Conclusion

As discussed and demonstrated, post-punk is vast and takes many forms. Its sounds, aesthetics, influences, moods, and semiotic methods vary among sub-genres, and especially among bands and musicians. The common thread that holds post-punk together as a category, however, is the apparent influence post-punk musicians took from modernist-era material, as well as the ambition to create radically, sonically new forms of music, to expand the possibilities for cultural expression. This is, ultimately, a modernist ambition—post-punk continued the trajectory of formal experimentation in art that had begun to accelerate during the modernist era, this time by fusing electronic instrumentation with retro themes, aesthetics, and signs. Post-punk musicians combined formal newness and aesthetic or thematic oldness to revive the modernist project—this is what I would like to call post-punk nostalgia. It is not pure nostalgia, nor is it pure futuristic experimentation—it is a way of seeing the world that reconciles past and future, and it can be directly contrasted with contemporary nostalgia.

Since the true post-punk era, the reservoir of post-punk symbolism has been ransacked time and again for post-punk-derivative and neo-post-punk musical projects. Bands like Interpol, Xeno & Oaklander, Boy Harsher—even, as Mark Fisher points out, the mega-popular Arctic Monkeys—and whole genres like electroclash in the early aughts have co-opted various sub-genres of the post-punk movement for their inherently retro work. Acknowledging the unmistakeable retro quality of this music does not have to mean that the music is bad—only that it is not, in any immediately discernible way, new. In this sense, Fisher’s and Reynolds’s contemporary claim that our collective formal “retromania” has intensified since the ‘80s is evident in popular (and even unpopular) music that reproduces, with every drum machine beat and analog-reminiscent synthesizer sound, music from forty years ago. It is as though we have tried, culturally, to prolong this last new cultural era for as long as possible, in the hope of warding off Fisher’s “specters of lost futures” indefinitely, while failing to see that these revivals themselves are the specters—they are evidence of our widespread cultural stagnation. What distinguishes contemporary nostalgia from the more sophisticated post-punk nostalgia is the closure of portals so that references are made to a condensed set of vague sonic or visual signifiers that have become “iconic” of a decade. In many cases, those cultural objects that have become “iconic” to contemporary, twenty-first century eyes are the ones that have been dumbed down to the point of near-universal recognizability. The intertextual references that reach across various media, genres, and aesthetic worlds—and beyond the banal towards the niche or intellectual—now seem to be missing from contemporary nostalgia. 

Perhaps I live in the wrong place—or, more likely, in the wrong time. I had come to this conclusion already by the time I was thirteen, and some feeling of cultural deprivation keeps me returning to it. Fisher describes a “feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush” that I have always identified with, at least culturally, and at least since I was old enough to begin consciously selecting retro over contemporary culture, to begin escaping into it when my surroundings felt mundane or inadequate (Fisher 8). I saw kindred spirits in these ‘80s post-punks, who also immersed themselves in what was retro for their time (film noir, dystopian novels, old-fashioned glamour, modernist art)—except when I look back, I look both at them and through them. I wore my parents’ old ‘80s clothing to school, and I let the soaring, melancholy (and, according to my peers, “old-fashioned”) synthesized sounds of Visage and Ultravox color the brown, suburban Minnesota landscapes I saw out the school bus window. For me and for other belated post-punk souls, this music fills voids—it reassured me that, as Fisher writes, “The problem wasn’t (just) me but the culture around me” (Fisher 29). The lost futures he described still haunt me as I continue to wonder whether there will ever be a cultural moment that resonates with me the way post-punk does, or if nostalgia so strongly shapes our contemporary culture and informs my own experience that I would be lost without it. Ultimately, I find solace in the realization that I have inherited the post-punk ethos—its musical-aesthetic remnants, its portals to other cultural objects, and its nostalgic tendencies. I revel in being a post-punk subject reincarnated, drawing connections, mining the past, feeling alienation, nostalgicizing, aestheticizing, intellectualizing, grieving lost futures and glorious pasts. 

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