Post-Punk Then and Now
Post-Punk
Then and Now
Edited by Gavin Butt,
Kodwo Eshun
and Mark Fisher
Contents
Preface
1 Introduction: Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher in Conversation
2 “Personality Crisis? Honey, I Was Born with One”: Lydia Lunch Interviewed by Dominic Johnson
3 Being in A Band: Art-school Experiment and the Post-Punk Commons — a Lecture by Gavin Butt
4 “On The One Hand The State Is Funding You and Enabling Your Existence, On The Other Hand, Your Whole Shtick Is To Rebel Against It”: Post-Punk and Poland, a Talk by Agata Pyzik
5 “Going Overground: The Jam between Populism and Popular Modernism”: A Lecture by Mark Fisher
6 Lockdown and Breakout: Laura Oldfield Ford and Gee Vaucher in Conversation with Mark Fisher
7 “The Weakest Link in Every Chain, I Always Want To Find It”: Green Gartside in Conversation with Kodwo Eshun
8 “40 Degrees in Black”: Eliete Mejorado and Bruno Verner in Conversation with Gavin Butt
9 “We Wanted This Sense of Fluxing In and Out of History”: Sue Clayton in Conversation with Kodwo Eshun
10 “Vague Post-Punk Memories”: A Lecture by Tom Vague, and Conversation with Mark Fisher
Contributors
Preface
Post-Punk Then and Now is based on a series of talks, lectures, and discussions organised by Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher in the autumn of 2014. The series was part of the Public Programme of the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. The motivations for organising the series were anything but “academic”. For all three organisers, who were teenagers during the post-punk period, post-punk served as a heady initiation into culture. In its restlessness, its allusiveness, its overreaching, post-punk vigorously affirmed the possibility that culture could be at once popular, experimental and intellectually-driven. Post-punk happened at a particularly fraught historical juncture: it came at the end of a long wave of extraordinary invention in popular music culture, but it also coincided with the rise of what Stuart Hall called “Thatcherism”. The Post-Punk Then and Now series took place some 35 years after the election of Margaret Thatcher, when another Conservative Prime Minister was presiding over an austerity programme which seemed set to implement the final phase of neoliberalism. This therefore seemed a particularly opportune moment to gather together musicians, critics and artists — some of whom directly participated in the original post-punk moment, some of whom came to it later — for a sustained ten-week examination of post-punk and its legacy. In this volume, we have sought to preserve the energy and the spirit of the conversations which took place in that ten-week period. Perhaps more than most, this book is the product of collective work, and we would like to thank all the speakers for their hard work in assisting us to convert the series into a book.
1 Introduction
Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher in Conversation (2|10|14)
Gavin Butt: We’ve organised this programme of talks together because we share an interest in post-punk art and music, and the era that gave rise to them. Given that there is relatively little scholarship on the period, we thought it would be a good idea to put together a series of events at Goldsmiths involving in-conversations and talks by leading post-punk artists and musicians, alongside some new critical voices on the subject. One of the questions that cropped up as we began to think about doing this was: Why post-punk now? Why are the three of us interested in post-punk at this particular historical juncture? And why, given that so many of you have turned out today, is this relatively narrow period in cultural history of interest to you too? So we thought we’d try and answer that question today, or at least begin to answer that question in a rudimentary way, by having a three-way conversation before opening up to hear your contributions and ideas.
I think I became conscious of the fact that post-punk was beginning to occupy my thoughts over the past few years as I began to reflect on the post-punk scene in the northern English city of Leeds, which is where I did my PhD at the university. There had been a very dynamic and interesting scene that preceded my time there, which I caught the tail-end of, and which was still in the air, if you like, in the late 80s when I was there. But, before that, I was also a fan and fellow traveller of many post-punk acts from differing city scenes across the UK and elsewhere. I guess, as I look back, I have begun to assess the formative impact of this time upon my political and aesthetic values, as well as upon my mature intellectual and cultural preoccupations. I discovered, quite by chance, that other professor friends of mine — Jennifer Doyle, from the University of California Riverside, and the late José Muñoz, former Professor in Performance Studies at NYU — had also, quite independently, begun research on punk and post-punk at more or less the same time. Since we are — or rather were — all of the same age in our mid-40s, it perhaps wouldn’t be unreasonable to answer the question “Why post-punk now?” by saying it’s a middle-aged thing, and that our interest in it is explained away as the expression of a generational nostalgia, of us enjoying the pleasure of returning to the primal scene of our youths. I’m sure there is some mileage in this. But I know Mark, Kodwo, and I are not happy to let the explanation rest there — in large part because understanding a “return” to post-punk as simply and only nostalgic obscures any possible exploration into its specific conditions of creation, and naturalises interest in it to normatively understood stages of an individual life-cycle.
Another way of looking at things would be to say that only now does post-punk seem, as a period, remote enough from our contemporary moment to allow us a good enough vantage point to turn towards it and begin to understand it historically. Given that the conditions of cultural possibility then seem so remote, so markedly different to those of our neoliberal present, perhaps it is only now we have travelled so far that we can more fully appreciate exactly how different everything was.
For those of you who don’t know, the post-punk period is normally characterised as existing from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, usually from 1978, which is the year that the Sex Pistols split up, to 1984 or 1985, which of course in this country saw the miners’ strike and their ultimate defeat, with miners trudging back to work, facing an uncertain future. This was a future which, in many ways, is now our present-day, neoliberal reality. Mark, in his book Ghosts of My Life, has much to say about the futures of post-punk, the futures that post-punk artists and musicians envisaged, and about what has befallen those imagined futures today. His book is a sustained exploration of what was once — in post-punk — a ready cultural capacity to orient oneself by radical visions of what might yet come.
Maybe I’ll turn to Mark first, to ask for some observations from him. Is this something — the imagining of an alternative future — that you think has become more difficult in contemporary times? Can you say a little bit about what you value about looking back to then from the vantage point of now?
Mark Fisher: I think the first thing to say is that, in a certain way it is a bad sign that we are interested in post-punk in the way that we are. As we came in, we listened to a Fad Gadget track — it didn’t sound like something from 30 years ago. 30 years back from post-punk would take you to 1948, 1949, to something like Glenn Miller: who knew what the music of 1948 was, who was particularly interested in it in the late 70s? Certainly, anyone who did listen back to music of the late 40s then could not have experienced that music as sounding as if it belonged in any way to the contemporary moment of the 1970s. But I think, faced with many examples of post-punk, we are confronted with something that does feel uncannily contemporary.
GB: In what ways Mark?
MF: Well, it just doesn’t sound outmoded. Ironically, much post-punk might have sounded more out-of-date in 1983 than it does now, because there’s been a flattening of cultural time since then. Post-punk was an example of what I’ve called popular modernism. The principle behind post-punk was the popular-modernist idea that you couldn’t repeat things, you couldn’t use forms that had become kitsch — and yesterday’s innovation was today’s kitsch. So post-punk was driven by a principle of difference and self-cancellation; a constant orientation towards the new, and a hostility towards the outmoded, the already-existent, the familiar. That’s why Simon Reynolds called his book on post-punk Rip It Up and Start Again. I guess what I’m saying is that that hostility towards the already-familiar has weakened to the point that it has disappeared. We can’t be hostile to the past in the way that post-punk was because we don’t now have a sense of the present or the future anymore.
GB: Can I just press you on that point, because I think much of what you say is pretty undeniable in terms of the widespread experimentalism of post-punk music. But if we think about maybe Talking Heads or Throbbing Gristle, Karl Marx’s old dictum about the “tradition of all dead generations” weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living” seems pertinent doesn’t it? Which is to say that as radically new as some of these bands may have sounded back in the day, today I sometimes hear the reworking of an earlier musical moment: Talking Heads reworking funk, for example, or Throbbing Gristle reworking 60s psychedelia in various kinds of ways. I wonder if you think that makes what you call “popular modernism” actually a form of postmodernism — with its habitual replaying of the past?
MF: Well, even high modernism was based on reworking; all forms of creativity originate in reworking. With the decline of popular modernism, though, we’ve increasingly seen already-existing reworkings presented as if they were new. No culture emerges ex nihilo, nothing comes out of nothing, there’s always a relationship to the past; it’s a question of whether that relationship is a passive one where it’s simply a matter of imitating and repeating, or an active one where a different kind of repetition is at stake. Take the example of Throbbing Gristle, for instance. Yes, Throbbing Gristle clearly were reaching back for 60s psychedelia as a reference, but their music doesn’t actually sound like 60s psychedelia. Post-punk depended on a set of strictures, often unstated but quite clear rules about what was acceptable. I think part of the reason it makes sense to describe it as post-punk, is that those rules were initially written by punk, and musically they were pretty boring rules. Punk is ultimately just a stripped-down form of rock music, but the shift into post-punk didn’t involve a simple setting-aside of those rules, it entailed a constant renegotiation. It was never a case that “anything goes”, there was a constant struggle over what was acceptable and what was not acceptable. It’s easy to forget how fierce those strictures were.
Kodwo Eshun: The idea of constraints is really important. When you see post-punk musicians or filmmakers now, that is the aspect that they are most apologetic about. They have learned to be ashamed of those self-strictures that are all too often dismissed as political correctness. Post-punk was an amateurist and autodidactic project that created a context for belief in your own incapacity rather than training or skill. What emerges is a drive towards self-authorisation in which people make up rules as they go. One of the norms that gets remade is the very idea of the rock group itself, its group dynamics of male bonding, its gang mentality; you can hear and see these notions coming under pressure and becoming disassembled in various ways. Green Gartside of Scritti Politti said that he wanted to make a music that was as uncertain and as unsure as he felt. Post-punk invented ways to dramatize that uncertainty.
GB: What that anxiety also pertains to, if you like, is the form of one’s cultural activity because it’s precisely at the moment when punk dies by becoming rock industry business-as-usual — maybe by 1977 but certainly by 1978 in this country — that simply making music becomes no longer the necessary limit of one’s cultural horizon. That it opens up to the anxiety of potentially working beyond music — sometimes without any sense of authority — and reaching out to other forms of art-making (performance, film, etc.) or different types of activity. Green Gartside, for example, was as driven by his reading of critical theory, of Gramsci or Derrida — by his intellectual practice — as he was by the writing of a lyric, or the improvising of a particular riff. Beyond a specific style of music then — discordant, angular guitars, or electronic, industrial soundscapes — post-punk might be more broadly characterised as creation within a permissive set of novel conjunctures between different disciplines or even institutions.
Lydia Lunch recalls the No Wave movement in New York as “the connective tissue where the cultural division of art, film, music and literature was cauterized, causing a vast insane asylum, part Theatre of Cruelty, part Grand Guignol, all Dada, all of the time”. Love the gothic drama of this! Post-punk then as a kind of expanded cultural playground where you risked your sanity, or at least the likelihood of being seen as deranged by cultural gatekeepers, as you went about making your idiosyncratic thing. Drawing from art, from film, from critical theory, or what have you — all this allowed for a re-imagining or a re-inhabiting of the public sphere, mixing things up in ways that allowed alternative visions to be forged.
MF: I think the point about the alternative public sphere is very important. When I interviewed Mark Stewart from the Pop Group, he said that they wanted to be an “explosion in the heart of the commodity”. They didn’t actually become a pop group, they certainly weren’t the Beatles. But nonetheless the overreaching Promethean ambition, the dissatisfaction with being confined to the margins, was crucial to post-punk.
Another dimension of that public sphere is the music press as it was shaped by post-punk culture. Probably the most important factor leading to me sitting here today would be the music press of the early 80s. The reason that I became interested in theory and philosophy etc. was seeing it in the pages of the New Musical Express, and that is another telling contrast between that period and the current moment. In the early 80s, its leading writers were autodidacts who had not gone to university but who were nevertheless steeped in post-structuralist thought and used to flaunt this in the pages of a music newspaper that was then selling hundreds of thousands of copies. There was a kind of contagion of autodidacticism, and the music press formed part of what was in effect an alternative education system. I think it was Jon Savage who has talked about music culture as a portal: an album, a single would be threshold that you could cross that would open up worlds to you. There would be all kinds of references, all kinds of distillations in the cover art — whether they’d be allusions to European art cinema or to theory, or to literature, to J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs (and in many ways Burroughs and Ballard were the most important influences on post-punk, more significant than any musical reference point).
Part of what made this culture popular-modernist rather than populist was its embrace of difficulty. It didn’t immediately make sense, references weren’t explained to you, and you had to rise to that challenge if you wanted to engage with it.
GB: The irony of all that is that despite post-punk being a permissive, DIY kind of world-making, a lot of post-punk artists went to art school to be taught how to become professional artists. I think that’s a really interesting paradox for us to toy with. But maybe that’s not right. Maybe people didn’t actually go there to become professional anythings. As I’ve been doing research on post-punk, I’m realising that a number of people actually went to art school to be in a band. That was even the principle reason they went. Not to become a famous painter. As Simon Frith and Howard Horne suggest, this was because art school was the place where you could get a local authority grant, have the costs of your tuition paid for by the government, and have three years to do whatever you wanted. Given the laissezfaire model in some art schools, you wouldn’t necessarily have to even talk to your tutor or show up in the studio. So it was a very, very different time. It feels remote from the seemingly more instrumentalised educational world of today. Especially given recent changes to the funding of higher education in this country, students are arguably under greater pressure today to focus on a career trajectory, and to appreciate their time at university as training for a graduate job. This is especially because education is now a costly consumer good, and students are encouraged to be mindful of getting a personal financial return for the investment in their studies. I wonder if going to art school in the 1970s and 1980s to be in a band opened up the possibilities of collective activity — both creative and political — that today’s individualising ethos serves to foreclose upon?
KE: A band is a very specific type of collective that accelerates and hybridises the tradition of artistic movements familiar from the history of 20th century modernisms. What you see in a group is a capacity to sustain a certain kind of insider mentality so that different theories, novels, art, all of these, are attitudinised through a stance that metabolises them quite dramatically. To quote a theorist or novelist is one thing; it is quite another to strike a pose with and through that quote. How you construct an attitude that is connoted through a gestural vocabulary, communicated in the way in which you hold your cigarette; all that is as important, more important than interviews or lyrics.
What is fascinating when look you at the era of 1978 to 1983 is that the generational resentments of the time targeted the welfare state that sustained that experimentation. People in this era were not grateful to the Labour Party for the welfare system. On the contrary, they were at odds with, if not antagonistic towards it. Post-punk, at least initially, was not targeting the Tories. It was attacking the Labour Party and the welfare system. The Song of the Shirt, which is set in 1979, begins with a discussion on welfare. A camera travels towards a television monitor on a table in a café that depicts a woman talking about welfare. She says that it is not worth her while to work because her husband can actually get more money through signing on for unemployment benefit. But he won’t go on the dole because he can’t bear to go through the interview process. She is trapped in low-paid work and decides to leave her husband which then obliges her husband to pay child-care support for her and her children. What man, she asks, will put up with this? These discontents animate The Song of the Shirt which then travels back into 1840 in order to understand the conditions for the formation of the welfare state. Just three days ago, at the Conservative Party’s annual conference, George Osborne promised to cap benefits for childcare and housing, stating that it was not fair that working families could earn less than families that claimed benefits. Between the arguments made by Osborne in 2014 and the arguments made by The Song of the Shirt in 1979 is a continuity that is articulated for quite different reasons by quite different political formations.
MF: That points to a problematic relationship between much of the organised left and the counterculture that goes back to the 60s. Nobody has described this bind better than the late critic Ellen Willis. She talks of a frustration she felt, an incompatibility between the kind of desires that were articulated and propagated by the counterculture, and mainstream left-wing politics, which she experienced as authoritarian and bureaucratic. We’re haunted by the failure of the left to come to some arrangement with the libertarian energies that came out of music culture. Instead, the right absorbed and converted the energies of the counterculture into its own project of re-individualisation. In retrospect, we can see the 80s as the moment when this happened, when things were lost: it was the period when neoliberalism really took control. You could say that the definitive end of post-punk was the defeat of the miners’ strike. Equally, I think the historical vantage point that we now have allows us to say that the things that post-punk was antagonistic towards, such as the welfare state, were actually part of the enabling conditions of post-punk cultural production. I think no one in post-punk culture who was targeting the left wanted the neoliberal solution that was offered. But at the same time this isn’t about fetishizing; celebrating social democracy as the ideal political form. Part of what haunts us in post-punk is the prospect of a kind of anti-authoritarian leftism, a kind of libidinal leftism, a leftism that could engage with those libertarian currents, that could engage with the desiring-fabric of style culture. That kind of leftism only ever appeared in fragments.
GB: It’s going to be interesting to pick up on these points with Agata Pyzik, who will share her thoughts on punk and post-punk in Poland. Of course, the political conditions of existence of that scene were very different to an ailing Labour government followed by a rampant Thatcherite one in the UK. You had instead military rule in the early 80s and then authoritarian communism. This will allow us to think the conditions of post-punk outside of the more customary Anglo-American context, and away from Western democracy. We will continue this in the conversation between Bruno Verner and Eliete Mejorado who will talk about post-punk in Brazil in the mid-80s at the time of a faltering military dictatorship and simultaneous resistances to it. I want to talk to them about how post-punk music might be understood as an integral part of a much broader cultural front organised, without any singular leader, as some kind of transversal libertarian movement. But I guess the thing that haunts all these conversations, and if you like, the political character of post-punk itself, is that it all took place before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War informed the imagined alternatives to this or that political regime, or economic system, and seeped into the mind-set for post-punk’s futurist imaginaries, in a way that is sometimes difficult to remember today — as you allude to in your book, Mark.
Maybe we could turn to something slightly different before we close: namely, the historicising of post-punk. One of the key books on the subject is Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again, published in 2005. But I know, Kodwo, you’ve been thinking about how the historicising of post-punk is not really happening so much in music journalism, even less in scholarly literature, but more recently in the blogosphere.
KE: Rip It Up and Start Again was published in around 2004. At around the same time, the blogosphere begins to assemble through a number of writers, such as Mark Fisher under the name k-punk, Matt Ingram under the name Woebot, and several others, each of whom analysed post-punk with an attention and ambition not seen since the 1970s. In the context of the discourse network of the blogosphere, this discussion was not nostalgic. On the contrary, it was urgent and necessary. Now why was this the case? And why was the writing actually more exciting than the majority of neo-post-punk recorded at the time by groups such as LCD Soundsystem or The Rapture. Because the new mode of online writing was theoretical rather than philosophical; because it circulated outside of the academy, creating a collective conversation that simultaneously functioned as libidinally charged speculation. The online discussions over post-punk went beyond questions of canonisation. A small number of writers exerted a massive influence by inventing new vocabularies for a music that had been quarantined in the precincts of old magazines. A new frame of reference was created that reset the terms for analysing the moment of post-punk.
*
Audience member 1: I have a question about the notion of a future, or our future being cut off. I’m from the United States — so maybe post-punk was theorised there in a very different way. It was a very visceral, this idea that we had no future. Lydia Lunch said that, like in an interview, she said: “I could get killed on the way home, we’re living in the worst area of New York, that’s been destroyed by Reaganomics”. So I guess my question is how does that translate? I’ve always assumed that post-punk got popular again today because again we don’t have a future.
MF: Different senses of the future are at stake really. Maybe post-punk began with the line from the Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’: “when there’s no future how can there be sin?” Post-punk was a Cold War culture, and it fits the analysis that Jeff Nuttall put forward in Bomb Culture, his claim that the major post-war youth scenes are really only possible because of the shadow of the mushroom cloud. It’s easy to forget that Cold War dread. But when I was a teenager in the early 80s, I used to dream of nuclear war practically every night, and every night when I got home from school, I would turn on the TV anxiously; have we taken the first step to nuclear war yet? Certainly ’79 was a key period for post-punk, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, you could really feel like we were on the way to the third world war.
But of course the paradox of this is that the sense of urgency produced an existential imperative: we can’t waste time because we might not have any time. That is what generated aesthetic futures, that’s what made things sound like they hadn’t sounded before. So the sense that there might not be one type of future, generated another type of future.
KE: One way to make the future is to intervene in the present which then becomes history; the present could be described as an experience of breadth or narrowness that Thomas Pynchon characterised as ‘temporal bandwidth’ in Gravity’s Rainbow. Part of Simon Reynolds’ recent argument is that contemporary culture has moved, broadly speaking, from analogue scarcity to digital abundance. Which implies that the temporal bandwidth of the present has decreased. Because there is more history, all the time, everywhere; it becomes more difficult to intervene in the present. As a result, the technological conditions for intervention into the present have to be artificially constructed. They are not spontaneously available. They are a form of work in themselves. To embark upon a project that is set in the present, you have to renounce digital abundance by undergoing a temporal diet or a media famine. You have to turn yourself into a castaway marooned on an island of the present separated from the abundance of digital archives of previous musical eras that continually saturate the contemporary. The conditions that Lydia Lunch spoke about now have to be self-consciously invented.
Audience member 2: I’m trying to think about how to formulate this. Recently I re-read The Buddha of Suburbia, and as you might know it’s set in London; there’s a key character named Charlie Hero who’s loosely based on Billy Idol, and he also went to the same school as David Bowie. Now, of course it’s figured as “Charlie Hero moves from the suburbs into downtown London and his trajectory parallels, or is developed kind of in conjunction with, the protagonist’s”. It’s figured as the rise of punk, but a lot of the characteristics that you have talked about in relation to post-punk sort of tie. Charlie Hero moves to the centre and it’s a completely cynical move to reinvent himself, he sees this as a way to become famous, and so he’s deskilled; he forms a band and they start playing their instruments really badly. So Hanif Kureishi was writing at the height of Thatcherism but it’s also this moment that’s more relevant to what you’re talking about in terms of post-punk. So my question is, a lot of this reinvention, a lot of this nihilism is contextualised in this reinvention of self, of moving from the suburbs to the centre. And I know that one of your interests in this context is about the proliferation of post-punk in Leeds and northern towns and its spreading to other parts outside the UK, but I wonder about how much this idea of the de-suburbanisation and the reinvention of self figures into what I think is actually a description of post-punk in this novel?
MF: Well I think that rhymes with what Jon Savage argues in England’s Dreaming, where he argues that you can’t just see punk as an urban phenomenon; it’s as much about the encounters of the suburbs with central London itself. That’s why Bromley and Beckenham, in Kent, were really significant… Bowie had come from that area, but so did Siouxsie Sioux, Billy Idol, and Japan.
KE: The psychic geography of the suburbs creates an intense self-consciousness that is not necessarily alleviated or assuaged by success; in fact, success might intensify these feelings of alienation. Post-punk makes a point of its misfit by insisting upon its distance and its unease from metropolitan centres.
In The Buddha of Suburbia Naveen Andrews could play the role of the young Hanif Kureishi as a picaresque figure, an updated version of Herman Melville’s confidence man who is able to charm and seduce and play with and against stereotypes. In the novels and essays of Ballard, the suburb operates as an unlimited dream company from which second-generation youth can plot their escape; the suburb incubates a certain kind of boredom that functions as a precondition for dreaming your way into the future. In a contemporary era characterised by nested interruptions, that kind of boredom has to be artificially created.
MF: This boredom question touches upon one of the key differences between then and now. There was apocalyptic terror and there was boredom, and both of them posed an existential challenge: faced with imminent death, it’s a scandal that I’m bored. But it’s a scandal that I had to solve myself, or, better, that we had to solve as part of a group. That temporality is difficult for us to return to in conditions that Kodwo has just described, it is so easy to fritter away time, it is so hard to construct that sense of urgency, so hard to construct the feeling that there’s no future, and therefore the present matters very intensely. We can endlessly float in the archive… Just one more click before I do something.
Audience member 2: Is the problem that the sense of no future is not acute enough, it’s not concrete enough, it hasn’t got that threatening image of the bomb?
MF: Part of the background to this is radically lowered expectations now. We call it post-punk now but that sense of living in a period after the fact was simply not in place at the time. People still had the expectation that music could be produced that was as good as any music that had come before. Those expectations have disappeared; the paradoxical routinisation of the exceptional in the post-punk period seems impossible to imagine now. The urgency that motivated that kind of cultural production is hard to muster when we are embedded in capitalist cyberspace. It makes us feel immortal, as if we’ve got infinite time to do something.
GB: As I was listening to that, I don’t know, it just brought out the vulgar Marxist in me. I was thinking that maybe we are all so interested in post-punk today simply because the political conditions of the contemporary moment in this country are akin to those of post-1979. We have another Conservative government that is basically setting about finishing the job that Thatcher started, trampling roughshod over the last vestiges of welfarism and social democracy. Post-punk was our antidote to all that the first time around. It represented a counter-public to Thatcherite cultural hegemony in the late 70s and 1980s. Rock Against Racism, miners’ benefits gigs, gay politics, alternative lifestyles, electronic music, multiculturalism, feminism: these were just some parts of the cultural firmament in which post-punk was lodged and which was set against the Thatcherite project of making Britain “great” again through an exclusionary, sometimes modern (neoliberal), sometimes antiquated (Victorian) image of Britishness.
In the resurgence of at least some of this since the election of the Tories in 2010, it feels like a return to that moment again. I’ve been on the various demos recently, for instance, the demos against the introduction of fees to university degrees, and I’ve chatted to a lot of activists of my generation and they all said the same thing: that it felt like the 80s all over again. So, at some affective level at least, we are back where we were. Sure things have changed massively since then — the Cold War is over, neoliberalism now runs rampant over the globe, and some of the progressive gains of the 80s around race, gender, and sexuality are still in place and largely accepted in the mainstream. But I think we are turning back to the 80s — and to post-punk — to see how we imagined it could be possible to beat these fuckers the first time around.
Audience member 3: Some of this discussion reminds me of one of the Riot grrrl things during the mid-90s and I was wondering if you could talk about that.
KE: The Riot grrrl era of the 1990s was a self-authorising movement driven by the intensity of creating a movement for its own sake. But from around 2005, when the first smartphones begin t appear, what you see in the advertising of that moment is a self-satisfaction that is inimical to the way in which Riot grrrl could redirect its self-loathing against the patriarchy of the music industry. What you see from the mid-00s onwards is that every time someone looks at their smartphone, they smirk to themselves. A smile that stems from possessing the computational capacity of the Apollo mission, regardless of what you actually do with it. A smartphone fuels an auto-affection that depletes the discontent which fuels a movement like Riot grrrl. When you look at Riot grrrl what you see is the brief and burning renewal of what Ulrike Meinhof called consumer panic; consumption is not denounced for its immorality as much as it is regarded with horror. The marketing of femininity on an industrial scale elicits terror. A contemporary movement would have to renew that sense of panic. That would be one of its challenges.
2 “Personality Crisis? Honey, I Was Born with One”
Lydia Lunch Interviewed by Dominic Johnson (9|10|14)
Dominic Johnson: After arriving in New York in 1976 at the age of 16, Lydia Lunch would make her mark as a musician, writer, underground film actress, spoken-word performer, visual artist, and subterranean icon. Her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks was short-lived but influential, not least through the release of Brian Eno’s compilation album No New York (1978). Alongside the bands DNA, Mars, and the Contortions, Lunch was a pioneer of what came to be known as No Wave, perhaps not so much a style as a musical attitude. Lunch is particularly notable for her singing voice, by turns childlike and coy, a rasping eternal snarl, or a primal scream. Lunch went on to form bands including Beirut Slump and 8 Eyed Spy, and in 1980 she released her first solo album, Queen of Siam, a record one reviewer described as: “A putrid classic of style and substance, so lazily erotic that it nearly sucks the life out of you”.
Lydia Lunch: Oh, if only!
DJ: Since Queen of Siam, Lunch has released an extensive discography of solo albums, spoken-word records, and albums in collaboration with Sonic Youth, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nick Cave, J.G. Thirlwell, Rowland S. Howard, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, and Exene Cervenka, among many others. Currently she performs and records with her new band, Big Sexy Noise and RETROVIRUS, an all-star line-up which includes Bob Bert of Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore, bassist Tim Dahl, and multi-instrumental composer Weasel Walter.
Lydia Lunch is also a prolific and compelling writer, both in and beyond her work as a songwriter. In her astonishing memoir Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary (2007), Lunch narrates her life from her time as a teenage tearaway in the 1970s to the years in New York, L.A., and London among other cities. She describes in incorrigible detail her experiences of hustling, criminality, drugs, violence, and plundering boys for sex. Her writing is sophisticated and gritty, her words hot with voodoo, soused with alcohol and blood, and varnished in semen. Her decadent style smacks of Jean Genet and Hubert Selby Jr., forged under the sign of Henry Miller’s romance with Anaïs Nin. Nevertheless, it’s a style entirely her own, typified by grit and literary gravel, and an erogenous brew of slickness, bombast, and swagger. As Thurston Moore writes of Paradoxia: “Lydia Lunch can lure fascist beasts to honey with a whiff of her thigh, she can eviscerate them in their own hideous pools of self-shame”.
Her acuity and verve extend to her critical writings, as evidenced in her book Will Work for Drugs (2009), which includes memoirs and essays and interviews with Jerry Stahl, Ron Athey, Hubert Selby Jr., and others. Tonight we will begin with a performance by Lydia in two parts, followed by a conversation between us. We’ll explore No Wave, post-punk, and the broader context of cultural innovation in New York in the 1970s, as well as Lydia’s key themes, politics, and practices.
She is the wet nurse in the trauma room, handmaiden, part criminal, queen of harsh, pretty scarred-up, bandaged and bruised, a predator at large. She is Lydia Lunch.
LL: I love you. [Laughter]. That’s a pretty good description, Doctor Dominic Johnson.
I’m Lydia Lunch. And you’re not. Lucky for you. I hit Manhattan as a teenage runaway in 1976 inspired by the manic ravings of Lester Bangs and Creem Magazine, the Velvet Underground’s sarcastic wit, the glamour of the New York Dolls’ first album and the poetic scat of Piss Factory — Patti Smith’s best, and probably only good record. I snuck out my bedroom window, jumped on a Greyhound bus and crash-landed in a bigger ghetto than the one I had just escaped from, but with 200 bucks in my pocket and a notebook full of misanthropic rantings, sporting a baby face — which I still do — which belied a hustler’s instinct and a killer urge to destroy everything that had inspired me; I thought I had hit pay dirt. I didn’t give a flying fuck if the Bowery smelt like dog shit. I mean I wasn’t expecting the toilets at CBGBs to be the bookend to Duchamp’s Urinal, but then maybe 1977 had more in common with 1917 than anyone would have imagined, as I do consider myself a Surrealist.
New York City during the late 1970s and early 80s was a beautifully ravaged slag, impoverished and neglected after suffering from decades of abuse and battery, she stunk of sex and drugs and aerosol paint, her breath hung heavy a sweet tubercular, sticky and viscous — [The microphone stops working]. I’ve already killed the microphone, you see that — I don’t need one. I killed it. I’ll just go on without one. Give me the… get your shit together!
Her breath hung heavy a sweet tubercular, sticky and viscous, she leaked from every pore like a sexy corpse unable to give up the ghost. A succubus that fed on new meat and fresh blood who in turn suckled on her like greedy parasites alchemising her putrefaction into a breeding ground of intoxicating fauna. A contaminated nursery overflowing with toxic belladonna, deadly nightshade whose blossoms mark death, by embracing the life that defied death which in turn mocked every-fucking-thing else.
Long before the family-friendly gentrification and capital-gain criminality whitewashed New York City of its kaleidoscopic perversion in order to make it safe for anyone who could afford the ridiculous rents charged for shoebox-sized apartments, the Lower East Side played crash-pad shooting gallery and bordello, to dozens of art-school dropouts, out-noise musicians, radical poets, no-budget filmmakers, and fly-on-the-wall photographers who all lived in glorious squalor in cheap tenement flats all within spitting distance of each other’s front window. It was a drug-fuelled, no-holds-barred, blood-soaked pornucopia of art terrorists documenting their personal dissent into the bowels of an inferno of a city where it felt like the lunatics had taken over the asylum, and I can assure you they had. Creativity acts like a virus, spontaneously combusting, splattering the brain matter of its host carriers across a finite terrain for a fleeting amount of time, forever staining the landscape. Hippie radicals flocked to Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love seeking revolution before the acid wore off. Heavyweight southern African Americans migrated north looking for paid work and ended up singing the blues in Chicago in the 1940s. The devil hollered when he caught his great balls of fire in Memphis during the 1950s. The scandals, the theatrics and the outrageous decadence of the Weimer Republic in the 1920s fostered both an uprise in prostitution and performance art — check out Anita Berber if you don’t know who she is — it made the golden age of Hollywood in the dirty 30s seem quaint by comparison.
The boisterous orgy that began in Andy Warhol’s Factory in the swinging 60s had become a bloated Technicolor corpse, kicked to the curb by gutter punks and No Wave nihilists of the late 1970s whose idea of a good time was defined by how much noise we could make, how much art we could create, and how much trouble we could fucking cause before the cops arrived to close down the after party. Like the anti-art invasion of Dada and the Surrealist pranksters who shattered them, we had a blast pissing all over everybody’s expectations of what art was. No Wave — and I am not punk, nor have I ever been punk, nor have I ever written a fucking punk-rock song — No Wave was a collective bowel-cleansing caterwaul which spat forth a collection of extreme artists who defied category, despised convention, defied the audience, refused to compromise, and has consequently influenced an important part of pop culture as well as mainstream fucking media ever since. Send your royalty cheques please. It’s only “a movement” in retrospect.
Post Alan Vega’s aptly named two-piece — Suicide — and before pop-punk-grunge Sonic Youth, New York City was the devil’s dirty litter box and No Wave was the bastard offspring of Taxi Driver, Times Square, the Son of Sam, the blackout of 1977, the dud of the summer of love, the hate-fuck of Charles Manson, the hell of the Vietnam War, Kent State, the Kennedy assassinations; it was a mad collective of death-defying miscreants desperate to rebel against the apathetic complacency of a zombie nation dumbed down by sitcoms, disco, fast food, and professional fucking wrestling. Yeah. We were angry, ugly, snotty, and goddamn vile. We used music and art as a battering ram and a form of psychic self-defence against our own naturally violent tendencies, an extreme reaction towards everything the 1960s had promised but failed to deliver, a collective mania that shot through the night skies of the decade riddled with the aftermath of all the failures and the frustrations that had come before it. But beneath the scowls of derision and the antagonism and the acrimony and the beautifully hideous harangue and the nearly unbearable shrill, that grotesque soundtrack which our lives defined, we were howling with fucking delight, laughing like lunatics at the brink of the apocalypse in a mad house the size of all of New York City. We were thrilled to be rubbing up against the freaks and the outcasts who somehow for some reason had all decided to run to land’s end and scream their bloody heads off. Yeah, that was New York in ’77 as I lived it.
I didn’t start in 1977. I started creating at the age of 12. I probably came out of the womb screaming a fucking horrible poem. I was born surrounded by death. My mother miscarried before me, after me, and I was born choking the life out of my dead twin — no fucking shit… in hell. At the age of six, my grandmother, a cruel Sicilian witch, died in bed while sleeping next to me, and for years afterwards I was chased through the basement by her evil apparitions, her heinous cackle.
My mother was surrounded by death too. Eleven brothers and sisters, only three of which lived to adulthood. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, cancer, diabetes, stroke. A sick brood indeed. Rotten fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. I spent my formative years in a town where future Hillside Strangler, Kenneth Bianchi, carried out his first experiments in lust killings. Month after month lurid details of his latest victim — always a preadolescent girl my age — would be splashed across the evening news or the front page of the daily paper. Grid-marking the map of bodies I was convinced, I actually prayed… I would be the next to join. Years later I survived Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker — see you in Disneyland — by three blocks. Now although at the time in the advanced stages of sick addiction to adrenaline and the endless possibility of death’s black magnetism I felt as if I had already spent many a new moon subjugated to the crazed killers’ unique charisma. Now, Ricky Ramirez never knew me but I felt as if we were fucking dating.
By nature I am death-defiant. I have survived illnesses — I’m not exaggerating — that have killed lesser mortals. Burst appendix, engorged lymph nodes, undetected and unwanted ectopic pregnancy that exploded filling my body with poisoned blood, septicaemia. I woke up while being butchered on the operating table, the surgeon’s vicious scalpel like a rotary saw slicing me open when the anaesthetic wore off. I came to surrounded by blinding white light which was in fact not the light, but the fluorescent overheads which I seemed to float eye-level to in a semicoma of indescribable pain. Silently screeching and beseeching every god, goddess, and demon that I thought worthy of summoning as I begged for death, begged for relief, begged to be set free from what I assumed was hell’s ultimate punishment. Eternal, unceasing, unrelenting physical pain, which I am still fucking in, goddamn. I’ve been stabbed in the gut an eighth of an inch short of pancreatic poisoning, I’ve been forced into the desert by a Manson wannabe whose idea of true romance was blood stains on the sun-bleached sand. I’ve been smashed in the head with a Heineken bottle with such brute force that it broke. I spent a charming weekend with a drifter who was arrested three days later at the Chelsea Hotel charged with cannibalism. I know, laugh if you will ‘coz I thought it was pretty damn funny he didn’t bite my baby pinkie toe off. He had my feet in his mouth and honey I’ve still got ten toes. You can count them later if you want to. I have been held hostage in snowy woods by a Robert Blake lookalike holding a sawn-off shotgun to my left temple, demanding to be told horrible fairy-tales detailing a dozen ways I would murder my own sisters. I’ve had two transatlantic flights which have stalled on European runways for hours while bomb-sniffing dogs have been let off in the luggage hold to look for explosives — and that was the early 1980s.