Alisdair posted some interesting things about Post-punk, which set me thinking, related to what a few other people wrote. And then Joshua Ellis set me off, thinking about what it means when I listen to the period described in Simon Reynold’s (brilliant) RIP IT UP. And… well, here’s the ramble:

I was born in 1975. I was listening to my parent’s Motown rather than post-punk in 1980, so it’s not really a question of nostalgia, but of *history*.

Except, to steal Blur’s phrase from when they were vaguely relevant circa Modern Life Is Rubbish, legislated nostalgia - Having nostalgia for something you’ve never experienced. One of my takes on Britpop (at least its start) was less ancestor worship, rather an artistic Oedipal thing. I want to fuck what Daddy did, and have the wife, the house, the swimming pool, the reputation.

History is a different thing. I remember when I started seriously thinking about music that I was aware there was SO MUCH MUSIC that I knew absolutely nothing about. Or rather, I knew about, but hadn’t had a chance to listen to. If you take 1990 or so as my year zero, that’s 15 years since punk and thirty since the start of the modern age of pop. That’s a lot of records to listen to before you can talk credibly about the whole flow of things, in terms of real understanding as opposed to a sampledelic dillentante thing.

I don’t think the generation after me even think of things in those terms. It’s post-pop-history now. While 15 years post-punk was vaguely dealable with, 30 years post-punk is an obscene figure. It’s that sensation I get when I walk into a decent library and realise I’m never going to know even a fraction of it. So you just take what you can, and live with it.

So, People may know that there was once a Band called the Gang of Four who The Futureheads rip-off, but don’t care at all. While someone like Elastica reappropriated early-Wire, it was reappropriated *for their own purposes* (which I always read as a indie-fication of sampling culture in a guitar-set up, a paradoxical mix of absolute respect (Ace! We’ll use it) and disrespect (Why shouldn’t we use it if we like it?)), most modern hair-cut Indie doesn’t even *care* about history enough to attempt to remix it. To the Futureheads, the Gand of Four are just some angular guitars. Nothing else matters.

And, by their succcess, The Gang of Four are just reduced to some guitar sounds. A Futureheads fan’s responses to the noise are conditioned to see them in the context of the Futureheads, and since they’re just a four-square band, that’s what the Gang of Four are. The Rapture’s (brilliant, annoyingly) House of Jealous Lovers reduces the Pop Group’s We Are All Prostitutes, and so on.

This leads me to thinking that there’s always been different sorts of revival culture. Two-Tone could be read as a sixties-Ska revival, but actually was infused with the post-punk scene and used for a specific, urgent purpose. Britpop was nothing but a revival movement, but was actually talking about specific, current state of mind in the Mid-nineties (and was mostly shit, but isn’t really the point). Conversely, the Mod revival of the early eighties (and the mini-one in the UK of the mid-nineties), is nothing but coping the stances of the earlier period, and in doing so, missing the point entirely. Modern Mod takes are quintissentially English, taking it as a traditionalist conservative thing. Actual Mod was virulently ANTI English, based around black American music, italian suits, etc. It’s an obvious point, but real mods today would be listening to hyper-tech R&B or similar, not Paul Weller. And the array of eighties/post-punk indie at the moment are nothing but pure formalists.

It was mainly music about ideas. Why, if you’re in a synth-edged band like the Bravery or whatever, should you dress in clothes similar or inspired by the period? They haven’t even engaged their brains (or even REALISED they should be engaging their brains enough) to move past that state.

I only got around to reading the Julian Cope autobiographies recently, but one thing that struck me was how absolutely literate everyone in the scene was. People read the reviews, and tried to apply the belief structures of the journalists (which were processed from other sources) to the making of music. It’s notable that the absolute intellectual emptiness of the mainstream music press (Which has expanded from just the inkies to coverage in “real” papers) just begats more intellectually empty bands. If it’s music about ideas, and they’re not digesting any, they’re not going to create anything which has them.

As a corroloary, these sorts of leap of creative faith I’m describing require exactly that: faith. Belief. That’s one thing everyone is deeply short of in the music scene, and the population at general. Believing in something is deeply unfashionable. Being Reasonable is the watchwords, and all that begats is reasonable, small things. Great pop is always based on grand, stupid designs. And this is why kids today (from the same social niche as the people who were primary forces in Post-Punk), despite having better tech and access resources than the period described by RIP IT UP, aren’t doing as interesting stuff. They don’t have the ideas, they don’t have the grandeur, they don’t have the absolute stupidity. Which is stupid.

My other thought about RIP IT UP that, despite the general disdain for what Pete Wiley coined Rockism, and eventual embrace of Morley’s Popism, that’s a very different thing from what people today mean by Popism. What’s interesting about that cusp-of-the-eighties was that it was people from a Rockist culture (and totally infected by it), trying to deliberately take a Popist stance. It was a volunary thing, rather than them coming from a culture where that’s actually the dominant belief structure. Religious converts have, on average, more faith than those who are born into it. In the same way, people in my generation - where Rockism has always been dumb and evil - are popist by default. We don’t really BELIEVE in it. It’s just what we’re supposed to think. So the popist escapades are a simultaneous smaller, lesser thing.

Which leads me to start thinking about a possible useful synthesis position, but that’s a different rant.