Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Postpunk and after


While we were on vacation some weeks ago, I brought along Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, a fascinating book about the bands that sprung up in the wake of the flameout of punk (which Reynolds places in 1978, when the Sex Pistols fell apart), including PIL (John Lydon's first post-Pistols band), Devo, The Fall, Joy Division, Talking Heads, Wire, and Mission of Burma. I've always thought I knew a lot about this stuff, and was thus a little astonished by my ignorance of the vast majority of the bands that Reynolds writes about.

To some extent, this may result from the fact that I didn't really discover postpunk until, according to Reynolds, it was over. The first identifiably alternative album I can remember buying was REM's Life's Rich Pageant (in 1986, as a sophomore in high school, at the Harvard Coop, of all places). REM, along with bands like the Smiths and New Order, was part of the movement that came after postpunk, which Reynolds calls alt-rock. (He says that REM and the Smiths were the two most important alt-rock bands. Hard to argue with that.) It was through some of these bands, like New Order (though they're more alt than rock) that I discovered their precursors, like Joy Division (with a little help from Raphael).

Reynolds book is very good and I highly recommend it. To fill in some of the gaps of our musical knowledge, Reynolds now has a CD coming out with some of the big bands he writes about in his book. May be worth checking out.

P.S. Through Reynolds' own blog, which is worth checking out, I discovered my favorite new blog, Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy.

Posted by jwb at 7:19 AM   

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