Post Punk all up in your grill
October 25th 2008 19:39
Hence, this blog. With a title ripped from a Fall LP from 1985, the collective posts herein will try to make sense of the post punk movement--then and now. You, dear reader will find that rather than a nebbish lot of bedroom-bound shoegazers, the best and most influential of the post-punk crowd were comfortable with a certain amount of self-promotion. Mark E. Smith can lash out at Pavement because he got there first, there being that self-referential, angular art punk noise that Stephen Malkmus and company so congenially appropriated. Then there is Ian McCullough. 'Mac the Mouth' during his band Echo and the Bunnymen's heyday, the lead singer is at least somewhat responsible for his musical progeny in Oasis--a great or disastrous thing depending on your general outlook.
Post punk was, and is, a fertile ground. Goth, industrial, electronic, new wave--all these forms and their myriad bastardizations sprung from the heady 1980s days when punk was dying but whispering last words--instructions for a blueprint, if you will--in the ears of a thousand willing pioneers of a new sound. Post punk was post-modern, writ large. Its leaders such as Ian Curtis and Peter Murphy and Morrissey were as influenced by proto punks like Iggy and Bowie and Lou Reed as by any pure punk band. With PiL, Johnny Rotten dropped the punk act altogether (and the contrived last name) and jammed like Can and Faust at some sort of space orgy ritual.
Post punk was like that. It discarded the rigid, largely misogynistic rules of mohawk hardcore in exchange for the artistic liberties of the early 1970s. Punks hated progressive rock's bombast; post punks wanted to know which Roxy Music album you thought was best and why.
This blog will be full of opinions, of course. In my earlier writings for other sites, I've included some artists among the post punk star-category that chafe. The movement casts a wide net. Billy Idol is important, like it or not. So are the Police and Gary Numan.
But mostly we'll explore here the bands that were huge in England, not so much in America, and then huge again in the record collections of some of today's best artists. David Bowie gets up on stage with Arcade Fire because he relates to them, I imagine, but also because you can't help hearing a bit of "Aladin Sane" in the Montreal collective's monumental work, "Funeral."
Post punk is the 80s saving grace.
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