a par with the Sex Pistols’ concert at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976, in the sense that “Everyone who was anyone on the early London punk scene was there.” According to Howe, da Silva was particularly impressed with “Smith’s defiance,” the fact that she spat out a flower onto the floor and appeared not to be “taking shit from anyone.”8 In an interview with Alan Anger at ZigZag magazine in August 1978, da Silva remarked: I saw [Smith] when she first came over [to the UK] and played the Roundhouse and until that day, I hadn’t seen anyone who could move me the way she did. I really loved the way she was communicating with her audience throughout the gig.9

Smith was not the only inspirational figure for post-­punk’s female musicians. As Reddington demonstrates, seeing the haphazard perfor-

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  103

mance style and irreverence for conventional musicianship exhibited by the Sex Pistols also marked a crucial turning point, especially for guitarist Viv Albertine of the Slits: I think I’d seen the Pistols once, and having seen the Pistols, I knew; I immediately got it. It wasn’t about how well you play; it was about how you’ve got something to say that no-­one else is saying. And I utterly got that: otherwise I’d never have thought in a million years of buying a guitar because I couldn’t play, and I’d never played, and I didn’t consider myself a musician. But it was just so liberating seeing the Pistols because I thought “Oh, you don’t have to be a musician, you just have something you desperately want to say and the bollocks to get up and say it.”10

But why would “amateurism” and DIY aesthetics, the fact that the Sex Pistols couldn’t “play,” necessarily have encouraged female artists specifically to buy guitars and start their own bands? The association between female musicians and amateur aesthetics is especially problematic in genres such as punk and post-­punk because all of the musicians in these genres, both male and female, are what we might call “amateurs.” This is to say that, as with most musicians in popular music, punk and post-­ punk musicians received no formal musical training and deliberately drew attention to their simple musical style.11 Skills in popular music are acquired through what Lucy Green has called “informal music learning practices,” which have few similarities with formal music education and may include teaching oneself and “picking things up” as you go along.12 By linking female rock musicians to amateurism in this way, then, is there a danger of re-­inscribing the idea that female musical skill is hindered by some kind of biological deficiency, which—­palpable misogyny aside—­is easily debunked by turning to other genres at which women excel, such as classical music and jazz? Helen Reddington, in her history of women rock musicians of the punk and post-­punk era, has argued that widespread youth unemployment in the UK during the 1970s gave young women a chance to resist the gendered roles prescribed by previous models of adulthood. Unemployment, Reddington argues, “leveled” the gender field by allowing both young women and young men to prolong their childhood and childlike creativity. Reddington argues that the “gender-­leveling” effect of unemployment was not the only condition that prompted women to join the punk movement as instrumentalists and singers; it is important

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104  what is post-punk?

to recognize, she argues, that punk was more than just a fashion statement or even a musical genre. Punk was a “social revolution,” she suggests, that challenged mainstream culture’s normativity and fostered an “atmosphere of enablement.” This atmosphere of enablement was paralleled, furthermore, by a significant political intervention, the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act in the UK in 1975.13 Throughout her book Reddington notes how the concept of “amateurism” in punk music was both an advantage and a disadvantage for punk’s women musicians. On the one hand, punk amateurism was advantageous because it meant that women who had previously lacked confidence or had been systematically excluded from the world of rock—­its equipment, its social spaces, its machismo posturing—­could now participate in the genre. Reddington’s conceptualization of punk’s valorization of amateurishness derives its meaning in opposition to the “polished and smug sounds” of progressive rock. In this regard Reddington’s argument echoes Caroline Coon’s 1976 Melody Maker article on British punk in its earliest stages. Punk emerged, Coon suggested, in opposition to “bands like Genesis, Jethro Tull, E.L.P., Yes, Rick Wakeman, Roxy Music and Queen,” who were “gentlemen rockers” and whose music “can only be played by people with similar academic temperaments.” Punk therefore “stripped [rock] down to its bare bones again,” with minimal equipment, fast songs, no solos and “no indulgent improvisations.” It was a genre in which audiences revelled “in the idea that any one of them could get up on stage and do just as well, if not better, than the bands already up there.”14 Young women as well as young men were among those who imagined they could “get up on stage and do just as well.”15 On the other hand, the notion of amateurism worked to disadvantage women musicians because punk’s embrace of minimal musical skill left women musicians vulnerable to the predominantly male, but also female, “gatekeepers” in the rock media. As I illustrated with Paton’s review of Smith’s concert, certain music critics often commented on female musicians’ inability to grasp the rock idiom.16 As I have suggested, suturing female participation in the punk and post-­punk genres to a discourse of musical amateurism has the potential to re-­inscribe the notion that women have a biologically determined inability to grasp the techniques or idioms associated with rock-­based music. This is especially true if the sociological preconditions for women’s exclusion from rock are not fully explored or if a song’s potentially gendered musical meaning is not carefully unraveled; as I shall discuss in more detail, feminist musicologists have often confused what Green calls “inherent” and “de-

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  105

lineated” musical meanings, and thus have inadvertently perpetuated essentialist assumptions.17 Counteracting arguments based on biological determinism, Bayton has outlined some of the primary sociological reasons why women have not historically been associated with the rock idiom (of which punk and post-­punk may be considered subgenres). This history of women’s exclusion from rock would also explain why some women might have been inspired by the aesthetics and performance of nonvirtuosity, such as those exhibited by the Sex Pistols or Smith, who hadn’t “even bothered to learn” her guitar. Bayton suggests that (teenage) women have not only been deterred from such masculine-­coded pursuits as playing the electric guitar via hegemonic cultural representations of “femininity,” they have also tended to lack the money, time, space, transport, and access to equipment that are, more often than not, the material preconditions for learning a rock instrument. Bayton also argues that women have usually not been party to the informal settings in which young men learn the electric guitar and young women are often excluded from being given technical “tips.”18 The arenas in which young men may acquire technical tips, furthermore, form part of what Green called the “informal music learning practices” that characterize and are at the centre of the acquisition of instrumental skill in popular music.19 The idea that women have historically been excluded from the position of electric guitarist in particular is something others have also remarked on. Apart from some notable exceptions from earlier eras (such as Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Wanda Jackson, Maureen Tucker of the Velvet Underground, 1960s garage-­rock bands such as the Shaggs and the Luv’d Ones, and the widely heard but often unsung bass player Carol Kaye), the late 1970s and early 1980s saw a comparative boom in the number of women musicians occupying positions (the spaces and roles carved out by social conditions and precedents) in popular music that had hitherto been dominated by men: namely, those of electric guitarist, bassist, and drummer.20 These roles as rock instrumentalists differed significantly from the positions previously occupied by women. As Bayton has suggested, women have tended to play the supporting roles of mother, wife or girlfriend, fan, consumer, and singer. Roles in executive positions, in journalism, in management, and as part of the road or technical crew, have often been mostly restricted to men.21 Both Simon Reynolds and Joy Press have identified a similar trend with regard to the positions women have played not only in rock but in countercultures more generally. Reynolds and Press argue that the posi-

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106  what is post-punk?

tions of the groupie and the “desexualised den-­mother” can be traced from the era of the Beat poets of the 1950s into the rock generation of the 1970s and beyond.22 In dialogue with these positions or roles offered by popular music history, Reynolds and Press have suggested that certain women musicians rejected the idea of fixed female roles while simultaneously celebrating “female imagery and iconography.” Musicians of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Kate Bush, Siouxsie Sioux, Nico, Annie Lennox, and Madonna, treated female stereotypes as “a wardrobe of masks and poses to be assumed,” and therefore highlighted the performative aspect of gender; these women “[shifted] between a series of female archetypes,” such as the mother, the whore, the ice queen, and the androgyne.23 The problem with the idea that female musicians navigate preordained pantomime identities, however, is that it implies that even women in creative fields are required to assume an identifiable, nameable position to be recognized, whereas the same is not demanded of male subjects. Judith Butler would argue, however, that male identity is similarly a product of “iterability,” that is, a “regularized and constrained repetition of norms” through which the subject is enabled and realized.24 Nevertheless, the kinds of preordained positions for women in popular music arguably form part of the technology that has excluded women from rock, and may be one of the reasons that musicians such as Ana da Silva and Viv Albertine felt inspired by Patti Smith’s on-­stage defiance or the Sex Pistols’ musical scruffiness. In terms of post-­punk specifically, Reynolds and Press refer to the female musicians in this category as the “post-­punk demystification” set. This group comprised, but was not limited to, the Slits, the Raincoats, Au Pairs, and Delta 5.25 Reynolds and Press argue that this particular group of musicians (almost all of whom belonged to mixed-­gender groups, even if their earliest incarnations were as exclusively female bands) sung about or “demystified” hitherto taboo subjects such as sex, menstruation, female masturbation, being followed home, rape, eating disorders, domestic banalities, and anxieties about physical appearances. This open exploration of such topics, as well as the assumption of new positions as guitarists, bassists, and drummers, was arguably stirred by or an articulation of the tenets of second-­wave feminism. The idea that women’s personal lives were political, because of how many aspects of women’s lives bore the traces of internalized, systemic misogyny, was of course an integral principle of this movement. Indeed, Bayton has suggested that punk’s DIY aesthetic was not the only factor that contributed to the increase in female musicians, but that second-­wave feminism ex-

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  107

erted a significant influence because it encouraged women to move into hitherto male-­dominated terrain and to assume hitherto male-­associated positions.26 However, interviews with members of both the Raincoats and the Slits from the 1970s and early 1980s suggest that these two particular groups chose to distance themselves from the feminist movement. When asked about the prospect of the Raincoats playing a then-­forthcoming “Women in Rock” concert in which every band was either all female or had a least one female member, da Silva said that she had “mixed feelings” about the prospect and did not “like the idea of putting male and female groups into separate categories.” On the one hand, da Silva valued the idea of “[showing] people that there are a lot of girls in rock bands,” but on the other hand, she stressed that she “[hated] all this feminist idea.” Having recently returned from giving a series of concerts in Poland, da Silva also remarked that audiences in the UK seemed to be comparatively more fixated on the idea of gender than those abroad: [S]traight after we had done a gig in Reading [UK] the other night, a girl came up to us and said, “You were quite good for a girls’ band.” I mean either you’re good or you’re bad, it shouldn’t matter what sex you are. I really loved the way that Poly Styrene of X-­Ray Spex shaved off all her hair as a kind of anti-­glamour stand. Glamour has always been an over-­exaggerated cliché, anyway.

Da Silva’s reflection on the Raincoats concert in Reading, as well as the disregard for what she calls “all this feminist idea,” raises at least two important issues. First, in a similar vein to Paton’s comments about the 1976 Smith concert, the female audience member’s surprise that the Raincoats’ were “quite good for girls” illustrates the internalization of (male-­produced) rock discourse’s mistrust of women’s playing abilities, which is inadvertently reinforced by the persistent, more recent tendency to frame female rock musicians in terms of punk’s DIY aesthetic. Second, the fact that da Silva admired musician Poly Styrene’s “anti-­glamour” head-­shaving reinforces the argument that post-­punk’s women were invested in the idea of “demystification,” which can also be construed as an implicitly feminist stance, even if the Raincoats chose to reject the label “feminist.” The reasons the Raincoats chose to distance themselves from what da Silva called the “feminist idea” may have resulted from certain public stereotypes about feminism or the women’s movement that circulated at

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108  what is post-punk?

the time. According to Debra Baker Beck, the women’s movement in the United States “was basically ignored by the mainstream press with the exception of a few high-­profile incidents such as the protest of the 1968 Miss America pageant.” The image of the feminist as a “bra-­burner” emerged from these protests, during which, according to Beck, “a few protest participants did throw some bras into a trash can. However, no lingerie was singed.”27 Back in the UK, the public may have derived their perceptions about feminism from the demonstrations that accompanied the 1969 Miss World competition. Publications such as Spare Rib, the UK’s longest-­ running feminist magazine, founded in 1972, also provided a point of reference for contemporary understandings of feminism. According to Joanne Hollows, Spare Rib adopted a stricter socialist-­feminist identity after 1975 and defined itself in opposition to lifestyles that its contributors considered not feminist, such as domestic consumerism.28 Furthermore, as Reddington has illustrated, many female musicians on the punk scene saw the punk men as close allies, as boyfriends, as friends, and as musical mentors.29 This presents another reason why performers such as da Silva may have been suspicious of what she perceived as “feminism’s” attempt to promote or entrench gender segregation. The Slits (the Raincoats’ London contemporaries) were also keen to assert their disregard for the feminist movement, or at least for the label “feminism.” In a 1977 interview with the band, music journalist Kris Needs introduced the topic of gender with the following words: “There’ve been girl members in male groups but never before has a group of girls like this come along and threatened the male domination of rock.” Yet, Needs continued, “the Slits are determined not to get involved with the feminist women’s lib stance,” noting how the band had recently turned down an interview with Spare Rib.30 The band’s lead guitarist, Albertine, declared outright, “We don’t want to do all that feminist stuff.” Echoing da Silva, she argued that the kind of feminism purveyed by Spare Rib was “discrimination” since the magazine “shouldn’t have just girl groups in there” and compared Spare Rib to “those yank magazines” that have the “girlie issue.”31 From the Slits’ perspective, the problem with explicitly feminist-­labeled events and publications was less about being pro-­equality and more about what the band perceived as entrenching the already-­in-­ place segregation between male musicians and female musicians. The US publications the Slits mention may refer to the Time magazine issue with Joni Mitchell on the cover from December 16, 1974, or, closer to home, the July 1975 issue of Let It Rock, subheaded “Women: Rocking or Rolled?” The latter is an odd mixture of generic participants united primarily by their

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  109

gender. These include the African American group Labelle on the cover as well as Judy Collins and rockers such as Suzi Quatro, which arguably served to further embed the exceptional status that women rock musicians were accorded at the time by both fans and critics. Like the Raincoats, however, the Slits professed an attitude, communicated in their songs as well as in interviews, that was nevertheless in accord with feminist principles. They criticized the “conditioning” effect of teen magazines on young women, for example, and they took a dim view of the kind of “typical guy who wants to have the woman under his thumb like his housewife and all that.” Therefore, even though both the Slits and the Raincoats resisted the labels “feminist” and “women’s lib” and were sceptical of all-­female rock events and publications such as Spare Rib, the kinds of principles or ideas that their songs communicated suggested a broadly feminist sensibility. These bands were probably reacting to a public stereotype about what feminism was, not the movement’s aims or theoretical concerns.

The Slits The Slits’ rejection of labels wasn’t confined to the term “feminism.” Indeed, their rejection of the word “punk” in the same ZigZag interview with Needs illustrates musicians’ broader tendency to resist labels of all kinds, particularly genre labels: Palmolive: We are not punks. We’re Slits . . . Ari: And we play Slits music! Viv: We’ve been labeled too much.32 Needs was in fact one of the Slits’ biggest proponents. His ZigZag features on the Slits followed the band from their earliest incarnations until at least the release of their first record, Cut, in the summer of 1979. Needs’s writing projected an awareness of the extent to which, in his words, the Slits as an all-­women group may have seemed like a “novelty.” He chose instead to see the Slits’ presence on the new-­wave/punk scene as something that had the potential to “threaten the male domination of rock.”33 The opening commentaries to his interviews with the band were always enthusiastic, and yet at the same time, he sometimes seemed to be overcompensating for the fact that the Slits were (in their earliest days) an all-­female group.34 For example, in a description not unrelated to Paton’s disappointment that Smith relied on her “freak originality” rather than her musicianship, Needs wrote,

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110  what is post-punk?

The Slits are out there on their own, proving almost singlehandedly that girls can form a group and play hard, vital music without relying on their attributes to get away with musical murder. [my emphases]35

Anticipating dismissal on the grounds of the group’s gender, Needs asserted that the Slits “can play” and do not “get away with musical murder.” Furthermore, Needs’s insistence that the Slits play “hard music” could be interpreted as participating in what Norma Coates has called the “technology” that “reinforces and reinscribes” the idea that rock is a masculine genre.36 That is to say, Needs used the word “hard” in a way that is comparable to using the word “rock” as a verb (as in, “these girls rock”), and therefore implied, in case anyone was worried about it, that the Slits can play as “hard” as men.37 The word “hard” implies a degree of physical strength and stamina that female musicians (especially female drummers) may be assumed to lack, not to mention the images of masculine virility that the word “hard” also invokes. In addition to highlighting the Slits’ tacit accord with the male-­ gendered expectations of rock (playing “hard, vital music”) and thereby abating a (male) reader’s instinct to dismiss them, Needs drew attention to the Slits’ gender by noting that they compose “strong, personal songs.” As Bonnie Gordon argues in her work on 1990s singer-­songwriter Tori Amos, the idea that women are more inclined to write personal songs has meant that the media have often given female songwriters the (negative) label of “confessional,” a label that not only alludes to the emotional and introspective content of a song by a female composer, but also subtly criticizes an approach to songwriting that provides “too much information” about the kinds of issues I discussed earlier (such as menstruation, masturbation, sex, and rape). The vocalization of such topics can furthermore be considered as participating in a broadly feminist political agenda.38 Indeed, Needs’s description of the Slits’ music as “personal” may have also been a reference to the “personal is political” slogan associated with second-­wave feminism. The way Needs discussed the Slits’ musicianship also exemplifies the kind of double bind that punk’s nonvirtuoso, amateurish aesthetic presented for female musicians of the era. Even though Needs was positive about the Slits’ presence in the new-­wave or punk field, his comments about the band’s grasp of rock parlance appear to have been gendered. He remarked, for example, “you know they can improve, which they are in leaps and bounds when their equipment works and the sound is right,” and concluded his interview with the band with, “What the Slits need is

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  111

their own sound mixer, who knows the songs and can get the balance which’ll bring out the best in the songs.”39 The Slits were probably not the only (post-­)punk band of the late 1970s whose live concerts were besmirched by poor sound. Needs’s comments, although well intentioned, take on a tone of condescension, especially given how women have traditionally felt alienated from the technical side of music production, and given that the “sound mixer” was likely to have been a “sound man.” As Bayton has suggested with regard specifically to the comparative dearth of female electric guitarists, women instrumentalists have often been affected by “the ‘black-­box-­with-­chrome-­knobs’ syndrome” that results not from an intellectual deficiency but from female musicians’ lack of familiarity with and access to certain kinds of sound equipment, as well as the jargon that often unnecessarily mystifies such “boxes.”40 The Slits probably knew that the sound at their live performances was bad, but perhaps they lacked the necessary jargon needed to request that it be changed.41 On the other hand, Needs reports that the Slits’ performances would sometimes “screech to a halt” because their lead singer, Ari Up, “can’t hear the guitar,” which is about as technical as one needs to be when asking for the balance to be adjusted during a live performance.42 By suggesting that the Slits “can improve” in “leaps and bounds,” Needs was also highlighting the Slits’ (lack of) skill as musicians. The drummer, Palmolive, was reported to have been playing “high-­speed metronomic jungle drums” but significantly had not “been playing for more than a year.” The group’s bassist, Tessa Pollitt, had only “learnt the bass two weeks before.”43 By noting the short time that Palmolive and Pollitt had been playing their instruments, Needs could be interpreted as doing two things. First, he was foregrounding an essential characteristic of punk, its conspicuous amateurism.44 But second, he often sounded as though he was apologizing for the Slits’ shaky musicianship. As I discussed in chapter 1, other post-­punk bands such as Wire did not have formal musical training; those who came to music from studying visual arts (like many rock musicians) foregrounded their novice musical skills, as is reflected in Wire’s song “Practice Makes Perfect.” Similarly, just as the Raincoats had an audience-­participation-­style song called “Instrumental in E,”45 Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook of Joy Division practiced their instruments by spending hours just playing E. Both of these “performances” (“Instrumental in E” and playing E) may refer to the process of teaching oneself guitar by starting with the first (lowest) string.46 The point is that musical amateurism in punk and post-­punk was not confined to the all-­female or predominantly female groups, but

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112  what is post-punk?

was a salient characteristic of the genre as a whole. But, as Reddington notes, amateurism in the women’s bands was either more conspicuous or interpreted negatively.47 The Slits’ drummer, Palmolive (Paloma McLardy), whose “high-­speed metronomic jungle drums” were a significant characteristic of the Slits’ early sound, left the group before the band had signed to Island Records and recorded their debut LP, Cut, in the summer of 1979. A male drummer known as Budgie (Peter Clarke) replaced Palmolive. Budgie had also played in the Spitfire Boys and cut his teeth on the punk scene.48 Although Palmolive purportedly left for political reasons—­feeling more at home with the small-­label ethos of the neighboring Raincoats, whom she joined after she left the Slits—­according to Needs, Palmolive’s drumming “wasn’t up to the increasingly stringent demands imposed on it by the Slits’ wildly rhythmic new songs.” After asserting that Budgie was “Obviously . . . technically better than Palmolive,” he asked the remaining members, “but do you reckon he’s made a lot of difference to the band?” Both Up and Albertine affirmed that Budgie had made a “musical” difference to the band in the sense that they were able to “experiment more” because “he [could] keep the beat.”49 But Needs’s framing of Palmolive’s involvement with and then departure from the Slits presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, the Slits were part of a punk movement that threw notions of conventional musicianship into question, as evidenced by Albertine’s reaction to the fact that the Sex Pistols were not a virtuoso group. On the other hand, both Needs and the remaining members of the Slits considered Palmolive’s limited musical capabilities to be a restriction and she was replaced. Furthermore, in this particular case, the dynamics of musical skill are gendered in a way that re-­inscribes essentialist ideas about the difference between male and female musicianship in the rock idiom; Palmolive was replaced by a (“more competent”) male drummer.50 This change of personnel from Palmolive to Budgie, from female drummer to male drummer, also coincided with a change of genre for the Slits, from punk to post-­punk. Significantly, the Slits weren’t the only band to recruit Budgie on drums. He joined Siouxsie and the Banshees and played on their record Kaleidoscope, released the following year in August 1980, alongside John McGeoch, formerly of Magazine. Kaleidoscope’s reception suggests a genre shift. In an article in ZigZag from May 1980, Needs describes Siouxsie and the Banshees’s most recent live performances as presenting “a changed group—­looser and more wide-­ranging with some impressive new songs like ‘Christine,’ ‘Hybrid’ and ‘Desert Kisses.’”

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  113

He noted too that Siouxsie was now “using her voice in greater areas, acoustic guitar on stage, greater reliance on the Severin-­Budgie [bass-­ drums] rhythm-­pulse, more taut strength than ever.”51 Perhaps indicating a change of stylistic direction to a more rhythm-­or dance-­oriented sound, the band discussed their composition and recording process, noting that the guitar played a lesser role and that their new record would “predominantly be bass, vocals and drums.”52 Describing Kaleidoscope in July 1980, Paolo Hewitt wrote how the album “is basically a series of sketches with each song trying to evoke its own particular atmosphere, time and place. Away from a band situation . . . the album sees Siouxsie, Steve Severin, and Budgie, with help from John McGeoch and Steve Jones, delving more into sound and it’s [sic] possibility than anything else.”53 This quote from Hewitt in Melody Maker recalls to some degree the art-­pop debate that unfolded on the pages of Sounds in 1978, in that he seemed to be suggesting an inclination toward nonpop experimentation. Hewitt also compared some songs on the album to contemporary groups: he likened the song “Tenant” to Public Image Ltd and described “Red Frame” (by which he perhaps meant “Red Light”) as “almost Human League but with more depth and darkness, than the aforementioned brand of lightweight pop.”54 Notably, “Red Light” includes musique concrète in the form of the opening and closing of a camera shutter, not unlike Dennis Bovell’s work with the Slits, as I discuss shortly. To return to the Slits’ change of drummers, the difference between the two playing styles of Palmolive and Budgie can be illustrated by analyzing two different performances of what is ostensibly the same song: “Newtown,” recorded with Palmolive for a 1977 session on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show, and also with Budgie for Cut, their 1979 LP.55 Up’s vocal melody is effectively the same in both performances, as is the basic idea for the backing vocals. But most other aspects of the song have changed. On the LP version, produced by dub producer Dennis Bovell, the texture is enriched with the addition of occasional organ and piano parts. The LP version also includes pre-­recorded sounds, including (what sounds like) shaking a box of matches, striking a match, and dropping a spoon, all sounds that accord with the song’s overall message, which equates innocuous-­seeming pleasures such as reading the newspaper and following a football team with getting a heroin fix. Albertine’s guitar part is also quite different, having switched from playing mostly power chords in the 1977 Peel session to playing single, high-­register punches on the second half of beat four in every other measure on the LP version. One of the most striking aspects of the song that has changed, how-

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114  what is post-punk?

ever, is the rhythmic groove. The bass line is the same in both the 1977 and 1979 versions, but in the 1979 version, Pollitt (the bass player) turns her bass part into a line that develops additively. On the 1977 version, however, the bass line is a continuously looping A-­minor pentatonic two-­measure phrase that doesn’t quite “feel right” because it begins and ends with the repetition of the same two pitches, C-­A (see example 6). On the LP version, however, the bass line has been broken up so that a quarter note is added every two measures, beginning with C in measure one then adding C-­A in measure three, and so on (see example 7). The bass line is therefore not heard in its entirety until Up’s vocal line comes in at approximately 0:22.

Example 6. The drums, percussion, electric guitar, and bass part to the 1977 John Peel version of the Slits’ song “Newtown” with Palmolive on drums, mm. 5–­13

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  115

The drumming in the two performances is also very different. As example 6 illustrates, Palmolive favors alternating between the floor-­tom plus kick drum, and the snare drum (a quarter-­note each and then two eighth-­notes each), although her drum part is complicated by the sound of continuous sixteenth notes (emanating from an unclear, drumlike source, which is indicated on the third staff) that produce an additional percussive line (see example 6). Budgie’s drumming on the LP version is, however, more syncopated and intricate. His part includes off beats on the hi-­hat, and a snare part (with the snare disengaged) that involves more elaborate subdivisions and arguably more dexterity owing to the use of “ghost” notes (see example 7). The 1979 version with Budgie also has a stronger reggae character than the 1977 Palmolive version. Needs had in fact noted how Budgie’s drumming gave the band “a new rhythmic treatment” that brought the group “galloping much closer to the girls’ beloved reggae.”56 Not only is Budgie’s drumming in this song more redolent of the reggae style, it is also more in time, since Palmolive and Pollitt tended to speed up on the eighth-­note passages in the 1977 version.57

Example 7. The drum and bass parts to the beginning of the album version of the Slits’ song “Newtown” with Budgie on drums, mm. 1–­5

The question is, then, how does the Slits’ change of drummers from Palmolive to Budgie bear on discussions of female musicianship in rock-­ based genres, and how does this issue intersect with questions of post-­ punk as a genre? As I indicated earlier, Palmolive may have left the Slits for reasons other than the dissatisfaction with her playing of the other three members. Nevertheless, I would argue that Palmolive and many of the Slits’ earlier, more amateur-­sounding recordings rose to the DIY

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116  what is post-punk?

challenge of punk, by exhibiting or performing a strong degree of amateurism. As exemplified by the 1977 Peel version of “Newtown,” the instrumental parts were simple and delivered haphazardly. Their later recordings, however, as illustrated by the 1979 version of “Newtown” from Cut, were more polished and showed more intricate attention to detail. It could be argued therefore that the Slits’ transition from Palmolive to Budgie marks a turn in genre: from punk to post-­punk, from a rough amateurish DIY style to a reggae-­inflected, more polished performance with a solid groove, and studio “tricks” (i.e., musique concrète) from Bovell. What is significant, however, is that this transition from one genre to another was accompanied by the replacement of Palmolive by Budgie, a female drummer by a male drummer. Of course, Palmolive does not represent the epitome of female musicianship, but while her amateurish drumming may have been acceptable in the punk genre, it was not “acceptable” or legible in the post-­punk genre. Furthermore, when reviewing the Slits post-­Palmolive material, journalists such as John Orme at Melody Maker suggested that it was producer Bovell’s “wisdom” that had brought the Slits’ music to full fruition. “The tireless patience of producer/control-­king Dennis Bovell,” wrote Orme, “has freed depths of musical resource that only the Slits’ most ardent admirers would have recognised.” Orme concludes that Cut was a record that the Slits and Bovell had “made together,” but he nevertheless implied that a significant amount of creative control was in Bovell’s hands.58 Thus the Slits’ turn from punk to post-­punk, from a more amateurish playing style to more polished performances, was accompanied by the incorporation of male members and contributors, whom critics such as Orme saw as integral to realizing the Slits’ creative vision and moving them beyond punk. Despite replacing Palmolive with Budgie, and despite the fact that journalists such as Orme put Bovell in the role of the clear-­headed genius come to sort out the women’s “rabble,” the Slits remained an all-­female-­identified group, keenly emphasizing that drummer Budgie was “not a full-­time” Slit.59 At the heart of this complex gender-­genre relation is one of the main issues concerning the implicit definition of post-­punk as a genre: post-­ punk should be different from punk, but this difference can be at the level of sonic characteristics or social identity. The fact that the Slits “progressed” to more complicated, non-­punk music and were still female-­ identified means that they “qualify” for post-­punk, whereby their gender functions as a kind of cultural capital. Furthermore, we see from Orme’s review that he is interested in Cut’s studio credentials. Indeed, the album’s incorporation of musique concrète recalls Goldman’s comments

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  117

about dub and New Musick discussed in chapter 1, as well as Wire’s status as a “studio band” and Joy Division’s “exotic electronics.” An emerging idea, then, is that post-punk might be considered more of a studio-based genre than punk.60

Lora Logic The way the Slits’ groove became male-­associated as they moved from punk to post-­punk, from a female drummer to a male drummer, was something that occurred with other post-­punk bands. What is more, the male gendering of rhythm and groove in post-­punk influenced how critics understood post-­punk women’s creativity. In her work on female musicians in the Montreal independent music scene, Vanessa Blais-­Tremblay observes that in certain indie rock scenes there is a pervasive assumption or prejudice that women cannot “groove.”61 Indeed, it is not uncommon to encounter descriptions of female musicians as having no sense of rhythm. John Cale of the Velvet Underground famously said that giving Nico a tambourine to play was a terrible decision because of her “unique” (read: poor) sense of rhythm.62 Such a gendering of rhythm and groove can also be traced in descriptions of music by post-­punk vocalist and tenor saxophone player Lora Logic. Richard Cook’s review of Logic’s 1982 solo album, Pedigree Charm, credits the male rhythm section with taming Logic’s excessive femininity: Perhaps the credit can be claimed by [band] This Heat’s Charles Hayward on drums and the guitars of Phil Legg; their no-­nonsense refusal to be led down the blind tunnels in Logic’s palindromic set of songs keeps things in shape while staying chipper enough to negotiate all the sharp bends and angularities.63

As in Orme’s review of Cut, where Bovell brought out the Slits’ hidden talents, Cook seems to suggest that, left to her own devices, Logic’s music would be structurally and rhythmically wayward, perhaps even “nonsense.” Throughout his review, Cook draws on the tropes of woman-­as-­ nature and woman-­as-­chaos, presenting Logic as a siren or witch-­like creature who threatens to lead the male rhythm section down “blind tunnels.” Logic’s amateurism appears therefore to be a kind of excess, an unwanted spilling-­over that the male rhythm section must contain, even though, as indicated above, amateurism was purportedly valued in punk. Indeed, listening closely to one of the songs that Cook praises on

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118  what is post-punk?

Pedigree Charm, “Brute Fury,” one might hear a simplistic gender binary in the song’s texture. The song opens with a minimalist-­sounding chorus of three tenor saxophones, which begin by playing homorhythmically but break out into a quasi-­canon. Following the opening saxophone chorus, Hayward and Legg’s tight disco groove fades in. Then, juxtaposed against this bouncy disco backing, two tenor saxophones accompany Logic’s double-­tracked vocal. The two saxophones play different, at times dissonant, ostinato-­like melodies, which provide counterpoint to Logic’s vocal (see example 8). Logic’s sax-­voice polyphony therefore contrasts with Hayward and Legg’s tight rhythm playing. Based on Cook’s review, we might exaggerate to say that Logic’s polyphonic, chaotic-­seeming amateurish excess is tamed by strict, on-­beat male musicianship.

Example 8. The vocal part accompanied by two tenor saxophones for the chorus section of “Brute Fury” by Lora Logic

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  119

But this interpretation of “Brute Fury”—­where Logic represents the wayward polyphonic free spirit and Hayward-­Legg represent the rhythmic grounding of the song—­relies on essentialism and re-­inscribes a simple gender binary, drawn from discursive tropes that have emphasized women’s “lack of” rhythm. It is therefore more productive to see the song in terms of genre and look at how the post-­punk genre provided a space for women to self-­consciously and self-­assuredly “perform” (in the Butlerian sense) amateurism as an articulation of empowerment or resistance against the historical disciplining of women’s bodies and voices. As I discussed with reference to PiL’s “Death Disco” in chapter 3, it was a characteristic of post-­punk music to fuse a disco groove with more improvisatory, chaotic-­seeming, punk melodic elements. In “Death Disco,” John Lydon screeches over a frantic disco beat, but there are other examples too. Vanessa Briscoe Hay’s amateur approach in the US band Pylon meets a male rhythm section and then there’s the “Severin-Budgie pulse” on Kaleidoscope. Furthermore, Logic’s lyrics in the song’s B-­section of “Brute Fury” may be interpreted as describing a domestic scenario and as articulating a feminist politics, since Logic appears to be singing sarcastically about her (male) partner’s inability to control his temper. Both Lydon and Logic, therefore, brought “alien” subject matter (death and male oppression) and punk aesthetics into the “hegemonic” language of disco.64

The Raincoats An important aspect of this discourse on punk and post-­punk women is the way some critics saw the musicians’ unconventional musical skills (or lack thereof) as one of their most appealing features. For example, journalist Neil Spencer described his expectations of the Slits as a standard punk group, but he in fact heard something rather different: “It was my first and (admittedly late) Slits gig, and I was expecting some trashy 3-­chord dole queue ramalama dressed in shocking pink female guise.” But Spencer in fact heard a group who had “evolved a long way from the primal punk mud of ’76” and whose “musical naivety perhaps encourages a refreshing willingness to explore new forms.”65 That the Slits’ lack of familiarity or command of generic conventions opened new musical vistas is an idea that surfaced in discussions of the Raincoats, the group that Palmolive joined after she left the Slits. A ZigZag interview with the Raincoats in 1980 described their live performances as follows: To see the Raincoats on stage for the first time is to see beauty emerge out of apparent chaos. I mean, they all seem to start at different times and

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120  what is post-punk?

they all seem to be playing something different, and the rhythm never seems to stay constant for half a minute at a time, and it’s not your average everyday platic [sic] mac sort of rhythm to start off with. But then, if you listen, everything suddenly clicks into place, and you realise how remarkable it really is. Careful thought that develops inspiration rather than being a heavy-­handed substitute for it. An abandonment of the traditional rock structures that, unlike with a good many other bands, does not lead to tedium and superficial would-­be freakiness. [my emphasis]66

This ZigZag commentary on the Raincoats’ live performances indicates two significant points: the band’s music displayed an irreverence for rock conventions, and this in turn inaugurated new approaches to playing rock and punk.67 In the section that follows I outline how the Raincoats’ music may have at times sounded like “apparent chaos.” I also identify some of the ways in which they “abandoned rock structures,” and whether or not this presented a challenge to certain “masculine” musical codes. The Raincoats’ song “Adventures Close to Home” from their 1979 self-­titled LP is one of their least-­conventional-­sounding songs, and it exhibits a number of the characteristics described in the 1980 ZigZag review cited above. “Adventures” in fact started as a Slits song and features on Cut, which was released two months prior to the Raincoats’ 1979 album. In some ways this helps explain the song’s reggae influence. In many respects, the song’s uneven phrasing (as I discuss) is more reminiscent of Slits’ songs such as “So Tough” than anything by the Raincoats. Nevertheless, the key thing we’re unravelling here is the reviewer’s comments that the Raincoats don’t seem to stay in the same time signature throughout, and “Adventures” (and Palmolive in particular) is a good example of that. As such, rather than trying to hear the song as having continuous groove, the structure of the song might be better understood as being divided into uneven units, each with its own rhythmic profile. The effect of these juxtaposed rhythmic units is one in which, recalling the above review, “the rhythm never seems to stay constant.” The first groove is established with the bass guitar and rhythm guitar. The bass plays straight eighth notes that are punctuated by the rhythm guitarists’ quasi-­reggae “skank,” alternating measure-­by-­measure between areas D major and B minor. After two full measures of this bass and rhythm groove, Palmolive enters with her idiosyncratic tom playing, a very on-­beat pattern beginning with a group of sixteenth notes (see example 9).

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  121

Example 9. “Adventures Close to Home” by the Raincoats, mm. 4–­6

This opening groove breaks off at measure seven as the vocal part enters. The first verse begins with the lyrics, “Passion that shouts and red with anger.” The syncopated groove that was established at the beginning changes here: the rhythm guitar becomes more difficult to hear, but nevertheless mirrors the kind of rhythmic pattern played by all of the instruments, including the bass, which has changed from playing continuous eighth notes (see example 9) to playing a line that is rhythmically similar to both the vocal line and, to some extent, the lead guitar line. In other words, all of the parts (vocal, electric guitars, bass, and drums) are characterized by the same rhythm pattern: a lilting rhythm that emphasizes the second half of beat three (see example 10).68

Example 10. “Adventures Close to Home” by the Raincoats, mm. 7–­9

After three measures of this pattern, the rhythmic focus shifts from lilting syncopation to a measure that almost feels as though we’re hearing two measures of 2/4, where the bass player plays exactly the same rhythm as the drummer (see example 11).

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122  what is post-punk?

Example 11. “Adventures Close to Home” by the Raincoats, m. 10

The next phrase or unit is nine beats long. In my illustration, however, I have divided this phrase into two measures, one in 4/4 and the other in 5/4, since the bass part seems to be articulating a downbeat into the measure in 5/4 (1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 5). But it could also be heard as a phrase in 9/4, especially because the drums confuse the meter by dividing the nine-­beat phrase differently, into a group of 3 + 4 + 2 (example 12).

Example 12. “Adventures Close to Home” by the Raincoats, mm. 11–­12

The song returns to a less ambiguous sense of 4/4 meter at measure 13 (the beginning of the chorus) with a wispy-­sounding sixteenth-­note cymbal roll and a chromatically ascending bass part (see example 13) that catalyzes a kind of vocal canon before the song eventually returns to the offbeat rhythmic groove heard at the beginning.

Example 13. The chromatic bass line and return to 4/4 in “Adventures Close to Home” by the Raincoats

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  123

Even though, ostensibly, the Raincoats use a conventional rock structure in “Adventures Close to Home”—­that is, they use verse-­chorus alternation—­the song’s structure is not immediately obvious, nor does it sound conventional. Indeed, the song sounds more like “apparent chaos,” to recall the ZigZag review of the band’s live performances. This sense of “apparent chaos” is due in large part to the additive character of the song’s composition: the song seems to be assembled using brief “units” of unequal length, each characterized by its own distinctive sense of rhythm or groove despite the fact that, interestingly enough, units one, two, and six have exactly the same drumming pattern (although it is played on different parts of the kit each time). The addition of a measure in 5/4 (or 9/4, depending on how one parses the measures) also contributes to the song’s rhythmic eccentricity. The ZigZag reviewer’s comment that “the rhythm never seems to stay constant for half a minute at a time,” when applied to this particular song, seems like a bit of an understatement: in fact, the rhythm does not remain constant for more than a few measures at a time. The particular relationship between gender and genre, and the Raincoats’ unconventional approach to rhythm, are issues that I shall return to shortly. But first, another significant aspect of “Adventures Close to Home” is the role played by the individual instruments. Unusually, in both the verse and the chorus sections, the bass, the guitar(s), and the vocal parts sound less like they are individual voices serving a particular function or even playing a particular role (i.e., the bass “should” support the harmony and rhythmically lock in with the drums, and not necessarily play the same rhythm as the drummer, as we have seen in some of these examples), and more like refractions of a single idea. As I have already indicated, for example, all of the “voices” in the verse have a similar rhythmic profile: all “aim” for the second half of the third beat, creating a kind of rhythmic homogeneity with only minor variations in each part. Furthermore, the pitch content of the bass line and the voice part especially are very similar in the verse, and in the chorus, the bass plays along with the vocalist(s). The bass thus not only functions as more of a melody instrument, it mirrors the role of the singer(s). This approach to “part writing” interfaces with issues of both gender and genre in several ways. First, there is something amateur-­seeming about this approach to the individual instrumental lines, a sense of “if we all play the same notes then it will sound okay.” This amateurishness, furthermore, seems more extreme than in other autodidact punk and

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124  what is post-punk?

post-­punk musicians. Second, the division of instrumental roles could be heard from a feminist-­political perspective: the Raincoats’ eschew the conventional sense of hierarchy associated with rock music (the lead leads, the bass supports, the vocalist sings the melody, etc.) by choosing to distribute the same basic idea among the band members somewhat equally. Third, by abandoning punk or rock conventions, the Raincoats’ music falls more easily within the eclectic ethos that has come to be associated with the emergent differences now associated with post-­punk.

Lateral Comparisons: Post-­Punk’s Generic Neighbors In her feminist analysis of the Raincoats’ music, Caroline O’Meara remarks that their departure from generic conventions and expectations can be heard as an eschewal of “common badges of musical masculinity.” O’Meara looks at the “specific modes the band uses to represent femininity in music,” modes that did not derive from the masculine-­coded gestures associated with rock.69 In other words, O’Meara interprets the Raincoats’ rejection of the rock idiom as a feminist gesture by drawing attention to the “masculine” character of the musical codes. In many ways O’Meara’s argument echoes that of Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie in their 1979 essay, “Rock and Sexuality.” Frith and McRobbie noted that “[some] feminists have argued that rock is now essentially a male form of expression, that for women to make non-­sexist music it is necessary to use sounds, structures, and styles that cannot be heard as rock.”70 Indeed, the kinds of unconventional approaches to songwriting heard in “Adventures Close to Home” could be heard as feminist in the sense that they are disassociated from the male language of rock. However, this interpretation risks a limited and homogenized understanding of female identity and female musicianship. I would therefore like to look laterally at the Raincoats’ and the Slits’ generic neighbors, to their female contemporaries in other but nonetheless closely associated genres. Some of the Raincoats’ and the Slits’ contemporaries did play masculine-­coded music, so how does this problematize a reading of rock’s sounds, structures, and styles as both masculine and sexist? In his work on glam rock, Philip Auslander takes a queer-­informed view of the argument that rock’s gestures have come to represent a stereotypically Western view of masculinity and an attendant misogynist politics. Auslander highlights the fact that several female musicians of the mid-­1970s, such as Suzi Quatro, participated in what he (after queer scholar Jack Halberstam) calls “female masculinity.” Auslander describes

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  125

“female masculinity” as not simply the emulation of masculine-­coded musical gestures but more of “a refusal on the part of masculine women to repress that aspect of themselves in favour of the masquerade of normative femininity.”71 In other words, the Slits and the Raincoats’ contemporaries participated in the male-­gendered rock formula in a way that raises two issues: first, the question of whether women who played in a conventional rock style were compliant with its macho bravura and suppression of women, and second, how the relationship between amateurism and female musicians is peculiar to punk and not other neighboring, rock-­based genres. The mid-­1970s LA group the Runaways is one example of an all-­ female group who participated in the hard rock genre. The rhythmic profile of the Runaway’s 1977 song “Queens of Noise,” for example, features the “pounding” eighth notes that O’Meara (with reference to Robert Walser) interprets as being male-­coded.72 The lyrics are simpler than the often detail-­laden anecdotal and metaphorical style cultivated by the Slits, Lora Logic, or the Raincoats. “Queens of Noise” also contains an oblique reference to the lyrics of Marc Bolan’s “20th Century Boy” (“20th century toy, I wanna be your boy”) in its chorus, “We’re the queens of noise, come and get it boys. Queens of noise, not just one of your toys.” Arguably this chorus articulates defiance in the face of objectification, even if the band had a reputation as being nothing more than “jailbait,” as I discuss shortly. “Queens of Noise” also has a limited harmonic palette that is more characteristic of the hard rock style than any songs by either the Slits or the Raincoats; it is based entirely on power chords moving by intervals of seconds, fourths, and fifths. The band’s onstage performance style also included the kind of pelvic thrusting and flying kicks associated with hard rock, and their appearance for some of their live performances borrowed from glam and hard rock, with long hair, silver jumpsuits, and knee-­high platform boots. It is true that these genres (hard rock and glam rock) have traditionally been associated with masculinity. This is not to say that these genres have essential masculine qualities, but rather that they have been gendered male as a result of the predominance of male musicians in these genres as well as the historically embedded coding of certain kinds of performance theatrics and musical gestures. The Runaways, who were influenced by Quatro,73 could therefore also be said to be performing “female masculinity,” not by simply imitating their male counterparts but by refusing to repress the aspect of their identity that resonates with masculine-­coded gestures. Not insignificantly, the Slits rejected comparisons with the Runaways.

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126  what is post-punk?

When asked by Needs what they thought of their female contemporaries, Up stated that the Runaways especially were “full of shit.”74 I can only speculate about why the Slits may have found the Runaways “full of shit.” She may have dismissed them because she didn’t like their music, which was not only in a different genre from the reggae-­styled post-­punk the Slits favored, but could also be construed as an antifeminist capitulation to and collusion with male-­associated modes of musical expression. She also saw the Slits as forging new paths, but the Runaways weren’t: “they’re just not innovators of anything—­music, ideas, attitudes, anything.”75 But Up may also have been aware of the Runaways’ reputation as objects of male desire, something that the so-­called post-­punk “demystification set” explicitly fought against in interviews and songs. In his review of a Runaways’ concert at Sheffield University in 1977, Chris Brazier wrote, It says a lot about current attitudes to women that the only all-­girl band to make it on any significant scale has been the Runaways, chosen by former mentor Kim Fowley as much for their jailbait rating as for their musical prowess.76

Brazier’s review not only highlighted how the Runaways’ were objectified, it reminds us of the pervasive anxiety about whether female musicians can exhibit “musical prowess,” as I discussed with reference to Paton’s dismissal of Patti Smith’s inability to “play properly” and the recurrent references to both the Slits’ and the Raincoats’ minimal musical skill. The significance of Brazier’s comments about the members of the Runaways being chosen for their “jailbait rating” can be traced in an interview with the band members themselves in another Melody Maker feature, also from November 1977. In the interview with Harvey Kubernik, guitar players Lita Ford and Joan Jett discussed the recent departures of bassist Jackie Fox and singer Cherie Currie from the group, with Jett having taking over the lead vocal responsibilities. Ford mentioned how she was “upset” because audiences and the media often failed to take the band seriously and treated them as a mere “novelty.” At the same time, however, Ford also commented that Fowley (the band’s male mentor) told their new bassist, Vicky Blue, to “lose weight if you wanna be in this band. No one wants to see a female version of Randy Bachman.” Furthermore, Fowley’s insidious “advice” to Blue was contradicted by Jett, who remarked in the same interview that the “band wasn’t put together for sexual purposes, we play music, we give good shows and work real hard.” Jett was not only palpably frustrated with the assump-

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  127

tion that women could not play rock music, but significantly, seemed to want to position the band in relation to the emerging new-­wave (punk) genre, commenting that she felt “an affinity with the new wave bands” because they also “wanted to be heard” (read: rather than seen).77 In other words, following their change of personnel and the departure of Currie (who journalist Brazier referred to as “more of a freak side show with her stripper’s corset”), the band wanted to move toward the new wave (further corroborated by the fact that Jett is pictured in the article wearing a Sex Pistols T-­shirt), which in many respects positioned itself against the rock tradition, including its conventional gender roles. What this suggests, then, is that punk, new wave, and post-­punk provided a potential space for women in which they could shed their confining status as sex objects or as novelty acts. The Runaways as novelty act, in contrast to the Slits, is further evident in the two-­part cartoon that appeared in issues 79 and 80 of ZigZag magazine. Needs described the cartoon on the contents page of issue 79 as follows: “The Runaways are depicted in action on our cover. This month we start the girls off in the first of their own cartoon strip telling their story. It’s all based on fact but at the time of writing this I ain’t seen what liberties the artist, Tony Ghura, has taken! Sorry girls!” (original emphasis). Indeed, Ghura’s cartoons depict Fowley as sleazy and predatory, but he also draws the band members as catty infighters who, thrillingly, often end each cartoon by ripping each other’s clothes off in a tongue-­ in-­cheek patriarchal fantasy that blends the pyjama party with girl-­on-­girl wrestling. See, for example, the front cover of issue 79 of ZigZag from December 1977 (see figure 2) where the band members bite each other and pull hair, Ford’s and Jett’s breasts are exposed, and a giant godlike Fowley glowers at them like the Wizard of Oz in Victor Fleming’s 1939 depiction. Notably, these images and narratives contrast with the more “serious” approach taken to the Slits and their concert at Holland Park School, which Needs reviews in the same issue. The examples of Quatro and the Runaways demonstrate that the pathway of amateur aesthetics was not the only route into rock for female musicians of the mid-­1970s. As Auslander illustrates, there was a space within hard rock and glam rock for women who wanted to perform “female masculinity.” At the same time, however, “female masculinity” did not discourage audiences and critics from seeing the band as objects or even as poor musicians. Is there a better way, therefore, to understand the imbrication of female musicians with the discourse of amateurism other than stating that punk’s amateur aesthetics opened the rock field

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Figure 2. The front cover of ZigZag magazine previewing the upcoming two-­part cartoon about the Runaways. December 1977. Cartoon by Tony Ghura.

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  129

to women, or by stating that musicians who eschewed conventional notions of groove or rock structure challenged “gender-­specific notions of rock”? O’Meara’s suggestion that the Raincoats “took advantage of punk’s unskilled performances in order to shatter traditional (read: masculine) subjectivity in rock music”78 inadvertently has a way of implying that the Raincoats’ music is an embodiment of (essential) female expression. This is partly because the argument overlooks some of the social conditions that contributed to the sound of the Raincoats’ music, as well as comparisons with contemporaries who did play in the “male” idiom, such as the Runaways. I therefore suggest that there are (at least) two slightly different ways of interpreting the Raincoats’ music. These two readings, furthermore, do not exclude each other and may be taken together. The first reading would be that the Raincoats’ sound/music is neither simply an expression of female identity nor an expression of an explicitly feminist agenda; rather, it is the sonic analogue to the technology of social relations that has historically excluded women from participating in masculine-­coded music making. As Bayton has suggested regarding female electric guitarists, a lack of money, space, transport, mentors, role models, confidence, and language are just some of the factors that contribute to female musicians’ exclusion from the rock genre.79 In other words, is there a practical aspect to the sound of women’s rock music that has been overlooked? That is, does the Raincoats’ music sound like music made by individuals who have been systemically excluded from acquiring familiarity with the conventions of a particular idiom? The second reading is to suggest that the Raincoats were familiar with rock or punk’s language but chose not to follow such conventions. They chose, rather, to perform amateurism, in the Butlerian sense. In this regard, the low expectations that certain cultural gatekeepers had of women’s musicianship was the necessary “constraint” that informed and contributed to the creation of amateurish performances as an aesthetic choice. As Kodwo Eshun proposes, post-­punk “was an amateurist and autodidact project that created a context for a belief in your own capacity rather than training or skill,” but also, perhaps more crucially, post-­punk also “invented ways to dramatize uncertainty.”80 If women were in some ways discursively “prohibited” from realizing their rock aspirations, then amateurism and the performance thereof became a space in which to realize creative possibilities.81 In much the way that Quatro and the Runaways performed female masculinity, post-­punk women may be said to have performed amateurism as a way to resist the disciplining of the

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130  what is post-punk?

female body and voice. Punk and post-­punk, in other words, were spaces for women to perform either the haphazardness that had hitherto only been in the male purview or a kind of haphazard femininity that was off limits in other genres.

Conclusion In the song “Come Again” by mixed-­gender post-­punk group the Au Pairs, female lead singer Lesley Woods and fellow band member Paul Foad play the part of a couple who are, in the words Reynolds and Press, “attempting to make sex more reciprocal and mutually satisfactory, only to find themselves entrapped in another set of expectations.”82 On two occasions during the album version of the song (from Playing With a Different Sex, 1981) Foad shakily seeks assurance, asking, “Am I doing it right?” and “Do you like this, like it like this?” Cutting Foad short in his questioning, Woods, in strident voice, poses the potentially devastating question, “Is your finger aching? I can feel you hesitating,” hollering and repeating, “Is your finger aching?” at the song’s three-­quarter-­mark climax as the band careens toward the instrumental break. Woods’s lyric is significant for the way it reclaims power and agency over the female body, putting female sexual pleasure back into the literal hands (fingers) of women, and blowing open the hitherto unspoken truth that some may not be able to “master” female genitalia. Woods’s lyric, accompanied by a deft grasp of the post-­punk idiom in her guitar playing, serves as an effective analogy for the reclamation of power that punk and post-­punk’s female musicians enacted by assuming the positions of drummer and guitarist specifically, and by creatively performing to or within the expectations of amateurism. As Reddington illustrates, male rock critics mocked the female bassists Tina Weymouth for “worriedly” checking her fingers, and Gaye Black for watching where she put hers.83 Thus, stealthily inserted into the hitherto masculine world of rock that has both covertly and overtly insisted that female musicians will always be amateurs in certain fields or genres, Woods’s lyric playfully suggests that there are other skills that require comparable degrees of manual dexterity, precision, patience, stamina, and access to and familiarity with the right equipment that some may never acquire. The sarcastic, symbolic castration enacted by Woods’s lyric is a powerful metaphor for understanding the kind of humiliation experienced by musicians such as Weymouth, Black, and also Patti Smith, the Slits, Lora Logic, and the Raincoats, who the cultural gatekeepers (male and female) implied

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Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism  131

were either incompetent, or whose implicitly natural musical whimsy, such as an inability to keep time, became the key to new artistic terrain, as reviews of the Slits’ and the Raincoats’ live performances suggested. It could also be argued that these accusations of incompetence pointed in different generic directions. Paton expected Smith to be able to play her guitar “properly” in accord with the classic rock aesthetic, but writers such as Needs and some of the other writers at ZigZag expected these female musicians to play punk and therefore antivirtuosic music. In yet another interpretation of musical genre and value, Reynolds and Press suggest that the post-­punk women’s groups’ “anti-­musical”-­ sounding songs were their “most subversive.”84 This interpretation, then, that links the inclusion of women musicians with subversion, speaks to one of my earlier points: post-­punk might be employed as a discursive trope that values, even fetishizes, social as well as musical elements that are perceived to stray from the otherwise male-­dominated conventions of rock. In this regard, the “post” may refer to the identities and musical styles that punk (retroactively) leaves out, namely women and the kinds of sonic artefacts written in an amateurish style that do not conform to standard rock or punk vocabulary. Indeed, as Frith and Horne have suggested, “feminist performers like Vi Subversa and the Au Pairs had to operate in this post-­punk ‘experimental’ space,” rather than the punk space.85 More cynically, the “post” might also be taken as a term of value, which is something that is implicit in Reynolds’s work. In this instance, women in post-­punk might be interpreted as a form of cultural capital, a marker of socially liberal distinction.

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five

| Between Flesh and Machines “Modern” Music and the “Industrial” Sound of Post-­Punk’s Regional Cities

In Creem magazine in November 1979, under the subheading “Heart of Darkness,” journalist “Robot” A. Hull opens an interview with the band Pere Ubu with this: In CB lingo, Cleveland is the Dirty City, where sulfur dioxide permeates human pores. But for years, as a challenge to the city’s concrete slab, Cleveland’s underground music scene has been riding the street waves in tempo with the rhythms of industry. From this real world of toil and sweat, Pere Ubu has emerged, embodying the sounds and textures of Cleveland just as the Beach Boys did California and the Velvet Underground, New York City.1

The title for this chapter comes from a comment made by Pere Ubu’s lead singer David Thomas. Describing his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Thomas said, “There’s a relationship between flesh and machines in Cleveland that is very strange. It’s a strong juxtaposition. Cleveland is a giant, blown-­out factory town. There’s the Flats with all this incredible industry, steel mills going flat out all day and all night, and it’s just a half mile away from where all the people live. This gives them the feeling that there’s no future for somebody here, and all the musicians seem to be in love with that fact.” See Thomas quoted in Paul Rambali, “Pere Ubu: Weird City Robomen,” New Musical Express, January 7, 1978, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/pereubu-weird-city-robomen 132 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/24/2021 6:59 AM via UNIV OF CHICAGO AN: 2331093 ; Mimi Haddon.; What Is Post-Punk? : Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 Account: s8989984

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Between Flesh and Machines  133

Hull’s profile of Pere Ubu thus begins with a multisensory description of the band’s hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. By referring to “CB” lingo, the slang used in citizens-­band radio, a medium favored by long-­distance truck drivers, Hull immediately sets the scene of a working-­class environment, and accordingly his reference to the CB community’s affectionate dubbing of Cleveland as “the Dirty City” conveys a lowbrow image. The references to sulfur dioxide in the air and Cleveland’s “concrete slab” also suggest the dystopian connotations of an industrial city in decline, an image similar to those proffered by theorist Marshall Berman in his work on the self-­destructive nature of modernization.2 According to Hull’s introduction, we have entered the heart of post-­industrial darkness, and Hull uses this image of an industrial city in decline to evoke the sound of Pere Ubu’s music. In this chapter, I concentrate on how late-­1970s rock critics used images associated with industry, industrial decay, and urban modernization to describe the sound of music made by certain bands in late-­1970s new wave. I focus mainly on Pere Ubu, Devo (also from Ohio), and Cabaret Voltaire from Sheffield in the UK, but I discuss bands from other regional scenes of the time to test the prevalence of these industrial metaphors. In the first part of the chapter I propose that these industrial metaphors are important for the way music critics used them to link these three bands into a quasi-­genre. More recently, as I demonstrate, writers on post-­punk, new wave, and industrial have placed these three groups in separate genres: Pere Ubu belongs to post-­punk, Devo belongs to new wave, and Cabaret Voltaire is a proto-­industrial group. Thus, by analyzing the historical discourse and juxtaposing it with presentist accounts, I emphasize how journalists’ use of the term “industrial” and its associated images can be considered an important part of industrial music’s prehistory, even if the term did not denote a generic category in the same way it does today. In the second part of the chapter I highlight the fact that late-­1970s critics folded their “industrial” interpretations of these bands in with ideas of what constituted “art” and of what constituted the “modern.” Critics seized specifically on the musicians’ use of the synthesizer and references to avant-­garde art practices in their work, and thus attached the moniker “modern music.” I conclude with a discussion of the “avant-­garde” in relation to these quasi-­industrial groups.

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134  what is post-punk?

From Cleveland, Ohio, to Sheffield, Yorkshire: Regionalism and the Meaning of “Industrial” Returning to Hull’s description of Pere Ubu, Cleveland’s history and reputation as an industrial city that traded principally in iron and steel did not merely serve as a backdrop to the city’s music scene. Like sulfur dioxide into human pores, Cleveland’s industrial by-­products—­its noise, its sweat, and its cynicism—­were perceived to have seeped into the very sound of the city’s music. Hull’s vague but nonetheless important extended metaphor about how “Cleveland’s underground music scene has been riding the street waves in tempo with the rhythms of industry” implies a homology between the city’s manufacturing activity and the city’s musical sound, as does his suggestion that Pere Ubu have been “embodying the sounds and textures” of Cleveland. Thus, in the same way that the Velvet Underground purportedly captured New York City’s edge, or in the way the Beach Boys channeled sunny California, Hull draws a direct correlation between Cleveland’s industrial identity and the sound of its local music. Hull’s article was not unique in this respect. From early 1978 other critics in the rock-­music press drew a direct connection between Pere Ubu’s music and Cleveland’s industrial landscape and soundscape. Indeed, Jon Savage at Sounds demonstrated a reflexive self-­awareness of this discursive trend; he remarked on critics’ tendency to use Cleveland’s industrial character as a framing device, writing how other critics have presented the city as “very bleak, and industrial” with “blank spaces and empty places, scarred planes stretching as far as the eye can see.” He concluded equivocally, “you could say that . . . rock traditions/bleakness are at Ubu’s core” (emphasis original).3 This trend persisted. In April 1978, Richard Grabel at New York Rocker wrote how Pere Ubu’s music drew on the “sounds and ambience of their industrial homeland.”4 And, two months before Hull’s piece in Creem, in September 1979, Max Bell at New Musical Express (NME) went so far as to introduce Pere Ubu as an “industrial band,” arguing that one could hear in their music “snatches and refrains from the nightmare blue collar world where you found yourself locked in the steel works without a box of matches.”5 In addition to describing Pere Ubu’s music as an embodiment of or sonic analogue to Cleveland’s industrial character, rock critics also provided lengthy descriptions of the band’s performing activity and life in the city. Such descriptions of the band’s Cleveland life further reinforced the idea that Pere Ubu dwelled in former industrial quarters situated in

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Between Flesh and Machines  135

a cultural wasteland. A building known as the Plaza was an apartment complex where almost all of the members of Pere Ubu lived, apart from their lead singer David Thomas. According to post-­ punk chronicler Simon Reynolds, the building was co-­owned and unofficially maintained by Pere Ubu’s synthesizer-­and saxophone-­player Allen Ravenstine.6 The building was located at 3206 Prospect Avenue, an apparently neglected street on which the streetlights had been out for a whole year.7 NME correspondent Paul Rambali described the Plaza as an emblem of the kind of American grandeur that began to recede in Cleveland from the 1940s onward. What was once a “fine example of American gothic architecture,” according to Rambali, the place where the city’s business overlords housed their mistresses at the end of the nineteenth century, was now situated in what had become the city’s red-­light district.8 The fact that the side of this building appears on the front cover of Pere Ubu’s second album, Dub Housing, released in November 1978, demonstrates how the band made their industrial-­city roots an important part of their self-­presentation and visual aesthetic. Not only did the members of Ubu live in the lots left vacant by Cleveland’s industrial decline, but according to Reynolds, the band’s rehearsal space was located in the former John D. Rockefeller Building, a seventeen-­story turn-­of-­the-­century building that was formerly the office hub of coal, iron, and lake shipping.9 This discursive tendency to use images of industrial decay to introduce Pere Ubu extended to describing the kinds of venues at which the band performed live. Like the Plaza, these venues were holdovers from the city’s industrial past and were equally as dire as their living quarters were purported to be. Ubu played regularly at a venue known as Pirate’s Cove, which was located on the Flats, the floodplain of the Cuyahoga River and site of the city’s main industrial activity in the nineteenth century, later transformed into a place for nightclubs and music venues. A sense of cultural scarcity and desperation characterizes Pere Ubu singer Thomas’s account of performing in these venues. He described them as “sleazo-­dive warzones” where, if you were lucky, you could “play for four or five drunks off the street.”10 Indeed, being in a band and doing the rounds at these unappealing venues was apparently one of very few opportunities that allowed young people to avoid working in one of Cleveland’s factories.11 In summary, the music press commentary on Pere Ubu and their life in Cleveland suggested that the band’s music somehow embodied or imitated the sound of the city’s industrial activity and their lives therein. This is in many ways a fairly conventional journalistic strategy. Journalists

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136  what is post-punk?

often amplify or exaggerate public and/or idealized perceptions of particular places and map them onto music. Consider the “Montreal sound” of the early 2000s, the sound of Motor City, Detroit, or the sound of the 1990s Pacific Northwest, for example. However, what is interesting about the Cleveland example is how often there were references to the city’s industrial character and its cultural dearth, not only in US publications but in British magazines, in Melody Maker, Sounds, and NME. British critics’ decision to emphasize the industrial homelands of these musicians from the United States was arguably an act of translation. Hoping to capture the full flavor of Ohio, for example, the independent label Stiff Records and Sounds magazine—­both British-­based—­launched a competition to win a holiday to Akron, Ohio, in July 1978, and Stiff Records released the Akron compilation album, which included music by “garage bands” and “odd balls” from the Akron area with a rubber-­scented, Akron-­ themed sleeve.12 The music press’s decision to emphasize the industrial nature of Cleveland and Akron also illustrates the regionalism that characterized the punk and post-­punk era in the UK more generally. As David Hesmondhalgh and Helen Reddington have both suggested, the punk movement fostered an interest in UK scenes outside of London, as illustrated by a series of articles on regional scenes in Melody Maker from the late 1970s onward.13 And, just as Cleveland’s steel-­and-­metal-­processing industry began to decline in the late 1970s, Britain’s cities were undergoing similar processes of deindustrialization. For example, in Peter Silverton’s profile of Akron in Sounds in June 1978, he uses Sheffield, UK, as a point of comparison. He suggested that Akron, “famed ‘Rubber Capital of the World,’” was to a British person “suburban in a way that English cities like Sheffield could never be.”14 Even though Silverton saw Akron and Sheffield as in some ways different, he nevertheless found the city’s shared industrial characters meaningful enough to compare the two. By trying to draw a semblance between two hives of activity in Sheffield and Ohio cities, then, Silverton and fellow British magazines perhaps made them more relatable to British readers by refracting the larger sociopolitical conditions that characterized the 1970s in both the UK and the US: the process of de-­industrialization and the onset of post-­Fordism. One of the main ways in which both critics and the members of Pere Ubu described their hometown was as a hopeless, artless wasteland. Pere Ubu’s singer, for example, described Cleveland as a “vacuum” with “no escape” where “failure is built into everything.”15 Such a statement may be illustrative of a provincial inferiority complex; the world outside is not only bigger and more intimidating than life within Cleveland’s proverbi-

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Between Flesh and Machines  137

al walls, but it’s also better. And this featured in descriptions of Britain’s second cities, too. Such language was similar to the critics’ introductions to Cabaret Voltaire and their hometown of Sheffield. The title of Andy Gill’s September 1978 article captures the turn toward UK cities other than London—­“Sheffield: This Week’s Leeds.” Here he presents a picture of a culturally bereft second city that compares effectively to the one presented by Pere Ubu’s singer: Until last year, Sheffield was undoubtedly the most musically inactive city in Britain. For a city with over half a million people, the paucity of small venues was little short of criminal, and the prospects for bands working outside the Working Men’s Club circuit absolutely non-­existent. “Drift south, young man, and drown” was the order of the day.16

Just as Thomas noted that Cleveland musicians were forced to play the city’s dive bars and how, for Cleveland’s citizens, failure was a self-­ fulfilling prophecy, Gill suggested that Sheffield musicians were faced with similarly unhappy prospects. They could either perform in the Working Men’s Clubs or suffer the inevitable-­seeming humiliation of trying to make it “down south” in London. It is not necessarily surprising that two small cities in the industrialized Western world at the end of the 1970s had similar cultural scenes, especially after the punk era when, as Hesmondhalgh has suggested, places such as London were no longer necessarily the central hubs of musical activity and the music press was keen to promote “new sounds from outside the capital.”17 Importantly, however, this late-­1970s press commentary dates from before Pere Ubu, Devo, and Cabaret Voltaire were separated into the now-­distinct genres of post-­punk, new wave, and industrial, respectively. In other words, before the stabilization of these generic terms or categories, this sense of regional identity and the sound-­place homologies could hold these groups together discursively, producing a quasi-­genre or perhaps a proto-­genre.18 However, as much as Gill highlighted Sheffield’s provincial chip on its shoulder, he was skeptical of the sound-­place homology: It would be all too easy to view Cabaret Voltaire as some kind of a response to the pressures of industrial society, and lard an account of them with grey images of urban decay and razor-­wrist despair. I mean, here’s this city, Sheffield, famed only for cutlery and

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138  what is post-punk?

viewed by motorway flashers-­by as the most probable place for God to fling a few fallen angels. And here’s this “band,” currently the most talked-­about musical phenomenon emanating from the city, producing music which sparks to mind adjectives like “flat,” “grey,” “repetitive,” “soulless,” “monotonous,” etc. It all fits! No it doesn’t.19

Contrary to critics’ prevailing tendency to tie Cabaret Voltaire’s sound to the industrial character of their city, then, Gill’s article suggested that Cabaret Voltaire “could have been spawned in any city.” Not only that, but the kind of music that Cabaret Voltaire made was not necessarily the product of their environment. The “route” taken by Cabaret Voltaire toward the kind of music they were making, Gill stressed, was via Roxy Music, “the arts in general,” “Kulchur,” and a desire to “create for themselves.”20 By framing Cabaret Voltaire using two almost competing sets of images—­(1) Sheffield’s unappealing grayness, steel and cutlery, and lack of culture versus (2) Roxy Music, art, culture, and notions of unique creativity—­Gill’s account begins to challenge the relatively superficial biographical information of hometown origins with a more detailed account of Cabaret Voltaire’s cultural activity and influences. Stephen Mallinder, a member of Cabaret Voltaire, offered a very similar argument in the band’s interview with Chris Westwood in ZigZag in September 1978. Mallinder stated, “I don’t think [the environment] is a direct influence on us.  .  .  . I think it’s industrial, yeah, but it would’ve come out if we’d live in a rural area.”21 Thus, Gill and the band themselves resisted the one-­to-­one equation of cityscape-­to-­musical-­sound that so many other journalists employed by introducing a different set of ideas into Cabaret Voltaire’s space of possibilities—­that of “culture” and nonindustrial influences. Indeed, in his critical history of industrial music, S. Alexander Reed gives a thorough account of Cabaret Voltaire’s affiliation with Sheffield University and local council youth projects, such as the arts and theater venture Meat Whistle, further stressing the “cultured” origins of the band.22 Cabaret Voltaire feature in Reed’s history as early participants in the industrial genre, alongside fellow Yorkshire bands Clock DVA and Throbbing Gristle.23 All three bands (Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA, and Throbbing Gristle) are, however, also subsumed within Reynolds’s post-­punk history.24 On assessing the interaction between Reed’s and Reynolds’s respective accounts, it could be argued that “industrial” is a style or subcategory locatable within the larger post-­punk umbrella, which would include Cabaret Voltaire alongside the Ohio acts Devo and

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Between Flesh and Machines  139

Pere Ubu.25 But rather than split hairs trying to decide who belongs where or whether industrial is or is not a subgenre of post-­punk, my aim here is to elucidate the continuities and the fractures in these competing discourses, since such continuities and fractures demonstrate the criteria according to which cultural gatekeepers (scholars and journalists, in this instance) participate in the production of categories of musical genre. I hazard the view, therefore, that even though both Pere Ubu and Devo are excluded from today’s industrial music canon, critics’ emphasis on post-­punk musicians’ industrial-­city origins and the deindustrializing of locales such as Cleveland, Akron, and Sheffield contributed to the prehistory of industrial music itself.26 Thus what was and still is a journalistic strategy—­setting the scene with references to a band’s biography and home surroundings—­has not only influenced present-­day conceptions of post-­punk as a bleak, scarred, gritty genre (as exemplified by Reynolds’s reference to “appropriate harshness”),27 but has contributed to the prehistory of the industrial genre, a genre that has more recently drifted away from post-­punk. If I may pull these threads together, then: on the one hand, the rock press used the same kinds of industrial analogies to describe the music of Pere Ubu, Devo, and Cabaret Voltaire in a way that is fairly typical of music journalism; the writers drew on biographical details and information about the musician’s locale for rhetorical effect. On the other hand, this writerly convention has in fact contributed to the formation of the musical category known as industrial. While industrial music is of course considered a genre unto itself with a more complex profile than the kinds of city-­music mappings I have extrapolated here, this discursive use of the term “industrial” and its associated imagery forms a significant part of the prehistory of that genre. Furthermore, the fact that these musicians were written about concurrently with no clear hints toward more detailed categorization or generic segregation points to the way the post-­ punk era or new wave as a whole was a stylistically heterogeneous field prior to more recent subdivisions that have been built from differences lurking inchoately in the historical discourse.

“Everybody Is Either a Hillbilly or a College Student” The Ohio-­band phenomenon of the late-­1970s that saw Cleveland’s Pere Ubu, Akron’s Devo, and Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire garner attention in the UK rock press was thus a key moment to the extent that it (1) informs our understanding of post-­punk as somehow appropriately industrial

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140  what is post-punk?

pace Reynolds, and (2) engages the prehistory of industrial as a genre unto itself. But what of other regional cities in the United States at this time? Did journalists frame the music of other regional bands with the same metaphors of industrial decline? Were Bloomington, Indiana, or Athens, Georgia, ever “this week’s Leeds”? And, as such, how does this inform the generic labeling of bands from those regions? The music press did indeed comment on the outsider status of other regional US bands in a way that presages and echoes the 1978 flourishing of the Ohioan and Yorkshire provinces. Some six months prior to the Ohio and Yorkshire preoccupations of mid-­1978, in December 1977, Charles de Whalley in Sounds magazine interviewed the Bloomington, Indiana, band MX-­ 80 (or MX-­ 80 Sound) using the same emphasis on US regionalism. Rich Stim, the band’s vocalist, described living in Bloomington in a way that is comparable to Pere Ubu’s descriptions of Cleveland or Gill’s description of Sheffield. Stim told de Whalley that growing up in Bloomington was like “living in a hermetically sealed mayonnaise jar” in the sense that “You don’t get bombarded with every musical trend like the Coastal regions do. There are no distractions. And there’s some very interesting bands coming out of the Mid-­West because of that. Like Devo and Pere Ubu and Static Disposal.”28 Thus, the sense of insularity and isolation that would be emphasized so much the following year in the music press’s discussions of Cleveland and Sheffield was also present in Bloomington, Indiana. But for de Whalley, the character of the place didn’t determine the sound of MX-­ 80, their sound wasn’t “industrial.” Yet the place did dictate both the kinds of people who lived there and, accordingly, the genres of music that were played and enjoyed: “in Bloomington Indiana, I am reliably informed, everybody is either a hillbilly or a college student and if you don’t dig Dan Fogelberg and Kenny Loggins . . .” And, stressing Bloomington’s lag behind the times, de Whalley noted, “The New Wave hasn’t yet struck the U.S. with real force and, so it seems, a band from the Mid-­West who don’t play Bluegrass is regarded with as much hilarity in the A&R [artists and repertoire] offices of America as a bunch of blacks from Brixton who don’t play reggae would be over here.”29 Thus while de Whalley didn’t map the sound of Bloomington’s industry (limestone? timber?) onto the music of MX-­80, he did map the identities of its people onto the genres pursued there. Indeed, his reference to a connection between black identity and reggae demonstrates a self-­conscious awareness of the ease with which such relationships between place and music or identity and music can slip into essentialism. Similar strains of regionalist discourse emerge regarding acts from

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Between Flesh and Machines  141

other locales in the US. Indeed, as late as December 1980, Richard Grabel suggested he wouldn’t try to “hype Athens, Georgia into a new Akron, Ohio,”30 and critics at the beginning of that year noted the “provincialism” of that town with reference to Pylon, Method Actors, REM, and the B-­52s—­who Cynthia Rose described as “Bringing kicks from the sticks of Hicksville, Georgia.”31 But though comments about the B-­52s and REM emphasized their regionalism, only Pylon attracted the kinds of post-­ industrial imagery we saw with Pere Ubu, Devo, and Cabaret Voltaire, although significantly, this appeared a while after the mid-­1978 interest in those acts. For example, in February 1981, the Village Voice wrote the following about Pylon: Up till now, all the class act of post-­everything modernism (PiL, Joy D., etc.) have issued forth from the most ancient bowels of decayed industrial capitalism, the dreary olde U.K. They have all exhibited a certain dirgy depth of angst, and while the young American may find this impressive and exciting, he/she cannot help but feel a bit alien from it, as truth be told, we’re not really rotted enough yet ourselves. [my emphasis]32

As in accounts of Pere Ubu, Devo, and Cabaret Voltaire three years earlier, then, the demise of industry appears as a discursive thread here. Two other points are worth highlighting in this discussion of other regional acts as I develop them later in the chapter. First is the way art college or universities more generally played an important role in anchoring the participants in these local scenes. As the vocalist from Pylon, Vanessa Brisoe Hay, says, her band didn’t come “from a trained musical background but more as artists. So we approached it in the same way with our tools, except instead of brushes and spray paint cans we had drums and the guitars and the microphone.”33 The second point concerns the lumping-­together of the B-­52s (new wave), Pylon (post-­punk), and REM (indie) in the discussions of Athens, Georgia, in particular.34 As Steven Brown from the San Francisco–­based group Tuxedomoon told a journalist in 1985, “At that time there was no question of punk, there was a question of this new energy. . . . People were excited by new things and would go and see anybody. The same people that went to see Z’ev would go to see the Dead Kennedys, would go to see Tuxedomoon.”35 Rather than focus on generic categories, then, the historical framing of these acts emphasized their regional roots, their art college backgrounds and eclecticism. Therefore, rather than retroactively decide who belongs to which bounded genre, it makes more historical sense to see the new-­

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142  what is post-punk?

wave era as a cluster of different regional networks with, in some cases, art college practices as foundational.36 San Francisco was another regional cluster that attracted critical comparisons to the Ohio acts, specifically the artists signed to Ralph Records, a label started by the band the Residents. Originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, the Residents, like other regional acts, felt stifled by their hometown and apparently moved to the Bay Area because Shreveport didn’t satisfy their artistic curiosity.37 While there they started Ralph Records and released music by Bay Area bands such as Tuxedomoon and Chrome, and MX-­80 Sound who relocated to San Francisco in 1978. Notably, the music journalist Andy Gill—­responsible for the “This Week’s Leeds” piece on Cabaret Voltaire of September 1978—­compared Chrome’s second album Half Machine Lip Moves to Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance in March the following year. Significantly, Gill opted to emphasize Chrome’s “use of non-­symbolic vocal detritus” in their instrumental songs as the characteristic that most closely connected to them to Pere Ubu. Gill was also preoccupied with the extent to which Chrome could overcome punk and, as he says, “blur the roles of form and content.” What Gill perhaps meant by blurring form and content was the way Chrome continued to play riffs and maintain rock structures (i.e. form as rock convention) but infuse those structures or “forms” with surprising fragments of noise (content from outside of rock convention)—­a “jarring, jagged, glass-­and-­metal” sound.38 While not explicitly labeling Chrome as industrial, then, Gill’s comparison between them and Pere Ubu, and his emphasis on their use of “non-­symbolic vocal detritus” or abstract noise, is important since this abstract noise was one of the things that made Pere Ubu sound “industrial.” This is illustrated well with the following words from mid-­1978 about the band This Heat, which mock the tendency to align “noise” with “industrial”: [This Heat] hop rather than swagger—­argumentative, tenuously rock-­ oriented noise. It’s often pure noise, yes (what isn’t?) but “Industrial” only in the sense that Abba too are “Industrial” . . . (both engaged in the manufacture of noise?).39

I return to this connection between abstract noise and the industrial in the next section. But to briefly sum up: while the music press didn’t describe the bands from the Bloomington, Athens, or San Francisco networks using the same metaphors of industrial decline, the band’s provincial origins were important and were used in comparisons with the Ohio

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Between Flesh and Machines  143

acts, especially in the case of the fellow Midwesterners MX-­80 Sound. Furthermore, Hay from Pylon saw the art-­college scene in Athens as an important generative force in that locale’s music. And, finally, though critics didn’t describe these acts using the same industrial metaphors, the terms that Gill used to describe the sound of Chrome’s music were similar to the way he and others described the “industrial” sonic effects of Pere Ubu and others, as best exemplified on Chrome tracks such as “Zombie Warfare (Can’t Let You Down).” In short, there are three interconnected themes in this discourse: regionalism, (art) colleges, and metaphors of industry and industrial decline.

Hooks vs. Noise: The Semiotic and Generic Signification of the Synthesizer In the modern times, the modern way. —­Roxy Music, “Editions of You,” 1973

There are two further images nested in these press commentaries from the late 1970s, and both relate to the idea of the “industrial.” Although in some ways these images contradict each other, both may be regarded as a refraction of the larger sociopolitical conditions that characterized the late 1970s in both the UK and US. Critics used these kinds of images in relation to music by Pere Ubu, Devo, and Cabaret Voltaire, particularly regarding the role of the synthesizer. First, one encounters images of large-­scale manufacture characteristic of the industrial revolution, such as factories and heavy machinery.40 Second, one encounters references to the kind of technology characteristic of post-­Fordist or late-­capitalist telecommunications, or even a 1950s vision of the “future.”41 Examples of both industrial and post-­industrial images abound in reviews of Pere Ubu’s music from the years 1978 to 1979. Using metaphors that evoke the images of the ruins left by failed large-­scale manufacture, Savage writes of how “the synthesizer blows like icy wind over the [Cleveland] flats [sic].” According to Savage, Pere Ubu’s songs are full of “white noise/ hiss howls,” and their song “Street Waves” on their first studio album, The Modern Dance, “[floats] free through distant explosions” and the “sounds of moving metal,” thus evoking the mechanical noises associated with industrial production. In the same article, Savage likens Pere Ubu’s use of noise to the music of Throbbing Gristle, now widely considered integral participants in the industrial music genre. Likewise, in 1978, Hull remarks on the way Pere Ubu “sonically [reproduces] the ma-

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144  what is post-punk?

chine hum of Ohio’s A-­1 Junk City” and how they were able to “weave the noises of the city into their music.”42 Even the critics who were skeptical of the homology between industrial cities and the sound of Pere Ubu’s music admitted to hearing a “mutant jack hammer” and “surreal landscapes of noise and slabs of blistering white noise” on The Modern Dance.43 Summoning the sounds of post-­Fordism more than those of heavy manufacture, however, Grabel suggests that Pere Ubu’s music evoked the “atmosphere of urban America” and the “modern world” via the use of synthesizer, “which blends unobtrusively with the other instrumental parts,” especially in songs such as “Real World,” where it is used to create “telephone bleeps, sirens.”44 Taking Pere Ubu’s geographic origins and biography as a point of departure, then, critics employed these two facets of “modern civilization”—­industrialization and technologized de-­industrialization—­ to describe the sound of the band’s music, often referring specifically to the synthesizer. Significantly, the ways the synthesizer could signify these two facets of “modern civilization” also intersect with recent scholarship, particularly how some post-­punk music has been more recently divided into the categories of new wave and industrial. In fact, from a present-­ day perspective, the particular use of the synthesizer in post-­punk may now be understood as pointing in two different generic directions, rather than two related semiotic directions. According to scholar of new-­wave music Theo Cateforis, the synthesizer came to represent the “modern” world through the eyes of new wave.45 But from the accounts I cite above, the synthesizer could just as easily be heard as an integral component of the abrasive sonic universe of the industrial genre. Furthermore, the different ways in which the instrument was used also bears on the distinction between these two genres. Berman’s image of modernity as the destruction wrought by failed industry and the sounds of technological “progress” could in fact be used to connect these two ideas, the new-­wave modern and industrial abrasion.46 Cateforis’s conception of the “modern” in relation to new wave is tied to particular historical moments that were marked by significant shifts in technology. For this reason, Cateforis writes, “no instrument symbolized [new wave’s] modern identity more fully than the synthesizer.” Even though synthesizers had been prominent in rock music since the early 1970s, as I shall discuss, Cateforis argues, “Not until new wave did a legion of synthesizer players truly usurp the lead role traditionally accorded the guitar and push the synthesizer’s modern associations fully to

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Between Flesh and Machines  145

the foreground” (emphasis mine).47 Cateforis therefore highlights the importance of a particular kind of synthesizer-­playing in relation to the new-­wave genre and its “modern” connotations. Commercially successful British musicians of the early 1980s such as Gary Numan, Human League, Depeche Mode, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark are Cateforis’s examples of this new way of using the instrument, which may be characterized as a hook-­based melodic style, and hence as usurping the lead guitar. This music represents what Cateforis calls a “seismic paradigm shift” made possible by the cheapness and easy playability of synthesizers at the turn of the 1980s.48 For Cateforis, the synthesizer’s “modern associations,” are also predicated on the negation of progressive-­rock aesthetics and on the articulation of the sounds of late capitalism, the kinds of “telephone bleeps” and “sirens” that I mentioned with reference to Grabel’s review of Pere Ubu.49 In line with this, in a 2010 profile on Devo in Sound on Sound magazine, journalist Sam Inglis wrote, “[in] rock and pop [in the early 1970s], synthesizers were most prominent in the hands of the prog-­rock acts emerging from Britain.” But Devo’s singer, Mark Mothersbaugh, was apparently more interested in sounds that I thought were relevant to our place in time. . . . V2 rockets and mortar blasts, stuff that reflected what I was watching on the evening news. I also wanted to find the sounds that were in the most subversive music that was out at the time, which wasn’t anything to do with pop music.

Mothersbaugh was therefore not interested in what he refers to as “bloopy organ sounds” emitted by groups like ELP and Yes. Rather, he preferred what he called the “shocking” and “inspiring” sound of the song “Editions of You” by Roxy Music from their 1973 album For Your Pleasure.50 And, although seemingly loath to admit it, Mothersbaugh borrowed much of his synthesizer inspiration from disco; to him, encapsulating much of what I discussed in chapter 3, though using the female body as “low other” (rather than black and/or queer), disco “was like a beautiful girl with a great body but no brain.” He continues: I hated [disco], but at the same time I was like “What kind of synths are they using to get that sound?” I begrudgingly would say: Yeah, the song “I Was Born To Be Alive” is idiotic, but there are some really cool

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146  what is post-punk?

synth sounds in it. They made some of the best mixes, and the beats were irresistible, even though I was resisting it because I thought it was moronic.51

In the original version of “Jocko Homo,” one of Devo’s earliest singles released on their own label, Booji Boy, in the US in 1977, the band can be heard employing the synthesizer at its most “subversive,” to use Mothersbaugh’s term. The accompanying video depicts Mothersbaugh dressed in a white coat and swimming goggles delivering a lecture to a group of students wearing plastic sunglasses, facemasks, and head coverings from surgical scrubs. The narrative climax of the video depicts the band writhing like maggots on the lecture desks, clothed in white body bags having presumably devolved in accordance with Devo’s analysis of Western civilization.52 The song opens with the sound of a factory alarm-­cum-­riff. This is followed by the descending riff, played on synthesizer and guitar at the very beginning of the song, and the ascending synthesizer figures and the bleating chorus (“We are Devo”) epitomize the kind of self-­consciously moronic absurdity that characterizes Devo’s oeuvre. True to their cynical and ironic manifesto (a quasi-­scientific “belief” in the de-­evolution of humanity), Devo’s riffs and the refrain in this song, in their pedantic simplicity, suggest a parody of factory-­made popular music.53 It is in that sense that Mothersbaugh perhaps understood what they were doing as “subversive.” Significantly, the synthesizer’s role in “Jocko Homo”—­playing the ascending figures and chromatic riff with the guitar—­is not pure noise. But neither does it play a catchy pop hook or a soloistic role like a conventional lead guitar. Rather, the synthesizer part in “Jocko Homo” seems to straddle two fields; it is melodic, but it also sounds like a manically malfunctioning communications interface with a low-­budget science fiction film and therefore connotes both the information technology age (post-­Fordism) and a retro vision thereof. In this regard, the semiotic significance of the synthesizer, coupled with the opening alarm sounds in this particular performance, overlaps with the kinds of (post)-­industrial sounds that critics heard in Pere Ubu and Cabaret Voltaire. Importantly, despite the prominent use of the synthesizer in music by Pere Ubu and Cabaret Voltaire, Cateforis excludes both bands from his definition of new wave. Based on the press commentary of the era (exemplified previously with Chrome’s “non-­vocal detritus” and This Heat’s “pure noise”), I suggest that this is because the incorporation of the synthesizer in Pere Ubu and Cabaret Voltaire’s music was in fact

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Between Flesh and Machines  147

more noise-­based. That is to say, the instrument was not used as a melody instrument in the way it was in the early 1980s new-­wave examples, nor does it have the same kind of post-­Fordist significance that we hear in Devo’s “Jocko Homo.” With Pere Ubu and Cabaret Voltaire, the instrument provided more of a textural and timbral layer. In some ways this textural, more abstract or noise-­based use of the synthesizer has more in common with Reed’s main criterion for industrial music. The “sonic use of noise,” Reed writes, is “perhaps the only compositional element reliably shared from Cabaret Voltaire to Combichrist and from Die Krupps to Doubting Thomas,” and might therefore be interpreted as a sonic unifier of the industrial genre.54 The fact that critics referred to the use of noise in relation to industrial imagery may also point to another important discursive node in the prehistory of the industrial music genre. Indeed, Reed’s decision to include Cabaret Voltaire in the industrial canon according to this criterion (“the sonic use of noise”) is to a certain extent bolstered by the early press commentary. For example, Savage described Cabaret Voltaire’s use of synthesizers in a way that evokes these ideas. He writes that Cabaret Voltaire used the synthesizers “as instruments with tonal qualities of their own rather than to reproduce the sound of another” (emphasis mine).55 Similarly, when describing Cabaret Voltaire’s music in October 1979, Gill argues that [instead] of concentrating on the easy hook and the instant rhythm, the Cabs here concentrate on emotional soundscaping, offering several alternatives to the pure noise/pure pop furrows endlessly ploughed by latterday synthesizer bands. [emphasis mine]56

Gill was therefore keen to point out how Cabaret Voltaire avoided using certain pop gestures, which may be contrasted with the “hooks” played by Numan in new-­wave songs such as “Cars,” released in August of the same year.57 Indeed, Cabaret Voltaire’s grainy all-­synthesizer texture blends highly repetitive and rhythmically insistent lines with siren-­ like pulsations and declamatory, roboticized vocals. From a present-­day perspective, then, post-­punk or new-­wave musicians’ different ways of using the synthesizer have contributed to perceptions of their generic affiliations: for a new waver, the synthesizer is a melody instrument, used to generate “cool” hooks; for industrial music, the synthesizer is a noise-­ generating machine. But, from a historical perspective, post-­punk or new-­ wave synthesizer playing in general connoted the post-­industrial locales

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148  what is post-punk?

with which these regional bands were associated. The press literature of the late 1970s reveals that Pere Ubu was on the noise-­generating end of the synthesizer spectrum. In fact, in a 1979 article Gill suggests that Pere Ubu’s music might be compared to Cabaret Voltaire’s debut album, Mix Up, in the sense that both bands composed what he calls “modern ‘mood music.’”58 Thus, Gill not only compares Cabaret Voltaire’s music to that of Pere Ubu, he uses the idea of “modern,” most likely indicating that Pere Ubu’s music fulfilled critics’ expectations that this music should be new and/or contemporary, or that these sounds somehow represented the “modern” world.59

A Generic No-­Man’s Land In his history of industrial music, Reed explicitly excludes both Pere Ubu and Devo from his discussions of early incarnations of the genre, despite Pere Ubu’s inclusion of synthesizer-­generated sonic noise, which 1970s critics compared to sounds heard in tracks by Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle.60 Reed suggests that the “political and sonic extremism” articulated by Devo and Pere Ubu “came packaged in too cartoonish a whimsy” and is “too song-­oriented to fit into the pantheon of early industrial music in all its abstract, oppressive direness” (emphasis mine).61 In addition to being “cartoonish” and too song-­oriented to be considered industrial, I’d like to suggest that Pere Ubu’s particular kind of “sonic noise” had precedents in classic rock, and therefore bears too close a resemblance to conventional rock to have the kinds of critical edge that industrial is now associated with. The fact that rock gestures could detract from Pere Ubu’s place in both new wave and industrial is illustrative of how these genres have been retrospectively constructed according to an exclusory agenda that devalues rock elements. And these more recent segregations run against the kind of plurality that defined the post-­punk or new-­wave field at the moment of its emergence. Thus, just as critics such as Gill drew a connection between Cabaret Voltaire’s “modern ‘mood music’” and that of Pere Ubu, other commentators referred to the song-­like nature and rock aesthetic of Pere Ubu’s music as a complementary component to the “slabs of blistering white noise.”62 Ian Birch, writing for Melody Maker in May 1978, for example, comments on the fact that Pere Ubu’s music was a meeting point between “full-­blooded rock” and “chunks of white noise” (emphasis mine).63 Rambali writes about the way Pere Ubu “use conventional rock forms but seem to give them a new language by re-­devising the way sound is used in these forms (emphasis mine).”64 And, in conversation with Rough Trade

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Between Flesh and Machines  149

founder Geoff Travis, Vivien Goldman remarks on the juxtaposition between “rousing rock & roll climax [emphasis mine]” and “these weird antiphonal wind instrument wailings,” to which Travis responded: We mustn’t forget though that, with [Pere Ubu’s songs] “Non-­ Alignment Pack,” “Street Waves” and their encore “Final Solution,” they have constructed all time power riffs that rank with any. Plus in “Street Waves” they have an electronic synthesizer break that is a bit like the break that Led Zeppelin played with in “Whole Lotta Love” before Jimmy Page comes back in with one of the best and most simplistic guitar solos in rock . . . The big difference is that watching Pere Ubu the synthesizer section enhances the song; with Zeppelin you find yourself dying for it to finish so you can hear the solo. [emphasis mine]65

Thus, even though some critics regarded them as being just as “modern” as Cabaret Voltaire and even though they were discussed as part of the regional trio (with Cabaret Voltaire and Devo) in the late-­1970s, they have more recently been excluded from definitions of both industrial and new wave. It seems, then, that Pere Ubu’s combination of rock riffs and synthesizer noise positions them in a generic no-­man’s-­land. Their synthesizer lines are not hook-­based enough and are too heavy sounding to belong to new wave, and their songs are too song-­like and rock-­oriented for industrial. “Street Waves” certainly uses conventional-­sounding rock riffs, especially the bluesy opening and the hard-­rock-­style guitar solo later in the track. The strumming pattern in the rhythm guitar part is reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, which also suggests a punk or proto-­punk aesthetic. As Travis remarked in the conversation with Goldman, Pere Ubu does include a synthesizer break in “Street Waves” that is almost a minute long and, unlike the kind of synthesizer lines composed by new-­wave musicians such as Numan or even Devo, serves a primarily textural function rather than a “lead” or “melodic” one, producing sheets of noise to accompany an otherwise conventional rock sound. As Travis indicated, the synthesizer break in “Street Waves” may be compared to the theremin solo and tape experiment section in Led Zeppelin’s “quintessential cock rock song” of 1969, “Whole Lotta Love,” especially in terms of its length and nonsolo style.66 But significant differences between “Street Waves” and “Whole Lotta Love” should be noted. First, the synthesizer is present as background noise throughout “Street Waves,” whereas the ther-

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150  what is post-punk?

emin in “Whole Lotta Love” occupies a place as more of a novelty feature. Secondly, Pere Ubu’s synthesizer break, which comes after a psychedelic-­sounding guitar solo, is accompanied by guitar feedback, a hypnotic bass groove, a minimal drum part comprising a syncopated bass drum and closed hi-­hat on two and four, and some distant guitar melodies that are once again reminiscent of the Velvet Underground. Furthermore, the synthesizer solo in “Street Waves” does not lead into a guitar solo, but back to the chorus. In “Whole Lotta Love,” however, the groove accompanying the theremin antisolo is very different. It is a more insistent four-­quarter-­note on-­beat rhythm with occasional fills and conga interjections with Robert Plant vocalizing over the top in a characteristically classic–­rock or—­even cock-­rock—­“eroticized” way. Therefore, even though both of these songs contain hard-­rock characteristics as well as noise-­based antisolos midway through, they convey different generic and aesthetic sensibilities. “Whole Lotta Love” epitomizes hard rock, whereas “Street Waves” has a more psychedelic or proto-­punk character. Nevertheless, it seems the rock-­like character of “Street Waves” is enough to exclude it from gatekeepers’ recent formulations of both industrial and new wave. In addition to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” another possible historical precedent to Pere Ubu’s particular way of employing the synthesizer as texture, color, and noise throughout their songs, accompanied by a more psychedelic style, is Hawkwind. Hawkwind was an English space-­rock band whose personnel were constantly changing, but generally comprised a five-­piece of guitar, drums, saxophone, and synthesizer, featuring Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister (later of Motörhead) on bass. Music journalists recognized Hawkwind as an important stylistic precedent for the use of the synthesizer by both Pere Ubu and Cabaret Voltaire. For example, while reminiscing about listening to the B-­side of Pere Ubu’s first single from 1975, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” backed with “Heart of Darkness,” Rambali writes how he sometimes wondered whether he was listening to nothing other than a more fashionable version of Hawkwind.67 Indeed, there is a more psychedelic rock sound to these earlier releases like “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” even though Pere Ubu themselves rejected such comparisons.68 Similarly, Chris Westwood, writing for ZigZag magazine, heard three different strains in Cabaret Voltaire’s music: the Residents, the Velvet Underground, and Hawkwind circa 1973.69 Notably, the sound of the synthesizer in the early 1970s did not evoke the same kind of industrial or post-­industrial images that it did for crit-

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Between Flesh and Machines  151

ics of these post-­punk musicians, either as a sonic analog to a regional city’s industrial past or as a signifier of late-­capitalist decline or progress. This could be because punk and its characteristically regional affiliations had not yet emerged or because the larger socioeconomic processes of deindustrialization were not yet in full sway. By and large, in the early 1970s, the sound of the synthesizer signified outer space and science fiction. In a 1973 issue of Phonograph Record, for example, journalist Greg Shaw wrote an article on the history of “space rock.” He listed as some of the genre’s precedents 1950s rock ’n’ roll; the Byrds’ song “C.T.A 102,” which featured theremin; Pink Floyd’s 1967 album Piper at the Gates of Dawn with its “weird organ noises and de rigeur synthesizer whooshes”; the German rock group Amon Düül (although Shaw suggests that they were not “technically” space rock); and Hawkwind’s song “Master of the Universe,” released on their second album, In Search of Space (1971). Significantly, Hawkwind’s “Master of the Universe” was re-­ released on Space Ritual, the 1973 record that Westwood compared to some of Cabaret Voltaire’s music. Shaw described “Master of the Universe” as evocative of the precise technology involved in space travel, while the synthesized sound suggests the sense of adventure and excitement we associate with science fiction movies, Star Trek and so-­on.70

Thus in 1973 writers such as Shaw associated the synthesizer with the “adventure and excitement” of science fiction and not the kinds of industrial or post-­industrial signifiers chosen by critics later in the decade to discuss the instrument in Pere Ubu and Cabaret Voltaire. Indeed, the synthesizer on “Masters of the Universe” does not serve a melodic function, and instead provides more psychedelic and sci-­fi-­style swooshing, with prominent glissandi and panning effects, and as a timbral contrast that punctuates the end of phrases. There is, nevertheless, a point of semblance between sci-­fi and post-­industrial “progress”; that is, both suggest an interest in the role and (retro) representations of technology. But, more to the point, critics observed a stylistic similarity between the mid-­late 1970s music of Pere Ubu and Cabaret Voltaire, and the late-­ 1960s/early-­1970s music by purveyors of hard rock and space rock. What effect, then, do these discursive overlaps have on conceptions of the tangled trio of genres—­post-­punk, new wave, and industrial? First, it presents a challenge to the idea that post-­punk was a continuation of the punk genre, since the influences that critics heard in these bands, such as the Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, and Hawkwind,

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152  what is post-punk?

all pre-­date punk, even though the Velvet Underground in particular have been folded into narratives of punk as “proto” representatives. Furthermore, the fact that these three influences and/or precedents (Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, and Hawkwind) are mentioned concurrently without drawing generic distinctions between Pere Ubu and Cabaret Voltaire not only speaks to the plurality of the new-­wave/ post-­punk field at the time, and how this differs from present-­day conceptions of these generic categories, it also problematizes a clear sense of lineage or genealogy between genres. These historical precedents to post-­punk’s use of the synthesizer (the kind heard in Pere Ubu and Cabaret Voltaire) also challenge Cateforis’s suggestion that, up until new wave, previous models of synthesizer-­playing were somewhat limited to the progressive rock style purveyed by musicians such as Rick Wakeman and ELP, who used the synthesizer as a lead instrument.71 I’d like to conclude this section with a brief note about the synthesizer as object and its potential impact on the kind of sounds produced by various musicians, especially Pere Ubu. In his book, Cateforis identifies the synthesizer as a “hybrid invention” since it “combines the familiar keyboard and tonal melodic possibilities of the acoustic piano with the electronic circuitry of sound synthesis.” Cateforis remarks on how Numan’s “signature synthesizer” was the Polymoog, particularly the preset “Vox Humana,” a synthesized string sound that “would come to signify the ‘cold, alien artifice’ of [Numan’s] particular sound.”72 The fact that groups such as ELP and their “modern” new-­wave adversaries used keyboard synthesizers has significant ramifications for the style and sound these musicians produced. The musicians that Cateforis discusses produced principally melodic lines of differing degrees of virtuosity on synthesizers that had keyboards. By contrast, Pere Ubu’s saxophone and synthesizer player, Allen Ravenstine, played an EML model, which, according to Rambali, had hitherto “been used for sound effects and teaching.”73 According to Reynolds, Ravenstine’s EML 200 was operated using “tone dials” as opposed to a keyboard, and, Reynolds argues, this mechanism allowed Ravenstine to avoid sounding like a progressive-­rock musician; the interaction with the instrument is indeed very different because the keyboard interface is absent.74 Thus, to some extent, the kind of synthesizer equipment the bands employed influenced the groups’ sound and, thus, their generic belonging. Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh had an EML synthesizer, which, although it had a keyboard, was similarly employed for what he calls “sound effects” owing to its problematic tuning: “they were crazy

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Between Flesh and Machines  153

keyboards, almost impossible to tune. I mean, they had a keyboard on them but we just ended up using ours for sound effects.”75 We might also see this in the context of Don Buchla’s decision not to build a conventional keyboard into his modular systems; Buchla synths accompanied acid-test happenings in the Bay Area in the late ’60s and his approach was to use nonmelodic sound-effect swooshes.

Post-­Punk “Art” vs. “Art Rock” Don’t expect art.76 —­Pere Ubu, 1979

By bringing together the press discourse on Pere Ubu, Cabaret Voltaire, Devo, and other regional post-­punk or new-­wave acts, one of my principle aims in this chapter has been to show how the criteria that present-­ day commentators have used to sort these bands into separate generic categories are not necessarily compatible with historical commentators’ concerns. Such criteria, furthermore, may be interpreted as having ideological underpinnings. New wave, to which Devo now belong, has come to represent a genre that blends pop-­style sonic characteristics with an ironic, distanced, kitschy sensibility, and this genre might be considered “modern” in the sense of the new or in the sense that it “represents” the imagined sonic world of de-­industrialization. Industrial music, the genre to which Cabaret Voltaire now belong, is known more for its violent, abrasive, shock-­laden aesthetic.77 Both of these genres participate in the kind of ideology critique that journalists such as Reynolds and Greil Marcus have associated with punk and post-­punk more broadly.78 That is to say, genres such as industrial, new wave, punk, and post-­punk achieve meaning through their opposition to mainstream culture and its normative trappings; they are countercultural genres that proffer alternative modes of existence as well as critiques of the culture industry from within. It is perhaps for this reason that Pere Ubu has been excluded from contemporary accounts of both new wave and industrial. Even though they were by no means part of dominant culture, their musical similarities to hard or classic rock—­too song-­based with too many pentatonic guitar riffs—­mean that they have been excluded from today’s accounts of both new wave and industrial. Their participation in an aesthetic derived from 1960s rock, recast as misogynist and ego-­driven in contrast to punk, “justifies” their exclusion. In the section that follows, I want to highlight the way new-­wave

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154  what is post-punk?

counter-­cultures of the 1970s employed so-­called “avant-­garde” art practices in their performances, but also how such practices were allied with notions of what constituted “modern” music. As such, I wish to briefly query the neutrality of the words “new” or “modern” as they pertain to post-­punk, new wave, and proto-­industrial as white-­associated countercultural genres. Indeed, through a conglomeration of discursive comparisons, metaphors, and analogies such discourse of post-­punk-­as-­ modern could be in danger of participating in what Peter Osborne, after Theodor Adorno, has described as the “qualitative” definition of modernity.79 I do not wish to conflate modern with modernity, but I think it is worth noting the kinds of valences afforded by describing music as “modern.” On the one hand, use of the terms “new” and “modern” by rock journalists of the late 1970s may be interpreted as denoting nothing more than “of the present.”80 On the other hand, notions of newness and the modern can in some instances suggest “better than,” and modernity in particular, as a term that bestows value, is inextricably linked to the historical perspective of the male colonizer.81 Or, to paraphrase Mothersbaugh of Devo, it is better that the synthesizer signify the sound of Western civilization’s industrial demise or its technological “progress” than the sound of disco’s “brainless” women.82 But the notion that these new-­ wave/post-­ punk acts were making “modern mood music” also relates to their backgrounds in or affiliations with art schools. Indeed, numerous critics of the era highlighted the “avant-­garde” leanings or fine-­art-­associated practices of these musicians and, importantly, linked such practices to the nonmelodic use of the synthesizer and the sound of the “industrial.” For those with knowledge of the European fin-­de-­siècle art world, the very words “Pere Ubu” and “Cabaret Voltaire” are conspicuous. Pere Ubu borrowed their name from Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, a surrealistic piece of satire from 1896. Similarly, Cabaret Voltaire lifted their name from the Zurich nightclub established by Hugo Ball in 1916, described by Bernard Gendron as “the founding venue of the dada-­movement.”83 The members of Pere Ubu in particular also made self-­conscious references to the world of art music. For example, in Hull’s 1979 interview with Pere Ubu, bassist Tony Maimone remarked that he drew inspiration from John Cage and George Gerswhin, and his fellow bandmates chimed in with their quasi-­ Cagean irreverence, declaring that the “drip, drip, drip” of the kitchen sink (i.e., abstract noise) had been an important influence.84 The early industrial groups Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle not only included references to the early-­twentieth-­century European

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Between Flesh and Machines  155

avant-­ garde, their art and performances also received institutional and university support, even if both bands flouted this institutional endorsement.85 As the band’s biographer Simon Ford has illustrated, using mass media as a forum for artistic experimentation was something that Throbbing Gristle did as early as the late 1960s.86 Devo similarly had institutional connections, with Kent State University in Ohio. Two of Devo’s members, Gerald V. Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, were students at Kent State, and both had already experienced the power of Dada-­inspired art’s irreverence for societal norms and conventions at Kent.87 And I cited above Vanessa Briscoe Hay’s emphasis on Athens’s art-­school environment.88 These art-­associated references illustrate how such practices and ideas circulated beyond the confines of the institutionalized or legitimized art world.89 Similarly, as Frith and Horne have argued, “[avant-­garde] discourse as such didn’t prevent [the post-­punk bands] from becoming part of ‘rock tradition’ but assigned them a particular place within it as an ‘art’ group.” In fact, the UK punk scene was closely tied to the country’s art colleges and connections, and Malcolm McLaren’s own interpretation of punk displayed the influence of two main art-­theoretical spheres: Andy Warhol’s Factory and the notion of “subversive Pop art” drawn from Situationism as it was interpreted by the 1968 French student movement and the radical group King Mob. According to Frith and Horne, punk’s performance conventions exhibited the art college influence most vividly. In these performances, “ideas of pop spectacle met up with anything-­goes silly-­and-­serious experimentation of the art event.” Punk performances were “thus informed by avant-­garde arguments about shock value, multi-­media, montage, and deconstruction.”90 Pere Ubu’s concerts were, for example, part performance art and part rock show. According to Hull, Pere Ubu shared Alfred Jarry’s “maxim that the absurd exercises the mind,” specifically with reference to the moments when singer Thomas, while onstage, would unload “a case full of hammers and began striking hammer-­on-­metal.”91 In fact, Thomas’s on-­stage hammer routine seems to have been something of a staple at Pere Ubu concerts, and several rock critics interpreted it as an “arty” gesture. Goldman, in her conversation with Travis, referred to it as such,92 and so did Don Snowdon in the Los Angeles Times in August 1979, writing that Pere Ubu were part of the “new avant-­gardist movement” (emphasis mine), and the title for his article, “Pere Ubu Plays for Body, Brain,” also indicated that this kind of popular music intellectually surpassed the kind of music available in the mainstream.93 Max Bell also

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156  what is post-punk?

highlighted Pere Ubu’s arty pretentions, not only by noting the bands’ interest in what he referred to as “art forms that have nothing to do with rock and roll,” but by highlighting Pere Ubu’s incorporation of poetry by American poet Vachel Lindsay into one of their songs. Most significantly, Bell interpreted the combination of such highbrow references in combination with Ravenstine’s synthesizer playing as something that would make Pere Ubu “the band most likely to formulate a lasting avant-­garde legacy for others to dilute” (emphasis mine).94 Devo’s relationship to notions of the avant-­garde arguably played a more obvious role in their performances than it did in Pere Ubu’s. Devo’s live performances were often multimedia events. Some of their concerts began with a short film made by Chuck Statler, a friend from Kent State, entitled The Beginning Was the End: The Truth About Devo.95 Devo’s performance art-­derived antics, absurdist mock-­science philosophy, goggles, boiler suits, and masks were, however, not too well received by certain writers. Hull, for example, wrote that Pere Ubu made “an artsy band like Devo look like buffoons from Fernwood.”96 One of the most aggressive anti-­Devo voices was Gill at NME, who was scathing about Devo’s outfits, which were more “clownish” than “futuristic,” and vicious about their live choreography, which was “a ridiculous nursery choo-­choo train of stomps and jumps.” After admitting that Devo were better live than he anticipated, Gill concluded that their music is “still formalist rock ’n’ roll, given a gloss of ‘newness’ by its presentations” (my emphasis). The way Gill chose to put “formalist rock ’n’ roll” in opposition to “newness” illustrates how late-­1970s rock media devalued pre-­punk counterculture music (i.e., 1960s and early 1970s rock). I also discussed this with particular reference to blues-­based and African American music in chapter 2. But here, it appears as though Devo’s expansion of their product into quasi-­fine-­art-­derived practices was another way this music could be perceived as “new” or “modern.” Again, we might interpret these discursive themes as contributing to the larger rock-­associated project of striving for legitimacy according to tenets of highbrow culture. It is important to recognize, then, how these “avant-­garde” groups differed from—­or were “modern” compared to—­previous genres of “art rock.”97 As Peter Bürger suggests, where modernism might be interpreted as an attack on tradition, the avant-­garde was more an attack on the institution of “art.” The journalists of late-­1970s rock media were perhaps not concerned with this academic distinction but employed the terms “new,” “modern,” and “avant-­garde” to signify the negation of previous genres of rock, and thus as terms of valorization. For example, Ian

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Between Flesh and Machines  157

Birch suggested that Devo positioned themselves against the obsolete 1960s counterculture by employing “Dadaist” ideas. According to Birch, this “radically different band from Akron, Ohio,” challenged “flabby, redundant ideas, particularly those that are left over from the Sixties.” It is clear from Birch’s interview with Devo that they were determined to become anything other than the “Sixties rock star,” complete with “glitter, open shirt, sweating chest and grinding pelvises,” or a “Seventies wank-­ off.” To avoid this kind of passé late-­1960s and early-­1970s model, Devo’s artistic approach was to fragment and collage together pre-­existing artefacts and ideas, which, according to the band, was something that the “Dadaists” may have done.98 The kinds of multimedia performances that Pere Ubu and Devo produced, which the musicians themselves interpreted as being “avant-­garde” or even “Dadaist,” were also a characteristic of Cabaret Voltaire’s work. Similarly, journalists were keen to stress the “Dadaist” connection and position Dadaist-­esque “art” in opposition to the “art rock” of the 1960s and 1970s. As Westwood noted, Cabaret Voltaire’s “Dadaism” was that implicitly superior kind of “art” known as “anti-­art,” not that “boring virtuoso-­crap they call ‘art rock.’”99 Thus, what was new, modern, and avant-­garde for post-­punk/new wave was that which could challenge the “formalist rock ‘n’ roll” or “art rock” of the 1960s. And like the industrial metaphors, this trope was a point of convergence for these bands, something critics perceived that they shared in common. It is of course ironic that this “newness” was a revival not only of the early-­twentieth-­century avant-­garde but also of the 1950s/’60s visions of the “future.” While this notion of the avant-­garde in post-­punk is important, I am also cautious regarding the way it legitimizes or elevates new wave/post-­punk as “art” in the tradition of other white-­associated countercultures. Speaking of post-­punk in terms of an avant-­garde nevertheless elucidates my claim that the genre held more symbolic capital than other genres of popular music.

Conclusion By comparing the sonic characteristics and music-­press discourse concerning the three post-­punk bands Pere Ubu, Devo, and Cabaret Voltaire, as well as some of their contemporaries, I have contrasted the fluidity that characterized categories of musical genre at the time of the music’s emergence with present-­day discourse, which has tended toward stricter rules of generic belonging and exclusion.100 According to current debates surrounding this period, Devo are new wave, owing to their rela-

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158  what is post-punk?

tive commercial success and “modern” aesthetic; Cabaret Voltaire are part of the industrial music genre as drawn up by Reed; and Pere Ubu are excluded from both genres. Pere Ubu is not commercially successful enough to belong to new wave, or sufficiently “dire” to belong to industrial, even if Cleveland was, according to certain commentators, “garnering a reputation for producing music for the industrialized Eighties.”101 I have also demonstrated how the rock press in the late 1970s drew comparisons among these three groups and how these comparisons were made according to three principal ideas. The first point of comparison was the musicians’ origins in “second cities,” former industrial centers of either the US or the UK. The second point of comparison concerned how the synthesizer was heard as a sonic corollary to these (post-­) industrial locales. The third point was the way all three bands bore some relation to what critics called the “avant-­garde” or the “modern.” This third point regarding what constituted “modern” unites the sound of the synthesizer as the sound of contemporary civilization with the band’s art antics as representative of the “avant-­garde”; these bands were “new” because their arty experiments with the synthesizer were heard as a sonic articulation of or response to deindustrialization. By restoring these historical tensions and overlaps between Pere Ubu, Devo, Cabaret Voltaire, and others, I have created a thick, historically specific impression of the post-­punk or new-­wave scene at the end of the 1970s, one that contrasts with cleaner, present-­day discussions. At the same time, however, I have also shown how discursive themes that pervaded the late-­1970s rock press have informed our present-­day conceptions of what constitutes post-­punk, new wave, and industrial. What is interesting about this late-­1970s rock discourse, then, is the way the connotative mapping of the sound of the post-­punk synthesizer onto the sounds of industrial decline and the onset of post-­Fordism, drawn from the environs with which these musicians were associated, have solidified into terms of genre, and perhaps even terms of value.

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Epilogue The “Post” in Post-­Punk Punk enabled people to say, “fuck you.” But somehow it couldn’t go any further, it was just a single venomous . . . two-­syllable phrase of anger, which was necessary to reignite rock ’n’ roll. But sooner or later someone was gonna wanna say more than “fuck you,” someone was gonna wanna say, “I’m fucked.” And it was Joy Division who were the first band to do that, to use the energy and simplicity of punk to express more complex emotions. —­Tony Wilson, Factory Records1

The generic label “post-­punk” denotes the more avant-­ garde strand of Anglo-­American, nonmainstream music that was coterminous with and followed on from mid-­to late-­1970s punk. As I have demonstrated, several bands that critics have more recently described as post-­punk started their careers either before or during the punk years of 1976–­77. Complicating matters even more, participants in both the punk and post-­punk genres were, at the time, situated within the synchronous category known as new wave.2 While many music critics of the period noted the emergence of more explicitly avant-­garde, “arty,” or musically hybridized styles during and after 1977, this music did not have a fixed label or a uniform set of musical characteristics. In other words, at the time of its emergence, this avant-­garde subgenre of punk was inchoate, and the media did not rigorously differentiate punk, new wave, and post-­punk. In this regard, the division of the mid-­to late-­1970s punk or new-­ wave field into three (or even more) distinct genres may be understood as a largely retroactive process, as illustrated by influential journalistic texts, fan lists, and scholarly work on these individual subgenres. The 159 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/24/2021 6:59 AM via UNIV OF CHICAGO AN: 2331093 ; Mimi Haddon.; What Is Post-Punk? : Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 Account: s8989984

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160  what is post-punk?

larger argument that I have tried to make in this book, then, is that post-­ punk as a genre does not denote a strict set of sonic characteristics, or a concrete musical period, or even a necessarily fixed group of musical artists. It is better understood as a field of discourse for which the mainstream connotations of “punk”—­the white, male-­associated music of the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, and the Clash—­do not account.3 Rather, the term “post-­punk” accounts for the kinds of musical, sociological, and aesthetic features excluded by the term “punk” in its narrowest, most mainstream sense. Post-­punk might thus be understood in terms of a number of discursive themes, and these discursive themes in turn have broader sociopolitical significations that allude to the way genres can also function as indicators of value or cultural prestige. With this book, I have taken as my point of departure themes that emerge from the discourse of writers producing retroactive histories and those drawn from the influential New Musick issue of Sounds from November 1977. These are the ideas that post-­punk musicians incorporated dub-­reggae and disco, that post-­punk was a space for women and gender-­positive relations, and that post-­punk was a genre with both regional and avant-­garde associations. These themes are not criteria but, rather, were present in the historical discourse as inchoate ideas and have since solidified to give post-­punk its more recent meaning. As such, post-­punk as a field of discourse can tell us something about genre at a broader level. Through a close analysis of the relationship between the rock media and musical characteristics, I have demonstrated how musical genres are not ontological facts; they are phenomena that emerge out of knotted, often chaotic-­seeming discourse, which is shaped into a more coherent, identifiable form over time. I suggested in the introduction that a genre might therefore be compared to an autostereogram or a “magic eye” image, insofar as dizzying masses of detail can assume a clearer shape when viewed from a particular angle, with a particular set of predilections or preoccupations. Furthermore, the “angle” that one takes may not necessarily concern musical characteristics alone; as I have demonstrated, a genre can describe an aesthetic sensibility, a set of political interests, a particular social demographic, an historical period, or a particular group of “actors,” and it can also serve to bestow value. If these discursive themes describe a kind of music that both came after and was concurrent with punk, then what does the “post” in post-­ punk mean, and how does this prefix relate to these discursive themes? In their interrogation of the meaning of post-­modern feminism, Carolyn

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Epilogue  161

Dipalma and Kathy Ferguson begin by questioning the signification of “post.” The first signification they address is the word’s function as a prefix, meaning after, behind, or later, and as a prefix that suggests a linear sequence. In other words, “post-­modern” follows or comes after “modern.”4 As I have demonstrated, understanding post-­punk as part of a linear sequence—­post-­punk follows punk—­does not hold up to rigorous historical investigation; certain post-­punk musicians predated the punk movement, whereas others were coterminous with it, and the shift from punk to post-­punk involved contestation over labels and their signification. The second reading of “post” that Dipalma and Ferguson offer is informed by their use of what they call the “alternative grammar of postmodern feminism.” They suggest that “post” in this instance could also be read as a noun: “post” as a place from which one takes a measure. “The postmodern,” they suggest, “could be a site from which one can get a fuller view of the modern, an outpost or incursion into the modern, a place where one can get one’s bearings, gather for resources, pause before reentering.” And their final reading of “post” is as a verb: “post” as in the act of posting a sign. “To postmodern,” they write, “is to denounce some aspects of the modern and to point out that other parts are lost or missing. Postmodernism could be that which keeps us well posted on the workings of the modern.”5 This last interpretation of the “post” in post-­modern may be applied to the “post” of post-­punk to great effect. The “post” in post-­punk does not necessarily refer to the music that came after punk. Rather, while the word “punk” allows post-­punk’s constellated community to belong to the punk/new-­wave field and share its historical space, the “post” allows this community of musicians, audiences, journalists, and present-­day commentators to step back, signaling an awareness of and/or a denunciation of punk/new wave’s perceived shortcomings. To “post-­punk” is to post or announce punk’s shortcomings, and turn toward music that offers a corrective to such shortcomings. I am not suggesting that post-­punk musicians consciously decided to denounce punk and self-­identify as post-­punk; as I have shown, it is not simply question of intention and musicians themselves tend to resist labels of all kinds. Rather, post-­punk is a discursive trope that serves to differentiate music with more self-­consciously complex lyrics, more eclectic influences, or more social diversity, from the punk caricature of simplicity, aggression, whiteness, and masculinity. As Tony Wilson’s comments about Joy Division indicate, punk is often characterized by

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162  what is post-punk?

simplicity and aggression, but post-­punk can be characterized by a more complex, introverted aesthetic. In other words, post-­punk holds more symbolic capital than punk; to identify as a post-­punk fan is akin to saying you are more intellectual, more complex, and more socially progressive than punk. But throughout this book I’ve striven to highlight the problems with characterizing post-­punk as a genre whose audiences and critics value symbolic capital by problematizing the tendency to read post-­punk as “radical” (pace Reynolds) and by considering what this implies for post-­ punk’s “sources” in the form of surrounding genres, particularly those associated with black identity. In short, to suggest that post-­punk’s radicalism is bound up with its (implicitly) social hybridity is to position blackness, women, and other historical epochs as forms of capital, as resources from which to draw, just as other so-­called “modernist” practices have done in the past. Similarly, framing post-­punk as a moment in popular music history concerned with “otherness” and “difference” participates in the kind of lip-­service that bell hooks critiques in her work on post-­modern blackness, where “otherness” and “difference” become theoretical concerns rather than the actual voices of the marginalized.6 Yet, I would stop short of describing the post-­in post-­punk as the same as the post-­in post-­genre as described by Robin James. While on the one hand post-­punk and post-­genre both imply whiteness, and whiteness affords the privilege of surpassing race, in the case of post-­ punk, black Britishness and post-­blues black American music participated in post-­punk but, especially retroactively, have not achieved full belonging in post-­punk. On the other hand, post-­punk differs from contemporary “post-­genre” music to the extent that what James refers to as post-­genre’s neoliberal “beauty narrative,” where antisexism and antiracism are assumed as the norm, was only emergent in post-­punk, if present at all.7 Therefore, in what other ways can we conceptualize this avant-­garde backfield of late-­’70s popular music without reinstating the trope of post-­punk as another white “radical” experimental movement or as a utopian “lost future” (pace Fisher)? And how can we reconsider post-­ punk along new lines while retaining the important factor of hybridity and the genre’s complex body politic? Through my detailed analyses of the post-­punk discourse I hope I have created possibilities for destabilizing the dominance of the white male subject both inside and outside of post-­punk, and to have created points of entry for an alternate post-­ punk discourse. For example, how might the voices and experiences

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Epilogue  163

of African American bands such as Death, Pure Hell, and Bad Brains interface with my analysis of the racialized body in chapter 3? Or, do the experiences of a mixed-­race women’s group such as ESG confirm, complicate, or unravel my analysis of women’s role as “amateur” musicians in the punk and post-­punk discourse? Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, can we reconceptualize the late-­1970s popular music field as a site of multiple radicalisms in a way that considers new wave alongside reggae and disco as parallel strains? Indeed, this is the overall impression one is left with from reading the late-­’70s music press. There were coexistent streams of reggae, popular new wave (the Jam, Blondie, the Knack, Dire Straits, the Police), 2-­tone, critics’ favorites such as PiL and Joy Division, echoes of disco, echoes of punk, and bands who were yet to be categorized. Another significant question this research raises is the afterlife of post-­punk and the afterlife of these discursive ideas. The category known as post-­punk applies not only to this era but to later groups as diverse as Sonic Youth, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, the Futureheads, and Micachu & the Shapes, among many others. Are these discursive themes applicable to these groups? What of reggae, for example, when exploring the post-­punk revival acts of the early 2000s? As I suggested in chapter 1, it is more likely the sound of post-­punk that more recent acts have resuscitated, rather than the social and political connotations of the new-­wave field. Indeed, I’d like to close with an event that speaks both to the paradoxical identity politics that characterized post-­punk at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, and to the paradox of musical genre. In the summer of 1981, the Clash, one of Britain’s most successful punk/ new-­wave acts, played sixteen nights at Bonds International Casino in New York City with the idea that fans would come from around the US to see their performance. “It’s like the fans are going on tour instead of us,” Joe Strummer told the NME in June 1981. In the same NME article, the journalist Mick Farren describes the American audience’s feverish enthusiasm for the Clash and compares their status at that time with that of the Rolling Stones years earlier, with audiences going to extremes to secure tickets: “A woman with matted frizzy hair,” writes Farren, “the kind of skimpy outfit that Rolling Stones tour groupies wore in 1975, is offering to strip in order to raise the money for a ticket.”8 This comparison to the Rolling Stones is particularly interesting given the distance punk/ new-­wave/post-­punk acts put between themselves and classic rock of the 1970s. It is significant too for the racial politics embedded therein—­that

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164  what is post-punk?

is, the way white-­dominated bands related to black-­identified music and how this shifted across the decade, from Keith Levene, who’d “hate to get involved with the blues” and the Rolling Stones, to the multifaceted identification with dub-­reggae that the new-­wave field cultivated.9 Furthermore, the Clash’s Bonds International Casino concerts are noteworthy for the stylistic diversity of the acts who supported the Clash, many of whom the band chose. In this regard, the billing for the Bonds International Casino event reflects the stylistic heterogeneity of the new-­ wave/post-­punk moment; it included, among many others, the Slits, the post-funk band ESG, and early rap act Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Farren describes this last act as having received the worst reception from the audience: First and worst victims were Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five, one of the city’s hottest rap acts. Their talkover funk interplay was clearly too much for three quarters of the crowd; white, Wonderbread-­ fed, post-­Travolta kids from the suburbs. To them, rap is the anthem of the ghettos, the music of the kids with whom they fight in high school. The Furious Five flee the stage after a scant 15 minutes in a hail of garbage and Dixie cups. (Fortunately Bonds doesn’t serve its over-­priced beer in bottles.)10

From Farren’s write-­up, it seems at least two discernible groupings—­ genres or categories—­run through the Bonds International Casino concerts. On the one hand there is the lineup the Clash chose, a representation of their musical interests and of the contemporary acts they heard as most exciting. This included British and US bands in a range of musical styles, including post-­blues black music in the form of rap. The Clash said, “We picked the bands that opened for us, so, supposedly we liked them and we wanted to turn the crowd onto something. [The audience are] too narrow-­minded to open up to something new.” On the other hand, there is the grouping produced by the audience, who, according to Farren, insist on seeing the Clash as “just another macho rock band” whose “political stance [is] just another gimmick.”11 As Farren described them, the audience comprised “white, Wonderbread-­fed, post-­Travolta kids from the suburbs,” for whom the music of New York’s black underground is of no interest or, at worst, a loathed symbol of their high-­ school enemies. These two parallel perspectives, then, that of the band and that of the audience, demonstrate the simultaneous and contradictory expec-

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Epilogue  165

tations of genre, where the audience has laid claim to the Clash in a way that actually competes with the band’s own interests.12 But these two perspectives also suggest the paradox at the core of the new-­wave field or post-­punk as a genre: as one of the main signifiers of symbolic capital in popular music, one that has been sculpted by predominantly white male voices but whose symbolic prestige is interlocked with a complex sociopolitics of race, gender, and an impulse toward the avant-­garde.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Ben Elton, Rik Mayall, and Lise Mayer, “Interesting,” The Young Ones, BBC2, December 7, 1982. 2. David Brackett, “Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music,” Black Music Research Journal 25, no. 1 (2005): 89; and Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-­ Century Popular Music (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). 3. Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–­1984 (London: Penguin, 2005). 4. Rip Rig + Panic is a reference to the 1965 album of the same name by African American jazz saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk. This could suggest post-­punk’s eclecticism that crosses both generic and racial boundaries. 5. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 41–­54. 6. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge; and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 11. 7. Reynolds, Rip It Up, x, 1. 8. Mark Fisher, Post-­Punk Then and Now (London: Repeater, 2016), 7; see also Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2014), 22. Dave Laing, One-­Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes, UK; Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985), 106–­8. 9. Nick Crossley, Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: The Punk and Post-­ Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975–­80 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 6–­11, 73. 10. Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher, Post-­ Punk Then and Now (London: Repeater, 2016), 27. 11. Matthew Boswell, Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 114. 12. Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan, Mark E. Smith and the Fall: Art, Music and Politics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 6. See also Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 167 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/24/2021 6:59 AM via UNIV OF CHICAGO AN: 2331093 ; Mimi Haddon.; What Is Post-Punk? : Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 Account: s8989984

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168  Notes to Pages 4–11 13. Goddard and Halligan, Smith, 6. 14. For a primary source that discusses the post-­punk guitar style in terms of its metallic timbre and textural role see J. C. Costa, “Post-­Punk Guitarists,” Musician, Player, and Listener, October 1, 1981, 122–­24. 15. Brackett, “Questions of Genre,” 77. 16. Greg Whitfield, “‘It Ain’t the Names that Matter, You Got to be Able to Hear them First,” August 2007, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.fodderstompf.com/ARCHIVES/ARTS/reggae.html. For more on this, see chapter 2 of this book. 17. Fisher, Then and Now, 60. 18. The idea of “symbolic capital” derives from Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production and might be understood in relation to, and as different from, economic capital. Compared to a dominant, mainstream genre such as disco, post-­punk had little financial capital and a smaller audience, but it attained meaning and prestige through the endorsement of cultural gatekeepers in the music press. For more on this see The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 19. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 85. 20. Will Straw, “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music,” Cultural Studies 5, no. 3 (1991): 384–­85. 21. Brackett, “Questions of Genre,” 89. 22. Will Straw, “Sizing Up Record Collections: Gender and Connoisseurship in Rock Music Culture,” in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley (London: Routledge, 1997), 10. A good example of the rock genealogy at work can be gleaned from music critic Paul Morley’s comments about the visual aesthetic of Joy Division’s 1979 record, Unknown Pleasures. According to Morley, Unknown Pleasure just seemed to “belong in your record collection” alongside Roxy Music, the Velvet Underground, and David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs even though the sleeve for Joy Division’s record did not use the same visual language as the sleeve for albums by these artists. See Morley in “Joy Division—­The Documentary,” YouTube video, 1:35:44, posted by Mathieu Guillien, July 17, 2012, accessed February 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1qQsHGHi8w 23. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 35–­7. 24. Ibid. 25. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 157. 26. Lawrence Grossberg, “Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of the Everyday,” Popular Music: A Year Book 4 (1984): 225–­58. 27. Altman, Film/Genre, 161. 28. Straw, “Systems of Articulation,” 374–­78. 29. Ibid. 30. Frith, Performing Rites, 87. 31. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 65. 32. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977).

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Notes to Pages 12–21  169 33. Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 28, 250–­57, 263, 279. 34. Frith, Performing Rites, 75. 35. See Matthew Bannister, “‘Loaded’: Indie Guitar Rock, Canonism, White Masculinities,” Popular Music 25, no. 1 (2006): 77–­95; and Ralf von Appen and André Doehring, “Never Mind the Beatles, Here’s Exile 61 and Nico: ‘The Top 100 Records of All Time’—­A Canon of Pop and Rock Albums from a Sociological and an Aesthetic Perspective,” Popular Music 25, no. 1 (2006): 21–­29. 36. See Steve Waksman, “Introduction: The Metal/Punk Continuum,” and “Metal, Punk, and Motörhead: the Genesis of Crossover,” in This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), esp. 1–­18 and 146–­71; Bernard Gendron, “Gaining Respect,” and “Accolades,” in Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-­Garde, 161–­88 and 189–­226 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Keir Keightley, “Reconsidering Rock,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, eds. Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, 109–­42 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 37. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, 76–­101 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974). 38. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 59. 39. Crossley, Networks, 34. See also the work of the Subcultures Network, Ripped, Torn and Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines from 1976 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018). 40. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 17. 41. This is exemplified effectively by Needs’s self-­consciously “daring” article on Kate Bush and her generic ambiguity in October 1980—­“if you’ve got any feelings or just like music,” he wrote, “have a go.” Kris Needs, “Fire in the Bush,” ZigZag, October 1980, 23. 42. Crossley, Networks, 6. 43. Brackett on “addressivity,” Categorizing Sound, 14–­15. 44. See Gavin Butt, Being in a Band: When the Leeds Art Scene Went Pop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 45. Tim Lawrence, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–­ 1983 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 46. Matthew Worley, “Punk, Politics and British (Fan)zines, 1976–­84: ‘While the World Was Dying, Did You Wonder Why?’” History Workshop Journal 79 (2015): 77, 81, 84. 47. Reynolds, Rip It Up, x, 1. 48. Foucault, Archaeology, 28–­32.

Chapter 1 1. See Reynolds, Rip It Up, 1. For more on punk in its earliest stages, see Caroline Coon’s article in Melody Maker of August 1976, which captures the energy of punk at the moment of its emergence. Her article not only provides a de-

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170  Notes to Pages 21–23 tailed overview of the movement’s main aesthetic principles, it introduces punk’s main UK and US purveyors. See Coon, “Punk Rock: Rebels Against the System,” Melody Maker, August 7, 1976, 24–­25. 2. Dave Laing, One-­Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes, UK; Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985), 106–­8. 3. Reynolds, Rip It Up, x, 1. Crossley makes a similar point: “There were many distinctive styles in the post-­punk camp,” including futurism, psychobilly, folk-­ punk, neo-­psychedelic, goth, ska, and neo-­funk. See Crossley, 6. 4. Reynolds, Rip It Up, xi. 5. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 5. 6. My take on this exclusionary bias of the modernist sensibility is informed by Andreas Huyssen in his book After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). I am not suggesting that post-­punk is “modernist” music, but I am interested in the “anxiety about contamination” than runs throughout present-­day accounts of post-­punk and the music press of the time. 7. Fisher, Then and Now, 7. See also Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 22. 8. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 6. 9. Will Straw argues that punk mined “lateral” genres such as reggae in order to sustain itself. See Straw, “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music,” Cultural Studies 5, no. 3 (1991): 374–­ 78. Similarly, David Brackett suggests that mainstream popular music has tended to treat African American music as a colony from which it may “draw periodically, to replenish itself in times of scarcity.” See Brackett, “(In Search of) Musical Meaning: Genre, Categories, and Crossover,” in Popular Music Studies, edited by David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus (London: Arnold, 2002), 69. 10. Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 27. Cf. King Adkins, who describes new wave as “postmodern” rather than modern. His timeline is 1978–­ 1984, and core examples include “Stop Making Sense” (Talking Heads) and bands such as the Human League. In terms of musical characteristics, Adkins identifies the synthesizer as important, as well as a “nervous” vocal style. Even though Adkins admits that it is hard to disentangle new wave from punk, he insists it was a separate “movement.” See King Adkins, New Wave (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–­9. 11. Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 2–­4. 12. Ian Birch, “In Outer Space,” Melody Maker, July 14, 1979, 17. 13. Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-­Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 249. 14. Ibid., 270–­71. In a slightly later article than the one published in August 1976, Coon defined the difference between punk and new wave as follows: “New Wave: An inclusive term used to describe a variety of bands like Eddie and the Hot Rods, the Stranglers, Chris Spedding and the Vibrators, the Suburban Studs, [and] Slaughter and the Dogs, who are not definitively hard-­core punk but, because they play with speed and energy or because they try hard, are part of the scene”; and “Punk: Not a popular label but now accepted to describe bands like

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Notes to Pages 24–28  171 the Clash, the Damned, Eater, Chelsea, Siouxsie, the Sex Pistols—­bands who usually play frantically fast, minimal aggressive rock with the emphasis on brevity, an all-­in sound rather than individual solos.” See Coon, “Punk Alphabet,” Melody Maker, November 27, 1976, 33. 15. Matthew Worley notes, for example, “Though its obituary was drafted many times within the music press and media, punk’s enduring relevance and diffusion continued long into the 1980s and was chartered across a seemingly never-­ending production line of fanzines.” Worley, “Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines, 1976–­ 84: ‘While the World Was Dying, Did You Wonder Why?’” History Workshop Journal 79 (2015): 83. 16. See also Crossley’s comments on punk and major labels in Crossley, Networks of Sound, 74. 17. See Crossley’s comments on the Human League and Cabaret Voltaire. Crossley, Networks of Sound ,164. 18. Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 27. 19. Jane Suck and Jon Savage, “New Musick: For Life on Rewind,” Sounds, November 26, 1977, 23. 20. Vivien Goldman, “Brian Eno: Before and After Science,” Sounds, December 10, 1977, accessed May 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/brian-eno-before-and-after-science. 21. Fisher in particular saw the Cold War as central to post-­punk. See Fisher, Then and Now, 12. 22. Some rock press reflections on being in Cold War Germany can be read in Paul Rambali’s interview with Wire following their tour with Roxy Music in summer 1979. See Paul Rambali, “Reluctant Rock Stars: A Nation in Crisis,” New Musical Express, July 7, 1979, accessed July 21, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/reluctant-rock-stars-a-nation-in-crisis 23. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 4–­5. 24. In the same edition of Sounds, Savage used the term “New Musick” with reference to Devo. The signification of his use of the term is not especially clear. He appears to have been self-­consciously reflecting on the whole idea that there could be a genre of “new” music. With reference to Devo’s song “Social Fools,” Savage wrote, “You want ‘new musick?,’ social fools? Beyond . . .” and quotes Devo’s interest in German groups such as Kraftwerk, who according to Devo resisted the rock paradigm associated with the previous generation of 1960s rock. Thus, for Devo German musicians pioneered the new music or New Musick, which derived meaning in opposition to hippie rock of the 1960s. See Jon Savage, “Devo Look into the Future!” Sounds, November 26, 1977, accessed January 22, 2015, http://www. rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/devo-look-into-the-future 25. Kris Needs, “Wire,” ZigZag, March 1978, accessed July 21, 2014, http:// www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/wire 26. Cateforis considers power pop a subgenre of new wave, a genre that can be defined by the revival of mid-­1960s musical culture. See Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 123–­50. 27. “The Ballroom Blitz” was a 1973 song by the British glam rock band, the Sweet. ChinniChap refers to the song-­writing duo Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn, who wrote the song “The Ballroom Blitz.”

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172  Notes to Pages 28–32 28. Chas de Whalley, “Power Pop Part 1: Suddenly, Everything is Power Pop!” Sounds, February 11, 1978, accessed March 19, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/power-pop-part-1-suddenly-everything-is-power-pop 29. Jon Savage, “Power Pop Part 2: The C&A Generation in the Land of the Bland,” Sounds, February 18, 1978, accessed March 19, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/power-pop-part-2-the-ca-generation-in-theland-of-the-bland 30. This song appeared alongside songs by recognized punk/post-­punk staples such as XTC and the Stranglers, as well as Dire Straits. 31. Savage, “Power Pop Part 2.” Around the same time, there was a Manchester band called the Smirks who journalist Andrew Harries described as neatly combing “elements of new wave and nostalgia. They feature quirky Shadows-­style dance routines.” See Harries, “Manchester: Riding the Second Wave,” Melody Maker, June 3, 1978, 38. 32. Savage, “Power Pop Part 2.” 33. Similarly, clinging dearly or ironically to a view of punk as total guttersnipe stupidity, pulp novelist and writer of the insider punk history Cranked Up Really High, Stewart Home decries the Manchester band the Fall as “art shit,” the majority of the New York scene as “art bores” (with the exception of the Ramones, the Dead Boys, Dictators, and the Electric Chairs), and Wire as “art rock not PUNK.” He disqualifies the Stranglers from punk because they had “keyboards all over their records.” See Stewart Home, Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock (Hove, UK: Codex, 1995), 12–­13, 22–­23, 51. 34. Reynolds notes how post-­punk musicians may have been guilty of reinstating “art rock elitism.” See Reynolds, Rip It Up, 2. 35. Simon Frith and Howard Horne suggest that post-­punk might be considered the “back field” of the pop scene or pop music’s “avant-­garde ghetto” in Frith and Horne, Art into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987), 134–­35. See also Green Gartside’s account of two kinds of punk: “there were those who listened to the Ramones,”—­loud, confident, proper distortion, self-­assured, tight rhythm section—­“then there were people like us. By design or default we made a much less ‘secure music.’” Gartside, quoted in Then and Now, 109. 36. Chris Brazier, “United They Fall,” Melody Maker, December 31, 1977, 9. 37. Similarly, two months before Brazier’s article on the Fall, another piece devoted to the Manchester scene divided the city’s main bands into two camps: the first camp included the Worst, the Negatives, the Drones, and Slaughter and the Dogs, and was referred to as the “living reminders” of British punk at its most riveting. Emerging bands such as Magazine, the Fall, and the Buzzcocks, however, were seen as “leading” the new wave in Manchester and pointing toward a cultural regeneration. See “United We Stand,” Melody Maker, October 22, 1977, 44–­46. 38. Charles Shaar Murray, “Magazine: Howard Devoto’s Enigma Variations,” New Musical Express, February 25, 1978, accessed December 18, 2014, http://www. rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/magazine-howard-devotos-enigma-variations 39. Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan, Mark E. Smith and the Fall: Art, Music and Politics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 6.

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Notes to Pages 32–42  173 40. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 4. 41. Mary Harron, “Dialectics Meets Disco,” Melody Maker, May 26, 1979, 17–­18. 42. Garry Bushell, “Gang of Four: The Gang’s All Here,” Sounds, June 2, 1979, accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ gang-of-four-the-gangs-all-here 43. Garry Bushell, “Stiff Little Fingers: (F)Ireland Rockers,” Trouser Press, July 1979, accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/stiff-little-fingers-fireland-rockers 44. de Whalley, “Power Pop—­Part 1.” 45. “Will America Swallow the New Wave?” Melody Maker, November 12, 1977, 37–­38, 69. 46. Robert Christgau, “The Triumph of the New Wave: Results of the Fifth (or Sixth) Annual Pazz and Jop Critics’ Poll,” Village Voice, January 22, 1979, 1, 40. 47. Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 28, 250–­57, 263, 279. 48. Christgau, “Triumph,” 41. 49. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), esp. 49. 50. Christgau, “Triumph,” 41. 51. Various contributors, “The Front Bit: The ZigZag Faves of ’78,” ZigZag, July, 4–­5. 52. Kris Needs, “Leglessly in Love! At a Banshees Gig!” ZigZag, July, 22–­23. 53. Worley notes that some punk fanzines such as Hard as Nails and Skinhead Havoc had less of a tokenistic connection to black music in that they “covered reggae and soul to reveal a far broader cultural heritage than that depicted in the music weeklies or tabloids.” He notes also how Black Echoes “helped fill a void in music coverage of the period” in the mainstream. Worley, “Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines,” 42, 103. 54. Frith, Performing Rights, 84. 55. “The 1979 ZigZag Reader’s Poll!” ZigZag, July 1979, 22–­23. 56. Ralf von Appen and André Doehring, “Never Mind the Beatles, Here’s Exile 61 and Nico: ‘The Top 100 Records of All Time’—­A Canon of Pop and Rock Albums from a Sociological and an Aesthetic Perspective,” Popular Music 25, no. 1 (2006): 21–­29. 57. In an article on Lene Lovich, Simon Frith singled out Stewart as the most “unpleasant sexual performer in rock.” See Frith, “Patti and Lene: Sisters Under the Skin?” Melody Maker, March 17, 1979, 14. 58. Kris Needs, “Wire,” ZigZag, March 1978, accessed July 21, 2014, http:// www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/wire 59. Gill, “Wire: But Obviously,” and Doherty, “Wire: Barbed Wire.” See also Gendron, esp. 234, 238, and 258. 60. Andy Gill, “Wire: But Obviously It Isn’t,” New Musical Express, September 16, 1978, accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/wire-but-obviously-it-isnt 61. Paul Rambali, “Reluctant Rock Stars.” 62. Nick Kent, “Wire: 154,” New Musical Express, September 22, 1979, accessed

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174  Notes to Pages 42–47 December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/wirei154i-harvest 63. Harry Doherty, “Barbed Wire,” Melody Maker, December 9, 1978, accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/wirebarbed-wire 64. Chris Bohn, “Wire: Wider Vision,” Melody Maker, October 13, 1979, accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ wire-wider-vision 65. The punk genre’s musical homogeneity is perhaps more likely to be found in its textures and its choices of tempi and groove, or lack thereof, than in its harmonic “simplicity.” As Paul Friedlander has suggested, the “simplicity” of punk’s harmonic language has often been overstated. See Friedlander, Rock and Roll: A Social History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 254. 66. Paul Rambali, “Reluctant Rock Stars.” 67. See Bernard Sumner in “Joy Division—­The Documentary,” YouTube video, 1:35:44, posted by Mathieu Guillien, July 17, 2012, accessed February 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1qQsHGHi8w 68. Chris Bohn, “Looking for a Certain Ratio. (B. Eno),” Melody Maker, February 2, 1980, 2. 69. Gendron, 249. 70. Needs, “Wire.” 71. Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 19, 22–­23. 72. Doherty, “Barbed Wire,” Melody Maker. 73. Paul Morley, “Boy’s Own Weepies,” NME, October 25, 1980, 45. 74. See particularly the second half of his book, which functions as a kind of post-­punk part 2. 75. Reynolds, esp. p. 364. For more on the Liverpool scene see Crossley, Networks of Sound, 174–­83. For an historical source on this see Chris Salewicz, “Echo and the Bunnymen: Welcome to the Bunnyhouse,” New Musical Express, November 22, 1980. 76. Ian Pye, “One day, Love Will Tear Us Apart,” Melody Maker, October 25, 1980. 77. See, for example, YouTube playlists such as Mr Secondsoul, “Top Punk Songs,” YouTube video, 500 videos, last updated 500 Greatest Post-­ December 2, 2018, accessed January 24, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/ playlist?list=PLEXox2R2RxZJCqT-YsNLeAiwpFvPCWEDC. 78. One of the most effective examples of the expressive possibility of fan lists in popular music and popular culture can be found in British writer Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity and the subsequent film adaptation by Stephen Frears. The male music connoisseurs in High Fidelity compile various top-­five lists for different genres and subcategories. To a connoisseur, these lists function as a shorthand code for conveying aesthetic values, ideas, and allegiances that to an outsider may not be easily detectable. See Hornby, High Fidelity (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996). 79. The idea of an “imagined” community comes from the work of Benedict Anderson; see Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). As I outlined in the Introduction, however, Altman also refers to his “constellated communities” as consisting of people

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Notes to Pages 47–56  175 who seldom come into contact and therefore are brought together by repeated acts of imagining. See Altman, Film/Genre, 161. For more on virtual scenes see Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004). 80. Jason Toynbee, Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity, and Institutions (London: Arnold; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 103–­4. 81. Mick Middles, “Joy Division, Teardrop Explodes, OMD, Echo and the Bunnymen et al.: Leigh Rock Festival, Lancashire,” Sounds, September 8, 1979, www.rocksbackpages.com, accessed July 23, 2018. In Jon Savage’s review of the event in Melody Maker he suggested that both labels (Factory and Zoo) were “exposing and servicing a gap in the market,” but he doesn’t explain exactly what that gap is or was. See Savage, “Angst in an East Lancs Wasteland,” Melody Maker, September 8, 1979, 31. 82. Fisher, Then and Now, 7. 83. Ian Penman and Andy Gill, “Joy Division, Pil et al.: Futurama ’79 Festival—­ Set the Controls For the Squalor of Leeds,” NME, September 15, 1979. Cf. Andy Gill, who described Echo and the Bunnymen as using the past properly—­they have “absorbed and transcended their influences, moving on to an area where their music is totally of their own making,” incorporating influences including particularly the Doors and Iggy Pop. Crossley describes the Futurama festival, which ran annually throughout the early 1980s and was organized by John Keenan, as “the key post-­punk festival.” See Crossley, Networks of Sound, 222. 84. Penman and Gill, “Set the Controls.” 85. Steve Sutherland, “Sounding Out,” Melody Maker, November 8, 1980, 23. 86. Vivien Goldman, “New Musick: Dub (King Tubby),” Sounds, November 26, 1977, 22. See also Goldman, “Dennis Matumbi in Dub: A Step by Step Guide,” Sounds, November 26, 1977, 25. 87. Steve Sutherland, “The Sound of Music,” Melody Maker, November 22, 1980, 22. 88. Lynden Barber, “U2 Take Us Over the Top,” Melody Maker, October 4, 1980, 24. 89. Paul Morley, “Boy’s Own Weepies,” NME, October 25, 1980, 45. 90. Susan Fast, “Music, Contexts, and Meaning in U2,” in Expression in Pop-­Rock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays, ed. Walter Everett (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 36. 91. Bono discussed his interest in Joy Division in this radio interview: “Bono on Joy Division, 1980, RTE radio, Ireland,” YouTube video, 4:58, uploaded by Michael Ross, January 17, 2009, accessed July 26, 2018, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=xQrJYzzGN2A 92. Danny (Shredder) Weizmann, “The Gun Club,” Flipside, 1981, accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-gunclub-2. I discuss post-­punk’s relationship to disco in more detail in chapter 3.

Chapter 2 1. Keith Levene quoted in Chris Bohn, “Public Image Ltd: Corporation Executive Report to Shareholders,” New Musical Express, July 5, 1980, accessed

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176  Notes to Pages 56–57 November 21, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/publicimage-ltd-corporation-executive-report-to-shareholders. PiL were not the only group to voice their dislike of rock music and the self-­importance associated with the previous/1960s generation. In a ZigZag interview from September 1977, a member of the group Subway Sect remarked, “I like 50’s rock ’n’ roll—­just don’t like ‘ROCK’ music.” At other points in the interview the band criticized musicians who were on a “Keith Richard [sic] trip.” See Steve Walsh, “Subway Sect,” ZigZag, September 1977, 12–­14. Cf. also Green Gartside’s comments on black music in Post-­Punk: Then and Now, eds. Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher (London: Repeater, 2016), 114–­15. 2. Levene quoted in Bohn, “Public Image Ltd.” Levene’s comment here confirms what Simon Reynolds more recently notes as an important characteristic of post-­punk: the rejection of “rama-­lama riffing” and “bluesy chords” in favor of what he calls a “cleaner” sound. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 2–­3. Evidence of punk musicians’ enthusiasm for 1950s rock ’n’ roll can be found in the 1970s rock music press. The singer from the Clash, Joe Strummer, admired African-­American blues musician Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, for example, and his first group, the 101ers, began its career singing Chuck Berry songs. See the article and interview by Peter Silverton, “The Clash: Greatness from Garageland,” Trouser Press, February 1978, accessed December 10, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/the-clash-greatness-from-garageland. For evidence of PiL’s dislike of 1950s rock ’n’ roll see Robin Banks, “We Only Wanted to Be Loved,” ZigZag, December 1978, 8, in which John Lydon says, “I’m not interested in digression or mod period music or rock ’n’ roll. It’s boring. I got pissed off listening to Steve [Jones] run through Chuck Berry riffs and then gradually changing to Peter Frampton riffs. It got depressing.” David Brackett observed a similar process of erasing black musical gestures in his article, “Elvis Costello, the Empire of the E Chord, and a Magic Moment or Two,” Popular Music 24, no. 3 (2005): 357–­67. 3. See Caroline Coon, “Punk Rock: Rebels Against the System,” Melody Maker, August 7, 1976, 24–­25. 4. In a genre such as rock where the idea of authenticity is held in high esteem, the inauthenticity inherent in white British performances of African American music is conspicuous. For more on authenticity in rock see David Brackett, “Rock,” The Continuum Encyclopaedia of Popular Music of the World, vol. 10, Genres, International (London: Continuum, forthcoming). For more on the complexities of black-­white identification on the 1960s British blues revival scene see Sean Lorre, “Urban Blues in Chicago and London” (paper presented at the McGill Music Graduate Students Society Symposium, Montréal, Québec, March 21, 2014). 5. PiL’s bassist was so enamored with dub that he changed his name from John Wardle to “Jah” Wobble—­ “Jah” meaning God in Rastafarian vernacular. See also Christopher Partridge, Dub in Babylon: Understanding the Evolution and Significance of Dub Reggae in Jamaica and Britain from King Tubby to Post-­Punk (London; Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2010), 230–­31. For an interview with Wobble in which he discusses his interest in dub see Simon Reynolds, Totally Wired: Post-­ Punk Interviews and Overviews (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 16–­26.

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Notes to Pages 57–59  177 6. The term “black music” is of course problematic insofar as it presupposes an ethnic essence of blackness, it homogenizes the different musics and identities of the black diaspora, and it is often used synonymously with African American music to the exclusion of other kinds of black music, as Levene’s interview illustrates. Philip Tagg’s 1989 open letter is one of the most notable examples of a challenge to such assumptions. See Tagg, “Open Letter: ‘Black Music,’ ‘Afro-­American Music’ and ‘European Music,’” Popular Music 8, no. 3 (1989): esp. 285–­92. It is also worth noting that during the 1970s, a publication in Britain called Black Music included articles on different black genres such as soul and reggae, which suggests that the term “black music” was in use during this particular period to denote different genres. See also George Lipsitz’s discussion of new categories such as “Black Britons” and “West Indians” in Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (London: Verso, 1994). 7. Vivien Goldman, “Jah Punk: New Wave Digs Reggae,” Sounds, September 3, 1977, accessed November 22, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/jah-punk-new-wave-digs-reggae. For more on punk and racial politics see Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay, White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race (London; New York: Verso, 2011). 8. Kris Needs and Danny Baker suggested to Eno that publications such as Sounds had presented him as someone who created “new Ice Cold Music of the Future.” Eno responded to this idea with the following: “I didn’t think it was ice cold (laughs). You see, it doesn’t derive from that bluesy feel, and people are so used to that, you know, the whole tradition of the Stones, that kind of it’s-­all-­felt kind of movement, and I don’t drive [sic] from that very much but nonetheless I don’t think that what results is therefore cold, it doesn’t have that particular kind of warmth.” For the full interview see Kris Needs and Danny Baker, “An Interview with Brian Eno,” ZigZag, January 1978, accessed November 22, 2013, http://www. rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/an-interview-with-brian-eno 9. More recently, Christopher Partridge refers to the connection between punks and Rastafarians as a “rapprochement” between two subcultures brought together by a shared experience of economic hardship and a status as outlaws. Partridge, Dub in Babylon, 171. See also Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Metheun, 1979), esp. 43–­44, 56. See also Crossley’s valuable critique of Hebdige in Crossley, Networks of Sound, esp. 56. 10. Vivien Goldman, “Jah Punk: New Wave Digs Reggae,” Sounds, September 3, 1977, accessed December 10, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/jah-punk-new-wave-digs-reggae 11. See for example Penny Reel, “Keith Hudson: A Better Brand of Dub,” New Musical Express, January 14, 1978, accessed December 13, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/keith-hudson-ia-better-brand-of-dubi 12. Kris Needs, “Roots Rock Reggae,” ZigZag, August 1977, 29. 13. Levene quoted in Bohn, “Public Image Ltd.” For more on Clapton and RAR see John Street, Rock Rebel: the Politics of Popular Music (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1986), 74–­75; and Ian Goodyer, Crisis Music: The Cultural Politics of Rock Against Racism (Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press, 2009). Gilroy suggests that David Bowie’s endorsement of Hitler was another catalyst for

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178  Notes to Pages 60–63 the formation of Rock Against Racism. See Gilroy, “Two Sides to Rock Against Racism,” in White Riot, eds. Duncombe and Tremblay, 181. 14. “News in Brief,” The Times, June 23, 1948, 2, accessed November 25, 2013, http://find.galegroup.com/ttda/newspaper 15. For more on this history see the work of Lloyd Bradley, particularly Sounds like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013). See also the AHRC-­funded work and exhibition project, Bass Culture, associated with the University of Westminster, accessed January 7, 2019, https://gtr.ukri. org/projects?ref=AH%2FN001826%2F1 16. James Maycock, “Metro and the Birth of the British Sound System,” The Independent, August 1998, accessed April 5, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/metro—the-birth-of-the-british-sound-system 17. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies,” Modernism/ Modernity 13, no. 3 (September 2006): 430. 18. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 15. The record-­label boss Chris Blackwell also played a significant role in stimulating the circulation of records between Jamaica and the UK from the early 1960s onward. See Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica’s Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 130. Similarly, Maycock’s detail about how Metro regularly ordered rare records from California and the Bronx, as well as from Jamaica, presents dub as a black Atlantic mode of expression. See Maycock, “Metro.” 19. See Partridge, Dub in Babylon, 168–­69. 20. Needs, “The Slits: Holland Park School, London,” ZigZag, January 1978. 21. Richard Williams, “The Pop Group/LKJ/Nico/Cab Voltaire,” Melody Maker, October 21, 1978, accessed December 10, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-pop-grouplkjnicocab-voltaire 22. Charles Shaar Murray, “Magazine, Howard Devoto’s Enigma Variations,” New Musical Express, February 25, 1978, accessed December 10, 2013, http://www. rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/magazine-howard-devotos-enigma-variations 23. “X is for X-­O-­Dus,” A Factory Alphabet, accessed February 27, 2013, http:// afactoryalphabet.blogspot.ca/2009/05/x-is-for-x-o-dus.html 24. For a more detailed explanation of these four modes of musical identity formation, see Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 35–­7. 25. Born and Hesmondhalgh, 35. 26. In a more recent interview, Bovell in fact declared the Pop Group’s drummer Bruce Smith and their bass player Simon Underwood to be the punk equivalents to Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, the drums and bass session duo who recorded with the most renowned names in dub-­reggae. Dennis Bovell quoted in Reynolds, Totally Wired, 103. See also “Don Letts: ‘Punk Is Not Mohawks and Safety Pins. It’s an Attitude and a Spirit,’” The Guardian, February 7, 2015, accessed February 16, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/07/ don-letts-this-much-i-know

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Notes to Pages 63–67  179 27. The punk-­reggae hybrid band Basement 5, who were also active in the late-­ 1970s, represents a contradiction to this general rule. 28. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 17. 29. Vivien Goldman, “John Lydon: Man A Warrior—­The Interview—­Part 1,” Sounds, March 4, 1978, accessed December 10, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/john-lydon-man-a-warrior—the-interview-part-1 30. Derry Nairn, “Legacy in the Dust: The Story of the Four Aces,” History Today, November 24, 2010, accessed December 10, 2013, http://www.historytoday.com/blog/2010/11/legacy-dust-story-four-aces 31. Greg Whitfield, “‘It Ain’t the Names that Matter, You Got to be Able to Hear Them First,” August 2007, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.fodderstompf.com/ARCHIVES/ARTS/reggae.html. A complete list of the songs played on the program is also available at Fodderstomp. 32. “John Lydon Interview Circa 1978,” YouTube video, 6:41, posted by SexPistolsChannel, September 12, 2009, accessed January 25, 2015, http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=XfWMnQcJ9Yc 33. Penny Reel, “Public Image Limited; Linton Kwesi Johnson: Rainbow Theatre, London,” New Musical Express, January 6, 1979, accessed December 10, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/public-image-limitedlinton-kwesi-johnson-rainbow-theatre-london 34. I am grateful to Stephan Pennington and Griffin Woodworth for their suggestions regarding the conspicuous “blackness” of the “skank” rhythm in white covers. These conversations took place at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Milwaukee, WI. 35. Martin Hannett, quoted in an interview with Bert van der Kamp, first published in Musikkrant Oor, September 1981, republished on Martin Hannet.co.uk, trans. Hans Huisman, accessed January 25, 2015, http://www.martinhannett. co.uk/interv.htm 36. See Max Bell, “Phantom of the Factory: It’s Martin Hannett! A Hero in His Own Town!! Didsbury!!!” New Musical Express, July 19, 1980, 6–­7; and Jon Savage, “An Interview with Martin Hannett 29th May 1989,” Touch-­Vagabond, 1992, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/aninterview-with-martin-hannett-29th-may-1989/ 37. “Martin Hannett and Tony Wilson at Strawberry Studios in July 1980,” YouTube video, 6:30, posted by Dimitri Krissof, August 27, 2008, accessed December 5, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI-w7LjSNi4 38. Michael Veal, Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 71. 39. “Hannett and Wilson at Strawberry.” 40. John Corbett, “Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others,” in Western Music and Its Others, eds. Born and Hesmondhalgh, 176. See also Peter Doyle’s discussions of exoticization and otherness in Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–­1960 (Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), esp. 124–­29; and Paul Théberge, “The Sound of Nowhere: Reverb and Sonic Space,” in The Relentless Pursuit of Tone, esp. 327–­28, eds. Robert Fink, Melina Latour, and Zachary Wallmark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 41. Stephen Morris quoted in Reynolds, Totally Wired, 239.

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180  Notes to Pages 68–71 42. “Factory Communications UK (Part 1: Fac 1 to 50),” accessed December 5, 2013, http://www.trans.com.au/factory/index2.html. See also Deborah Curtis, Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 84. 43. Steve Taylor, “Convalescing with the Durutti Column,” Melody Maker, February 2, 1980, 13. 44. Mark Prendergast, “The Durutti Column Biography 1978–­1991,” Durutti Column, accessed August 22, 2012, http://thedurutticolumn.com/the_durutti_ column_biography_1978–1991.html 45. Ibid. 46. Michael Dregni, “Echoplex EP-­2,” Vintage Guitar, July 2012, 54–­56. 47. Anon., Vini Reilly, interview with two unidentified interviewers, August 13, 1981, accessed December 5, 2013, http://users.rcn.com/rpsweb/durutti-column/texts/iv-muntplein.html 48. Peter Doyle, Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–­1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 126. 49. Ibid., 123–­26. 50. Ibid. 51. Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK; Washington: Zero Books, 2014), 98–­99. 52. The idea of post-­punk as a “movement with no name” connects to my discussion of the Futurama Festival in chapter 1. See also Mick Middles, “Joy Division, Teardrop Explodes, OMD, Echo and the Bunnymen et al: Leigh Rock Festival, Lancashire,” Sounds, September 8, 1979, accessed July 23, 2018, www. rocksbackpages.com 53. Curtis, Touching, 31. 54. Alan Hempsall, “A Day Out with Joy Division,” Extro 2, no. 5, January 8, 1980, accessed December 5, 2013, http://home.wxs.nl/~frankbri/jdvextro.htmlAlso 55. Anon., “PIL—­High Price for Canned Music,” Melody Maker, September 22, 1979, 4. The album was later repackaged as a double album with a new price of £5.49 available from February 1980. 56. Mark Price, “Joy Division: Equipment,” Joy Division Central, accessed April 7, 2014, http://www.joydiv.org/eqpt.htm. The instrument’s importance to Joy Division is recorded in Peter Hook’s autobiography of the band, which features a photograph of a melodica on p. 259. However, Hook does not discuss the instrument in the book’s text. See Hook, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division (New York: It Books, 2013), 259. 57. Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 234. 58. Charles Shaar Murray, “The Mekons/The Fall/Human League/Gang of Four/Stiff Little Fingers: The Lyceum, London,” New Musical Express, March 31, 1979, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ the-mekonsthe-fallhuman-leaguegang-of-fourstiff-little-fingers-the-lyceum-london 59. Reynolds, Totally Wired, 110.

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Notes to Pages 71–80  181 60. Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 176. 61. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 48. 62. See also the Vivien Goldman interview with the Slits, “What’s So Good About Natural Primitivism?” Melody Maker, September 8, 1979. 63. Sarah Daynes, Time and Memory in Reggae Music: The Politics of Hope (Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), 103–­4. 64. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 36–­38. 65. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 18. 66. Jon Pareles, “Augustus Pablo, 46, Musician; Helped Shaped Reggae’s Sound,” New York Times, May 20, 1999, accessed March 26, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/20/arts/augusto-pablo-46-musician-helped-shape-reggae-ssound.html 67. Veal, Soundscapes,163–­66. 68. Ibid., 165. 69. Charles A. Kennedy, “When Cairo Met Main Street: Little Egypt, Salome Dances, And the World’s Fairs of 1893 and 1904,” in Music and Culture in America, 1861–­1918, ed. Michael Saffle, 271–­77 (New York: Garland, 1998). 70. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 23. For the original quotation see Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 72. 71. Doyle, Echo, 129. 72. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 66. 73. For more on this, see chapter 1.

Chapter 3 1. Fisher, Ghosts, 62. 2. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 213. 3. Reynolds describes the period from 1979 to 1981 as “one of the great neglected eras of modern music,” a period of “post-­punk experimentalism—­ death-­disco, agit-­funk, ‘John Peel bands.’” See Reynolds, “The Slits: Cut,” Uncut, December 1997, accessed October 14, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com 4. Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–­1979 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Lawrence, Life and Death. 5. The ideas of “symbolic capital” and “economic capital” derive from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. See Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 29–­73. 6. Nick Kent, “The Ramones: Ramones (Sire-­Import),” New Musical Express, May 15, 1976, accessed December 14, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ article.html?ArticleID=18501&SearchText=ramones. Kent’s comment about the Rolling Stones suggests that white musicians’ incorporation of reggae predates

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182  Notes to Pages 80–82 the punk and post-­punk era. The immediate point of reference was perhaps the Stones’ album Black and Blue (1976). Another example of earlier incorporations of reggae into rock would be Led Zeppelin’s “D’Yer Mak’er” from 1973. 7. Andrew Kopkind, “The Dialectic of Disco: Gay Music Goes Straight,” in Pop, Rock, and Soul: Histories and Debates, ed. David Brackett, 352–­53 (New York: Oxford University Press). Originally published in Village Voice, August 12, 1979. 8. Kent’s argument has echoes of Adorno’s references to the “rhythmically obedient type” of listener who is coerced into having “institutionalised wants” by “standardized,” beat-­driven music. See Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, esp. 460–­61 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). See also Bernard Gendron’s response, “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). For a discussion on the relationship between labor and mechanized or synthesizer music, see Theo Cateforis’s chapter on synthesizers in new wave in Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 151–­81. 9. It is possible that Kent means on the “off beat,” as in, on beats two and four. 10. Tavia Amolo Ochieng’ Nyong’o, “I Feel Love: Disco and Its Discontents,” Criticism 50, no. 1 (2008): 101–­2. 11. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 97. For a critical dance-­studies perspective on this that may challenge this reading, see the work of Brenda Dixon Gottschild, specifically Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998) and The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 12. John Morthland, “Lou Reed, Say It Again, Lou,” Creem, 1976, accessed December 14, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=19 968&SearchText=say+it+again%2C+lou 13. See Jon Savage, “Lou Reed: Street Hassle,” Sounds, March 11, 1978, accessed April 7, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/lou-reed-istreethasslei 14. Peter Silverton, “Lou Reed in Cloning Sensation!” Sounds, May 6, 1978, accessed April 7, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/lou-reedin-cloning-sensation; and Peter Silverton, “Lou Reed at Hammersmith Odeon,” Sounds, April 21, 1979, accessed April 7, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/lou-reed-at-hammersmith-odeon 15. Savage’s sexuality complicates an overdetermined image of white male identity and/or sexuality in this instance, however. See also Kodwo Eshun, who sees post-­punk as “getting funk wrong”; “wrongness”; “ill-­preparedness”; “fragility”; and “the kinds of illness and vulnerability that go with that.” Eshun in Post-­ Punk: Then and Now, eds. Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher (London: Repeater, 2016), 119. 16. Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 109–­10.

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Notes to Pages 83–87  183 17. Ronald Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 234–­36. 18. For critical dance literature that tackles such topics see Ramsay Burt, “Dissolving in Pleasure: The Threat of the Queer Male Dancing Body,” in Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage, ed. Jane C. Desmond, 209–­ 42 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), as well as work by Thomas DeFrantz and Kelina Gotman. 19. Richard Dyer, “In Defense of Disco,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 413. Originally published in Gay Left 8 (Summer 1979): 20–­23. 20. Andrew Kopkind, “Dialectic,” 352–­53. 21. Note that the 1979 ZigZag readers’ poll discussed in chapter 1 singled out John Travolta, star of Saturday Night Fever, as one of its most hated people. Travolta connoted disco at its most mainstream and was also associated with another pop hit of 1978, the film Grease. See “The 1979 ZigZag Reader’s Poll!” ZigZag, July 1979, 22–­23. 22. Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 203–­6. 23. Kopkind, 352–­54. 24. Lester Bangs, “The Sylvers: Something Special,” Circus, January 31, 1977, accessed December 14, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?Art icleID=8541&SearchText=sylvers 25. Chris Bohn, “‘Looking for a Certain Ratio’ (B. Eno),” Melody Maker, February 2, 1980, 21–­22. 26. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 154. 27. Gillian Frank, “Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash against Disco,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 2 (May 2007): 279. It is also worth noting the relationship between punk and gay cultures early in punk’s lifetime, particularly the way gay fashion informed punk and the important role played by gay clubs as “punk places” in the early days. See Nick Crossley, Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2015), 56, 169. 28. Nyong’o, “I Feel Love,” 102. 29. Will Straw, “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music,” Cultural Studies 5, no. 3 (1991): 375–­85. 30. Chris Bohn, “MM Single of the Year,” Melody Maker, December 29, 1979, 17. 31. Danny Baker, “The Private Life of Public Image,” New Musical Express, June 16, 1979, accessed December 14, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article. html?ArticleID=10063&SearchText=private+life+of+public+image 32. Frank, “Discophobia,” 278. 33. Reynolds suggests that the whole of Metal Box (the 1979 album by PiL that features the song “Death Disco”), particularly its 45-­rpm format, demonstrated a debt to both dub and disco. Songs such as “Memories” possessed a dance-­music style, and PiL’s earlier release, “Fodderstompf,” could be heard as a parody of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby,” foreshadowing the songs on Metal Box with its “hypnotic dub-­funk bassline.” Reynolds, Rip It Up, 24. 34. Baker, “Private Life.”

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184  Notes to Pages 87–93 35. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 25. 36. Jon Savage, “Public Image Ltd.: The Factory, Manchester,” Melody Maker, June 18, 1979, accessed December 16, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ article.html?ArticleID=18367&SearchText=downer+disco 37. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 213–­14. 38. Dyer, 413. 39. Fisher, Ghosts, 55. 40. Bohn, “Certain Ratio,” 21–­22. 41. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 420. 42. Jake Kennedy, Joy Division and the Making of Unknown Pleasures (London: Unanimous, 2006), 24. Joy Division’s version of the song was never released, though I might argue that there’s an unintended echo of the track’s main guitar riff in Joy Division’s song “Interzone” on Unknown Pleasures. 43. Significantly, Dixon Gottschild lists the polyrhythm in her taxonomy of “Africanist” dance aesthetics as something that white concert dance has misrecognized or appropriated. See Digging the Africanist Presence. Thanks to Arabella Stanger for this observation. 44. Jon Savage, “Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures (Factory FACT 10),” Melody Maker, July 21, 1979, 27. 45. Kent, “The Ramones.” 46. Morthland, “Say it Again, Lou.” 47. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 97. 48. For more on the idea of black music as “healthy” see Julian Stringer’s article, “The Smiths: Repressed (But Remarkably Dressed),” Popular Music 11, no. 1 (1992): 22. Cf. Simon Reynolds, “How Soon Is Now?” Melody Maker, September 27, 1987, 28. 49. Mick Middles, “Joy Division.” Sounds, November 18, 1978, accessed December 16, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=10 649&SearchText=epileptic+fashion 50. Jon Savage, “Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures (Factory FACT 10),” Melody Maker, July 21, 1979, 27. 51. Paul Rambali, “Joy Division: Take No Prisoners, Leave No Clues,” New Musical Express, August 11, 1979, accessed December 16, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/article.html?ArticleID=17350&SearchText=elbows+that+flap+madly 52. Chris Bohn, “Northern Gloom: 2, Southern Stomp: 1,” Melody Maker, February 9, 1980, 31. 53. Paul Morley, “Joy Division: University of London, London,” New Musical Express, February 16, 1980, accessed December 16, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=9116&SearchText=comical+trapped+butterfly 54. Max Bell, “Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures (Factory),” New Musical Express, July 14, 1979, accessed April 7, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/joy-division-iunknown-pleasuresi-factory. For more discussions of Curtis’s epilepsy in the field of music and disability see David Church, “Welcome to the ‘Atrocity Exhibition’: Ian Curtis, Rock Death, and Disability,” Disability Studies Quarterly 26/4 (Fall 2006), accessed February 17, 2015, http://dsq-sds.org/ article/view/804/979; and George McKay, Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), esp. 134. 55. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2008), esp. 89–­94.

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Notes to Pages 93–101  185 56. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 217. 57. Ibid., 225–­28. 58. For more on forging masculinity in popular music, see Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Wesleyan University Press, 1993). 59. I am extremely grateful to Arabella Stanger for her feedback and for helping me crystallize these ideas. 60. Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 53–­4. 61. Joy Division, “She’s Lost Control,” YouTube video, 3:39, posted by robbanzanas kanal, June 1, 2007, accessed December 12, 2012, http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=QVc29bYIvCM; and Joy Division, “Transmission,” YouTube video, 2:54, posted by Le Locomotion, August 21, 2006, accessed December 12, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rdf9gxp-_4A 62. “Killing Joke—­ Unspeakable/Exit (Generation 80, Belgium 1981) [Stereo],” YouTube video, 8:59, posted by rp61productions, Jul 8, 2013, accessed June 30, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wzh3yb44xQ 63. Josef K, “Sorry for Laughing (Official Video) (Domino Records),” YouTube video, 3:05, posted by Domino Recording Co., May 16, 2012, accessed December 12, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VzcWv8qKQw 64. Mary Harron, “Factory Products: Food for Thought,” Melody Maker, September 29, 1979, 19–­20. 65. See also Mitzi Waltz and Martin James for comments on this in “The (Re) Marketing of Disability in Pop,” Popular Music 28, no. 3 (2009): 367–­80. 66. Rambali, “Joy Division.” 67. Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 74. 68. Like the band Pure Hell, the African American punk band Death present an interesting counterpoint to this that needs exploring, but unfortunately, that is beyond the scope of this chapter. 69. Reynolds is presumably referring to the spiritual “Dem Dry Bones,” but the language also evokes that of minstrelsy. See Reynolds, Rip It Up, 215. 70. Joshua Gunn, “Gothic Music and the Inevitability of Genre,” Popular Music and Society 23, no. 1 (1999): esp. 33–­37. 71. David Brackett, “AMS/RRHOFM Lecture April 25, 2012,” YouTube video, 1:30:53, posted by amsformusicology, May 16, 2012, accessed December 12, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J38fq0fHV4 72. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 222. 73. Bill Flanagan, “The Last Elvis Costello Interview,” Musician (March 1986), accessed December 14, 2012, http://www.elviscostello.info/articles/m/ mu8603a.html. The actual quotation from Costello is “Two types of rock ’n’ roll had become bankrupt to me. One was ‘Look at me, I’ve got a big hairy chest and a big willy!’ and the other was the ‘Fuck me, I’m so sensitive’ Jackson Browne school of seduction. They’re both offensive and mawkish and neither has any real pride or confidence.”

Chapter 4 1. Maureen Paton, “Patti Smith,” Melody Maker, October 30, 1976, 21. 2. Ibid. 3. Paton’s review, from October 1976, appeared only months after Coon’s Melody Maker article, “Rebels Against the System,” which christened punk and EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/24/2021 6:59 AM via UNIV OF CHICAGO AN: 2331093 ; Mimi Haddon.; What Is Post-Punk? : Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 Account: s8989984

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186  Notes to Pages 101–4 championed its “anyone can do it” ethic. See Coon, “Punk Rock: Rebels Against the System,” Melody Maker, August 7, 1976, 24–­25. Allan Jones’s article, “But Does Nihilism Constitute Revolt?,” which appeared underneath Coon’s two-­page punk special, referred explicitly to the Patti Smith Band as a punk group, and argued that “Smith and the like” may be seen as part of a lineage of groups from the 1960s who prioritized “physical energy and passion” over “technique or musical competence.” See Jones, “But Does Nihilism Constitute Revolt?” Melody Maker, August 7, 1976, 24–­25. 4. See Mavis Bayton, Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Helen Reddington, The Lost Women of Rock: Female Musicians of the Punk Era (Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2012); and Caroline O’Meara, “The Raincoats: Breaking Down Punk Rock’s Masculinities,” Popular Music 22, no. 3 (October 2003): 299–­313. 5. Rather than focus on the idea of musical amateurism, Simon Frith and Howard Horne have suggested that punk’s close associations with the fashion departments in the UK’s art colleges also contributed to the increased participation by women, since women “traditionally had a stronger presence” than men in those departments. See Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987), 129. 6. Bayton, Frock Rock, 63. 7. Ibid., 65. See also O’Meara, “Raincoats,” 300. 8. Zoe Street Howe, Typical Girls? The Story of the Slits (London: Omnibus, 2009), 14. 9. Alan Anger, “The Raincoats,” ZigZag, August 1978, 36. 10. Viv Albertine quoted in Reddington, Lost Women, 46. 11. An example of the kind of excitement generated by this new amateur aesthetic can be read in James Wolcott’s introduction to the New York punk scene in the Village Voice in the mid-­1970s. Wolcott wrote, “what you get [from this music] is not high-­gloss professionalism but talent still working at the basics; the excitement (which borders on comedy) is watching a band with a unique approach try to articulate its vision and still remember the chords.” See James Wolcott, “A Conservative Impulse in the New Rock Underground,” in The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates, 3rd ed., ed. David Brackett, 341–­45 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). For the original article see Wolcott, “A Conservative Impulse in the New Rock Underground,” Village Voice, August 18, 1975. 12. Lucy Green, How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 5. 13. Reddington, Lost Women, 17–­23. Running parallel with the incorporation of women into rock via punk, it is also worth noting, the women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States revived and adopted the music of all-­ women swing groups from the 1940s. See Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: “All-­Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 165. 14. Coon, “Rebels Against the System.” According to Frith and Horne, punk’s “debunking of ‘male’ technique” was not the main condition that contributed to women’s participation in rock. They suggest, rather, that spaces for women already existed “because of women’s involvement in the first place. Punk brico-

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Notes to Pages 104–8  187 lage, for example, was most effective in the work of Vivienne Westwood and Poly Styrene, in the play of the female art-­school musicians on images of femininity. Iconography that is consistent in patriarchal ideology—­woman as innocent/ slut/mother/fool—­was rendered ludicrous by all being worn at once.” See Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, 155. 15. In another article from November 1976, Coon noted how punk was a genre that valued women’s participation. She wrote, “For the first time ever, a culture is developing which is not, like mods and rockers, dominated by males. Post-­hippie equality and trans-­sexuality are a nearly fully-­realised fact of life.” She listed as notable punk women Judy Nylon, Chrissie Hynde, Vivienne Westwood, Viv Albertine, and Siouxsie Sioux. See Caroline Coon, “Punk Alphabet,” Melody Maker, November 27, 1976, 33. 16. See also Reddington, Lost Women, 21–­22. 17. Lucy Green, Gender, Music, Education (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 127–­32. 18. Mavis Bayton, “Women and the Electric Guitar,” in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley (London: Routledge, 1997), 37–­40. 19. Green, How Popular Musicians Learn, 5. 20. I am using the word “positions” with reference to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. In The Field of Cultural Production, Bourdieu suggests that cultural fields (such as French literature of the late nineteenth century, or in this case rock and pop music of the late 1970s) may be understood in terms of the interaction between the available “positions,” which can be understood as the genres (e.g., novel, song, etc.) or roles (e.g., painter, electric guitarist, etc.) available to artists, and the “position-­takings,” which are the products or “manifestations” that agents create that either conform to or challenge/disrupt the previously available positions. See Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 16–­17, 30. 21. Bayton, Frock Rock, 10–­11, 26. As I have already indicated, one notable exception is the abundance of all-­women swing groups from the 1940s, who have been erased from most jazz histories. See Tucker, Swing Shift. 22. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 230–­32. 23. Ibid., 233, 291–­306. See also Frith and Horne’s more nuanced argument about these pantomime images, in which they suggest that by wearing these personae all at once, women punk artists drew attention to their absurdity. Frith and Horne, O’Meara, “Raincoats,” 155. 24. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 91. 25. For a complete list of the women musicians and bands included in Reddington’s study see Reddington, Lost Women, 8. Indeed, the artists that Reynolds and Press have chosen to include may reflect their antipop biases, as identified by Reddington, Lost Women, 115. 26. Bayton, Frock Rock, 68–­73. 27. Debra Baker Beck, “The ‘F’ Word: How the Media Frame Feminism,”

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188  Notes to Pages 108–11 NWSA Journal 10, no. 1 (1998): 142. See also Susan Faludi, who has also noted that the bra-­burning incident is a myth in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown, 1991), 75–­77. 28. Joanne Hallows, “Spare Rib, Second-­Wave Feminism and the Politics of Consumption,” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 2 (May 2013): esp. 269–­72, 281. Tucker has also noted how the women’s movement in the US came under attack during the 1970s and 1980s from “women of color, working-­class women, lesbians, and other women excluded from the narrow confines of white middle-­class US women’s experience.” See Tucker, Swing Shift, 168. 29. Reddington, Lost Women, 32–­33. 30. Kris Needs, “The Slits,” ZigZag, August/July 1977, 20. Reddington has also cited a 1976 letter from a female reader to Sounds magazine in which the letter-­ writer expresses an interest in playing the electric guitar. Significantly, the writer seems to have found it necessary to disassociate herself from the women’s liberation movement, stating, “I’m no women’s libber.” The Raincoats’ and the Slits’ attitude therefore appears to have been part of a more widespread distrust of the feminist movement among young women interested in rock and punk. See Reddington, Lost Women, 24. 31. Needs, “The Slits,” 20. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. The Slits were in fact only an all-­female group until 1979, when their drummer Palmolive (Paloma McLardy) left and was replaced by male drummer Budgie (Peter Edward Clarke). I discuss this in more detail shortly. 35. Needs, “The Slits,” 18. Needs also stresses the Slits’ ability to play “hard” in a later article from January 1978. See Needs, “The Slits: School Hall 5pm–­5p,” ZigZag, January 1978, 31. 36. Coates is using the word “technology” in the Foucauldian sense; the word denotes the systems and processes through which power replicates itself. In this case it refers to the hegemony of masculine encoding of the rock genre. See Norma Coates, “(R)Evolution Now? Rock and the Political Potential of Gender,” in Sexing the Groove, 52–­54. 37. The image of folk music specifically as one of the few genres available to women was in fact echoed by Slits’ guitarist Albertine, who remarked in 1979 that Chrissie Hynde was the first woman to show women “they could play guitar without being a ‘wimpy folkie.’” Quoted in Vivien Goldman, “What’s So Good About Natural Primitivism?” Melody Maker, September 8, 1979, 36. 38. Bonnie Gordon, “Tori Amos’ Inner Voices,” in Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds, ed. Jane A. Bernstein (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 192–­ 94. Bayton has also discussed the kinds of topics that appear in punk and post-­ punk women’s songs. See Bayton, Frock Rock, 66. Of course, men also attract the label “confessional.” James Taylor was one of the first singer-­songwriters to attract this label. For more on the history of the confessional mode in rock, see David Shumway’s book Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014). 39. Needs, “The Slits,” 21. 40. Bayton, “Women and the Electric Guitar,” 42.

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Notes to Pages 111–17  189 41. An interesting anecdote from bassist Gaye Black confirms this speculation, at least with regards to her own experience of not having the right (male) jargon. She tells Reddington that she was always frustrated by her bass sound, how it never sounded the way she wanted it to, because she did not know “technically” how to ask for it to be adjusted. See Reddington, 62. 42. Needs, “The Slits,” 19. 43. Ibid., 18. 44. Coon, “Rebels Against the System,” and Jones, “But Does Nihilism.” 45. Anger, “Raincoats,” 36. 46. See Bernard Sumner in “Joy Division—­The Documentary,” YouTube video, 1:35:44, posted by Mathieu Guillien, July 17, 2012, accessed February 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1qQsHGHi8w 47. Reddington, Lost Women, 21–­22. 48. Nick Crossly, Networks of Sound, 176. 49. Needs, “The Slits—­Now,” ZigZag, April 1979, 7. For more on the role played by John Peel and his colleague John Walters, particularly concerning their promotion of the Slits and Siouxsie and the Banshees, see Reddington, Lost Women, 57. 50. For a critique of the gendering of physical or bodily skill, see Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 51. Kris Needs, “Siouxsie and the Banshees May Call Their New LP Kaleidoscope, Reflecting their New, Multi-­Faceted Strength. Here They Talk about the New Songs and Plans . . . ,” ZigZag, May 1980, https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/siouxsie—the-banshees-haul-of-mirrors 52. Ibid. 53. Paolo Hewitt, “Siouxsie and the Banshees: Kaleidoscope (Polydor),” Melody Maker, July 26, 1980, https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ siouxsie—the-banshees-ikaleidoscopei-polydor 54. Ibid. 55. For the 1977 version of “Newtown,” see “The Slits—­Peel Session 1977,” YouTube video, 9:41, posted by Vibracobra XXIII, December 1, 2013, accessed February 21, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E-9gceMQgA 56. Needs, “The Slits—­Now,” 6. 57. The drum notation is as follows: F kick drum, A floor tom, and C snare, but in this performance the snare is disengaged. The crosses on the G line indicate the closed hi-­hat and the diamond-­shaped note heads on the G line indicate the open hi-­hat. 58. For more on Bovell’s role on Cut see John Orme, “‘Cut’ (album review),” Melody Maker, September 1, 1979, 23. This article is also noteworthy for the gendered dynamics between Bovell (male producer) and the Slits (female musicians) that it implicitly communicates. 59. Needs, “The Slits—­Now,” 8. 60. I am grateful to my anonymous reviewers for this suggestion. 61. Vanessa Blais-­ Tremblay, “‘Montre moi c’que t’as dans les culottes!’ A Review of the Scholarly Literature on Gender and Groove” (unpublished paper; McGill University 2011). See also Ingrid T. Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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190  Notes to Pages 117–31 62. Richard Witts, Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon (London: Virgin, 1993), 140. 63. Richard Cook, “Where’s the Logic in That Then?” New Musical Express, March 6, 1982, 33. 64. I problematize the notion of disco as a hegemonic, mainstream genre in chapter 3 by illustrating how it occupied a complex position. 65. Neil Spencer, “Some Girls Do It Pretty Good,” New Musical Express, August 12, 1978, 43. 66. “In A Warm Kitchenette with the Raincoats,” ZigZag, May 1980, 19. 67. Lucy O’Brien makes a similar suggestion about her experience in the band the Catholic Girls: “It was a point of principle not to make music that had been done before, to write lyrics of romantic clichés, to express the truth of fraught sexual relations.” See O’Brien, “Can I Have a Taste of Your Ice Cream?” Punk & Post-­Punk 1, no. 1 (2012): 28. 68. The triangulated note heads indicate a woodblock-­like percussion instrument. 69. Caroline O’Meara, “The Raincoats: Breaking Down Punk Rock’s Masculinities,” Popular Music 22, no. 3 (2003): esp. 302–­7. 70. Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, “Music and Sexuality,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 372. 71. Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 212. See also Jack (Judith) Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 72. O’Meara, 303. See also Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1993), 109. 73. Auslander, Performing Glam, 223–­26. 74. Needs, “The Slits,” 20. 75. Ibid. 76. Chris Brazier, “The Runaways,” Melody Maker, November 19, 1977, 68. Auslander discusses the objectification of teenage girls in 1960s rock culture, which may help contextualize Brazier’s “jailbait” comment. See Auslander, Performing Glam Rock, 211–­12. 77. Harvey Kubernik, “Catching the Runaways,” Melody Maker, November 5, 1977, 35. 78. O’Meara, “Raincoats,” 299. 79. Bayton, “Women and the Electric Guitar,” 40. 80. Kodwo Eshun, Then and Now, 8. 81. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 91. 82. Reynolds and Press, Sex Revolts, 312. 83. Reddington, 49. See also Chris Salewicz, “Review of the Adverts,” New Musical Express, June 11, 1977, 44. 84. Reynolds and Press, Sex Revolts, 306–­9. 85. Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, 134.

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Notes to Pages 132–35  191

Chapter 5 1. Robot A. Hull, “The World According to Pere Ubu,” Creem, November 1979, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ the-world-according-to-pere-ubu 2. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Schuster and Schuster, 1982), 15. For more on the slang used in CB radio, see Richard David Ramsey, “The People Versus Smokey Bear: Metaphor, Argot, and CB Radio,” Journal of Popular Culture 3, no. 2 (Fall 1979): 338–­45. There is a scene in Werner Herzog’s 1977 film, Stroszek in which a group of long-­ distance truck drivers take advantage of the protagonists’ girlfriend and broadcast it over Citizens’ Band radio. The scene is pertinent not only because of the time period (mid to late1970s) and its effective illustration of the lower-­class connotations of long-­distance truck drivers and their use of CB radio, but because the film is also a critique or parody of life in the American Midwest. It is set in the fictitious town of Railroad Flats, Wisconsin. Incidentally, watching Stroszek was one of the last things that Joy Division singer Ian Curtis apparently did before committing suicide. See chapter 3 for more on Curtis and themes of death and psychiatric struggle in post-­punk. 3. Jon Savage, “Pere Ubu, the Modern Dance,” Sounds, February 11, 1978, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/pereubu-the-modern-dance 4. Richard Grabel, “Pere Ubu: CBGB’s, New York, NY,” New York Rocker, April 1978, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ pere-ubu-cbgbs-new-york-ny 5. Max Bell, “Pick Up a Picnic,” New Musical Express, September 15, 1979, 37. This description is somewhat reminiscent of Bell’s depiction of the clanging doors and labyrinthine hallways of a mental institution that he used when describing Joy Division, a description that I discuss in chapter 3. Cf. Max Bell, “Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures (Factory),” New Musical Express, July 14, 1979, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/joy-division-iunknown-pleasuresi-factory. It is also worth noting the emphasis on blue-­ collar aesthetics that appear in this review of Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, released in June 1978. See Peter Silverton, “Bruce Springsteen: Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Sounds, June 10, 1978. 6. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 72. Also see Ubu Projex, accessed October 4, 2013, http://www.ubuprojex.net 7. Hull, “World According.” 8. Paul Rambali, “Pere Ubu: Unique Ideas Lead to Prison,” New Musical Express, November 18, 1978, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/pere-ubu-unique-ideas-lead-to-prison 9. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 72. 10. Thomas quoted in Ian Birch. “The Pere Tree,” Melody Maker, May 13, 1978, 3. 11. Ibid. In the interview with Hull, Pere Ubu’s bass player Tony Maimone stated how he would often “tell people he worked with cement rather than have to explain that he was employed by something called Pere Ubu.” See Hull, “World According.”

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192  Notes to Pages 136–40 12. Jon Savage, “Various Artists: The Akron Compilation (Stiff); Short Circuit—­ Live at the Electric Circus (Virgin),” Sounds, June 24, 1978, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/various-artists-ithe-akron-compilationi-stiff-ishort-circuit—live-at-the-electric-circusi-virgin. Akron is known for its rubber production, hence the decision to use rubber as the signature scent. In their interview with Hull, the members of Pere Ubu also pointed out that they were more popular in Europe than in the United States. The fact that European outlets such as Stiff and Sounds were releasing Ohio-­associated material demonstrates how this music had garnered a niche, non-­US audience. See Hull, “World According.” 13. See David Hesmondhalgh, “Post-­Punk’s Attempt to Democratize the Music Industry,” Popular Music 16, no. 3 (Oct. 1997): 255–­74. Helen Reddington also mentions the importance of regional scenes. See Reddington, Lost Women, 6. 14. Peter Silverton, “Rock in Akron: The Music of Greater Akron,” Sounds, June 17, 1978, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/rock-in-akron-the-music-of-greater-akron 15. Thomas quoted in Birch, “Pere Tree.” 16. Andy Gill, “Sheffield: This Week’s Leeds,” New Musical Express, September 9, 1978, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/cabaret-voltaire-sheffield—this-weeks-leeds 17. For more on this and the importance of “decentralization” in the punk and post-­punk eras, such as the boom in specialist record shops and small labels, see Hesmondhalgh, “Post-­Punk’s Attempt,” 259. 18. This is also reminiscent of when in the mid-­1960s groups were organized around such regional “sounds” as Detroit and California. For more on this, see Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, esp. 175–­80. 19. Gill, “This Week’s Leeds.” 20. Ibid. 21. From the interview with Westwood, it’s worth noting that Cabaret Voltaire’s studio was “an ex-­derelict office just off the city centre” that was shared with 2.3 (a Sheffield punk band). This is interesting for the way it resembles the location of Pere Ubu’s rehearsal spaces. See Chris Westwood, “Cabaret Voltaire,” ZigZag, September 1978, 18–­19. 22. S. Alexander Reed has similarly emphasized the way Cabaret Voltaire created music not out of “indifference” for Sheffield, “but in spite of Sheffield,” referring presumably to the city’s cultural scarcity. See S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (New York: Oxford University Press), 61–­72. 23. Ibid., 61. 24. Reynolds, Rip It Up, esp., 85–­103, 124–­39. 25. Ibid., 71. 26. Reed in fact cites a Spin article that accords with Bell’s 1979 description of Pere Ubu as an “industrial band.” See both Bell, “Pick Up a Picnic,” and Reed, Assimilate,127–­28. 27. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 70. 28. Chas de Whalley, “MX-­80,” Sounds, December 3, 1977, accessed September 25, 2018, https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/mx-80 29. de Whalley, “MX-­80.” Another reference to MX-­80 Sound can be found in

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Notes to Pages 141–44  193 Richard Riegel’s review of the Ohio band Human Switchboard, but from much later, August 1981. Rather than bemoan the cultural dearth of the Midwest, Riegel presents his night at Walnut Hills in Dayton, Ohio, with a degree of romance: it’s a “boundless Saturday night,” and he feels as though he’s “living out some kinda vintage Kerouacian cool jazz prose fantasy from the early ’50s. The red neon ‘Walut Hills’ sign is fizzing away above the cozy dark riches of the mirrored bar.” And: “Instantly it’s like the first time I heard MX-­80 Sound—­I had always dreamed of hearing a band just like this, but didn’t count on stumbling across them among the naked Midwestern realities of my stranded-­in-­the-­jungle life.” See Riegel, “Deft Mutants in a Telephone Booth: Human Switchboard at Walnut Hills, Dayton,” Creem, August 1981. 30. Richard Grabel and Roy Carr, “Athens Calling: The Post-­Bouffant Pop,” NME, December 6, 1980, 11. 31. Cynthia Rose, “The B-­52’s: Hair Today Gone Tomorrow?” NME, January 3, 1981. 32. Van Gosse, “Pylon Draws the Line,” Village Voice, February 25, 1981. 33. Hay quoted in Fred Mills, “Everything Is Cool: Form Followed Function for Athens Postpunk Legends Pylon,” Harp, December 2007. 34. Later, in January 1982, Andy Schwartz at New York Rocker noted REM’s “commercial” potential and how that made them different from other Athens acts. Schwartz wrote, “R.E.M. strikes many observers as an eminently commercial proposition, certainly more so than Athens pals like Pylon or the Method Actors.” See Schwartz, “R.E.M.,” New York Rocker, January 1982. This raises interesting questions about the way artists may move from one genre to another—­ from post-­punk/new wave to indie or pop. 35. Jack Barron, “Tuxedomoon: Bad Moon Rising,” Sounds, May 5, 1985. 36. For more on this approach see Nick Crossley, Networks of Sound, and Gavin Butt’s forthcoming book, Being in a Band: Artschool Experiment in Post-­Punk Leeds. 37. Jim Green, “Ralph Records: Surrealism a Go Go,” Trouser Press, September 1980. 38. Andy Gill, “Chrome: Half Machine Lip Moves,” New Musical Express, March 17, 1979. 39. Ian Penman, “The Pop Group/This Heat: The Collegiate Theatre, London,” New Musical Express, July 17, 1978. 40. See, for example, the interview with Thomas cited at the beginning in which he mentioned the “mills going flat out all night.” Rambali, “Weird City.” 41. The fact that the Futurama festival (discussed in chapter 1) was described as “the first sci-­fi music festival” speaks to a preoccupation with retro notions of the “future.” Regarding Cabaret Voltaire specifically, the journalist Frank Worral described them as “the first to adhere to the Festival’s own futuristic definitions, being utterly wayward in contrast to all that has preceded them.” See Frank Worral, “Looking to Tomorrow,” Melody Maker, September 15, 1979, 11. 42. Hull, “World According.” 43. Paul Rambali, “Pere Ubu: The Modern Dance,” New Musical Express, March 11, 1978, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/pere-ubu-the-modern-dance 44. Grabel, “Pere Ubu: CBGB’s.”

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194  Notes to Pages 144–48 45. Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 151. 46. We might also think here of the use of synthesizers in sound design, specifically the Radiophonic Workshop’s use of the EMS VCS3 throughout the 1970s in the UK television programme Doctor Who, for example. Here the instrument was used to create the sounds of “future” modern and/or “future” industrial with the sounds of whooshing doors, spacecraft taking off, and the low-­level synthetic sounds of the control room. 47. Cateforis, 151. Perhaps as a counterpoint to this we might consider the recordings of the band the United States of America or George Russell’s “Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature” (1971). Thanks to synth boffin Joe Watson for this. 48. Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 152. See also Crossley, who notes, “It wasn’t the synthesizer per se that enabled the Sheffield post-­punk world to take the shape that it did, for example. Synthesizers had existed for several years and were used in progressive rock. It was the increased availability of cheap synthesizers.” See Crossley, Networks of Sound, 47. 49. Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 160–­62. See also Grabel, “Pere Ubu: CBGB’s.” See also Bernie Worrel’s synth work with George Clinton as another example of the experimentation with—­for want of better words—­bleeps, bloops, sirens, and effects. 50. “Born to be Alive” was a late disco song by French singer Patrick Hernadez. The “brainless” connotations of disco are discussed in chapter 3 of this book, but in relation to issues of race, sexuality, and male identity more than in relation to the female body. For reference, Eno’s synthesizer break on “Editions of You” comes after the saxophone solo at roughly 1:30. 51. Mothersbaugh quoted in Sam Inglis, “Four Decades of De-­Evolution,” Sound on Sound, August 2010, accessed October 3, 2013, http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug10/articles/devo.htm 52. This is of course excerpted from Devo’s ten-­minute 1976 film The Truth about De-­Evolution. The importance of the theme of madness and the aestheticization of psychiatric disturbance is addressed in chapter 3. The video can also be found here as “Jocko Homo (original version),” YouTube video, 3:57, posted by Shaw Israel Izikson, accessed April 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hRguZr0xCOc 53. For more on this see Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, 437–­70. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, and also Bernard Gendron, “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs.” 54. Reed, Assimilate, 47. 55. Jon Savage, “Cabaret Voltaire: Something Strange Is Going on in Sheffield Tonight,” Sounds, April 1978, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/cabaret-voltaire-something-strange-is-going-on-in-sheffield-tonight 56. Andy Gill, “Cabaret Voltaire: Mix Up,” New Musical Express, October 20, 1979, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ cabaret-voltair e-imix-upi-rough-trade 57. Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 178. 58. Gill, “Mix Up.”

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Notes to Pages 148–53  195 59. As Simon Frith and Howard Horne have suggested, post-­punk groups “found themselves playing to self-­consciously experimental audiences, to critics who expected something novel every time.” Simon Frith and Howard Horne, Art into Pop (London: Methuen, 1987), 134. 60. For the comparison to Cabaret Voltaire, see Gill, “Mix Up,” and for the comparison to Throbbing Gristle, see Savage, “Modern Dance.” 61. Reed, Assimilate, 128. 62. Rambali, “Modern Dance.” 63. Birch, “Pere Tree.” 64. Rambali, “Weird City.” 65. Geoff Travis in conversation with Vivian Goldman. See Goldman, “Datapanik in the Year 1978: Pere Ubu,” Sounds, May 13, 1978, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/datapanik-in-the-year1978-pere-ubu 66. Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 248–­ 50. Furthermore, by using noise and rock conventions we hear Pere Ubu “blur the roles of form and content” in the way that Gill described with reference to Chrome. See Gill, “Chrome.” 67. Rambali, “Unique Ideas.” 68. Hull, “World According.” 69. Westwood, “Cabaret Voltaire.” It is worth noting that Westwood does say that the comparisons are “questionable.” 70. Greg Shaw, “The Future Will Happen This Year: Space Rock,” Phonograph Record, March 1973, accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/the-future-will-happen-this-year-space-rock. It is worth noting that some of the sounds highlighted by Shaw were probably not produced by synthesizers, since most late-­1960s musicians only had access to the theremin, musique concrète, and the mellotron. 71. Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 155. 72. Ibid., 172. 73. Rambali, “Unique Ideas.” 74. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 72. Similarly, journalist Birch likened Ravestine’s synthesizer to a “modern press-­button phone.” See Birch, “Pere Tree.” 75. Mark Mothersbaugh, “Exclusive Keyboard Video: Devo’s Synths and Studio with Mark Mothersbaugh!” Keyboard Magazine, July 26, 2010. 76. Hull, “World According.” 77. It is worth noting that “shock” was an important component in early avant-­ garde art insofar as avant-­garde art refused conventional notions of meaning. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-­Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 80. As such, it is possible to draw a line of descent from avant-­garde art to movements such as punk and industrial, and situationism provides a convenient point of contact. But I am also concerned with questioning the meaning of such quasi-­genealogies. 78. It is also worth noting that Reynolds applies similar terms of valorization to electronic dance music, which he has described as a genre that “inherited rock’s seriousness: its belief that music could change the world.” See Simon Reynolds,

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196  Notes to Pages 154–57 “Historia Electronica Preface,” in Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader, 504. For the original source see Simon Reynolds, “Preface,” in Loops: Una Historia de la Musica Electronica, eds. Javier Blànquez and Omar Morera (Barcelona: Reservoir Books, 2002). 79. Peter Osborne, “Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category,” in Postmodernism and the Re-­Reading of Modernity, eds. Francis Baker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, 65–­84 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). 80. Ibid., 69. 81. Ibid., 69–­75. For more on the idea of modernity as it relates specifically to colonialism see Robert Young, White Histories: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 1990). 82. Indeed, it would be worth considering whether the abundant use of synthesizers in Stevie Wonder’s music of the 1970s or the radical black and queer gender play in disco similarly qualified as “modern” in its own time. 83. Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002), 30. 84. Hull, “World According.” 85. Reed, esp. 66–­67, 75. 86. Simon Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (London: Black Dog, 1999). 87. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 76–­77. 88. Hay quoted in Mills, “Everything Is Cool.” 89. As Benjamin Piekut has suggested regarding the London avant-­ garde scene between 1965 and 1975, multiple musicians from different genres haphazardly employed the language of the avant-­garde at this time; these ideas were not restricted to the highbrow-­associated art music world. Benjamin Piekut, “Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-­Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965–­1975,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 771. It is worth noting, too, the resurgence of interest in the early-­ twentieth century avant-­garde in the late 1970s in the art world and in the context of postmodernism, as discussed by Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, esp. 160–­77. 90. Frith and Horne, Art into Pop, 127–­35. 91. Hull, “World According.” 92. Goldman, “Datapanik.” 93. Don Snowdon, “Pere Ubu Plays for Body, Brain, Pere Ubu: The Whiskey, Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Time, August 4, 1979, accessed April 6, 2015, http:// www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/pere-ubu-plays-for-body-brain 94. Bell, “Pick Up a Picnic.” 95. Reynolds, Rip It Up, 79. 96. Hull, “World According.” It is possible that Hull is referring to the US comedy show Fernwood 2 Night from 1977. The program was a talk show designed to parody small-­town life in the fictitious town of Fernwood, Ohio. If so, then Hull’s belittling of Devo’s “artiness” is even more scathing. 97. Bürger, Avant-­Garde, xv. 98. Ian Birch, “We Are Devo: We Are the Next Thing,” Melody Maker, 25

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Notes to Pages 157–65  197 February 1978, 10. Ironically, this is similar to what Frank Zappa had done on Only in It for the Money (1968) in a deliberate pastiche of the hippy counterculture. 99. Westwood, “Cabaret Voltaire.” As Bürger noted, the European avant-­garde art movement of the 1920s was the first artistic movement to challenge the institution of “art.” It is perhaps with reference to this idea—­Dada as negation of previous institutions of art—­that journalists such as Westwood were able to suggest that the music made by post-­punk musicians was a negation of earlier genres of art rock. See Bürger, Avant-­Garde, 22. 100. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” in On Narrative, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 65. 101. Birch, “Pere Tree.”

Epilogue 1. “Joy Division—­ The Documentary,” YouTube video, 1:35:44, posted by Mathieu Guillien, July 17, 2012, accessed February 10, 2015, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=b1qQsHGHi8w 2. See also Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-­Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. 269–­71. 3. In this regard, the generic term “post-­punk” functions in a similar way to Gendron’s reading of the term “new wave.” See Gendron, Between Montmartre, 270. 4. Carolyn Dipalma and Kathy Ferguson, “Clearing Ground and Making Connections: Modernism, Postmodernism, Feminism,” in Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies, eds. Kathy Davis, Mary Evans, and Judith Lorber (London: Sage, 2006), 130. 5. Ibid., 131. 6. bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” Postmodern Culture 1, no. 1 (September 1990): https://muse.jhu.edu/article/27283, accessed August 27, 2018. See also Fredric Jameson’s comments about the “post-­” in postmodernism and the extent to which it differs from modernism in Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” 13–­29. 7. Robin James, “Is the Post-­in Post-­Identity the Post-­in Post-­Genre?” Popular Music 36/1 (2017): 21–­32. 8. Mick Farren, “How the Clash Fed the Wonderbread Generation, Made the Mountain Come to Mohammed—­and Other Miracles,” NME, June 20, 1981, accessed September 25, 2018, https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ how-the-clash-fed-the-wonderbread-generation-made-the-mountain-come-tomohammed—-and-other-miracles 9. See chapter 2. 10. Farren, “How the Clash Fed Wonderbread.” 11. Ibid. 12. For more on the way genres can be the site of struggle for definition, see Jason Toynbee, Making Popular Music, 103.

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Bibliography

Primary Sources Anger, Alan. “The Raincoats.” ZigZag, August 1978, 36. Anonymous. “News in Brief.” The Times, June 23, 1948, 2. Anonymous. “Will America Swallow the New Wave?” Melody Maker, November 12, 1977, 37–­38, 69. Anonymous. “1979 ZigZag Reader’s Poll!” ZigZag, July 1979, 22–­23. Anonymous. “PIL—­High Price for Canned Music,” Melody Maker, September 22, 1979, 4. Anonymous. “In A Warm Kitchenette with the Raincoats.” ZigZag, May 1980, 19. Anonymous. Vini Reilly, interview with two unidentified interviewers, August 13, 1981, accessed December 5, 2013, http://users.rcn.com/rpsweb/durutti-column/texts/iv-muntplein.html Baker, Danny. “The Private Life of Public Image.” New Musical Express, June 6, 1979. Accessed December 14, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-private-life-of-public-image Bangs, Lester. “The Sylvers: Something Special.” Circus, January 31, 1977. Accessed December 14, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-sylvers-isomething-speciali Banks, Robin. “We Only Wanted to be Loved.” ZigZag, December 1978, 8. Barber, Lynden. “U2 Take Us Over the Top.” Melody Maker, October 4, 1980, 24. Barron, Jack. “Tuxedomoon: Bad Moon Rising,” Sounds, May 5, 1985. Bell, Max. “Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures (Factory).” New Musical Express, July 14, 1979. Accessed April 7, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/joy-division-iunknown-pleasuresi-factory Bell, Max. “Pick Up a Picnic.” New Musical Express, September 15, 1979, 37. Bell, Max. “Phantom of the Factory: It’s Martin Hannett! A Hero in his Own Town!! Didsbury!!!” New Musical Express, July 19, 1980. Birch, Ian. “We Are Devo: We Are the Next Thing,” Melody Maker, February 25, 1978. Birch, Ian. “The Pere Tree.” Melody Maker, May 13, 1978, 3. Birch, Ian. “In Outer Space.” Melody Maker, July 14, 1979, 17. 199 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/24/2021 7:01 AM via UNIV OF CHICAGO AN: 2331093 ; Mimi Haddon.; What Is Post-Punk? : Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82 Account: s8989984

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200  Bibliography Bohn, Chris. “Wire: Wider Vision.” Melody Maker, October 13, 1979. Accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/wirewider-vision Bohn, Chris. “Public Image LTD: Metal Box.” Melody Maker, November 24, 1979. Bohn, Chris. “MM Single of the Year,” Melody Maker, December 29, 1979, 17. Bohn, Chris. “Looking for a Certain Ratio (B. Eno).” Melody Maker, February 2, 1980, 21–­22. Bohn, Chris. “Northern Gloom: 2, Southern Stomp: 1.” Melody Maker, February 9, 1980, 31. Bohn, Chris. “Joy Division: University of London Union.” Melody Maker, February 16, 1980. Accessed December 16, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/joy-division-university-of-london-union Bohn, Chris. “Public Image Ltd: Corporation Executive Report to Shareholders.” NME, July 5, 1980. Accessed November 21, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/public-image-ltd-corporation-executive-reportto-shareholders Brazier, Chris. “United We Stand.” Melody Maker, October 22, 1977, 44–­46. Brazier, Chris. “The Runaways.” Melody Maker, November 19, 1977, 68. Brazier, Chris. “United They Fall.” Melody Maker, December 31, 1977, 9. Bushell, Garry. “Gang of Four: The Gang’s All Here.” Sounds, June 2, 1979. Accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/gang-of-four-the-gangs-all-here Bushell, Garry. “Stiff Little Fingers: (F)Ireland Rockers.” Trouser Press, July 1979. Accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/stiff-little-fingers-fireland-rockers Christgau, Robert. “The Triumph of the New Wave: Results of the Fifth (or Sixth) Annual Pazz and Jop Critics’ Poll.” Village Voice, January 22, 1979. Cook, Richard. “Where’s the Logic in That Then?” New Musical Express, March 6, 1982. Coon, Caroline. “Punk Rock: Rebels Against the System,” Melody Maker, August 7, 1976, 24–­25. Coon, Caroline. “Punk Alphabet.” Melody Maker, November 27, 1976, 33. Costa, J. C. “Post-­Punk Guitarists.” Musician, Player, and Listener, October 1, 1981, 122–­24. Doherty, Harry. “Barbed Wire.” Melody Maker, December 9, 1978. Accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article /wirebarbed-wire Dregni, Michael. “Echoplex EP-­2.” Vintage Guitar, July 2012. Dyer, Richard. “In Defense of Disco.” Gay Left 8. Summer 1979, 20–­23. Farren, Mick. “How the Clash Fed the Wonderbread Generation, Made the Mountain Come to Mohammed—­and Other Miracles,” NME, June 20, 1981. Flanagan, Bill. “The Last Elvis Costello Interview.” Musician, March 1986. Accessed December 14, 2012, http://www.elviscostello.info/articles/m/ mu8603a.html Frith, Simon. “Patti and Lene: Sisters Under the Skin?” Melody Maker, March 17, 1979, 14.

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Bibliography  201 [Various contributors]. “The Front Bit: The ZigZag Faves of ’78,” ZigZag, July 1978, 4–­5. Ghura, Tony. “The Runaways, Queens of Noise. Part One.” ZigZag, December 1977. Ghura, Tony. “The Story of the Runaways, Queens of Noise. Final Part.” ZigZag, January 1978. Gill, Andy. “Sheffield: This Week’s Leeds.” New Musical Express, September 9, 1978. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/cabaret-voltaire-sheffield—this-weeks-leeds Gill, Andy. “Wire: But Obviously It Isn’t.” New Musical Express, September 16, 1978. Accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/cabaret-voltaire-imix-upi-rough-trade Gill, Andy. “Chrome: Half Machine Lip Moves,” New Musical Express, March 17, 1979. Gill, Andy. “Cabaret Voltaire: Mix Up.” New Musical Express, October 20, 1979. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ cabaret-voltaire-imix-upi-rough-trade Goldman, Vivien. “Jah Punk: New Wave Digs Reggae.” Sounds, September 3, 1977. Accessed November 22, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/jah-punk-new-wave-digs-reggae Goldman, Vivien. “Brian Eno: Before and After Science.” Sounds, December 10, 1977. Accessed May 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/brian-eno-before-and-after-science Goldman, Vivien. “John Lydon: Man A Warrior The Interview—­Part 1.” Sounds, March 4, 1978. Accessed December 10, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/john-lydon-man-a-warrior—the-interview-part-1 Goldman, Vivien. “John Lydon: Man A Warrior The Interview—­Part 2.” Sounds, March 11, 1978. Accessed December 10, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/john-lydon-man-a-warrior-part-2 Goldman, Vivien. “Datapanik in the Year 1978: Pere Ubu.” Sounds, May 13, 1978. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ datapanik-in-the-year-1978-pere-ubu Goldman, Vivien. “What’s So Good About Natural Primitivism?” Melody Maker, September 8, 1979, 36. Goldman, Vivien. “Black Gypsy, Folk Dreams.” Melody Maker, September 22, 1979, 23. Gosse, Van. “Pylon Draws the Line.” Village Voice, February 25, 1981. Grabel, Richard. “Pere Ubu: CBGBs, New York, NY.” New York Rocker, April 1978. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/ pere-ubu-cbgbs-new-york-ny. Grabel, Richard, and Roy Carr. “Athens Calling: The Post-­Bouffant Pop.” NME, December 6, 1980, 11. Green, Jim. “Ralph Records: Surrealism a Go Go.” Trouser Press, September 1980. Harries, Andrew. “Manchester: Riding the Second Wave.” Melody Maker, June 3, 1978, 38.

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202  Bibliography Harron, Mary. “Dialectics Meets Disco.” Melody Maker, May 26, 1979, 17–­18. Harron, Mary. “Factory Products: Food for Thought,” Melody Maker, September 29, 1979, 19–­20. Hempsall, Alan. “A Day Out with Joy Division.” Extro 2, no. 5, January 8, 1980. Accessed December 5, 2013, http://home.wxs.nl/~frankbri/jdvextro.html Hewitt, Paolo. “Siouxsie and the Banshees.” Melody Maker, July 26, 1980. Hull, Robot A. “The World According to Pere Ubu.” Creem, November 1979. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/theworld-according-to-pere-ubu Jones, Allan. “But Does Nihilism Constitute Revolt?” Melody Maker, August 7, 1976, 24–­25. Kamp, Bert van der. “Martin Hannett An Interview.” Muziekkrant Oor, September 1981. Translated by Hans Huisman. Accessed January 25, 2015, http://www. martinhannett.co.uk/interv.htm Kent, Nick. “The Ramones: Ramones (Sire-­Import).” New Musical Express, May 15, 1976. Accessed December 14, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-ramones-iramonesi-sire—import/ Kent, Nick. “Wire: 154.” New Musical Express, September 22, 1979. Accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/wirei154i-harvest Kopkind, Andrew. “The Dialectic of Disco: Gay Music Goes Straight.” Village Voice, August 12, 1979. Kubernik, Harvey. “Catching the Runaways.” Melody Maker, November 5, 1977. Letts, Don. “Don Letts: ‘Punk is Not Mohawks and Safety Pins. It’s an Attitude and a Spirit.’” The Guardian, February 7, 2015. Accessed February 16, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/07/don-letts-this-much-iknow Middles, Mick. “Joy Division.” Sounds, November 18, 1978. Accessed December 16, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/joy-division/ Middles, Mick. “Joy Division, Teardrop Explodes, OMD, Echo and the Bunnymen et al: Leigh Rock Festival, Lancashire,” Sounds, September 8, 1979. Accessed July 23, 2018, www.rocksbackpages.com Mills, Fred. “Everything Is Cool: Form Followed Function for Athens Postpunk Legends, Pylon.” Harp, December 2007. Morley, Paul. “Joy Division: University of London.” New Musical Express, February 16, 1980. Accessed December 16, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/joy-division-university-of-london-london/ Morley, Paul. “Boy’s Own Weepies.” NME, October 25, 1980, 45. Morley, Paul. “Moany Minor.” NME, November 15, 1980, 37. Morthland, John. “Lou Reed, Say it Again, Lou.” Creem, 1976. Accessed December 14, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/lou-reed-sayit-again-lou/ Mothersbaugh, Mark. “Exclusive Keyboard Video: Devo’s Synths and Studio with Mark Mothersbaugh!” Keyboard Magazine, July 26, 2010. Murray, Charles Shaar. “Joe Jackson: Look Sharp!” New Musical Express, February 3, 1978. Accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/joe-jackson-look-sharp-

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Bibliography  203 Murray, Charles Shaar. “Magazine: Howard Devoto’s Enigma Variations.” New Musical Express, February 25, 1978. Accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/magazine-howard-devotos-enigma-variations Murray, Charles Shaar. “The Mekons/the Fall/Human League/Gang of Four/ Stiff Little Fingers: the Lyceum, London,” New Musical Express, March 31, 1979. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/the-mekonsthe-fallhuman-leaguegang-of-fourstiff-little-fingers-thelyceum-londonNeeds, Kris. “The Slits.” ZigZag, July/August 1977, 20. Needs, Kris. “Roots Rock Reggae.” ZigZag, August 1977, 29. Needs, Kris. “The Slits: Holland Park School, London.” ZigZag, January 1978. Accessed December 14, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-slits-holland-park-school-london Needs, Kris. “The Slits: School Hall 5pm-­5p.” ZigZag, January 1978, 31. Needs, Kris. “Wire.” ZigZag, March 1978. Accessed July 21, 2014, http://www. rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/wire Needs, Kris. “Public Image Ltd.: ‘Public Image Ltd.’ (Virgin).” New York Rocker, February 1979. Needs, Kris. “The Slits—­Now.” ZigZag, April 1979, 7. Needs, Kris. “Public Image Ltd.: The Metal Box.” ZigZag, December 1979. Needs, Kris. “Siouxsie and the Banshees . . .” ZigZag, May 1980. Needs, Kris. “Fire in the Bush.” ZigZag, October 1980, 23. Needs, Kris, and Danny Baker. “An Interview with Brian Eno.” ZigZag, January 18, 1978. Accessed November 22, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/an-interview-with-brian-eno Orme, John. “Cut.” Melody Maker, September 1, 1979, 23. Paton, Maureen. “Patti Smith.” Melody Maker, October 30, 1976. Penman, Ian. “The Pop Group/This Heat: The Collegiate Theatre, London,” New Musical Express, July 17, 1978. Penman, Ian, and Andy Gill. “Joy Division, Pil et al: Futurama ’79 Festival—­Set the Controls for the Squalor of Leeds.” NME, September 15, 1979. Pye, Ian. “One Day, Love Will Tear Us Apart.” Melody Maker, October 25, 1980. Rambali, Paul. “Pere Ubu: Weird City Robomen.” New Musical Express, January 7, 1978. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/ Article/pere-ubu-weird-city-robomen Rambali, Paul. “Pere Ubu: The Modern Dance.” New Musical Express, March 11, 1978. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/pere-ubu-the-modern-danceRambali, Paul. “Pere Ubu: Unique Ideas Lead to Prison.” New Musical Express, November 18, 1978. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/pere-ubu-unique-ideas-lead-to-prison Rambali, Paul. “Reluctant Rock Stars: A Nation in Crisis.” New Musical Express, July 7, 1979. Accessed July 21, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/reluctant-rock-stars-a-nation-in-crisis Rambali, Paul. “Joy Division: Take No Prisoners, Leave No Clues.” New Musical Express, August 11, 1979. Accessed December 16, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/joy-division-take-no-prisoners-leave-no-clues/

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204  Bibliography Reel, Penny. “Keith Hudson: A Better Brand of Dub.” New Musical Express, January 14, 1978. Accessed December 13, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/keith-hudson-ia-better-brand-of-dubi Reel, Penny. “Public Image Limited: Linton Kwesi Johnson: Rainbow Theatre, London.” New Musical Express, January 6, 1979. Accessed December 10, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/public-image-limited-linton-kwesi-johnson-rainbow-theatre-london Reynolds, Simon. “How Soon Is Now?” Melody Maker, September 27, 1987. Riegel, Richard. “Deft Mutants in a Telephone Booth: Human Switchboard at Walnut Hills, Dayton.” Creem, August 1981. Rose, Cynthia. “The B-­52’s: Hair Today Gone Tomorrow?” NME, January 3, 1981. Rose, Cynthia. “Invasion of the Walkman People.” City Limits, October 16, 1981. Accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/invasion-of-the-walkmen-people Salewicz, Chris. “Review of the Adverts.” New Musical Express, June 11, 1977, 44. Salewicz, Chris. “Echo and the Bunnymen: Welcome to the Bunnyhouse.” New Musical Express, November 22, 1980. Savage, Jon. “Buzzcocks/Magazine/John Cooper Clarke/The Worst/The Fall/ The Prefects/The Negatives/Warsaw: Electric Circus, Manchester.” Sounds, October 15, 1977. Savage, Jon. “Devo Look Into the Future!” Sounds, November 26, 1977. Accessed January 22, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/devolook-into-the-future Savage, Jon. “Pere Ubu, the Modern Dance.” Sounds, February 1978. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/pere-ubuthe-modern-dance Savage, Jon. “Power Pop Part 2: The C&A Generation in the Land of the Bland.” Sounds, February 18, 1978. Accessed March 19, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/power-pop-part-2-the-ca-generation-in-the-landof-the-bland Savage, Jon. “Lou Reed: Street Hassle.” Sounds, March 11, 1978. Accessed April 7, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/lou-reed-istreet-hasslei Savage, Jon. “Cabaret Voltaire: Something Strange Is Going on in Sheffield Tonight.” Sounds, April 1978. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/cabaret-voltaire-something-strange-is-going-on-in-sheffield-tonightSavage, Jon. “Various Artists: The Akron Compilation (Stiff); Short Circuit—­Live at the Electric Circus (Virgin).” Sounds, June 24, 1978. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/various-artists-ithe-akroncompilationi-stiff-ishort-circuit—live-at-the-electric-circusi-virgin Savage, Jon. “Public Image Ltd.: the Factory, Manchester.” Melody Maker, June 18, 1979. Accessed December 16, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/public-image-ltd-the-factory-manchester-/ Savage, Jon. “Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures (Factory FACT 10).” Melody Maker, July 21, 1979, 27. Savage, Jon. “Angst in an East Lancs Wasteland.” Melody Maker, September 8, 1979, 31.

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Bibliography  205 Savage, Jon. “An Interview with Martin Hannett 29th May 1989.” Touch-­Vagabond, 1992. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/an-interview-with-martin-hannett-29th-may-1989/ Schwartz, Andy. “R.E.M.” New York Rocker, January 1982. Shaw, Greg. “The Future Will Happen This Year: Space Rock.” Phonograph Record, March 1973. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/the-future-will-happen-this-year-space-rock Silverton, Peter. “The Clash: Greatness from Garageland.” Trouser Press, February 1978. Accessed December 10, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-clash-greatness-from-garageland Silverton, Peter. “Lou Reed in Cloning Sensation!” Sounds, May 6, 1978. Accessed April 7, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/lou-reed-incloning-sensation Silverton, Peter. “Bruce Springsteen: Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Sounds, June 10, 1978. Silverton, Peter. “Rock in Akron: the Music of Greater Akron.” Sounds, June 17, 1978. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/rock-in-akron-the-music-of-greater-akron Silverton, Peter. “Lou Reed at Hammersmith Odeon.” Sounds, April 1979. Accessed April 7, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/loureed-at-hammersmith-odeon Snowdon, Don. “Pere Ubu Plays for Body, Brain, Pere Ubu: The Whiskey, Los Angeles.” Los Angeles Time, August 4, 1979. Accessed April 6, 2015, http://www. rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/pere-ubu-plays-for-body-brain Spencer, Neil. “Some Girls Do It Pretty Good.” New Musical Express, August 12, 1978, 43. Sutherland, Steve. “Sounding Out.” Melody Maker, November 8, 1980, 23. Sutherland, Steve. “The Sound of Music,” Melody Maker, November 22, 1980, 22. Valentine, Penny. “Flying Lizards: TV.” Creem, May 1980. Accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/flying-lizards-tv Various contributors, “The Front Bit: The ZigZag Faves of ’78,” ZigZag, July 1978, 4–­5. Walsh, Steve. “Subway Sect.” ZigZag, September 1977, 12–­14. Weizman, Danny (Shredder). “The Gun Club.” Flipside, 1981. Accessed December 18, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-gunclub-2 Westwood, Chris. “Cabaret Voltaire.” ZigZag, September 1978, 18–­19. Whalley, Chas de. “MX-­80,” Sounds, December 3, 1977. Whalley, Chas de. “Power Pop Part 1: Suddenly, Everything is Power Pop!” Sounds, February 11, 1978. Accessed March 19, 2014, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/power-pop-part-1-suddenly-everything-is-power-pop Williams, Richard. “The Pop Group/LKJ/Nico/Cab Voltaire.” Melody Maker, October 21, 1978. Accessed December 10, 2013, http://www.rocksbackpages. com/Library/Article/the-pop-grouplkjnicocab-voltaire Wolcott, James. “A Conservative Impulse in the New Rock Underground.” Village Voice, August 18, 1975. Worral, Frank. “Looking to Tomorrow.” Melody Maker, September 15, 1979, 11.

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Bibliography  207 ence, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Boswell, Matthew. Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film. Basingstoke, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Translated by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Brackett, David. “(In Search of) Musical Meaning: Genre, Categories, and Crossover.” In Popular Music Studies, edited David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus, 65–­83. London: Arnold, 2002. Brackett, David. “What a Difference a Name Makes: Two Instances of African American Music.” In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, 238–­50. New York: Routledge, 2003. Brackett, David. “Questions of Genre in Black Popular Music.” Black Music Research Journal 25, no. 1 (2005): 73–­92. Brackett, David. The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Brackett, David. “Elvis Costello, the Empire of the E Chord, and a Magic Moment or Two.” Popular Music 24, no. 3 (2005): 357–­67. Brackett, David. “Black or White? Michael Jackson and the Idea of Crossover.” Popular Music and Society (May 2012): 169–­85. Brackett, David. “AMS/RRHOFM Lecture April 24, 2012.” YouTube video, 1:30:53. Posted by amsformusicology, May 16, 2012. Accessed December 12, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J38fq0fHV4 Brackett, David. The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates. 3rd ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014. Brackett, David. Categorizing Sound: Genre and Identity in Popular Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Brackett, David. “Rock.” The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Vol. 10. Genres, International. London: Continuum, forthcoming. Bradley, Lloyd. This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica’s Music. New York: Grove Press, 2001. Bradley, Lloyd. Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-­Garde, translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Burt, Ramsay. “Dissolving in Pleasure: The Threat of the Queer Male Dancing Body.” In Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage. Edited by Jane C. Desmond, 209–­42, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Butt, Gavin. Being in a Band: Artschool Experiment in Post-­Punk Leeds. Forthcoming. Butt, Gavin, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher. Post-­Punk Then and Now. London: Repeater, 2016. Cateforis, Theo. Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011.

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208  Bibliography Church, David. “Welcome to the ‘Atrocity Exhibition’: Ian Curtis, Rock Death, and Disability.” Disability Studies Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Fall 2006). Accessed February 17, 2015, http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/804/979 Coates, Norma. “(R)Evolution Now? Rock and the Political Potential of Gender.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, edited by Sheila Whitely, 50–­ 65. London: Routledge, 1997. Corbett, John. “Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others.” In Western Music and Its Others, edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, 163–­86. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Crossley, Nick. Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: The Punk and Post-­ Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975–­80. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Curtis, Deborah. Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Davis, Kathy, Mary S. Evans, and Judith Lorber, eds. Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies. London: Sage Publications. Daynes, Sarah. Times and Memory in Reggae Music: The Politics of Hope. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” In On Narrative, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Doyle, Peter. Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording, 1900–­ 1960. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Duncombe, Stephen, and Maxwell Tremblay. White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race. London: Verso, 2011. Dyer, Richard. “In Defense of Disco.” In On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 410–­18. New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Fabbri, Franco. “Genre Theories and Their Applications in the Historical and Analytical Study of Popular Music: A Commentary on My Own Publications.” PhD dissertation, University of Huddersfield, 2012. Fabbri, Franco. “Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications.” Accessed December 14, 2014, http://www.tagg.org/others/ffabbri81a.html Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Crown, 1991. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Atlantic, 2008. Fast, Susan. “Music, Contexts, and Meaning in U2.” In Expression in Pop-­Rock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays, edited by Walter Everett. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK; Washington: Zero Books, 2014. Ford, Simon. Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. London: Black God, 1999. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge; and, the Discourse on Language, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

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Bibliography  209 Frank, Gillian. “Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash against Disco.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 2 (May 2007): 276–­306. Friedlander, Paul. Rock and Roll: A Social History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies.” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (September 2006): 425–­43. Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996. Frith, Simon, and Howard Horne. Art into Pop. London: Methuen, 1987. Frith, Simon, and Angela McRobbie. “Music and Sexuality.” In On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 369–­ 90. New York: Pantheon, 1990. Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989. Gendron, Bernard. “Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs.” In Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, edited by Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Gendron, Bernard. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-­Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Gilman, Sander. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gilroy, Paul. “Two Sides to Rock Against Racism.” In White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race, edited by Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay, 177–­89. London; New York: Verso, 2011. Goddard, Michael, and Benjamin Halligan. Mark E. Smith and the Fall: Art, Music and Politics. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Goodyer, Ian. Crisis Music: The Cultural Politics of Rock Against Racism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Gordon, Bonnie. “Tori Amos’ Inner Voices.” In Women’s Voices Across Musical Worlds, edited by Jane A. Bernstein, 187–­207. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. London: Praeger, 1998. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Green, Lucy. Gender, Music, Education. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Green, Lucy. How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Is There Rock After Punk?” In On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 111–­23. New York: Pantheon, 1990. Gunn, Joshua. “Gothic Music and the Inevitably of Genre.” Popular Music and Society 23, no. 1 (1999): 31–­50.

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210  Bibliography Haddon, Mimi. “Dub is the New Black: Modes of Identification and Tendencies of Appropriation in Late-­1970s Post-­Punk,” Popular Music 36, no. 2 (2017): 283–­301. Haddon, Mimi. “Not Playing Properly: Amateurism as Generic Choice in Three Post-­Punk Case Studies—­the Slits, Lora Logic, and the Raincoats.” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 23 (2019, forthcoming). Haddon, Mimi. “From ‘New Music(k)’ to ‘WHITE MUSIC’: Artiness, Wire, and the Emergence of Post-­Punk, 1977–­1979.” In Music and Genre: New Directions, edited by Georgina Born and David Brackett. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming. Halberstam, Jack (Judith). Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979. Hesmondhalgh, David. “Post-­Punk’s Attempt to Democratize the Music Industry.” Popular Music 16, no. 3 (Oct. 1997): 255–­74. Hollows, Joanne. “Spare Rib, Second-­Wave Feminism and the Politics of Consumption.” Feminist Media Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 268–­87. Home, Stewart. Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock. Hove, UK: Codex, 1995. Hook, Peter. Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division. New York: It Books, 2013. hooks, bell. “Postmodern Blackness.” Postmodern Culture 1, no. 1 (September 1990). Accessed August 27, 2018, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/27283 Hoover, Michael, and Lisa Stokes. “Pop Music and the Limits of Cultural Critique: Gang of Four Shrinkwraps Entertainment.” Popular Music and Society 22, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 21–­38. Hornby, Nick. High Fidelity. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. Howe, Zoe Street. Typical Girls? The Story of the Slits. London: Omnibus Press, 2009. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Inglis, Sam. “Four Decades of De-­Evolution.” Sound on Sound, August 2010. James, Robin. “Is the Post-­in Post-­Identity the Post-­in Post-­Genre?” Popular Music 36, no. /1 (2017): 21–­32. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Keightley, Keir. “Reconsidering Rock.” In The Cambridge Companion to Rock and Pop, edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street, 109–­42. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kennedy, Charles A. “When Cairo Met Main Street: Little Egypt, Salome Dances, and the World’s Fairs of 1893 and 1904.” In Music and Culture in America, 1861–­ 1918, edited by Michael Saffle, 271–­77. New York: Garland, 1998. Kennedy, Jake. Joy Division and the Making of Unknown Pleasures. London: Unanimous, 2006. Laing, Dave. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keynes, UK; Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1985. Lawrence, Tim. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–­1979. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

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Bibliography  211 Lawrence, Tim. Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–­1983. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place. London; New York: Verso, 1994. Lorre, Sean. “Urban Blues in Chicago and London.” Paper presented at the McGill Music Graduate Students Society Symposium, Montréal, QC, March 21–­22, 2014. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Marcus, Greil. In the Fascist Bathroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Maycock, James. “Metro and the Birth of the British Sound System.” The Independent, August 1998. Accessed April 5, 2015, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/ Library/Article/metro—the-birth-of-the-british-sound-system McKay, George. Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Mills, Fred “Everything Is Cool: From Followed Function for Athens Postpunk Legends Pylon.” Harp, December 2007. Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Neale, Stephen. Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1980. Nyong’o, Tavia Amolo Ochieng. “I Feel Love: Disco and Its Discontents.” Criticism 50, no. 1 (2008): 101–­12. O’Brien, Lucy. “Can I Have a Taste of Your Ice Cream?” Punk & Post-­Punk 1, no. 1 (2012): 27–­40. O’Meara, Caroline. “The Raincoats: Breaking Down Punk Rock’s Masculinities.” Popular Music 22, no. 3 (2003): 299–­313. Osborne, Peter. “Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category.” In Postmodernism and the Re-­Reading of Modernity, edited by Francis Baker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen, 65–­84. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. Pareles, Jon. “Augustus Pablo, 46, Musician; Helped Shaped Reggae’s Sound.” New York Times, May 20, 1999. Accessed March 26, 2013, http://www.nytimes. com/1999/05/20/arts/augusto-pablo-46-musician-helped-shape-reggae-ssound.html Partridge, Christopher. “King Tubby Meets the Upsetter at the Grass Roots of Dub.” Popular Music History 2, no. 3 (2007): 309–­31. Partridge, Christopher. Dub in Babylon: Understanding the Evolution and Significance of Dub Reggae in Jamaica and Britain from King Tubby to Post-­Punk. London: Equinox, 2010. Piekut, Benjamin. “Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-­ Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965–­1975.” Journal of the American Musicological Society (Fall 2014): 771–­826. Prendergast, Mark. “The Durutti Column Biography 1978–­1991.” The Durutti Column. Accessed August 22, 2012, http://thedurutticolumn.com/the_durutti_column_biography_1978–1991.html Radano, Ronald. Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

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212  Bibliography Ramsey, Richard David. “The People Versus Smokey Bear: Metaphor, Argot, and CB Radio.” Journal of Popular Culture 3, no. 2 (Fall 1979): 338–­45. Reddington, Helen. The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era. London: Equinox, 2012. Reed, S. Alexander. Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Reynolds, Simon. “The Slits: Cut.” Uncut, December 1997. Accessed October 14, 2012, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/the-slits-cut/ Reynolds, Simon. “Preface.” In Loops: Una Historia de la Musica Electronica, edited by Javier Blànquez and Omar Morera. Barcelona: Reservoir Books, 2002. Reynolds, Simon. Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–­1984. London: Penguin, 2005. Reynolds, Simon. Totally Wired: Post-­Punk Interviews and Overviews. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Reynolds, Simon, and Joy Press. The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Shumway, David. Rock Star: The Making of Musical Icons from Elvis to Springsteen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Shumway, David. “The Emergence of the Singer-­Songwriter.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-­Songwriter, edited by Katherine Williams and Justin A. Williams. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Straw, Will. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies 5, no. 3 (1991): 368–­88. Straw, Will. “Sizing Up Record Collections: Gender and Connoisseurship in Rock Music Culture.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Genre, edited by Sheila Whitely, 3–­16. London: Routledge, 1997. Street, John. Rock Rebel: The Politics of Popular Music. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Stringer, Julian. “The Smiths: Repressed (But Remarkably Dressed).” Popular Music 11, no. 1 (1992): 15–­26. Tagg, Philip. “Open Letter: ‘Black Music,’ ‘Afro-­American Music’ and ‘European Music.’” Popular Music 8, no. 3 (1989): 285–­98. Théberge, Paul. “The Sound of Nowhere: Reverb and the Construction of Sonic Space.” In The Relentless Pursuit of Tone, edited by Robert Fink, Melina Latour, and Zachary Wallmark. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Toynbee, Jason. Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity, and Institutions. London: Arnold; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Tucker, Sherrie. Swing Shift: “All-­Girl” Bands of the 1940s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Veal, Michael. Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. Waksman, Steve. Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Waksman, Steve. This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Walser, Robert. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993.

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Bibliography  213 Waltz, Mitzi, and Martin James. “The (re)Marketing of Disability in Pop.” Popular Music 28, no. 3 (2009): 367–­80. Werner, Craig. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Whitfield, Greg. “‘It Ain’t the Names that Matter, You Got to Be Able to Hear Them First.” Fodderstompf, 2007. Accessed September 9, 2014, http://www. fodderstompf.com/ARCHIVES/ARTS/reggae.html Wilson, Tony. 24 Hour Party People: What the Sleeve Notes Never Tell You. London: 4 Books, 2002. Witts, Richard. Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon. London: Virgin, 1993. Worley, Mathew. “Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines 1976–­1984: ‘While the World Was Dying, Did You Wonder Why?’” History Workshop Journal 79 (2015): 76–­106. Young, Iris Marion. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History in the West. London: Routledge, 1990.

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214  Bibliography Hannett, Martin, and Tony Wilson at Strawberry Studios in July 1980. YouTube video, 6:30, Posted by Dimitri Krissof, August 27, 2008. Accessed December 5, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI-w7LjSNi4 Hawkwind. Space Ritual. ©1973, by United Artists Records. UAD 60037/8. LP. Human League. Dare. ©1981, by Virgin. V2191, V2192. LP. Iggy Pop. The Idiot. ©1977, by RCA. APL1–­2275. LP. Iggy Pop. Lust for Life. ©1977, by RCA Victor. AFL1–­2488. LP. Josef K. “Sorry for Laughing (Official Video) (Domino Records).” YouTube video, 3:05. Posted by Domino Recording Co., May 16, 2012. Accessed December 12, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VzcWv8qKQw Joy Division. Unknown Pleasures. ©1979, 2007 by London Records. 2564 69778 9. Compact disc. Joy Division. Closer. ©1980, 2007 by London Records. 2564 69779 1. Compact disc. Joy Division. “She’s Lost Control.” YouTube video, 3:39. Posted by robbanzanas kanal, June 1, 2007. Accessed December 12, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QVc29bYIvCM Joy Division. “Transmission.” YouTube video, 2:54. Posted by Le Locomotion, August 21, 2007. Accessed December 12, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Rdf9gxp-_4A. Joy Division. “Joy Division—­The Documentary.” YouTube video, 1:35:44. Posted by Mathieu Guillien, July 17, 2012. Accessed February 10, 2015, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=b1qQsHGHi8w. Original source: Joy Division. Directed by Grant Gee. 2007; Rip Rig + Panic. ©1965, by Limelight. LS 86027. LP. Led Zeppelin. Led Zeppelin II. ©1969, 2011 by Atlantic. LWA-­5004. Compact disc. Lora Logic. Pedigree Charm. ©1982, by Rough Trade. ROUGH 28. LP. New Order. Substance 1987. ©1987, 1999 by London Records. 3984282272. Compact disc. Pablo, Augustus. “Java.” ©1971, by Impact! No catalog number. LP. Pere Ubu. The Modern Dance. ©1978, by Blank Records. 001. LP. Pop Group. Y. ©1979, by Radar Records. RAD 20. LP. Porter, Janet Street. “John Lydon Interview Circa 1979.” YouTube video, 6:41. Posted by SexPistolsChannel, September 12, 2009. Accessed January 25, 2015, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfWMnQcJ9Yc Public Image Ltd. First Issue. ©1978, 2013 by Light in the Attic. LITA100. LP. Public Image Ltd. Metal Box. ©1979, by Virgin. METAL 1. LP. “Punk Britannia at the BBC [09]. Magazine—­Shot by Both Sides (TOTP 1978).” YouTube video, 2:05. Posted by DeKlootHommel, June 27, 2012. Accessed January 25, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxahgaOQch0 Raincoats. The Raincoats. ©1979, by Rough Trade. ROUGH 3. LP. Rip Rig + Panic. “You’re My Kind of Climate.” ©1982 by Virgin. VS507–­12. 12-­inch single. Roxy Music. For Your Pleasure. ©1973, 1999 by Virgin. ROXYCD2 24394739922. LP. Runaways, the. Queens of Noise. ©1977 by Mercury. SRM11126. LP. [Various.] Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus. ©1978, by Virgin. VCL 5003. LP. Slits. Cut. ©1979, 2009 by Island Records. 5321250. Compact disc.

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Bibliography  215 Slits, the. “The Slits—­Peel Session 1977.” YouTube video, 9:41. Posted by Vibracobra XXIII, December 1, 2013. Accessed February 21, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E-9gceMQgA Stroszek. Directed by Werner Herzog. 1976. Troy, MI: Anchor Bay Entertainment, Inc., 2001. Wire. Chairs Missing. ©1978, 2006 by Pinkflag. PF12843190000517. Compact disc.

Selected Websites and Internet Media BBC Radio 1. “John Peel.” Last updated September 2007. Accessed February 5, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/johnpeel/ Factory Alphabet, A. Accessed February 27, 2013. http://afactoryalphabet. blogspot.ca/2009/05/x-is-for-x-o-dus.html Factory Discography, A. Accessed December 5, 2013. http://www.trans.com.au/ factory/index2.html Fodderstompf. Accessed December 20, 2013. http://www.fodderstompf.com/ ARCHIVES/INTERVIEWS/rm578.html Joy Division Central. Accessed December 5, 2013, http://www.joydiv.org/eqpt. htm Martin Hannett. Accessed January 25, 2015. http://www.martinhannett.co.uk/ bio.htm Reilly, Vini. Interview with Two Unidentified Interviewers, August 13, 1981. Accessed December 5, 2013, http://users.rcn.com/rpsweb/durutti-column/ texts/iv-muntplein.html Ubu Projex. Accessed October 4, 2013. http://www.ubuprojex.net

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Index

2-­tone, 163 10cc, 28 Abyssinia, 73 Acme Attractions, 62 Adam and the Ants, 1 Adorno, Theodor, 80, 154, 182n8 Adverts, the, 23, 24 Africa (as utopia), 72–­75 Albertine, Viv, 103, 106, 108, 112–­113 Alimentado, Dr, 64 Altman, Rick: audiences, 9–­10; “constellated communities,” 9–­10, 161 Amnesty International Benefit, 62, 65 Amon Düül, 26, 151 Amos, Tori, 110 Akron, Ohio, 136, 139, 141, 157, 191n12 Apocalypse Now, 92 Arabs, the, 38 arty, artiness, 24, 28, 30–­32, 34, 41, 44, 54, 89, 133, 153, 155–­156, 158–­159, 172n33 art colleges, institutions, 10, 16, 141–­ 143, 154, 155, 186n5, 186n14 art rock, 31, 153, 156, 157 Aswad, 58 Athens, Georgia, 140–­142, 155 Au Pairs, 106, 130, 131; Playing with a Different Sex, 130 Auslander, Philip, 124, 127 avant-­garde, 93, 133, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 162, 195n77, 196n89;

as musical category, 14, 21, 32, 44, 155; as characteristic, 14, 19, 23, 34, 67, 154 B-­52s, 23, 141 Bachman, Randy, 126 Bad Brains, 76, 163 Baker, Danny, 86–­88 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 15, 76 Ball, Hugo, 154 Bangs, Lester, 85 Banks, Robin, 38 Basement 5, 65, 197n27 Battle, Mike, 68 Bauhaus, 46, 98 Bay Area, 142 Bayton, Mavis, 101, 104–­106, 111, 129 BBC Radio 1, 41, 113 Beach Boys, the, 132, 134 Beatles, the, 28, 40–­41 Beebee, Thomas O., 11, 36 Bee Gees, the, 84–­85, 99 Bell, Max, 67, 92–­93, 134, 155–­156 Benson, George, 85 Berke, Joe, 93 Berman, Marshall, 133, 144 Bernhardt, Sarah, 44 Berry, Chuck, 56, 176n2 Birch, Ian, 23, 148, 156, 157 Birmingham, 1, 59, 64 Birthday Party, the, 46, 58 black Atlantic, 38, 61 217

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218  Index Black, Gaye, 130 Blackwell, Chris, 178n18 Bloc Party, 4, 53 Blondie, 23, 27, 35, 37, 76, 86, 163; “Heart of Glass,” 86; Parallel Lines, 37 Bloomington, Indiana, 140, 142 blues, 56–­57, 76, 149, 164, 176n4 blues-­based music, 37, 57–­58, 60–­61, 65, 68, 73, 149, 156, 164, 176n2, 176n4, 177n8 Blue, Vicky, 126 bluegrass, 140 bohemia, 6–­7; definition of, 14; bohemian, 6, 16, 36–­37 Bohn, Chris, 15, 56–­57, 68, 86, 89, 92 Bolan, Marc, 215 Bonds International Casino, 163–­164 Bono, 49–­50, 52 Booji Boy, 146 Boomtown Rats, the, 49, 51 Born, Georgina, 8–­9, 17–­18, 62–­63 Boston (band), 35, 41 Bourdieu, Pierre: field of cultural production, 36; “proletaroid intelligentsia,” 14; symbolic capital, 14, 168n18; positions, position-­takings, 106–­107, 187n20 Bovell, Dennis, 25, 60, 62–­63, 73, 113, 116–­117 Bowie, David, 62, 177n13; “Heroes,” 26; Lodger, 26; Low, 26 “Space Oddity,” 1; Boyfriends, the, 28–­29 Brackett, David: genre, 4, 98; social identity and music, 2, 4, 8; addressivity, 15 Brando, Marlon, 92 Branson, Richard, 64 Brazier, Chris, 15, 25, 30–­31, 126–­127 Britten, Benjamin, 68 Brown, Steven, 141 Buchla, Don, 153 Budgie (Peter Clarke), 112–­116, 188n34 Bürger, Peter, 156, 197n99 Burning Spear, 38

Bush, Kate, 106, 169n41 Bushell, Garry, 33–­34, 41 Butler, Judith, 106, 119, 129 Butt, Gavin, 3 Buzzcocks, the, 23, 24, 30, 42 Byrds, the, 151 Byrne, David, 67, 96–­97 Cabaret Voltaire, 19, 24, 62, 133, 137–­ 158, 192n21, 193n41 Cage, John, 154 Cale, John, 117 California, 132, 134 Can, 26, 87 canons, 6–­7, 12–­13, 168n22 Casale, Gerald V., 155 Cateforis, Theo, 96–­97, 144–­146, 152; on new wave, 22–­23 categories of people and categories of music, 1–­2, 6, 10, 63 CBGBs, 23 CBS, 67, 76 Certain Ratio, A, 4, 6, 44, 49, 85, 89, 97–­98 Chapman, Mike, 171n27 Cherry, Neneh, 6 Chic, 87–­89 Chicago World’s Fair, 74 Chin, Clive, 74 Chinn, Nicky, 171n27 ChinniChap, 28, 171n27 Christgau, Robert, 35–­37, 54 Chrome, 142–­143, 146; Half Machine Lip Moves, 142 citizens-­band radio, 132–­133, 191n2 Clapton, Eric, 59, 63 Clash, the, 5, 24, 39, 56, 66, 160, 163–­ 164; as new wave, 34, 35, 38, 163; as punk, 7, 28, 30, 163; “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais,” 5, 64, 66 Clarke, John Cooper, 29 classic rock, 7, 30, 101, 125, 130, 148, 149, 150, 153, 163,175n1 Cleveland, Ohio, 132–­136, 139, 140, 158 Clock DVA, 138 Cobalt Haze, 16

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Index  219 Cold War, the, 26, 171n22 cold wave, 25 Coleman, Jaz, 95 Collins, Judy, 108 Combichrist, 147 confessional, 110, 188n38 constellated communities, 9, 161, 174n79 Contortions, the, 36 Cook, Richard, 117 Coon, Caroline, 104, 169n1, 187n15 Cope, Julian, 46 Costello, Elvis, 29, 54, 98; as new wave, 7, 24, 34–­36; as power pop, 27; My Aim Is True, 35 Corbett, John, 67 County, Wayne/Jayne, 39 Coxone, Sir, 60 Crossley, Nick, 3; DiMaggio and “commercial classification,” 14; on publications, 14; social networks, 3 Culture (band), 64 Currie, Cherie, 126, 127 Curtis, Deborah, 69 Curtis, Ian, 69, 91–­92, 94–­95 Cuyahoga River, 135 dada, 29–­30, 155, 157, 197n99 Damned, the, 28, 34, 98 dance music, 6, 19, 36, 55, 87, 90, 92, 96, 183n33, 195n78 Dead Boys, the, 27 Dead Kennedys, 141 Death (band), 163 “Death to Disco,” 87 Delta 5, 6, 49, 106 Denny, Martin, 69 Depeche Mode, 145 Derrida, Jacques: “The Law of Genre,” 11; participation and belonging, 11, 38 Detroit, 85, 136 Devo, 19, 23–­25, 28, 30, 34–­35, 38, 133–­ 157, 171n24, 194n52; “Jock Homo,” 146 Devoto, Howard, 31–­32 Die Krupps, 147

Dipalma, Carolyn, 160–­161 Dire Straits, 163, 172n30 disco, 6, 12, 15, 19, 25, 34, 35, 36, 41, 54, 57, 118, 145, 160, 163; characterization, 78; “Dialectics Meets Disco,” 32; Disco Demolition Night, 85 Disco Sucks, 36 diversity: as capital, 7, 14, 162 Dixon, Don, 68 Doherty, Harry, 46 Doors, the, 49–­50, 100 Doubting Thomas, 147 Doyle, Peter, 68, 75 Drummond, Don, 74 dub, 25, 50, 57, 176n5 dub-­reggae, 5, 18, 58, 59, 160, 164; borrowing from, 5, 15, 65; as emergent identification, 9 Duke Reid, 60 Duke Vin, 60 Dunbar, Newton, 64 Dunbar, Sly, 178n26 Durutti Column, the, 58, 66–­68, 76; “Sketch for Summer,” 68–­69 Dury, Ian, 35 Dyer, Richard: “In Defense of Disco,” 83–­84, 95–­96; White, 98 Dylan, Bob, 26 Eagle, Roger, 67 Echo and the Bunnymen, 25, 42, 46–­ 50, 53, 175n83 Echoplex, 68 Edmunds, Dave, 38 electropop, 2, 34, 71 ELP, 104, 145, 152 Eno, Brian, 25, 26, 31, 38, 58, 67, 177n8; My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 67 epileptic, epilepsy, 92 ESG, 163, 164 Eshun, Kodwo, 129, 182n15 Ethiopia, 73 Factory Records, 48, 50, 62, 64, 67–­ 69, 155, 159

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220  Index Fall, the, 30–­31, 34, 54, 58, 89, 172n37 Fanon, Frantz, 93 Farren, Mick, 163–­164 Faust, 26 feminism, 160–­161; second-­wave, 37, 39, 102, 106–­110 Ferguson, Kathy, 161 Fernwood, Fernwood 2 Night, 156, 196n96 Fisher, Mark, 3, 78, 89; exclusions, 5; “lost futures,” 69, 71, 162; on the music press, 14; “popular modernism,” 22, 48–­49 Flamingo Club, 60 Fleetwood Mac, 35 Foad, Paul, 130 Fogelberg, Dan, 140 Ford, Lita, 126 Ford, Simon, 155 Fowley, Kim, 126–­127 Fox, Jackie, 126 Foucault, Michel: “dispersions,” 2; Friedrich Nietzsche, 13; formations of knowledge, 13; suspending continuity, 20 Four Aces, 64 Frampton, Peter, 35, 176n2 France, 74 Frith, Simon: genres in opposition, 11; on genre labels, 6, 12; on readers’ polls, 38; and Angela McRobbie, 124; and Howard Horne, 131, 155, 172n35, 186n5, 186n14, 187n23, 195n59 Futurama Festival, 46, 49, 53, 175n83, 193n41 Futureheads, the, 4, 163 Gang of Four, 4, 15, 21, 32–­33, 39–­41, 46, 52–­53, 58, 66, 71, 74, 76, 89; Entertainment!, 71; “Ether,” 71; Return the Gift, 10 Gartside, Green, 172n35, 175n1 gatekeeping, gatekeepers, 5, 15, 20, 39, 104, 129–­130, 139, 150, 168n18 Geldof, Bob, 40–­41, 49–­50 Gendron, Bernard, 13, 42, 44, 154; on

new wave, 23 gender: androgyny, 32; and genre, 2, 17, 41, 54, 85; exclusions, 37, 39, 54; female musicians, 19, 101, 100–­165; “femininity,” 19; forging masculinity, 79, 92, 99; rock as masculine, 29, 85, 109–­110 Generation X, 23, 34, 35, 66 Genesis, 104 genre: as discourse, 3, 13–­14, 16, 25, 139; as networks, 3, 14, 16, 25, 142; as sonic characteristics; 2, 4, 25; audiences, 2, 9, 14, 16, 39–­40; belonging; 6, 11, 38, 67, 69, 97, 157, 162; participation, 11, 38, 42–­46, 69, 125, 138, 143, 159 Gerswhin, George, 154 Ghura, Tony, 127–­128 Gibbs, Joe, 67 Gilman, Sander, 82, 93 Gilroy, Paul, 18, 61, 73, 81, 91, 93 Gill, Andy (Gang of Four), 71 Gill, Andy (writer), 15, 42, 44, 49–­50, 137, 140, 142, 147, 148, 156 glam rock, 124–­125, 127 Goldman, Vivien, 7, 15, 26, 50, 57, 59, 64, 116, 149, 155 goth, 46, 96–­98 gothic, 89, 91–­92, 98 Grabel, Richard, 134, 141, 145 Grandmaster Flash, 164 Grease, 36, 40 Grossberg, Lawrence, “affective alliance,” 9 Hagen, Nina, 101 Haig, Paul, 95–­96 Halberstam, Jack, 124 Hannett, Martin, 66–­69, 89, 91, 92 Hammersmith Odeon, 82, 100 Hansa Studio, Berlin 26 Harries, Andrew, 172n31 Harron, Mary, 7, 15, 32–­33, 44, 96 Hassell, Jon, 67 Hawaiian steel guitar, 68 Hay, Vanessa Briscoe, 119, 141, 143, 155 Hayward, Charles, 117–­119 Hawkwind, 150–­152

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Index  221 Hazlewood, Lee, 67, 76; Nancy & Lee, 69 heavy metal, 1, 51–­52 Hebdige, Dick, 58 Hendrix, Jimi, 56 Hernandez, Patrick (“I Was Born to Be Alive”), 145, 194n50 Hesmondhalgh, David: four planes of identity formation in music, 8, 18; regionalism, 136–­137 Hewitt, Paolo, 113 High Fidelity, 174n78 Home, Stewart, 172n33 Hook, Peter, 111, 180n56 hooks, bell, 162 Hoopii, Sol, 69 Hope and Anchor Front Row Festival, 28–­29 Horne, Howard, 131, 155, 172n35, 186n5, 186n14, 187n23, 195n59 Hudson, Keith, 38 Hull, Robot A., 132–­134, 143, 154–­156 Human League, the, 1–­2, 33–­34, 113, 145, 170n10; “The Things that Dreams are Made Of,” 2 Human Switchboard, 192n29 Hutter, Ralf, 25 Huyssen, Andreas, 170n6 identity, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7–­13, 37–­38, 41, 45, 54, 58, 62, 70, 86, 97, 102, 106, 116, 125, 134, 140, 162–­163 Idol, Billy, 40–­41 Iggy Pop, 49, 91; The Idiot, 26; Lust for Life, 26 imagined communities, 47, 175n79 indigenization, 61 industrial (genre), 19, 133, 137–­140, 142, 144, 147–­148, 158 Inglis, Sam, 145 Interpol, 4, 163 Island Records, 112 Jackson, Wanda, 105 Jam, the, 24, 34, 39, 54, 163 Jamaica, Jamaican, 18, 58–­62, 64–­67, 73–­74, 178n18

Jarry, Alfred, 154–­155 Jethro Tull, 104 Jett, Joan, 126–­127 Johnson, Donald, 6 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 62, 65; Poet and the Roots, 38 Johnson, Robert, 56 Jones, Steve, 113 Josef K, 89, 95–­96; “Sorry for Laughing,” 95–­96 Joy Division, 4, 5, 15, 21, 46, 49, 52-­ 55, 58, 66–­67, 71, 74–­78, 89–­98, 111, 141, 159, 162–­163; Closer, 67; “Dead Souls,” 90; “Decades,” 69; “In a Lonely Place,” 70; “Love will Tear Us Apart,” 69; “Shadowplay,” 52; “She’s Lost Control,” 90, 94–­96; “Sound of Music, The,” 69; Still, 90; “These Days,” 69; “Transmission,” 94–­95; Unknown Pleasures, 52 Kamp, Bert van der, 66–­67 Kansas (band), 35–­36, 41 Kaye, Carol, 105 Keightley, Keir, 13 Kent, Nick, 80–­83, 91, 94 Kent State University, 155–­156 Kerr, Jeremy, 85 Killing Joke, the, 46, 95–­96 King Mob, 155 King Tubby, 25, 50 Kirk, Rahsaan Roland, 167n4 Knack, the, 163 Kopkind, Andrew, 80, 84 Kosmische Musik, 27, 44 Kraftwerk, 25–­27, 171n24 Kubernik, Harvey, 126 Labelle, 108 Laing, Dave, 3; punk to post-­punk, 21–­23 Laing, R.D., 93 lateral borrowing, 16, 22, 86, 170n9 Lawrence, Tim, 16, 79 LCD Soundsystem, 53, 163 Leckey, Mark, 94–­95

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222  Index Led Zeppelin, 35, 149, 150, 152, 181n6; “Whole Lotta Love,” 149–­150 Leeds, 34, 46, 49, 62, 137, 140, 142 Leigh Valley Rock Festival, 48 Legg, Phil, 117–­119 Lemmy (Ian Kilmister), 150 Lennox, Annie, 106 Lesser Free Trade Hall, 102 Letts, Don, 45, 59, 61–­65, 73 Levene, Keith, 56–­59, 62–­63, 68, 76, 164 LiLiPUT, 6 Lindsay, Vachel, 156 lists, 12, 39, 47, 53, 174n78. See also canons Liverpool, 46, 48, 174n75 Locks, Fred, 64 Loggins, Kenny, 140 Logic, Lora, 19, 102, 117, 125, 130; “Brute Fury,” 118; Pedigree Charm, 117 London, 46; Brixton, 140; Covent Garden, 65; Holland Park, 62; Islington, 64; Ladbroke Grove, 60; Soho, 60 London Weekend Television, 65 Los Angeles, 87 Lowe, Nick, 35–­36 Luv’d Ones, the, 105 Lyceum Theatre, 71 Lydon, John, 119, 176n2; interest in disco, 86–­88; in dub-­reggae, 5, 57, 63–­66, 71 madness, 79, 91–­97 Madonna, 106 Magazine, 34, 43, 112; as New Musick, 29–­30; as post-­punk, 31; “Shot By Both Sides,” 31, 33 Maimone, Tony, 154, 191n11 Mallinder, Stephen, 138 Manchester, 48, 62, 102; Moss Side, 69 Marcus, Greil, 22, 29, 39, 46, 49, 153 Marley, Bob, 63 Marxist, Marxism, 33, 94 masculinity, 7, 19, 78, 93–­94, 99. See also gender

Maxïmo Park, 53 McCook, Tommy, 74 McGeoch, John, 112–­113 McLaren, Malcolm, 31, 61, 155 McNeil, Legs, 85 McRobbie, Angela, 124 mediation, levels of, 16, 79 melodica, 66–­75 Method Actors, 141 Metro Club, 60 Metro, DJ, 60 Micachu & the Shapes, 163 middle-­of-­the-­road (MOR), 35–­36, 41, 54 Middles, Mick, 48–­50, 92 minimalism, 42–­43 Mittoo, Jackie, 74 “modern,” 19, 23, 133, 144, 145, 148, 158 Montreal, 117, 136 Moore, Dizzy, 74 Morley, Paul, 15, 51, 76, 92, 168n22; coining post-­punk, 3 Moroder, Giorgio, 25 Morrison, Jim, 1, 100 Mothersbaugh, Mark, 145–­146, 152–­ 155 Motörhead, 150 Murray, Charles Shaar, 31–­33, 43, 62, 71 musical characteristics. See sonic characteristics music information retrieval, 13 musique concrète, 50, 113, 116, 195n70 MX-­80 Sound, 25, 140, 142, 143, 192n29 Needs, Kris, 14, 15, 27, 38, 39, 45, 62, 108–­115, 126–­127, 169n41 Neale, Stephen, 45 Neu!, 27, 87 New Musick, 22, 25–­30, 32, 34, 37–­38, 42–­44, 50, 53, 78, 117, 160, 171n24 New Order, 70, 90 New Pop, 46–­47, 49 New Rock, 46–­47 new wave, 6–­7, 23, 35, 42, 54, 59, 127,

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Index  223 140; British new wave, 34; definitions, 29, 42, 146, 170n10, 170n14, 172n37; new-­wave field, 24, 30, 36, 41, 45, 53, 77, 139, 159, 163; sonic characteristics, 42–­43 New York City, 79–­80, 132, 134 New York Dolls, 32 Newton-­John, Olivia, 36, 40 Nico, 26, 62, 106, 117 Northern Soul, 94 Numan, Gary, 23, 71, 145, 147, 149, 152 Nyong’o, Tavia, 81, 85 O’Meara, Caroline, 101, 124–­125, 129 Ohio, 133, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142, 144, 155, 192n12 Oi!, 21–­22, 24 Oliver, Andrea, 6 On-­U Sound, 57 Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, 145 orientalism, 67, 75 Orme, John, 116–­117 Osborne, Peter, 154 Pablo, Augustus, 64, 66, 70–­71, 74–­76; East of the River Nile, 74; “Java,” 74 Pacific Northwest, 136 Page, Jimmy, 149 Palmolive, 111–­115 Papua New Guinea, 72 Pareles, Jon, 74 Paton, Maureen, 100–­104, 107, 109, 126, 131 Pazz and Jop, 35–­38. See also Robert Christgau Peel, John, 113–­116, 189n49 Penman, Ian, 15, 49–­50 Pere Ubu, 15, 19, 28, 30, 34–­36, 54, 132–­158; Dub Housing, 135; The Modern Dance, 142, 143, 144; “Street Waves,” 143, 149–­150 Perry, Lee “Scratch,” 42 Pink Floyd, 151 Plant, Robert, 150 Pleasers, the, 28–­29 Police, the, 5, 7, 66, 71, 76, 163; “Can’t Stand Losing You,” 71

Pollitt, Tessa, 111–­115 polls, 35–­41, 45–­50, 54 Pop Group, the, 2, 25, 28, 62, 63, 72; Y, 72 Porter, Nolan, 90 “post”: meaning of, 6–­7, 20, 24, 131, 159–­161 post-­Fordism, 136, 143–­144, 146–­147, 158 post-­genre, 162 postmodern, 161–­162 post-­punk: as eclectic, 3, 148, 152, 170n3; as experimental, 3–­4; as modernist, 3, 73, 93, 154; as radical, 3–­4, 17, 53–­54, 78, 162; as revolutionary, 22, 32, 41, 46; as progressive, 17, 46, 54, 63, 76; aura of sophistication, 5, 32; beginnings, 25; borders of, 4–­6, 139; characteristics, 2–­3, 4, 69; cohesion, 3, 48; definitions of, 2, 4, 15, 21, 25, 33, 48, 53, 55, 58, 159; difference from industrial, 137, 139–­140, 144, 151; difference from new wave, 6, 24, 35, 54, 55, 66, 72, 137, 144, 151, 161; difference from punk, 6, 24, 32, 35, 54, 55, 58, 66, 72, 86, 161; genealogy, 18, 86, 152; historical usage, 29, 31, 35, 48; hybridity, 4, 18, 22; “musicianship,” 4; neighbors, 12; newness, the new, 22, 63, 68, 72–­73; online lists, 47; “others,” 12, 18; periodization, 3, 152, 159; present-­day definitions, 18, 139, 147, 152, 157; problems of definition, 7–­8, 152; quasi-­modernist, 22, 32, 49, 53–­54, 76, 86; revival, 4; rules (of inclusion), 4, 66; sonic characteristics, 4, 53, 58, 160; stabilization, 18, 137; stylistic diversity, 2–­3, 34, 54, 160; symbolic capital, 6, 14, 15, 26, 36, 53, 66, 71, 162; system of differentiation, 12; “theatricality,” 4 Powell, Enoch, 59 power pop, 25, 27–­32, 35, 37, 44, 53, 171n26, 172n31 primitivism, 81 Prince Far I, 38

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224  Index progressive rock, 64, 104, 145, 152, 194n48 “proletaroid intelligentsia,” 14 proto-­punk, 32, 149, 150 provincialism, 141 Public Image Ltd., 4, 5, 15, 21, 24, 39, 46, 49, 56–­57, 58, 62, 65–­66, 96–­98, 113, 141, 163; “Chant,” 97; “Death Disco,” 19, 78, 85–­88, 97, 119; “Graveyard,” 97; Metal Box, 57, 63, 69–­70; Public Image: First Issue, 65; “Theme,” 65 Pure Hell, 163 punk, 59, 127, 163; as multifarious and heterogeneous, 5, 30, 33, 139, 141; definitions of, 4–­5, 7, 23, 32, 42, 78, 142, 159, 169n1, 170n14, 172n33, 172n35, 185n3; DIY ethos, 6; DIY aesthetics, 101, 107, 110, 111, 116, 123–­124, 186n11; periodization, 21, 23; sonic characteristics, 42–­43, 71, 174n65 Pylon, 119, 141 quasi-­modernist, quasimodernist, 3, 22, 32–­33, 49, 53–­54, 76–­77, 86 Quatro, Suzi, 124–­125, 127, 129 Queen, 28, 88, 104 Quick Spurts, the, 56 race: black music, 56–­57, 59, 162, 173n53, 176n2, 177n6; blackness, 7, 19; connotations of genre, 25, 38–­ 39, 62, 70, 79–­84, 89, 93; whiteness, 7, 19, 37, 54, 78, 91–­94, 98–­99 Radano, Ronald, 82–­83, 93 Radiophonic Workshop, 194n46 Rainbow Theatre, 65 Raincoats, the, 6, 15, 19, 39, 101–­102, 106–­107, 111–­112, 119–­131; “Adventures Close to Home,” 120, 121, 122, 123, 124 Ralph Records, 142 Rambali, Paul, 15, 42–­43, 92, 132, 135, 148, 150, 152 Ramones, the, 27, 35, 44, 80–­82; as punk, 7, 31, 160, 172n35

Randy’s (studio), 74 Ranking Joe and the Steppers, 38 rap, 164 Rastafarian, 45, 58–­59, 63, 72, 74–­76 Ravenstine, Allen, 135, 156 RCA, 90 Reading, 107 Reddington, Helen, 101–­103, 112, 130, 136 Reed, S. Alexander, 138, 147–­148, 158 Reed, Lou, 38, 81, 91; “I Wanna Be Black,” 81 Reel, Penny, 59, 65 reggae, 4–­6, 9, 12, 16, 18, 21, 22, 38–­39, 45, 46, 58–­77, 80–­81, 86–­87, 89, 115–­ 116, 120, 126, 140, 163–­164, 173n53 regionalism, 26, 62, 132, 133, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 153, 160; second cities, 158 Reilly, Vini, 68 REM, 141, 193n34 Residents, the, 25, 142, 150 Reynolds, Simon: Rip It Up, 3, 21, 24, 64, 72, 78, 135, 139, 153, 162; exclusions, 4–­5; on European influences, 26–­27; “post-­punk vanguard,” 17, 21, 46, 53 Rezillos, the, 34 Rhino Post-­Punk Chronicles, 10 Richman, Jonathan and the Modern Lovers, 24 Richman, Jonathan, 27 Rimbaud, Arthur, 100 Rip Rig + Panic, 1, 6, 167n4; “You’re My Kind of Climate,” 2 robotic, 26–­27, 147 rock, adult-­oriented, 28 Rock Against Racism, 10, 59, 61, 65, 177n13 rock connoisseurship, 7. See also symbolic capital rock ‘n’ roll, 21, 26–­27, 29, 42, 50, 53, 57, 68, 76, 175n1, 176n2, 185n71 Rolling Stones, the, 40, 56–­58, 66, 80, 163, 164, 181n6; Black and Blue, 58, 181n6; “Cherry Oh Baby,” 58; Some Girls, 38

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Index  225 Rotten, Johnny, 42, 43, 64. See also John Lydon Rough Trade, 149 Roundhouse, the, 102 Roxy, the, 42, 45, 61 Roxy London WC2, The, 42 Roxy Music, 32, 104, 138, 143, 145, 168n22, 171n22; For Your Pleasure, 145 Runaways, the, 125–­129; “Queens of Noise,” 125 Russell, George, 194n47 San Francisco, 141–­142 Saturday Night Fever, 40, 84–­85, 99, 183n20 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 12 Savage, Jon, 15, 25–­32, 39, 59, 82, 87, 90, 92, 134, 143, 147, 171n24, 175n81, 182n15 Saxon, 1 Scaggs, Boz, 28 Schneider, Florian, 25 Seditionaries/Sex, 31, 61 Severin, Steve, 113, 119 Sex Pistols, 44, 64–­65, 86, 88, 102–­ 104, 106, 127; as new wave, 34; as punk, 7, 28, 30; break up, 3, 31; “God Save the Queen,” 24, 90; Never Mind the Bollocks, 43 Shaggs, the, 105 Shakespeare, Robbie, 178n26 Sham 69, 42 Shaw, Greg, 151, 195n70 Sheffield, 46, 126, 133, 134, 136–­140 Sherwood, Adrian, 57 Shreveport, Lousiana, 142 Silva, Ana da, 102, 106–­108 Silverton, Peter, 82, 136 Simonon, Paul, 39 Siouxsie and the Banshees, 19, 21, 25, 27–­28, 30, 34, 38, 39, 54, 98; Kaleidoscope, 112–­113 Siouxsie Sioux, 6, 101, 106 Sisters of Mercy, the, 98 Situationism, 155, 195n77 Skatalites, the, 38

skinheads, 64 Slaughter and the Dogs, 42, 170n14, 172n37 Smith, Bruce, 178n26 Smith, Patti, 24, 35, 100–­109, 126, 130–­ 131, 185n3 Smith, Patti Group, the, 35, 185n3; Easter, 37 Smiths, the, 95 Sniffin’ Glue, 16 Snowdon, Don, 155 Sonic Youth, 163 Soul Brothers, 74 Soulettes, the, 70, 74 Sound, the, 25, 42, 46–­47, 50–­55; Jeopardy, 50, 54 sound-­system sessions, 60–­61 Slits, the, 6, 19, 39, 62–­64, 101–­103, 106–­119, 125–­126, 130, 164; Cut, 72, 109, 112–­113; “Newtown,” 113–­116 Spare Rib, 108–­109 Spencer, Neil, 119 splintering (of punk), 22, 24, 30, 54 Spitfire Boys, 112 Springsteen, Bruce, 191n5 Static Disposal, 140 Statler, Chuck, 156 Stewart, Mark, 72 Stewart, Rod, 40–­41,49, 173n57 Stiff Records, 136, 192n12 Stim, Rich, 140 Stranglers, the, 7, 28, 34, 170n14, 172n30, 172n33 Straw, Will, 86; scenes, 6; lifecycle, 10 Street-­Porter, Janet, 65 Stroszek, 191n2 Strummer, Joe, 163, 176n2 Studio 54, 84 Stylistics, the, 28 Styrene, Poly, 107, 186n14 Subversa, Vi, 131 Suck, Jane, 25–­26, 78 Sumner, Bernard, 111 surrealism, 29–­30 Talking Heads, 23–­24, 35; Stop Making Sense, 96–­97, 170n10

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226  Index Tatum, Art, 68 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr (Swan Lake), 87 Teardrop Explodes, the, 46–­48 Television, 24, 35 Tharpe, Sister Rosetta, 105 Thatcher, Margaret, 40 This Heat, 117, 142, 146 Thomas, David, 132, 135, 137, 155, 193n40 Thompson, Errol, 74 Thornton, Big Mama, 105 Thornton, James, 74; “The Streets of Cairo,” 74 Throbbing Gristle, 24, 25, 138, 143, 148, 155 Thunders, Johnny, 38 Top of the Pops, 31 Topping, Simon, 44 Tosh, Peter, 64 Toynbee, Jason, 47 Travis, Geoff, 149, 155 Travolta, John, 40, 85, 164, 183n20 Tucker, Maureen, 105 Tuxedomoon, 141–­142 U2, 25, 42, 46–­47, 49–­55; Boy, 51; “I Will Follow,” 51; “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” 51; “Stories for Boys,” 52; “Twilight,” 52–­53 Ultravox, 23 Underwood, Simon, 178n26 Up, Ari, 62, 111–­113, 126 Vance, Tommy, 64 vanguard, 17, 21, 42, 46, 47, 53–­54 Veal, Michael, 67, 74 Velvet Underground, the, 6, 26, 48–­ 50, 62, 81, 105, 117, 132, 134, 149, 150, 152 Vibrators, the, 24, 170n14 Vicious, Sid, 88 Village People, the, 84 Virgin Records, 64

Waksman, Steve, 13 Waller, Fats, 68 Warhol, Andy, 155 Walser, Robert, 93–­94, 125 Watch Something Else, 94 Wedge, the, 94 Wire, 18, 25, 35, 43–­46, 52, 54, 111, 116–­117, 171n22, 172n33; “Another the Letter,” 44; Chairs Missing, 18, 42–­46; “French Film Blurred,” 44; “Outdoor Miner,” 44; “Practice Makes Perfect,” 43–­44, 52, 111; “Sand in My Joints,” 43 Webster, Martin, 40 Weller, Paul, 35 Westwood, Chris, 138, 150–­151, 157, 196n98 Westwood, Vivienne, 31, 61 Weymouth, Tina, 130 Whalley, Charles de, 15, 35, 140; on power pop, 27–­32 Whitfield, Greg, 5, 64 Wilson, Delroy, 70, 74 Wilson, Tony, 67, 69, 159, 162 Windrush, 60 Wobble, Jah, 57, 63, 65, 70, 87, 176n5 Wonder, Stevie, 28, 196n82 Woods, Lesley, 130 World Music, 2 World War II, 60 Worley, Matthew, 16 Worrel, Bernie, 194n49 X-­O-­Dus, 62 X-­Ray Spex, 24, 42, 107 XTC, 38, 172n30 Yes, 104, 145 Yorkshire, 1, 134, 138, 140 Young Ones, The, 1–­2 Z’ev, 141 Zion, 73 Zoo Records, 48

Wah! Heat, 48 Wakeman, Rick, 104, 152

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