Other Voices: Post-Punk, Pissing Matches, Les Paul

I've been backlogged on responding to all the thinkers out there, so in the meantime here's a quick look at some of the posts from the last ten days or so that have been giving me food for thought:

—I'm only just getting to Parlando's post on post-punk from last week, which has some good comments in addition to the main post. It was written as a response to the Pitchfork review of U2 that dared use the p-p-word to describe their early albums. Though I've never been a U2 fan in any of their phases, I'm with Scraps that I'd never think to refer to any of their material as "post-punk." Some of the comments, however, are interesting—partly because they coincidentally get into something I just brushed at in my Marquee Moon post at Star-Maker Machine on Monday, which is that Television and the Ramones existed on the same stage, in the same scene, at the same time. Thinking about it renders the whole idea of "post"-punk a little ridiculous, since the genres really did happen simultaneously, not chronologically. (Not that the Ramones or Television were the very first of either genre, but we're talking 1977 here—the dawn of both genres.)

—Sunday's Los Angeles Times filled its Calendar section with essays and musings on the idea of the guilty pleasure. Ann Powers' contribution, about critical pissing matches, was linked in a few blogs, and out of context from the rest of the paper it seemed a little half-baked. Carl Wilson picked up on the thread and added his always-interesting two cents over at Zoilus.

—The Guardian did a nice interview with Les Paul, who still plays out every single week, despite his arthritic fingers. For anyone who doesn't grasp how important Paul was to music, this is a great read. There is no Jimi Hendrix or Thurston Moore without Les Paul. [via Rich Girls]

It took many more years of tinkering before he made his first solid-wood guitar, in 1941; he had to wait another 10 years before Gibson finally embraced the idea, in 1951. "The electric guitar was laughed at! They called me the character with the broomstick with pick-ups on it. It was terrible. Before we came along the guitar was an apologetic wimp - the weakest, most unimportant guy in the band. As soon as we put a pick-up on him, and a volume control, he became the king."

Comments

[Richard]

"Television and the Ramones existed on the same stage, in the same scene, at the same time. Thinking about it renders the whole idea of "post"-punk a little ridiculous, since the genres really did happen simultaneously, not chronologically. (Not that the Ramones or Television were the very first of either genre, but we're talking 1977 here—the dawn of both genres.)"

The word "genre" here seems wrong. If we think of "punk" or "post-punk" as attitudes and not styles, we get closer to understanding why these groups get lumped in together. When punk became a particular sound (when it became that which the Ramones are the exemplar of), then it became a genre. I almost think this is because of the British punk bands, who seem modeled mostly on the Ramones, with politics thrown in, rather than any of the others, be they Talking Heads, Blondie, Television, to name just the most famous CBGB bands. American hardcore punk follows on from here (talking somewhat out of my ass, but hey). And it's this strain, more than anything, I'd wager, that Pere Ubu's David Thomas has seen as "reactionary". Pere Ubu, he's always claimed, fits right in with the mainstream evolution of rock music. If we see post-punk in this way, too, it makes sense. In England, it seems to me, post-punk emerges out of the (conservative) energy of punk, and allows for that evolution to continue (almost as if the moment of punk is something like the punctuated equilibrium posited by some evolutionary theorists, or the laying waste that allows the evolution to pick up again--sorry for the sloppy science analogies, I couldn't resist!). In the US, "punk" was never really popular in the way it was in the UK, so the music got driven underground, etc...

But if we get caught thinking that "punk" sounds a certain a way (which is easy to do, since the term has gotten applied to a certain, simple guitar-band sound), and then think that "post-punk" follows on from here, and also sounds a certain way--well, we then have a hard time talking about it.

I brought up Simon Reynold's (quite excellent) Rip it Up and Start Again over at Parlando, because I think it usefully expands the notion of what is post-punk so that it allows the music to pick up on what Thomas is talking about: moving forward, in the Main Stream of the history of rock. And it takes special notice of where the (different) music(s) came from, what social forces shaped the sounds and groupings, etc.

(I should say that in this context, I have always and will always think of Television as "punk", even though they are immeasurably more complex than the Ramones. Same with Talking Heads--who at least had the very minimal early records.)

Etc, etc, etc.

[sroden]

i think ye all have some memory issues. talking heads and blondie were never considered punk bands, post punk bands, or no wave... they were at the time considered new wave, as was elvis costello, so the uk/usa thing is not quite right either.

these bands had much more reverence for pop music than most of the first punks did (the first jam record is a big question mark, because of their love of motown and soul, but they still kicked ass then, and played along with all the early punk bands, so no one really called them mods until much later).

television, really was a rock band, as were the velvet underground, as were the stooges, and it's pretty clear where they came from (and it's pretty clear jesus and mary chain came out of this trajectory rather than punk).

post punk really did come about AFTER punk's initial development, and included things with, as you say, a much different kind of sound - siouxsie and the banshees are one of the few bands i would consider crossed over from punk into post punk in that way (i'd never think of the cure as being a punk band, but probably post punk would fit the first record or two if not their trajectory).

u2, even at the beginning, was pretty much a rock band, and most folks that were into the post punk scene were not fans - even though they liked teardrop explodes or the first echo and the bunnymen single, and of course joy division, and the like. u2 even back then seemed like poseurs. it's why i've always had a hard time with r.e.m. because they also always felt like a rock band, and were never part of a scene with other bands i was interested in. (i still don't see u2 and r.e.m. as being that different... and that is the music that spawned the awful smashing pumpkins... so i dare say not a drop of goodness in any of them...)

post punk still had punk's energy but was willing to branch out in terms of sound. i think about josef k, gang of four, the pop group, joy division, it's a clear lineage from punk to these bands. but post punk also eventually embraced things it was initially afraid of (the clash embraced these things with so much gusto, that they ended up with some of it's greatest poppier experiments: london's calling and sandinista - neither of which i would consider post punk).

and then there's PIL, one of the greatest experiments in all of post punk, and here it's clear, because you've got some of the fathers of punk rock, trying to take it to a DIFFERENT place, a place that is clearly a kind of 'after punk'. to me, metal box is the pinnacle of what post punk could've been (as were the first two or three cabaret voltaire records); because these things not only maintained punk rock attitudes, but dragged them kicking and screaming away from guitar bands, into totally new territory.

if you add to all this bands like the young marble giants, felt, monochrome set, you get a whole other sound, but i think still with a relationship to punk's ethics, and here is where basing on the sound of something gets dicey, because post punk was not generally about conformity as it was about breaking punk open so that it could have many faces.

i think it's really difficult to categorize these things after the fact, when they were really all part of different scenes, and those different scenes were where these genre's came from. television is to the ramones as eddie and the hot rods were to the damned, they were sort of part of the scene, because there was no one else they could play with, but they didn't really evolve into the scene in the same way.

[Scraps]

It may seem silly in retrospect, but it was definitely not uncommon at the time of their first two albums -- pre-Parallel Lines -- to hear Blondie referred to as a punk band.

[Richard]

sroden - there is not a single moment in your comment I agree with. And to follow on from Scraps, not only was Blondie referred to as a punk band, the Talking Heads definitely were. "New Wave" means nothing.