Jeff Chang & Simon Reynolds, pt. 1

I'm always looking for great pairs to throw together for an Author2Author discussion, and I think this chat between Jeff Chang and Simon Reynolds is going to be a real winner. Jeff's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and Simon's Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 tackle the formative musical years of my generation from two different directions, and it's interesting to see how their work informs and relates to each other.

Jeff Chang: First off, congratulations on Rip It Up! It's fantastic work, and more than deserves every accolade that's come down. My formative music years also coincided with the turn of the 80s and Reagan/Thatcher, and—all VH1 kitsch aside—I agree that it's a period that has been easier to parody than take seriously. I love the breadth of the groups you cover in the book, from Adam and the Ants to PiL to the Slits; it resonates with my own musical explorations during my teens. I remember that reggae, Hawaiian music, and hip-hop were the sounds that I searched out, and that post-punk and new wave was what I was primarily reading about, in magazines like Rolling Stone, Musician, Trouser Press, and the occasional NME and Melody Maker that made it to my shores in the Pacific.

How in the world do you begin to capture this all under one big "post-punk" umbrella? And do you think it's possible that the diversity of that period sets us up for the proliferation of micro-pop genres and niches these days? And how do you think the profusion of styles you encountered in your teens informed your views of music and culture?

Simon Reynolds: Thanks, Jeff, and big up ya chest for Can't Stop, Won't Stop, a colossal achievement—literally colossal (more on that later!). I did tons of research for Rip It Up but I can't imagine what it was like for you embarking on a project that cuts across three decades of not just musical but social and political history. Perhaps you could talk a bit about how you approached such a huge undertaking, how long it took to research, and also the difficulty of deciding what to leave out.

On the subject of postpunk as umbrella term, the way I loosely defined postpunk was music that had been catalysed by punk but didn't sound like punk rock in the classic sense of Pistols/Clash/Ramones. Bands that wouldn't have existed without the spur of punk giving them the confidence to do it themselves, but who felt the true spirit of punk was not to repeat but to experiment and keep moving. The big exception to "catalysed by punk"—which requires a second-level definition of postpunk—is bands who happened to be in existence before punk happened; e.g. Devo, Cabaret Voltaire, Pere Ubu, the Residents. Some of them had been around many years, but only found a substantial audience because punk opened things up. That opening-up had several levels. Firstly, punk created an audience with an appetite for more challenging music. It shook up the major labels, and made them more likely to sign edgy bands or take risks—the chase to sign Devo as "the next Sex Pistols" is one example—for fear of getting left behind. Punk also catalysed the independent label movement, which provided a distribution network for weirdo music that would otherwise have just subsisted on a home-taping/mail-order level, and also a cultural context in which risk-taking music "signified" and found a proper reception. So overall, I'd define postpunk not as a genre of music but rather as a possibility space in which a host of new genres and scenes formed.

That open-endedness naturally lent itself towards diversity and fragmentation. So as the postpunk era proceeds, by the time we get near the end of the period I'm covering (1983-84) the distance between things is starting to get vast. There's a gulf between Goth and the glossy New Pop stuff, between synthpop and the return-to-guitars of those bands I've dubbed "glory boys" (Echo & the Bunnymen, U2, etc). Everything is scattering and following its own divergent and often antithetical path. But the point of origin—the mythic site of lost unity—is punk. That's the ignition point, the Big Bang. Even Duran Duran, who seem like the ultimate "like punk never happened" band, had started out wanting to combine Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" and Chic's "Le Freak."

I don't know if postpunk is the beginning of the modern age of genre fragmentation, though, because the early Seventies was like that, in a way: a diverse but diffuse era that people still have some difficulty getting a grip on. It's more like rock history has alternated between periods of unity (the mid-to-late Sixties; punk; to a lesser extent grunge and early rave) and phases when consensus disintegrates and the tribes scatter. These periods of drift and diaspora tend to get seen unfairly as troughs or wastelands, which was one reason it was enticing (but also challenging) to attempt to write about the punk "aftermath" as both a unified epoch and a surge-phase.

Simon Reynolds: I've loads of things I want to ask you about. Let me start by bringing up the weighty nature of our books—the sheer heft of them, physically. The Wire reviewer Rob Young described the UK edition of Rip It Up, which is longer and on heavier paper stock, as resembling a brick, something you could read and then throw through a megastore window as a protest against modern music! Your book's even more hefty—it'soccasionally made me think of a small gravestone. There is something of a sense of summation, if not quite requiem, about both: what one might call two major "discourses of emancipation" which have arguably run their course. There have been many great (musically, artistically) rock records made since 1984, but I do think of postpunk as the last great spasm of the idea of rock as a force of change—at least in the mainstream (music + radicalism survives as a niche market).

The same thing has happened with hip hop: The idea of rap as a force of resistance, as black folks' CNN, has been largely displaced (in the mainstream) by rap as entertainment, or as career structure for self-advancement on the individual rather than collective level. Neither genre is exhausted in musical terms, but it scarcely seems to be viable to think of them as "movements" anymore. And there's a melancholy intimation, from the standpoint of today's cynical realism, that such an expectation of music as a force for change was always too idealistic, an over-estimation. The idea that a song could actually fight the power… it can seem hopelessly naïve, especially when you see how devious and entrenched the people and forces who run Babylon actually are. Anyway I wondered what your feelings were on this topic, whether the kind of thing you're celebrating in Can't Stop, Won't Stop—really from the title on down—is now "over". To adapt the words of Monty Python's parrot sketch, is "it" dead, or just resting?

Jeff Chang: Something that I've been thinking a lot about: I wonder if change always necessitates forgetting everything that just happened—in other words, if we always need to rip it up and start again? Your point about the diversity of music in the '70s makes me realize that the punk and post-punk mythos was built on discursively narrowing the field of its opposition—not so different from how the hip-hoppers of the '80s used disco, even though most rap before 1982 really was disco-based.

I worry that my peers are overly cynical about young people enslaving themselves in the pop-culture matrix, too quick prone to make sweeping generalizations about the "them" on the other side of an age gap they don't yet recognize, while carefully working to burnish their own story. I've straddled that line. Can't Stop Won't Stop was explicitly conceived as a way to burn through all the baby-boomer platitudes with a little myth of our own. I tried to be as real as I thought I could be, but in the end, I couldn't escape writing what a good friend of mine called a "heroic narrative". Critical historiography be damned. At the same time, I'm busy trying to collect all the flowers of change I see, perhaps even before they've bloomed. Against time and my peers, I remain optimistic about hip-hop, even as I recognize it may be in the process of becoming the next thing.