[kj] The great POST-PUNK debate

[Graeme Rowland]

I don't think that gig was in 1978

Keep strummin' gtrs!

 --- nicholas fitzpatrick <gasw30 at hotmail.com> wrote: 
> So when was post-punk born? What do you think to
> this statement?
> 
> ---"Punk turned into post-punk when the group Wire
> played their now mythic 
> "Document and Eye Witness" set at the Electric
> Ballroom, Camden, in 1978. 
> Comprising nearly two hours of repetition-based
> performance art, to an 
> audience largely of drunk skinheads, the event
> featured masked performers in 
> paper headdresses, and a hammer attack on a gas
> cooker."
> 
> It was taken from the following article about punk
> (doesn't talk about 
> American punk though) to promote a new fashion show,
> or something.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> >>>>>The Times
> 
> September 25, 2004, Saturday
> HEADLINE: Live fast, die old
> 
> Punk was meant to be a short, sharp cultural shock
> with no future, so how 
> come its legacy is still all around us, asks Michael
> Bracewell
> 
> Malcolm McLaren once declared: "History is for
> pissing on." Which is ironic 
> given the enduring legacy of punk, the cultural
> movement he is credited with 
> having helped to create. Today, the origins of
> British punk comprise a 
> culturally enshrined configuration of people, events
> and places, the 
> accounts of which breed lengthening bibliographies,
> provoking questions of 
> ownership, authorship, status and authenticity. In a
> world gorged on 
> product, punk played tricks on production itself
> -dismantling technique, 
> reclaiming materials and reversing rhetoric.
> 
> This month there is a new exhibition of punk clothes
> and artefacts from the 
> collection of Andrew Wilson and Paul Stolper, yet
> another biography of Sid 
> Vicious, and a new compilation CD, England's
> Dreaming, compiled by the Sex 
> Pistols biographer Jon Savage, of key punk and
> post-punk tracks. The 
> aggressive modernity of punk just never seems to
> date.
> 
> Entitled Punk: A True and Dirty Tale, the exhibition
> of Stolper and Wilson's 
> meticulously assembled collection of artefacts seems
> set to give the most 
> accurate assessment to date of punk's creative
> importance. Including 
> garments made by Vivienne Westwood and McLaren for
> their infamous Chelsea 
> boutiques, SEX and Seditionaries, the exhibition
> contains such rarities as 
> handmade, handprinted shirts and T-shirts which can
> undoubtedly be regarded 
> as art objects in their own right. (The nearest
> comparison would be, 
> perhaps, with Elsa Schiaparelli's design
> collaborations with Salvador Dali.) 
> With crude printing on muslin, elongated sleeves,
> dropped necklines and 
> restraining dog clips and D-rings, many of these
> pieces feature quotations 
> from Futurist and Situationist writings, as well as
> from lumpen popular 
> culture.
> 
> Alongside posters, flyers and handwritten Sex
> Pistols' lyrics, there are 
> also such morbid items as a Never Mind the Bollocks
> poster, retrieved from 
> Sid Vicious's hotel room in New York, and stained
> with blood along its 
> bottom edge from where he cleaned his syringes.
> 
> The first wave of punk in Britain, between 1976 and
> 1977, was arguably the 
> single most important cultural revolution to occur
> in Britain since the 
> height of Modernism in the 1920s. Although the
> movement became a cartoon 
> version of itself within a year of the first
> notoriety of the Sex Pistols, 
> the fallout of punk dismantled the existing cultural
> language, and proposed 
> a whole new perspective with which to view the
> modern world. Its audacity, 
> in terms of both its creativity and its attitudes,
> has yet to be equalled.
> 
> But ought a movement of such targeted nihilism
> -beginning with a slogan such 
> as "No Future" -allow itself to own a history? By
> the rules of its own 
> rhetoric, punk ought now to occupy a discursive void
> -booby-trapped by its 
> pioneers to repel the historians of the future.
> 
> Punk's artefacts -more than almost any other form or
> period of pop cultural 
> relic -have become narrative, each telling their
> different story of 
> trickery. As yesterday's punks are today's Friends
> Reunited and eBay 
> junkies, they can all recall the day they bought
> their bondage trousers -the 
> experience, in most cases, was one of making a very
> intense statement about 
> how you saw yourself and saw the world.
> 
> Punk's trickery was comprised in part by speed, and
> in part by aggressive 
> rhetoric.
> 
> The first phase of punk styling was most probably
> the last time in social 
> history that clothing would provoke such hatred. As
> the garments sold at SEX 
> and Seditionaries went to prove, punk style declared
> society derelict, and 
> its wearers the occupants of a post-history
> position, in which science 
> fiction strangeness was fused with fetish-wear
> doubling as sloganeering.
> 
> The rubber fetish-wear sold by Westwood and McLaren
> appeared more scientific 
> than erotic -more attuned to anti-radiation than
> sensual constriction. 
> Similarly, the exquisite tailoring, fragility and
> detailing of much of 
> Westwood's work added a dandified, aristocratic
> elegance to the often 
> outrageous basis of its principal imagery. The
> potency of their effect lay 
> in their reversal of accepted values - even to the
> point of debunking 
> anarchy itself, and turning it into a camp joke.
> 
> The film-maker John Maybury, for instance, recalled:
> "One of my favourites 
> was the Anarchy hanky. It came with a black
> Seditionaries tag."
> 
> The clothing sold at SEX and Seditionaries was
> considered way beyond the 
> limits of public tolerance. To imagine their impact
> now, one would have to 
> think of a Chelsea boutique selling an exquisite
> shirt, hand-printed with 
> the face of Ian Huntley, over a caption taken from
> the sentencing of Gary 
> Glitter or some academic treatise on civil
> disobedience. In 1977 to sell a 
> T-shirt printed with the legend "Cambridge Rapist"
> -referencing a recent 
> crime -was off the scale of acceptability.
> 
> Mohair jumpers and ties made of feathers added an
> element of surrealism - 
> completing the idea (and sold at World's End, of all
> the aptly named 
> places!) that history had ended, society was senile
> and culture out of 
> balance. In short, the shock factor of punk styling
> was in fact covert 
> intelligence -intellectualism, mysticism even, and
> conveyed through 
> fashion's equivalent of a story by Bulgakov or
> Burroughs.
> 
> All sides now claim punk for their own, from the
> most committed class 
> warriors to the most inflexible of aesthetes.
> Academics grow fierce and 
> red-faced as regards rival interpretations of the
> movement, their 
> contortions becoming ever more complex as they
> struggle to balance their 
> theories against their memories. For punk is still
> regarded as representing 
> and authorising cultural authenticity; and each of
> punk's participants, 
> survivors and champions, in the manner of a
> fairytale, seems to find their 
> 
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