[lbo-talk] Modern punk - WAS Re: The Cramps!

Mike Beggs mikejbeggs at gmail.com
Fri Feb 6 19:39:17 PST 2009


On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 10:29 PM, Philip Pilkington <pilkingtonphil at gmail.com
> wrote:


>
>
> What really vexes me is that, while I like all the vulgar
> "spit-on-your-own-mother" sort of stuff, punk really evolved through the
> 80s
> and into the early 90s and then all the experimentation suddenly died. Some
> of the links I was throwing around there would be good examples of this.
> Crime and the City Solution and The Birthday Party are good examples, but
> not just Australian stuff. This happened loads of places. Cop Shoot Cop
> were
> a New York outfit if I recall correctly and they did some really
> interesting
> stuff (for the uninitiated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlL7fKT6NUw),
> obviously more famous bands like Gang of Four and Mission of Burma have to
> get a mention too. And I know you can lump each of these into various
> sub-sections or whatever (gothic, industrial etc.) but they're all really
> just experimental punk music.
>

See I would call this stuff 'post-punk', which is quite a broad label covering music that emerged out of the same milieu as turn-of-the-80s punk but with more experimental momentum in all kinds of interesting directions. Simon Reynolds' book 'Rip it Up and Start Again' is really good on the whole picture in the UK and US, and he traces the lines through it to quite surprising places, up to and including Grace Jones, Gary Numan and so on (and also including pre-punk that doesn't really sound much like punk, like Television, the Residents etc.)

Speaking of Australian stuff, I went to All Tomorrow's Parties here in Sydney the other week and it was quite a reunion: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the Saints, Rowland S. Howard, the Go-Betweens etc, along with a bunch of interesting newer stuff like the Fuck Buttons. The press here were painting it as an oldies event although the music was generally much more radical than that at the kids fest Big Day Out a couple of weeks later. Apparently oldies aren't just baby boomers anymore.

Cheers, Mike



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