When Did "Post-Punk" Become a Genre Designation?

[negative potential]

Currently reading Simon Reynolds' history of "post-punk", which is very engrossing and informative, but I started to ask myself, when did the term "post-punk" actually become something like a genre designation for groups like Wire, Gang of Four, PIL, Joy Division, the first Rough Trade bands, etc.?

Contemporary textual evidence suggests this is more a retroactive label. My older siblings, in their teens during the original era, considered all this stuff "punk" or more broadly, "new wave". If you look at Lester Bangs' contemporary writings, "new wave" also seems to be the preferred term to anything that ventures outside of the more formulaic three-chord "punk" formula. Jon Savage's book "England's Dreaming", published a little over a decade after the original era, also doesn't really employ the term, and the discography, while acknowledging that groups like Joy Division and Gang of Four were part of the "diaspora" rather than punk proper, also doesn't really employ the term. The one useage I remember, a quote from Geoff Travis, it's used as an adjective rather than as a genre designation.

But sometime over the course of the last decade, "post-punk" seems to have become an actual genre designation. "New Wave" now seems to apply only to the more "pop" oriented groups like XTC or Elvis Costello, whereas "post-punk" allegedly refers to a "darker" sound. The earliest useage I can remember for "post-punk" in a genre sense is from the online Allmusic Guide, which also employs the dubious designation "proto-punk" to refer to pre-77 groups, hence leading to the weird situation that groups like "Suicide" and "Pere Ubu" are miraculously both "proto" and "post" punk!

[jon abbey]

Simon Reynolds is best known for creating genre labels, that's his thing, so maybe it was him.

[Dan Warburton]

Yes, I suspect Simon is probably responsible for this one. I certainly have no recollection of ever hearing the term at the time.. "Punk" was the Pistols, the Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch, the Damned and I suppose the Clash (though they always seemed more mainstream to me). Nowadays folks add the Ramones to the list, but back then I wasn't listening to them. "Hardcore" was what the American stuff got called, from Bad Brains to Hüsker Dü to Black Flag to Minutemen (God, how different all those bands are from one another!!). Just about everything else was dubbed "New Wave" - PiL, Joy Division, Gang of Four, Bauhaus, Cure, Swell Maps etc. Don't remember anyone going on about "Goth" or "Dark Wave" until the late 80s. Then you had "Futurist" - Gary Numan, the first Mute releases, the synth stuff - "Industrial" (we know who they are) and "New Romantic" - Haircut 100, Duran Duran, Heaven 17, Wham! Don't recall what they called Eurythmics, Yazoo and Depeche Mode at the time.. synthi pop? And the ZTT bands? I just thought they were wankers so I'm afraid I didn't pay much attention to them. But anyway, as punk itself burned bright and hard for a very short time but had enormous repercussions immediately after, I think "post-punk" is quite acceptable as a term, even though, like all our favourite terms, it's hard to pin down when you really try.

[Wombatz]

Wiki says: In 1980 critic Greil Marcus referred to "Britain's postpunk pop avant-garde" in a July 24, 1980 Rolling Stone article. He applied the phrase to such bands as Gang of Four, The Raincoats, and Essential Logic, which he wrote were "sparked by a tension, humor, and sense of paradox plainly unique in present-day pop music."

[Herb Levy]

Hmmm, I thought I'd posted to this thread before leaving the house this morning.

Anyway, I worked in record stores & then for a small label distributor in Seattle from 1975 til about 1982 & it's very hard to imagine hearing people who went to a lot of shows or who were otherwise very involved in the music, using the terms "punk" and "new wave" interchangeably. That could have been different wherever negative potential grew up. "New wave" was decidedly more poppish, though there probably wasn't a hard & fast line of demarcation. But again, at the time, I don't think anyone involved in the music would have called bands like XTC or Wire "punk".

I did remember post-punk as a phrase in journalism and the timing & the scope of the Greil Marcus article makes sense to me as an early citation, though there may have been something earlier in a smaller publication, say, one of the British zines or New York Rocker.

As with the term "post-Modernism", I'm not sure what post-punk may mean now aside from being a chronological term, especially given the range of bands and musicians listed in Wikipedia's related list of "post-punk" artists.

[negative potential]

Wiki says: In 1980 critic Greil Marcus referred to "Britain's postpunk pop avant-garde" in a July 24, 1980 Rolling Stone article. He applied the phrase to such bands as Gang of Four, The Raincoats, and Essential Logic, which he wrote were "sparked by a tension, humor, and sense of paradox plainly unique in present-day pop music."

Of course this is open to interpretation, but this sounds like an adjective, i.e. "pop avant-garde" is the substantive, and "postpunk" the adjective.

Herb,

Yeah, I mean, I get why people make a distinction between "punk" as a formulaic three-chord rock whereas "new wave" is skinny-tie edgy pop, it's not like I don't understand the useage, I'm just saying that my brother and sister used the terms interchangeably growing up, so that The Clash/Iggy Pop/Sex Pistols/Ramones/Talking Heads/PIL/Gang of Four/Wire were all "punk" or "new wave" depending upon whatever arbitrary phrase the speaker was using.

And bear in mind, I'm not necessarily saying that the useage of "post-punk" as a genre designation is "wrong", I'm just trying to figure out if it was actually used as such at the time, or if it's a case of retroactive designation from the remove of a couple decades.

[joeperucki]

I'm 44, was there, lived it. There was hardcore, punk rock, and new wave. Hardcore and new wave were obvious - Punk was somewhere in between. That's it for me.
Never heard of post-punk but someone always needs to put post at the beginning of every genre (take post-EAI for instance - sorry Jon, could not resist ).
Some records are tough - the great ones are hard to classify like Second Edition (or at least I refuse).

[Dan Warburton]

I'm 44, was there, lived it. There was hardcore, punk rock, and new wave. Hardcore and new wave were obvious

Maybe they were / are for you, but unless you name some more names, they're not for me.

someone always needs to put post at the beginning of every genre (take post-EAI for instance)

Whatever that means.

[WCrap]

mark stewart told me that he "invented post-punk". he was a bit drunk at this point, but serious.

[fischer]

edit: nevermind

[Dan Warburton]

Um, is that the Nirvana album of the same name? Thought that was called "grunge" m'self

[J.F.]

I just found out about the existence of a book by Judith Amman called "Who's been sleeping in my brain?". At least the pictures of the 1998-edition show the subtitle "Post Punk Interviews" on the cover. Maybe the original edition from 1987 also already had that subtitle? - I don't know.

I delved into this sort of music in recent years as well, found many refreshing sounds, and so I'm actually interested in learning more about Judith Amman's book I mentioned. Google didn't really help me finding out more about its actual contents (except for a Gabi Delgado-quote from the book). Does anybody here know it?

edit:
Just ordered it anyway...

[nonightsweats]

i was playing in post-punk bands in sydney at the time and we didn't give it any name although we always saw the music we were making as different to punk. we used to go to all the same venues. we never had anything called hardcore in aus - that seemed a US specific term to us and later in the timeframe. new wave seemed a term used to denote the commercial end of punk - punk co-opted by the record companies. the earliest i remember the term being used as a definition was sometime around 2000 when the re-releases starting happening but i can't remember specifics.

[Gaendaal]

But sometime over the course of the last decade, "post-punk" seems to have become an actual genre designation.

I remember thinking of Joy Division and the like as post-punk when I was listening to them in college and that's 20-ish years ago now, so it's not a recent genre designation.

[FifePsy]

I would agree with others 'who were there at the time' that this was not a label routinely applied to the bands mentioned. In the UK these bands were more likely to be described as 'something heard on John Peel'. Also, even when labels are now bandied around such as Punk and New Wave there appear to be different nuances in meaning between UK and US audiences.

[diggedy d]

Really interesting thread.

I can remember post-punk being discussed in the early 90s, although it was used to represent a set of tendencies/ideas/affinities... a nexus of music, rather than a scene (there were too few of them for that, weren't there?) and certainly not a genre with any kind of musical conventions.

As with all genre labels, it can be fleetingly useful to indicate the vague ballpark that artists operate in, or the context they emerged from. But as with all genre labels, they don't get you that much further. Post-punk as a 'genre' is a really problematic idea, given how damn different these bands sound from each other.

Its usage has certainly become more frequently and often more wooly after Simon Reynolds's book, but I'm not sure whether it's a matter of causation or correlation.

Is it's influence being overstated now? Perhaps. Certainly there were some seriously switched on bands, politically and musically, but I wonder if it's in danger of being over romanticised, given how small the network of players is.

[FifePsy]

I seem to remember Reynolds saying that one of the reasons he wrote Rip it Up and Start Again was as a corrective to the vast plethora of writing on "punk" centred around 1976/77, Pistols, Clash etc. Seemed to be very little written on the bands that came after and specifically the period 1978-84. It may just be false memory but I think the label "postpunk" certainly became much more widely used after Reynolds book.

Edit: Sorry didn't make that very clear. The main point I thought Reynolds was trying to make with the label was one of historical chronology rather than any genre or scene specifically.

[negative potential]

I seem to remember Reynolds saying that one of the reasons he wrote Rip it Up and Start Again was as a corrective to the vast plethora of writing on "punk" centred around 1976/77, Pistols, Clash etc.

But that's very unfair to Jon Savage's book. I'd say it's not so much a history of punk music circa 76/77 as it is a psychogeography of England in the 1970s at the tail end of the Fordist era, right at the dawn of neo-liberalism. It's far more than a music book, and even if one just regards the music, it also encompasses groups like Cabaret Voltaire, Gang of Four, Throbbing Gristle, Joy Division. It admittedly doesn't go all the way to 1984, but I think that's a bit of a stretch on Reynolds' part anyway. I'd say rock music ceases being interesting at about 1982. After that, hip-hop and electro are king.

[FifePsy]

I seem to remember Reynolds saying that one of the reasons he wrote Rip it Up and Start Again was as a corrective to the vast plethora of writing on "punk" centred around 1976/77, Pistols, Clash etc.

But that's very unfair to Jon Savage's book. I'd say it's not so much a history of punk music circa 76/77 as it is a psychogeography of England in the 1970s at the tail end of the Fordist era, right at the dawn of neo-liberalism. It's far more than a music book, and even if one just regards the music, it also encompasses groups like Cabaret Voltaire, Gang of Four, Throbbing Gristle, Joy Division. It admittedly doesn't go all the way to 1984, but I think that's a bit of a stretch on Reynolds' part anyway. I'd say rock music ceases being interesting at about 1982. After that, hip-hop and electro are king.

Funny, you beat me to it. Didn't say I agreed with Reynolds and whilst its a long time since I've read it, I totally agree that Savage's book is much more than a history of punk. Just out of interest I pulled it off the shelf this afternoon. Published in 1991 Savage is using the term "post-Punk" throughout. For example: "Magazine...were definitely post-Punk: extravagant, musicianly"; Joy Division: "The post-Punk move to inner space"; "on punk's avant-garde side, electronics and Captain Beefheart were the new gods for the first post-Punk generation".

Interestingly, Savage recounts how Sounds attempted to create a label - 'New Musick' which attempted to merge strands of Electronics (Eno, Kraftwerk, Throbbing Gristle, Pere Ubu, etc.) post-Punk bands, Dub and Disco. Obviously never caught on!

[nonightsweats]

well, i'm sure reynolds wasn't talking about savage's book which he certainly admires. i think he was reacting to the hundreds of other books about the timeframe which definitely lean towards the 'rock' axis.