Jeff Chang & Simon Reynolds, pt. 2

Jeff and Simon continue their discussion about the musical legacy of the late '70s and early '80s, as elaborated in their recently published histories, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.

Jeff Chang: My politics have always shaped my aesthetics, probably to a fault. One thing that has always made your writing "must-read" for me is that you always seem to inhabit the aesthetic you are writing about. Your voice has changed as you've moved from one genre to another. Rip It Up reads much differently from Generation Ecstasy reads very different from The Sex Revolts, and so on. From a reader's point of view, it's always a challenging and satisfying journey.

Is this a conscious shift that you make when you move to a new subject? More to the point, I guess, do you have an interest in trying to mix these up, throw them all together, connect the dots and develop, say, an idea about how postpunk, grunge, rave, electronic musics, post-modern pop, hip-hop, how they all fit together? Do you at all work toward a unified theory of popular music? Or is this a project that is a uniquely American, rockist, modernist, neo-Marxist, whatever kind of notion?

Simon Reynolds: It's not really a "conscious shift," the differences of style and approach with each book; probably it's more that the material dictates the style. (The Sex Revolts actually has three styles that unconsciously mirror the material: the first section, on misogyny and masculinism in rock, is argumentatively thrusting, relentless, slightly deranged; the middle part, on psychedelia and the androgynous "soft male", is drifting and associational, c.f. Toop's Ocean of Sound; the third bit, examining the various strategies taken by female artists, is fractured and detail-oriented.) But with Rip It Up I did arrive at an approach, partly consciously and partly just through how things worked out, where I wasn't really concerned with imposing my own take on everything, but more endeavoring to understand what the protagonists were trying to do, where their heads were at. I saw my goal as being to illuminate the artists' musical and intellectual adventures by delineating the context they operated in.

I was conscious of the fact that postpunk was densely populated with incredibly smart and articulate people who had a strongly defined sense of what they were doing, and this made the job different from writing about, say, electronic music, which was much more of a blank canvas for critical projection. With postpunk, the groups get critiqued and occasionally rebuked, but the general spirit of the enterprise was supportive: as I said before, these people, for all their flaws and, often, their ultimate failure, are heroes to me.

"A unified theory of popular music"… One part of me feels a really strong pull towards doing this, but I also know this is most likely a foolish and foredoomed project. Even if I could come up with an over-arching theory that "explained" the main things I've written about over the years--postpunk, neo-psychedelic rock, rap, rave--there's so many other kinds of music that I enjoy and that have a powerful effect on me that I've never been able to account for adequately with whatever Master Theory I've been touting at any given moment. For instance, this weekend I've been playing Fleetwood Mac nonstop. You could make a case for Lindsey Buckingham as an auteur-producer visionary (apparently he was listening to dub when he produced Tusk) but otherwise it'd be hard to say what the Mac's music has in common with postpunk/psychedelia/rave/et al. Yet it slays me. I once wrote a piece on Tusk that started with me as a postpunk fan in 1980 being ambushed by "Sara" on the radio, how it was an "aberration" in taste otherwise constituted by PiL/Gang of Four/Joy Division. In some ways, though, such aberrations are the most interesting things of all.

Simon Reynolds: I liked what you said about wanting to "burn through the baby-boomer platitudes with a little myth of our own". You wrote something along those lines in the introduction to Can't Stop, right? I recognized an affinity there with Rip It Up—the same frustration and fatigue with the endlessly retold tales of the Sixties, the desire to big up one's own era. That's something I made explicit in my own introduction, (over)stating the case for the postpunk era as a fair match for the 1963-67 period both musically, and in terms of a spirit of change and political turbulence infusing the music. There's definitely a sense of generational jousting there, even though I love the music of the Sixties and in some ways feel like a child of the Sixties (born in 1963).

How one goes about celebrating one's own formative era without bumming out the youth of today is a tricky thing to pull off, of course. I certainly wasn't claiming that postpunk was the last time rock mattered or had power (in my own lifetime as critic a/k/a "professional fan," there's been hip hop, rave, grunge, and many other things less obviously momentous; apart from a couple of pronounced lull years, I've never lacked for something to get worked up about in print). But there was a unique combination of historical circumstances that made that moment (the six or seven years after punk) exceptionally exciting and productive. A "heroic narrative" is definitely what I had in mind; although a lot of the individual narratives of bands and labels end in ignominy of one sort or another, these characters did seem heroic for the way they tried to do something different, something difficult. Time and again, they took the path of most resistance.

Your guarded optimism about hip hop's future is admirable (I want to come back to this at some point, the question of being a "hip hop patriot", which, although I love the music and find it endlessly fascinating and thought-provoking, I've never quite been, for a bunch of reasons). One thing I noticed about our books is that, as much as they cover a lot of artists, they both have a pivotal band, a group that gets two chapters. Intriguingly, both groups start with the word Public: Public Enemy and Public Image Ltd. If, as Simon Frith once wrote, punk is all about public gestures—semiotic terrorism, the use of publicity and hype as the basic material of artistic expression, a theatre of provocation and controversy—then Public Enemy were true punks. That's how they got written about at the time, as I recall, at least in the UK: the Black Clash. (I wrote about them and Def Jam at the time as "black rock", which I think they were much more interestingly than, say, Living Colour were). "Rebel Without A Pause," you could almost see as their "White Riot": The stance and the sound of it is saying "black punk, black punk, we want a punk of our own"! Didn't the Bomb Squad deploy mid-frequency sounds, the same ones that distorted electric guitars transmit, to give PE's records a punk-like attack?

Public Image Ltd were actually doing something completely opposite: PiL was Lydon's retreat from the arena of public gestures. It was John Lydon dismantling his Johnny Rotten persona in order to escape the Public Enemy #1 status that had put him in the cross-hairs of patriotic rage, a target for royalist retribution during 1977's summer of "God Save the Queen" . Shucking off the burden of being simultaneously rock savior and media anti-Christ, PiL was Lydon unveiling the "real me" and embarking on an emotionally expressionistic art trip. So in a sense Public Enemy and PiL were going in reverse directions.

There's a couple of ways that Public Enemy remind me of postpunk, though. One is the idea that it's no use having radical content if it just sits on top of unadventurous or tame-sounding music; the music has to be as challenging and confrontational as the lyrics. The other is the whole concept of "edutainment," the didacticism that crept into rap in the wake of PE (I recall a mini-trend for videos with blackboards and lecterns!). The whole idea of being "conscious" is totally in tune with the postpunk era: being aware as being awake, not being lulled into a trance by consumerism or propaganda, constantly being in a red alert state of ideological vigilance. And you write in Can't Stop, the immediate precursor to PE was a phase in rap where people talked about getting stupid, getting dumb: concussive bass, retarded tempos. The whole feel of PE—the fast tempos, the paranoid thinking—reminds me a bit of the amphetamania that runs through the whole postpunk era, common to everyone from PiL to Scritti Politti to The Fall.

Jeff Chang: There's a quote by Anne Magnuson at the end of your chapter on New York's mutant disco and punk funk that talks about decentering the "Bright Lights, Big City" narrative of cocaine-snorting stockbrokers to people "who had to create art, or die." It seems to me that class aspiration is a recurrent theme in the book, from the late 70s art-school lean toward Marxist and anti-racist solidarity politics for authenticity (a stance I certainly recognize in the US context) to the "Penthouse and Pavement" critique of ambition and aspiration embedded in the New Pop (that is startlingly reversed in the course of months, and finds an ironic denouement when folks like Martin Fry return to Sheffield). I've been thinking about this a lot within the context of hip-hop's ongoing crisis, its apparent dead-end in a materialist realism. Perhaps I should explain, and perhaps this will help contextualize some of the conversation that we have been having.