the book club
Rip It Up and Start Again
The sexual politics of "twee pop."
Updated Tuesday, March 7, 2006, at 1:08 PM ET
From: Stephen Metcalf
To: Simon Reynolds
Subject: The Messy History of Postpunk
Updated Monday, March 6, 2006, at 9:39 AM ET
Simon,
First, let me congratulate you. Rip It Up and Start Again is a superb book. In fact, I'm tempted to pound the table here; I can't imagine a better book on rock 'n' roll, full stop. Why? Well, first of all, you manage the difficult task of balancing the voice and interests of the fan with those of the scholar. The book is suffused with your deep affection for this music, for this period in music, and for the people who made a quiet but extraordinary revolution in pop-music consciousness; and yet you combine this with a tempered, layered, richly textured history. This is a fan's note and a serious social document. As someone who has tried to write about rock as social history, I feel like Clapton after he saw Hendrix play: Take my guitar (word processor) away! Kudos; henceforth, let Rip It Up be the model for the form.
Let me briefly describe the book. Rip It Up covers the postpunk years in Britain and America. Now, for your average rock monumentalist, pop history goes Elvis, Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Ramones, Pistols, Clash, [blank space], Nirvana. The Rock Snob, often an anti-monumentalist, would fill in, oh, you pick: Nick Drake, Roxy Music, the Bowie of Low and Heroes, Television, the Stooges. The first terrific feature of Rip It Up is how well it combines the impulse to cherish the obscure with the impulse to see a band as a Moment in History. As you convincingly argue,
In retrospect, as a distinct pop-cultural epoch, 1978-1982 rivals that fabled stretch between 1963 and 1967 commonly known as the sixties. The postpunk era makes a fair match for the sixties in terms of the sheer amount of great music created, the spirit of adventure and idealism that infused it, and the way that the music seemed inextricably connected to the political and social turbulence of its era.
Now some specifics. Punk rock, you argue, burned hard, burned fast, and burned out quick: The Ramones debuted in '76, their hopped-up, rootsy, retro-garage sound hopped quickly across the pond, the Pistols and the Clash hit big, and by the summer of 1977, the whole thing was already a wearisome cliché. In 1978, the Pistols "auto-destructed," as you put it, and the Clash (this is me now) turned into an FM-friendly classic rock band. (I would say, to their credit; and would love to hear what you think of the London Calling period.)
What happened next is often called, loosely, postpunk but has never before received either its proper respect or a comprehensive survey; it now has both. As you point out, this period is enormously influential. A quick list of bands that were postpunk, or had roots in postpunk, would include the Talking Heads, U2, Gang of Four, Devo, the B-52s, Joy Division, the Cure, Public Image Ltd., Echo & the Bunnymen, the Specials, the Human League. (Listen to the Specials, "
International Jet Set," 1980.) If I trace out the influence correctly, and in its broadest terms, postpunk's first contribution to pop was its refusal to hew to the old guitar-based formulas of rock 'n' roll. The '80s synth sound comes out of postpunk, as does an angular, choppy, anti-blues style of guitar-playing that now dominates rock 'n' roll (cf Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, the Libertines). You describe the new sound beautifully, so let me let you:
Rather than rama-lama riffing or bluesy chords, the postpunk pantheon of guitar innovators favored angularity, a clean and brittle spikiness. They shunned solos, apart from brief bursts of lead integrated with more rhythm-oriented playing.
The sound was self-consciously new; the attitude, meanwhile, was very anti-hippie, anti-'60s, anti-peace and love (as punk had been), but also anti-'70s druggy malaise. So, what was it? You nail it precisely: "The entire postpunk period looks like an attempt to replay virtually every major modernist theme and technique via the medium of pop music." Bands borrowed attitudes and words and gestures from absurdism, dada, Brecht, Bauhaus, and Duchamp. But before the reader gets too put off and concludes postpunk was simply the maunderings of overwrought teens, let's recall that postpunk had two faces. It was, on the one hand, a catalog of all the outré stances of the 20th-century avant-garde. But having cast off the self-serious '60s, it could also be blissfully fun. I love the title of the book, which comes from one of the best singles in the history of postpunk: "Rip It Up," by Orange Juice. Orange Juice is an almost totally unknown quantity in the States, but they were brilliant: fun, witty, bouncy, weird Glaswegians, sort of a cross between the Velvets and the Rev. Al Green, whose memory has been scandalously ill-preserved. I hope you talk more about OJ, and why you chose—other than how obviously apropos their song title is to your subject matter—them as the headliner, in some sense, of the book.
And so, a question. Do you ever feel with postpunk that the pranksterism and tendency to gesture eclipsed the actual music? For example, the anti-music aesthetic of Lydia Lunch and the various No Wavers—the group of New York-based here-today, gone-tomorrow scenester bands that included Suicide, Mars, and DNA—struck me as grotesquely precious. (Listen to Mars, "Helen Forsdale," 1978.) Has this held up well, as anything more than a standard-issue romance with the gutter? Another way of putting it is: The pattern in pop music has been pretty consistent. The major labels get stuck repeating a formula, for which they laugh all the way to the bank. In the shadows of that repetition, a host of small, independent labels start signing local acts who are flying totally off-radar—and something new, exciting, and fresh is allowed to grow. Once the big labels get a hold of it, they formula-ize it, throw it onto the radio, and sunlight disinfects away all of its strangest flavors. Here is my question: Does the apprehension of the mainstream always ruin a band? Isn't London Calling a kind of classic? And didn't it get there because suddenly the Clash were hungry to be monumental? Not just to sneer in the shadows at the Beatles and the Stones but to eclipse them? And, conversely: When the majors finally come along and ruin the party, doesn't the onus to find something new become so intense that a lot of nonsense gets taken too seriously? (I'm thinking now of Brian Eno panting after the No Wave vibe.) Anyhow, cheers, Simon; you have written a great book, and I look forward to our exchange.
And finally: If you don't mind me asking you to summarize it, what was the spirit of the age? What was it about that precise moment? Diverse as they are, the artists you write about do seem united—none have crawled out of the dreariest nadir of the '70s, but all hint at something liberating (the '80s?) lying on the horizon. Besides arriving a little late on the scene, what is it about a band like the Smiths, or the Replacements, that keeps them out of the category?
Steve
From: Simon Reynolds
To: Stephen Metcalf
Subject: The Cultural Exile of the Replacements and the Smiths
Posted Monday, March 6, 2006, at 1:29 PM ET
Hi Steve,
Thanks for your kind words about Rip It Up. I am glad you used the word "affection" because that is really how I came to feel about pretty much everyone involved in postpunk—the musicians, but also the behind-the-scenes catalyst figures who started labels, managed bands, promoted festivals. All these people could have taken a much easier path, but they chose to make things difficult for themselves by trying to do something interesting and new. Writing the book, I wanted to provide a context that would allow these people and their ideas to shine, and also to build a framework through which you could see the connections—so it all felt like a movement, a gigantic collective project, rather than just disparate activity.
I did feel like I was "on their side," and maybe this begins to answer your question about whether the rampant experimentalism generated that much in terms of lasting listenability. Yes, there was a fair amount of willful weirdness going on, but a great spirit pervaded it all, which I find both inspiring and touching, even when the experiments were failures. And although "affection" is possibly an odd word to use in reference to a bunch of nihilists, I do feel fond of the No Wave people. James Chance's music actually stands up really well, I think; there are great moments throughout Lydia Lunch's long discography, and Suicide's records are just beautiful. (Listen to James Chance & the Contortions, "Contort Yourself," 1979; and Suicide, "Touch Me," 1980.) DNA and Mars are extremists even within something as extreme as No Wave, and although their records aren't exactly on my turntable constantly, I admire their attempts to create something completely without precedent. I agree with Eno's remark about how pioneers like the No Wavers provide a useful service: They mark out the edge of a terrain, and then later bands come along to cultivate it and do something more listener-friendly with their ideas. That's what Sonic Youth did; they took No Wave's hair-raising guitar glissandi and psychotic vocals and fed that into something more song-oriented and rocking.
You asked about Orange Juice and my book title. Apart from being one of my absolute favorite singles from that period, the song's chorus "rip it up and start again" was so perfect because it suggests both postpunk's destructive impulse to reject tradition, and also its constructive, forward-looking side—people starting independent labels or embracing new technology like synths. Rip it up/start again was the dynamic running through the entire era, the motor of constant change: Whenever things settled into orthodoxy, there'd be a schism, a new fork in the path—anything just to keep things moving. So postpunk reacted against punk's rock 'n' roll traditionalism; then, a few years later, when postpunk itself became codified as a style of dour, difficult music, you had the "New Pop" movement—groups like Orange Juice, Human League, ABC—who embraced melody and brought back the love song. And a few years after that, when New Pop itself got bland and bloated, musicians took a whole bunch of new directions in response, such as Goth, or the new rock of "glory boy" bands like U2 and Echo & the Bunnymen. The song "Rip It Up" itself was written when Orange Juice had grown disillusioned with how New Pop had degenerated into the vapidity of Wham! and Duran Duran. But almost all these groups, even Duran Duran actually, had some connection to punk—it was the Sex Pistols, typically, that had fired them up in the first place. Which is why I feel that 1978-1984 is one unified epoch, "postpunk." It's just that the New Pop phase was a revolt against a certain narrow definition of postpunk that had set in—bleak, racked by existential angst or political guilt, puritanical. A revolt into hedonism and positivity.
Orange Juice and their label Postcard were also among the very first people to come out of postpunk who manifested a new ambitious spirit of wanting to have hits rather than skulking morosely in the underground. So, as a child of that era, I would actually agree with you when you question that indie notion that the embrace of the mainstream always ruins music. Some groups only make sense as big bands—the Clash is one example; so is U2. And there's a sense in which, if bands really believe in what they're doing, they won't be satisfied with being cult artists, they want to reach as large an audience as possible. That's why so many of the postpunk bands decided to adopt a more glossy, accessible sound, to explore the potential of video and new technology like synths and drum machines.
I've noticed that quite a few Americans are resistant to the idea that there's any connection between, say, the agit-funk of Gang of Four and the glam-disco of ABC. That's a big impetus behind Rip It Up: to show that it was all one movement, one long cultural moment. The evolution of a band like Scritti Politti, a bunch of communist squat-dwellers making fractured, avant-garde music, into Billboard Top 20 stars, proves there's a continuum there, as does the transformation of Joy Division into New Order.
The spirit of the age? Weirdly, given that the period was full of songs with titles like "Death Disco" or "Isolation" or "We Are All Prostitutes," I think it was actually optimism, confidence, a certain will-to-power. Charged up by punk, these groups really believed they could change things, they could actually take over in some sense—whether it was by building an alternative culture, as with postpunk, or, with New Pop, invading the mainstream and displacing Old Pop, as it were. By the time the Smiths and the Replacements came along, there was much more of a sense of defeat and exile and being out-of-time. A colleague of mine described the Smiths as being "against the '80s"—for a long while they refused to do videos, for instance. Same with the Replacements, whether it's the "lost generation" idea behind songs like "Bastards of Young" or the fact that they did a bunch of videos that were anti-promotional—you couldn't actually see the band members. And, you know, I loved both those bands, and in a sense, agreed with those gestures—that self-defeating refusal to play the game, to put yourself across well on MTV, felt timely and appropriate in the mid-'80s. But it's a whole different spirit from postpunk.
But perhaps this is a British person's perspective. I get the impression that postpunk in America was always much more of an underground phenomenon. Growing up in the U.K., you would see PiL and Joy Division on TV; they'd even have the occasional hit single. "Pop" has just never been such a dirty word in Britain as it has been for most American fans of left-field music. There was always a tradition of weird, arty groups having hits—Roxy Music, Bowie, or even Sparks, an American group that was huge in England but never got anywhere near the Billboard Top 40. So, in the U.K., I think there is this abiding sense in which "pop" has been thought of as something that could be reclaimed. Whereas in America the default position for fans of alternative music is feeling like the permanent opposition. Would you say that's a fair comment?
Simon
From: Stephen Metcalf
To: Simon Reynolds
Subject: British Wimps and American Weirdos
Updated Tuesday, March 7, 2006, at 8:38 AM ET
Simon,
I agree absolutely: In America, alternative music is just that, "alternative," and more oppositional to a mainstream culture it regards as not only rote, treacly, and formulaic but deeply reactionary. Think about the innovators in white American pop music who also had commercial success: Bing Crosby, Elvis, Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, the Ramones, Bruce Springsteen. Well, they're not only retro, they play (albeit self-consciously) to that reactionary streak. They sell an idea of American exceptionalism rooted in an exalted American past, all while keeping their innovations hidden in plain sight. The best example is always Wilson's. It took the Beatles to open up his little profiterole beach ditties, deconstruct them, and champion their creator as a Mozart-like genius. Now think about the great American weirdos who advanced the ambitions of pop without winning much mainstream acceptance: Captain Beefheart, Zappa, Velvets, Iggy, Television, Minutemen, even Sonic Youth. (Listen to the Minutemen, "History Lesson, Pt 2," 1984) What do they have in common? A revulsion for the toll-taking, soul-taking American spotlight. Compared with Springsteen—or even the later Scritti Politti—these are night-grown fungi.
One thing we're missing and likely will never locate in American culture is the great U.K. tradition of heterosexual wimpiness that runs from at least Keats up through at least Belle and Sebastian and takes a nice detour through the glorious Orange Juice. Let me quote some of your book:
Orange Juice talked and acted in ways that broke with both rock's rebel swagger and postpunk's militant solemnity. They were literate, playful, witty, camp. "Everyone used to think we were a bunch of androgynous little twits," Collins recalled. This exaggerated wimpiness was a revolt against the Glasgow music scene's traditional blues-rock machismo … but also against the hooligan menace of Scottish punks …
And now for a brief aside, if you'll indulge me. As someone imprisoned within a bizarrely testosterone-addled culture, it seems to me that the hermetically sealed universe of grad student twee epitomized by Orange Juice, and later by Belle and Sebastian, does have a larger significance. (Listen to Orange Juice, "Falling and Laughing," 1980) If you're an American, the very ideas of "literate, playful, witty, camp" conjure up a gender indeterminacy that makes many American males squeamish, to say the least. You close your book by adverting to George W. Bush; you wonder if the current crop of bands that name-check postpunk can oppose Bush, and his and Blair's joint venture in Iraq, with the same intensity that the original postpunkers opposed Reagan and Thatcher. We think of punk rock as necessarily violent and loud, but does political anger always have to be violent and loud? Look at how Bush came to power, then stayed there: in no small part by feminizing his opponents, often on the issue of national security. Responding to the tone colors the Republicans surrounded him in, the American electorate saw John Kerry as French, a kept man—good god—a windsurfer. Why not say it outright: He hits like a girl. A society with such a low tolerance for the ironic and quirky is a society with a low tolerance for ambiguity and nuance, and we're paying for this fact dearly right now.
I think one reason I prefer the brand of epicene rock (Felt, Orange Juice, Field Mice, Smiths, B and S) a friend has labeled, hilariously, "sissycore" is, in addition to being a committed sissy, I prefer it to rock's more masculinist ideal. This, as you deftly point out, often slid into a romance with fascist imagery during the punk and postpunk era—at one point or another, the Clash, the Pistols, the Ramones, Pil, and Joy Division all played with swastikas or related imagery. This co-existed with a powerful streak of fringe leftism that animated punk and postpunk, though the contradiction is easy enough to account for: Both were responses to a drastic spike in U.K. unemployment in the late '70s that created an avid culture of dead-enders in search of an extreme politics. All the poses of the '60s were suddenly considered not only suspect but revolting; and this led to some pretty extreme posturing.
Now I think we can begin to piece together an idea about the English mainstream and the American mainstream. The American mainstream revives itself almost always on the backs of the legacy of Jim Crow. For the black experience, of course, is where innovation meets commercial success in American music history, from Satchmo and Ellington and Billie Holiday, to Miles and Coltrane and Sly and George Clinton and Prince and Chuck D. So familiar are we in my country with this maneuver, that when a band like Pere Ubu expands into a sound so completely outside the tradition of jazz, soul, funk, it boggles our mainstream tastes completely.
Which brings us to one final topic: authenticity. I wonder if you could talk more about how odd that dialectic is in the postpunk movement. After all, authenticity was rescued from a set of petrified counterculture clichés by bands that trampled all over the twin paradigms of authenticity—the hey, man, that singer-songwriter, he speaks to my soul of folk—and the endless attempts by white middle-class teens to appropriate the attitudes of blacks. Postpunk often took this one step further and gloried in the idea of the album/band as pure commodity. The shamelessness of Malcolm McLaren—who not only hatched the Pistols but later put his stamp on postpunk with Adam Ant and Bow Wow Wow—did rule the age. And yet, by using words like "product" and "swindle" so openly, shamelessness somehow kept rock 'n' roll true to itself.
Well, thanks a mil, Simon. Your book is a triumph.
Be well,
Steve
From: Simon Reynolds
To: Stephen Metcalf
Subject: The Sexual Politics of "Twee Pop"
Updated Tuesday, March 7, 2006, at 1:08 PM ET
Hi Steve,
In U.K. pop, I think there's always been more of a penchant for the artificial, the blatantly sensationalistic and gimmicky. When I was growing up, the first pop acts I would have seen on television were T. Rex, Gary Glitter, Sparks, and the Sweet. I'm flashing right now on the Sweet doing "Ballroom Blitz" on Top of the Pops: the band all in makeup, the bassist dressed as a woman except for a little black Hitler moustache! That song was at the top of the charts, whereas in America the cross-dressing New York Dolls never got close to the Billboard 200. OK, you did have Alice Cooper and Kiss over here, but I do think there is an anti-image current that runs deep in American rock. So when glam was huge in the U.K., in America the big thing was denim-clad Californian soft rock and country rock. Didn't the Eagles have a slogan, "Song Power," that was meant to be their riposte to glam's "lack of substance"?
Glam is really central to postpunk, especially Roxy Music and David Bowie. And certainly the New Pop bands like ABC, Human League, and the Associates could barely have existed without For Your Pleasure and Bowie's incredible run of records from Young Americans through Low to "Boys Keep Swinging." (Listen to the Associates, "Party Fears Two," 1982) Equally influential was the "soft male" persona of Brian Eno—his feather boa'd androgyny, his dilettante-sensualist approach to making music, his defiant talk of being a nonmusician at a time when there was a premium on technical prowess and mastery of your instrument. Eno did a lot to give the synth its enduring association with gender-bending; before him, it was considered a bombastic, grandiose instrument because of its associations with prog-rock groups like Emerson, Lake and Palmer. On a more philosophical level, Eno talked about how he was rebelling against rebellion, how he wanted to be the opposite of Keith Richards. Yet in another sense he was something of a Brian Jones figure: a dandy who discovered that looking effeminate is a surefire way to pull the chicks.
Talking about "the soft male" brings me round to your point about this U.K. indie-rock cult of heterosexual wimpiness. In the U.K. especially—but also with the Anglophile contingent in America—there is an abiding syndrome of boys who are basically straight but relate to a figure like, say, Morrissey. It's a mixture of identification and idolatry, with a tinge of homoeroticism. There was a heavily Smiths-influenced band called Suede in the early '90s; the singer, Brett Anderson, once described himself, notoriously, as "a bisexual man who's never had a homosexual experience." The remark provoked a heap of derision, but I think it actually spoke to, and for, a lot of men: the appeal of a certain kind of amorous surrender. You can trace that swoony passivity back to Smiths songs like "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out." And if you go back even further, you find one source for it in Orange Juice's songs like "Falling and Laughing" and "Consolation Prize." (Even further back: Pete Shelley's singing and non-gender-specific love songs for the Buzzcocks). Many of the things that made Morrissey famous were trail-blazed by Orange Juice's Edwyn Collins—the flowery-literary, slightly arch lyrics, the "worldliness must keep apart from me" innocence, the unmanliness.
So I agree with you totally about how Belle and Sebastian-style twee pop does have this interestingly dissident sexual politics to it. There's a lovely song (whose title I forget) by B and S side project Looper about an agonizingly drawn-out romance where it takes the girl and boy about five years to get to the point of holding hands! This sort of naiveté and nonthrusting, virginal shtick was a big thing in the late '80s, when I first started writing about music. Mostly it was groups like the Pastels, the June Brides, and James, which again had precursors during the postpunk era: Swell Maps and Television Personalities, with their "weak" vocalists and their lo-fi aesthetic that made a fetish of not sounding robust, of not rockin'. In the late '80s you also had the K Records label in America, with Beat Happening, a group I really liked. I can see why this kind of sensibility—the amateurism, the awkwardness and sensitivity, the refusal of adulthood—would appeal even more strongly in America as a rejection of dominant cultural values. I'm sort of "on its side," but most of the time I find the indie-pop thing sonically a bit too flimsy.
You mentioned the question of "authenticity," which is a huge and complicated subject. I think you're right to suggest that the postpunks largely abandoned the hippie singer-songwriter idea of confessional storytelling. People as varied as David Byrne and Gang of Four weren't necessarily drawing from personal experience. But in another sense there was a great earnestness and passion about postpunk, a seriousness of intent. They meant it, maaaaan. Which is one of the things that attracted me to the period: the lack of irony. There's never that sense of wry disengagement from their own music you get with so many modern bands. Ian Penman, an NME writer and an associate member of the Scritti Politti collective, singled out the quality of the era as "sincerity—everyone was brittle with it." People like Scritti main man Green Gartside were racked with doubt about what they were doing; every decision seems to have had an impossible weight to it. This stemmed from the idea that rock had a renewed power to change things, and therefore a lot was at stake in terms of deciding how to use that power. I can imagine it might seem bizarre, even silly, to younger people—"Why were they getting so worked up? Did they really think pop music could matter this much?" Well, you know what: They really did. We really did.
I'm afraid my list of indispensables is going to be somewhat canonical. (Although canons usually tend to be more right than wrong, don't you think?) But these really are the postpunk songs I'd be most pained to never hear again. I've listed the specific song and also where it can be found in terms of the original album/compilation/box set, each of which is indispensable in itself:
10. Orange Juice, "Consolation Prize" (The Glasgow School)
9. Joy Division, "Atmosphere" (Heart and Soul)
8. Pere Ubu, "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" (Datapanik in the Year Zero)
7. The Human League, "Love Action" (Dare)
6. Scritti Politti, "Bibbly-O-Tek" (Early)
5. The Fall, "Fiery Jack" (Early Years 77-79)
4. Gang of Four, "Natural's Not in It" (Entertainment!)
3. Public Image Ltd., "No Birds Do Sing" (Metal Box)
2. Talking Heads, "Seen and Not Seen" (Remain In Light)
1. The Slits, "Instant Hit" (Cut)
Thanks for an entertaining and thought-provoking discussion.
Best,
Simon R.
Stephen Metcalf is Slate's critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s.Simon Reynolds is the author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2137333/
