Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up And Start It Again

Things I liked:

• The combination of historical sweep and detail
• The occasional contextualisation within the personal, particularly in the introduction and the aside when referring to American girls’ love of pretty English boys wearing makeup “I should know: I married one of those brainy Anglophile girls!” In fact, I’d have welcomed more of that approach.
• The ‘experimental’ chapter - the one covering NYC music which puts together quotes from a wide variety of different interviews. Would have loved to have seen each chapter in a different stylistic approach like this.
• The final chapter.

Things I didn’t like so much:

• The episodic, potted history structure. Even when interleaved, this temporal approach quickly palled. I’d have preferred a detailed analysis of landmark albums within a particular sub-genre of post-punk rather than a repeated rise and fall.
• The seemingly endless references to the failures of bands as projects, as though popularity was all too frequently the primary objective: “But after three successful major label albums, Ultravox were in an even worse place than The Human League…” (p325); “… Magazine… another band who had failed to deliver on high expectations…” (p326)
• The basic thrust that Post-Punk was the next great pop wave after the ’60s. Reynolds does an admirable job of proving this, but ultimately I felt a little like, well so what?
• Although a stated favourite of his wife’s, his description of Japan reads as resolutely perfunctory.
• Did Goth really need to be covered? It seemed so irrelevant, but maybe that’s just my prejudice.

Groups the author clearly loved:

• Joy Division
• PiL

Groups the author clearly had little time for:

• The original Human League (too geeky)
• The Durrutti Column (just not as good as Joy Division, apparently)

Doh! moment:

• Martin Rushent quoted as saying (of Dare’s production): “But there’s enough feeling in it so it doesn’t sound like Kraftwerk…”

Rip It Up And Start Again is an excellent chronicle of Post-Punk. It sets out to do what it intended and does so admirably. However, I missed Kodwo Eshun’s creative approach to music, the way he forged a new syntax and thereby avoided the lepidopterist-like pinning of the subject to a board. Reynolds’ analyses too often reduce his subjects’ best works to the mundane by tieing them to the index of popularity. I know that’s a highly problematic criticism, particularly in light of the particular subject being popular music. It’s not applicable in every chapter of the book, but it’s frequent enough to leave me feeling a tad dispirited.