barty's guide to the post-punks

All that current post-punk revival stuff (Fontaines DC, Shame, Idles, Black Midi, Black Country New Road, Dry Cleaning) is so shit and point-missing it's making me want to start a band in disgust.

subvert47 said:

It only became a sound when another tranche of tedious guitar bands got marketed as "post punk revival", completely missing the point. It's hard to think of any recent bands who might count as properly post punk. Massicot maybe. Or – I suppose – Sleaford Mods

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Well there was a very distinct sound or aesthetic of all those bands like Blurt, Cabs, ACR etc etc I don't see that as debatable. The phrase 'post-punk' ended up coalescing around that sound even if originally it had loftier and wider aims. These days if someone says "I like post-punk music" I know what they mean and so do you. Perhaps it's a shame that an ideology collapses to a shorthand for a sound but it wasn't the first or last time. I mean surely Punk was meant to mean something other than ripped clothes and fast rock n roll at one point wasn't it?

IdleRich said:

I mean surely Punk was meant to mean something other than ripped clothes and fast rock n roll at one point wasn't it?

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as for the ripped clothes, it depends on whether or not you believe the Jon Savage theory that UK punk started with a couple of manufactured boy bands formed by the owners of competing fashion boutiques in order to sell some trousers...

but when UK Punk started there were no rules about the music side, that took a few years and the second wave of "studs, leather, and mohican" type bands who were more conservative in their approach - at the start of 1977 some things got called punk which we wouldn't categorise as punk at all nowadays - this Top of the Pops appearance was unbelievably termed "punk" by some people at the time on the basis of the "bin bag" fashion on display...


The Rah Band - The Crunch

I just picked punk as an example cos we were talking about post-punk and I wanted to show you didn't need to go far to see a wider, almost philosophical, movement get fastened down to a few signifiers.

IdleRich said:

I just picked punk as an example cos we were talking about post-punk and I wanted to show you didn't need to go far to see a wider, almost philosophical, movement get fastened down to a few signifiers.

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Oh well, I was trying to prove your point - seems like I failed....

I'm not disagreeing, just saying I don't know the details as well as you. But yes the point stands I think.

IdleRich said:

I'm not disagreeing, just saying I don't know the details as well as you. But yes the point stands I think.

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Sorry, a bit of a hungover misunderstanding on my part...

I was just thinking about how sometimes genres get named in retrospect, that journalists looking to make a name for themselves are keen to discover and name a scene - I can remember when what we call "grime" was also called "8-bar", "grimy garage", "sub-low", "eski-beat", but it was "grime" that gained traction ..

I was just wondering if it was the same for "post punk"...and according to Wikipedia it was originally also referred to as "New Musick" in the contemporary music press, which is a bit of a shit name to be honest...

No worries. Northern soul was obviously applied retroactively too.... freakbeat whatever the fuck that is.

There will only ever be one New Musik for me

IdleRich said:

No worries. Northern soul was obviously applied retroactively too.... freakbeat whatever the fuck that is.

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One of my favourites is "mod reggae" - a total retrospective fabrication

Matthew said:

agreed.

for a while (until 1994 - maybe 1995) it was obvious that dance music was the new post-punk.

apart from anything it was FULL of post-punkers (see this old comic of mine https://photos.app.goo.gl/7X3q5RaVFh55UTNu5)

that's life innit. nothing can stay the same - and remain the same thing.

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Good comic!

william_kent said:

Sorry, a bit of a hungover misunderstanding on my part...

I was just thinking about how sometimes genres get named in retrospect, that journalists looking to make a name for themselves are keen to discover and name a scene - I can remember when what we call "grime" was also called "8-bar", "grimy garage", "sub-low", "eski-beat", but it was "grime" that gained traction ..

I was just wondering if it was the same for "post punk"...and according to Wikipedia it was originally also referred to as "New Musick" in the contemporary music press, which is a bit of a shit name to be honest...

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Ah well that is a funny one, because "New Musick" was the title of a two-part feature package in Sounds at the end of 1977, across two issues / two weeks, and involving Jon Savage, Vivien Goldman, Sandy Robertson, etc writing about all kinds of new directions coming out of punk (Banshees, Cabaret Voltaire etc), or things that they thought would be an influence on the next direction (so Kraftwerk, disco, dub reggae, Throbbing Gristle etc). But in the intro, right at the start, Savage uses the word "post-punk" - as an adjective ("post-punk projections" - so he's saying these are my predictions about what's going to happen next, or my hopes). But what starts as an adjective does tend to become a noun (e.g. "grimy" becomes "grime). So even as early as 1977, "post-punk" was a word beginning to circulate.

There was a period of "wot-you-call-it" semantic unfixedness - in 1978, people interchangeably use terms like New Musick, New Wave, postpunk, even the ungainly term after-punk had some proponents. But by about 1979 post-punk is pretty established as the term for "what we are now in the midst of, what's unfolding around us" - and it's becoming a noun, a very loose genre term. And by 1980 it's becoming a set of cliches - bands whose followers all wear grey overcoats (they used to call Joy Division's followers the Cult With No Name).

I vaguely remembered this from the actual time of living through in real-time, but when I did Rip It Up I trudged through the music papers chronologically 1977-83, and saw the term gradually creep into the discourse.

I know Northern Soul and freakbeat are not the same, I'm just saying they are two genres with names applied retrospectively.

I'm pretty sure no 6Ts band said "we are a freakbeat band" and Northern Soul was so called cos of where it was played... northern England. I think it was Dave Godin who kinda inadvertently named it.

I think "Doo-Wop" is the ur-example of retroactive genre naming. Also, as an aside, Northern Soul never exclusively meant African-American soul music and garage/beat stuff (Human Beinz, Outsiders) was being played from the start (and still is).