swoony passivity
Slate.com is running an exchange between one of its book critics and Simon Reynolds, whose Rip It Up and Start Again : Postpunk 1978-1984 was released in the US last month. I read the British edition1 of Rip It Up over the summer, and, while Reynold’s Generation Ecstasy is an authoritative book on electronic dance music, I was not particularly impressed with his take on post-punk.2 The book is composed of short biographical chapters over a wide variety of different bands. I’m not sure Frankie Goes to Hollywood deserves the same amount of space as landmark groups like Public Image Ltd. or Gang of Four. As a record guide it serves its purpose, but I thought it fell flat as a work of cultural history.
In Tuesday’s edition, Slate critic Stephen Metcalf suggests that there’s a “great U.K. tradition of heterosexual wimpiness” that US culture lacks. He goes on to attribute US embrace of unironic machismo for the election of Bush. (Kerry was portrayed as effete, so he lost.) In contrast to the UK’s use of wimpiness to challenge the dominant culture, that US groups pillaged African-American culture as a source of rebellious pop culture. I wonder if this needs to be unpacked more: just as Americans often use race to talk about class, it seems likely that race is used to construct feminized men. Reynolds dodges the race issue, but he does suggest that the popularity of figures like Morrissey3 in the US suggests that there’s a latent culture of wimpiness here. Metcalf contrasts hippie culture with the postpunks, but I suspect a lot of that wimpiness is articulated through 60s psych-pop homages. Most of the Elephant 6 bands were pretty darn twee while resisting macho mainstream “alternative” rock.
1I imagine I’ve attained new level of music snobbery when I’ve gone beyond collecting import records and I’m searching out import versions of music books. However, the British version was the one the UT library had, and I understand that the US version has been cut substantially.
2I read Generation Ecstasy when I first developed a serious interest in electronic music, while I’ve been a fan of post-punk bands since my teen years, so the material in Rip It Up would be more familiar.
2In high school, I had a Smiths sticker on the windshield of my oh-so-macho VW Beetle Convertible. As a skinny, awkward trombone-playing teen, I had little choice but to be twee.
