# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cultures, Subcultures, and Countercultures: Crash Course Sociology #11

# data[].attributes.body
Article by R Haenfler

# data[].attributes.headline
Living in Poverty | The Welfare State | 1970s Britain 

# data[].attributes.subject
Living in Poverty | The Welfare State | 1970s Britain 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Living in Poverty | The Welfare State | 1970s Britain | Hard Times | Report | 1970

# data[].attributes.headline
A Brief History of Punk's Birth in the UK

# data[].attributes.subject
A Brief History of Punk's Birth in the UK

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Brief History of Punk's Birth in the UK - MusicMadeUs

# data[].attributes.body
Book by Dick Hebdige

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jamie Reid: Never Mind The Interview (The Suburban Press)

# data[].attributes.body
Article by R Larkin

# data[].attributes.headline
Never mind the Sex Pistols - Simon Reynolds

# data[].attributes.subject
Never mind the Sex Pistols - Simon Reynolds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Rip It Up And Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-1984
by Simon Reynolds
Faber £16.99, pp520

It is hard to imagine there's anything left to learn about punk. The punk years have become a British landmark as exhausted of mystery as the Sixties, its styles dissected by cultural commentators and its sounds and attitudes constantly referenced by bands. But what of punk's aftermath?

Often dismissed as an awkward period in which punk's gleeful ructions petered out into the vacuity of the Eighties - into New Wave and worse - the post-punk era of music has gone largely uncelebrated until very recently. In the last few years, a clutch of bands such as Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, Interpol and the Rapture have shot to prominence with an arty guitar pop which owes a huge debt to this morning after the revolution before.

Post-punk resisted revisiting with some good reason. With the exception of Joy Division, who slotted straight into rock'n'roll mythology when their singer, Ian Curtis, committed suicide, and Public Image Limited, whose singer, John Lydon, never quite outpaced his Sex Pistols infamy, these bands had enjoyed relatively little in the way of fame or fortune in their lifespans. There were reasons for that.

Many of them came to pop from art college with austere agendas, bristling with theories and influences culled from art, literature, performance and critical theory. Inspired by the seismic upheavals punk conducted in subject matter as well as chord play, the post-punks sought to bring to pop the most un-pop of themes. Boy meets girl gave way to lyrics about industrial decay and the mechanics of power.

That post-punk resisted scholarship is rather strange. Seething with ideas, it's a music writer's genre in excelsis. Indeed, many of our best music journalists were either directly involved with, or inspired by, the post-punk period. Paul Morley, from the Manchester scene, wrote for NME, the organ of record. Simon Reynolds, author of a number of books on music, and of this definitive overview of post-punk, was a teenager at the time, excited by each new record, thrilling at the heady ideas that came along with the music.

Later, in the mid-to-late Eighties, Reynolds sowed what he had reaped from Scritti Politti and planted Roland Barthes into the pages of Melody Maker. Post-punk made him the intellectual gymnast he is today (his weblog - http://blissout.blogspot.com - is a dizzying but authoritative read). And in Rip it up and Start Again, Reynolds returns to the bands of his youth, intent on reassessing the after-punk dawn.

Reynolds's overarching polemic is this: that punk was not year zero at all, but, rather, the last gasp of a conventional, staid, macho, rock'n'roll - all crude Chuck Berry riffs and no innovation. Post-punk was where punk actually delivered on its promises. It was a time when the good ideas of 1976 (DIY attitudes, independent record labels, questioning everything) were disseminated outside the capital. The tired hegemony of guitar-bass-drums-vocals was questioned by bands building their own synthesisers. Dancing and black music were not shunned.

Post-punk then gave way to new pop, the subject of the second half of this wide-reaching book. It was a movement which marked the uptake of post-punk's intellectual work into the wider marketplace, where post-punk's open challenges to the sounds of the charts were superseded by a policy of entryism, or subversion from within. Bands such as the Human League and ABC, the Art of Noise and Frankie Goes to Hollywood had shiny surfaces but ulterior motives. Or, at least, they had once nurtured them. Scritti Politti, for instance, were a knowing enterprise named after Gramsci's Scritti Politici, who ended up smuggling Jacques Derrida into the Top 10.

Despite Reynolds's brainiac twists, Rip it up and Start Again is his most accessible book, compared with more polysyllabic works such as Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock and Energy Flash. Much of it is taken up by a detailed chronicle of the myriad bands and scenes of the late Seventies and early Eighties, the flow of ideas channelled along by traditional narrative and some magnificent research.

He tells how Mark Mothersbaugh, now most famous for the music to Rugrats, was at Kent State University in 1970 when the National Guard opened fire on student demonstrators. His band, Devo, were founded in the days immediately afterwards. In 1978, Virgin's Richard Branson flew Devo to Jamaica to propose they take a bandless Johnny Rotten as a new frontman; they refused.

Former Roxy Music man-turned-producer Brian Eno emerges as a benign eminence grise throughout the period, connecting the arty end of the pre-punk period to the experiments of the post-punks, and popping up behind the production desk for a trio of Talking Heads albums. Malcolm McLaren, by contrast, emerges as an arch-manipulator. When the Pistols implode, McLaren succeeds in getting EMI to fund a magazine pitched as Oz for schoolkids, which, according to its editor, Fred Vermorel, was intentionally outrageous, skirting the edges of teen pornography in a bid to create a subversive subculture that would goad the media and the music industry. He also sacked Adam from the Ants and controversially replaced him with 14-year-old Annabella Lwin to form Bow Wow Wow.

The husbandry with which Reynolds tends his material is impressive. He spends time with obscure former members of almost-forgotten bands. He skilfully probes the way a great number of groups flirted with Nazi imagery, testing for shock tactics, latent sympathies or artistic expressions of horror.

There are some unfortunate omissions, though. He could use an interview with John Lydon, whose move from the Pistols to PiL ushered in post-punk, a transformation that frames Reynolds's entire inquiry. You wonder, too, whether Reynolds is the only music journalist alive who takes bands entirely at face value when they say they are influenced by Dada, tribal polyrhythms and Wittgenstein. But he does, and his latest book is, ultimately, a compelling reminder of a time when clever, mischievous, creative people formed bands - and wrote about them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Observer review: Rip It Up And Start Again by Simon Reynolds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Rip It Up And Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-1984 by Simon ReynoldsFaber £16.99, pp520 It is hard to imagine there's anything left to learn about punk. The punk years have become a British landmark as exhausted of mystery as the Sixties, its styles dissected by cultural commentators and its sounds and attitudes constantly referenced by bands.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Most Radical Gesture - Situationist International

# data[].attributes.subject
The Most Radical Gesture - Situationist International

# data[].attributes.body
Book by S Plant

# data[].attributes.headline
The Situationists: Professor Alex Danchev

# data[].attributes.subject
The Situationists: Professor Alex Danchev

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Situationists: Professor Alex Danchev

# data[].attributes.headline
How to be a Situationist without Breaking Things

# data[].attributes.subject
How to be a Situationist without Breaking Things

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to be a Situationist without Breaking Things

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Resistance Through Rituals_ Youth Subcultu - Stuart Hall

# data[].attributes.body
| by Mark Fisher

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Capitalist Realism_ Is There No Alternativ - Mark Fisher