Rip it Up and Start Again
Postpunk 1978 - 1984
by Simon Reynolds
A lot of kids’ musical tastes are defined by the things that their parents liked. Often, it teaches them what to hate. Growing up in the eighties, my older brother and my father were in a constant battle over what, exactly, good music should sound like. Dad was into Yes, Pink Floyd, Grand Funk Railroad, and, later, anything considered “Adult Contemporary.” My brother, on the other hand, loved Prince, Asia, and as time moved on, hard-core gansta’ rap. It was not a quiet childhood for me, then.
Why am I telling you this? What’s with the mon sequitar? you may ask. Background, my friends, background! In between this clash of musical tastes, I managed to find a furrow in which to dive. Postpunk. Specifically, synthpop. A startling admission that could only make me look bad, I know, but still. It’s true.
So, I’m not really the most impartial person you could find to talk about Simon Reynolds‘ book, Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978 — 1984. Sure, I eventually learned to like just about every kind of music ever made, but that’s another story. It doesn’t change the fact that I have a soft spot for postpunk. I was hoping that my bias in this area would practically guarantee that I’d love this book. And I do — kind of.
Here’s the thing: I don’t believe that interviews, biographies, or long, discursive essays by the artists that create music are good for the people who appreciate it. (I thought the Beatles were all right, until I heard the local radio station play one of their fan-club Christmas messages.) Of course, if you want to know more about a band’s output, if you want to understand what everything’s about, then, by all means, pseude away. I just don’t think that any of these behind the scenes peeks enhances the enjoyment of the music.
As with any book that lays out the stories behind acts of artistic creation, some readers (well, okay, just me, then) might be a little disappointed at how shallow and childish a lot of the people involved were. There’s been some terrific music released that, it just so happens, was inspired by some of the most risible political and social theories that you could find. (Take Rush, for example. Or… on second thought, that’s a bad example.) People who sound articulate — or at least, pleasingly vague and abstruse — on record and in song, can seem just plain silly when you read their words in print.
Take this description of John Lydon’s plans for his post-Sex Pistols band, Public Image Ltd:
“The idea of ‘Ltd’ soon escalated to take on its business meaning [...] PiL, proclaimed Lydon, was not a band in the traditional sense, but a communications company for which making records was just one front of activity. Enthused, Lydon and Levene talked about diversifying into movie soundtracks, graphics, making ‘video albums,’ even designing music technology.” (Pg. 21)
Oh yes, pull the other one. It’s not unthinkable that a band could also be a corporation — look at the Rolling Stones, or any other long-lived mega-group — but the idea of a band that’s actually going to do it all themselves? Drug addicts make very unreliable executives, when there’s no established bureaucracy to handle day to day implementation issues.
Actually, the particulars of the various featured bands’ drug use was sort of lulling, in a way. While some groups fancied themselves pioneers and trailblazers, their continuous reliance on getting fucked up before writing or recording puts them on the same linear path that all serious musicians occupy. It’s a golden thread that links the bands of the here and now, with the moment when Thomas Edison — after snorting a rail of snuff that was roughly the size and shape of a boot-lace — shouted, “All right, let’s fucking do this, man!” and then proceeded to record “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on a piece of foil, for the first time. (The groups that stand out are the ones, like Human League, who took an anti-drug stance. Good for them, but I think it shows in their music. I’ve never been able to enjoy it without going through a painful, cleansing, detoxification process, first.)
A lot of the groups mentioned might be more familiar to British readers than to a yank, like me. More knowledgeable readers may already know their stories pretty well and, thus, may find themselves skipping around a bit. Reynolds himself does a bit of that, as well. Chapters tend to either focus on a pair of big-name bands; a particular musical movement, encompassing lots of bands; a specific region where the bands may or may not have been similar; or any combination of those things. The focus runs all the way up to 1984, dips back to ‘78 (or earlier, in some cases), then runs up again. This was probably the fairest way to organize things, but it does tend to make the context a bit more difficult to grasp — unless you’ve got a pretty great memory.
The greatest lesson to be learned from Rip It Up is probably this: Postpunk might possibly be too broad a term. Yes, technically, it’s all about the music that came about in the years after punk imploded. But nothing that hits the mass-market ever really dies, it seems, and punk was no exception. It got small, it went underground for a while, but they sold it back to us again, during the nineties. And they’ll try it again, before many of the people who are reading these words will be dead. The postpunk bands that came after 1977 prove that punk’s influence never stopped — it merely became something else to react to, to rebel against. The creative confusion that arose, as depicted by Reynolds, was simply a question of locating punk’s antipode and planting a flag based on your best guess. In this metaphor, if “ska” were a country, “rock” were a continent, then “postpunk” would be the entire Southern Hemisphere.
I’m just not knowledgeable enough to think of any important late-seventies/early-eighties bands that Reynolds might not have covered. Everybody seems to at least get a mention, and most get whole chapters; Rip it Up certainly feels authoritative. There’s also, probably, no better book to read if you want to get the big-picture of the aftermath of punk. Again, my reading on this subject has not been wide, although I’ve run across a couple of works that featured only a single band, like Depeche Mode, the Smiths, or R.E.M. The wider scope is helpful.
The problems with the book are not problems the writer could do much about. You’re either interested in the subject, or not; you’re either willing to read the whole thing, or you just want to skip to the bit about the bands you like. (In that case, you’ll want to check the books rather servicable index.) Reynolds doesn’t call attention to himself in his writing; it has no distinguishing scars or characterisitcs — beyond its utter clarity, which ain’t easy to achieve, let me tell ‘ya. Although, it would have been nice to have the chapters broken up into sub-sections, but that’s just my personal taste. I’d have been quite happy to see those three friendly asterisks pop up in some of the longer chapters.
To put it more simply: The problems with the book are the fault of its subject, not its writer. Some of the bands covered had a tendency to be smug, elitist and dull — and, so it goes with the parts of the book covering them. A passage about Spandau Ballet’s flirtation with synthpop and its attendant fascism-of-the-elite (We are your beautiful masters), ends with a whimper. Rather like Spandau, themselves:
“Spandau Ballet’s dalliance with the Eurosynth sound was short-lived, though, and the group quickly reverted to their soul-boy roots, venerating black American music above all else and producing, by way of tribute, a series of stilted funk records.”
It’s reportage, it had to be said, but not that interesting of a story, really. Which is why Reynolds had the smarts to snap off their bit with a single sentence; no fool, that Simon. But dozens of bands end in similar sentences, and it does add up — in the part of the brain that keeps track of mild irritants.
So, at the end of the day, postpunk is either forward-thinking or reactionary, artistic or popular, cold or passionate, witty or primal, stupid or smart, provokative or affirming, all of the above, none, or some combination of this that and the other. Good reading, but by the end, you start to wonder about what you’ve learned. That music tends to be influence by earlier music? That it arises out of context that might be invisible to the end-consumer? Or that authoritative histories of broad musical trends can be entertaining, but sadly lacking in significance?
I know — it’s only Eurosynthdanceposttrancepolipsychic Brit-pop. But, um, I like it?
