One of the compensations for living in the age of unrestrained capitalism -- perhaps its chief compensation -- is that we're possessed of a dynamic, flowing pop culture that'll rush in to fill any void in the entertainment realm that's been left unstewarded, as long as there's a buck to be made from the deal. It's not a bad system at all, if carnival's all you're after. But systems sometimes break down. And in this case, with a huge, rich store of music cramming the bins and a crowd of successful fans aching to be serviced, you have to wonder: Why on God's green earth has the current '80s-postpunk boomlet been so slow in arriving?
Considering how long we've been stuck in the '70s revival, which began in avant circles in about 1982, and which has yet to percolate all the way through the water-table, all of the 30-ish Saab-drivers and code-churning alternageeks who are poised to run the media nowadays must be near to the point of violence, what with having to sit through endless hipster-flipster rehashings of somebody else's Polyester Years. Disco? Led Zep? Like hell: What we need is one more night in the dorms with the old college station on, one more drag of a clove cigarette -- just one simple little pop cultural mirroring statement to put our scrawl into the rosters. Never mind whether our inclinations in that are pure or whether we're all just eager for a self-worshipping nostalgia kick of our own. Never mind that: We can pay! And all we've been handed so far to slake our thirst is a bunch of crummy pop/new wave compilations and "The Wedding Singer." Wrong messages; wrong messengers. Just more reasons among many to snatch Adams Ant and Sandler from the proverbial marketplace and to hang them from something tall. But fortunately -- and none too soon -- all of that is changing.
Rhino Records' new "Postpunk Chronicles" series goes pretty far toward separating out the reflexive kitsch from pop-'80s revivalism, and sets forth a fairly compelling version of the alternative music that really mattered at the time, for the people who really cared about what they listened to. That three-disc set (so far), along with such gems and ephemera as George Gimarc's recent book "Postpunk Diary" and the 10 zillion small label compilations that've lately been hitting the decks, are collecting together what's been until now an unheralded golden age of pop music.
It was also, to an important degree, the foundational movement of the subsequent 20-or-so years of rock 'n' roll. The real blockbuster bands of the '80s, in the long run, were middleweight British acts such as Julian Cope's the Teardrop Explodes and the (pre-Big Country) Skids, and such small American bands as the Dream Syndicate and Mission of Burma. (All are collected here.) It was this stuff, bubbling under, sticking in craws and tape decks, whose influence carried through the end of the decade, outlasting the flash pop and haircut-rock that dominated MTV and finally sparking the Nirvana revolution that, in turn, helped it to fragment into nearly all of the various alt-rock genres and subgenres that now stuff the record bins. While punk was becoming hardcore -- which became bad hardcore, which became speed metal -- postpunk was keeping hard rock proper from choking on its own hair spray during the Mvtley Cr|e years and saving pop from falling entirely into the hands of megadivas and smooth-boys. Consequently, of all the pop musics that were in service at the time, it's the one that comes off as the most modern and appealing today, even if it's among the least-chronicled and the most imperfectly championed. Mission of Burma, the Wipers, R.E.M. -- these bands are in the canon now, to a lesser or greater extent. But who speaks for Pigbag or the Pop Group? Who's ever traced a line between white neofunk and Medium Medium, whose widely popular "Hungry, So Angry" introduced scads of young bassists to the popping bass line? Whither Tuxedomoon? It's about time the canon stretched to encompass them. These are good things, too long mislaid.
If you look into things even moderately closely, you'll find that a lot of wide areas of modern rock collapse down into a single band from the '80s, or even into a single song. The Burma track that Rhino hiked, for example, is about half of all collegiate indie rock, set forth in a single lesson. Like the Velvets before them, it's a truism that very few people ever bought a Mission of Burma record -- but everybody who did went straight out and started a band. And while the "Academy Fight Song" single isn't Burma's magnum opus (not next to "That's When I Reach For My Revolver" or "Trem Two"), it's the record that everybody bought first. More than that, though, outfits like Unrest and Superchunk, hugely influential on their own merits, apparently bought little besides Burma records, and most of those were the "Academy Fight Song" single.
The implication that arises is this: The more seriously you take this series as a historical document, the more styles that we call original -- as opposed to stuff that's ripped off whole-cloth from the Velvets or Black Sabbath, or whatever -- turn out just to have been ripped off from sources that few people can identify anymore, and often at fourth and fifth remove. Throbbing Gristle (whose "Adrenaline" is here) are, for their part, the monad upon which the "industrial" scene was built. The very term comes from the name of their record label, and while more recent industrial bands can tend to sound like the Sisters of Mercy or Einst|rzende Neubauten, or even Mvtley Cr|e, it's a point of debate whether there would've been a Sisters of Mercy or a Neubauten without Throbbing Gristle having first fired up the rhythm boxes and started troweling noise over the top. Even hip-hop owes a debt to them.
There's nothing sinister about any of that; pop music is built on thievery in the first place. But when styles begin to float free from their influences -- when something becomes comme il faut simply because that's the way it's supposed to be, then it ceases to be art -- or even creative in the strict sense -- and becomes craft instead. Again: great. Still, some of these songs' return from exile brings up real questions about what sort of pop musical forms we can call creative. If all of a certain flavor of indie rock is merely a footnote to Mission of Burma (which isn't precisely true, but let the example stand), then what makes it any edgier than formalist country-Western? Or than those Sha-Na-Na-type punk rock bands that've been emerging recently, like Total Chaos? There are, in fact, enough styles represented here (Chills, Cocteau Twins, Swell Maps) to cast a doubt over most of the major flavors of middlebrow alterna-indie rock (haute-jangly, swirly, retarded), and the 48 tracks that make up the package don't suggest the sprawl left uncompiled or keep to any rigid standard of seminality (OMD, Thomas Dolby and New Order each have a slot, although their lineages are largely dead and their songs pepper dozens of other reissue compilations).
It makes you wonder why the avant-garde might've stopped being quite so avant after the burst of creativity that flung such rock bands as the Pop Group, Echo and the Bunnymen and Killing Joke into the world practically at once, and with little contemporary pop musical precedent. What was in the goddamn water back then that kept producing such great rock bands? One thing's certain: However things transpired in England, and however the chips were subsequently to fall in America, the postpunk period -- stretching from about the time the Sex Pistols blew up until about the mid-'80s -- was the last in which the domestic underground labored under the difficult (but magically nurturing) condition of being simultaneously superior to and marginalized by the corporate mainstream. Whether or not this was the American boho's finest hour, it was in many regards his last stand -- after which indie and alt rock began to turn inward, choosing a new insularity over the prospect of either losing at its own game to the major labels (who were beginning to launch cod-alternative bands against real ones for a college audience who didn't always know the difference) or getting with the program, watering down the elixir and shooting for MTV rotation -- as bands like X were to do.
And that's precisely the choice that bands are left with today. If there's one lesson for the underground to learn from the whole Rhino series, it's that there's a crucial third option, too often overlooked: Going out and making something singular that the next generation can steal, trash and ultimately neglect. Without that, the scheduled '90s revival is going to be a dull affair indeed. If there's a lesson for those 30-ish alterna-geeks who've long been thirsty for this package or something like it, it's enjoy your self-worshipping nostalgia kick -- but don't be hogging the trough for 17 years like those piggy '70s kids.
