Introduction: Post-Punk Nostalgia and Lost Modernist Futures
Below is the introduction to my undergraduate thesis, “Fade to Grey: Post-Punk and Lost Modernist Futures.”
Given the visual and sonic nature of this material, I have created an audiovisual piece to accompany the written thesis. It contains the music and music videos discussed in the text, as well as found footage that complements the atmosphere, aesthetics, or themes of the music it accompanies.
Password: Caron
Introduction: Post-Punk Nostalgia and Lost Modernist Futures
On a crowded beach washed by the sun, he puts his headphones on
His modern world revolves around the synthesizer’s song
Full of future thoughts and thrills, his senses slip away
He’s a European legacy, a culture for today
- Ultravox, “New Europeans,” 1980
Lasting from roughly the late 1970s through the early ‘80s, post-punk was a period of popular music culture characterized by productive nostalgia—futuristic modernism. Such characterizations may seem self-contradictory, yet the post-punk era saw some of the most significant twentieth-century innovations in popular music from a formal perspective (synthesizers and other electronic instruments had become more accessible by the mid-‘70s), a methodological perspective, and an aesthetic perspective. Post-punk infused late-‘70s/early-‘80s culture with a nostalgic sensibility and managed to make it futuristic. Invocations of modernist-era signs, methods, and themes abound in the post-punk oeuvre, all with varying degrees of self-awareness and a range of semiotic effects. Through referencing and reworking, post-punk musicians placed themselves in dialogue with the modernist era, something rather unusual for popular music, which usually seeks to rebel against older forms of popular culture. Instead, post-punk proposed a model of postmodern-era cultural production that reconciled nostalgia and innovation—for these musicians, nostalgia was not a sentimental emotion, but one perfectly compatible with musical experimentation. Post-punk lyrics—such as those from Ultravox’s “New Europeans” above—often blend images of then and now, offering a blurred and alienating, even ambiguously sinister, vision of the present. Our post-punk subject’s “modern world revolves around the synthesizer’s song,” and “his senses slip away” as he listens on his headphones, drowning out the crowded beach around him. He is detached from his environment but somehow still wound up in it—“He’s a European legacy, a culture for today.” Another paradox—he is a subject informed and inspired by the culture of prior generations, yet he is emblematic of his own. These are post-punk concerns, and this is the post-punk subject.
Post-punk captures under its wide umbrella music with sounds as varied as Cabaret Voltaire’s discordant, sample-heavy arrangements, Ultravox’s wailing synths layered over punchy beats, or the transgressive “electronic body music” of Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft. This thesis will consider two of the most iconic and distinctive post-punk genres that emerged in the UK and West Germany: New Romantic (also called New Wave, when referring more broadly to bands not associated with the London Blitz club scene) and Industrial. These genres appeared spontaneously in politically complex geographic locations (London, industrial Northern England, West Berlin, and the industrial Nordrhein-Westfalen region of Germany) and grew like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome model, in which the connection being established (between then and now, between post-punk musicians and the late-nineteenth/early twentieth century—post-punk’s elaboration upon then’s modernism to forge now’s cultural vanguard) tells us more than any “root-tree” model that chronologically lists each influential work and innovation. A rhizomatic approach can better present and emphasize post-punk’s underlying nostalgic spirit by focusing on the connections themselves—the intergenerational dialogue between post-punk musicians and their modernist reference points. Deleuze and Guattari write, “It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again” (Deleuze and Guattari 20). In post-punk, the modernist project is what is “prolonging itself,” “breaking off and starting up again,” and finding new, or continued, expression in popular music. The units that constitute the rhizome are the cross-cultural and cross-generational connections (the non-hierarchical lines, rather than the points; the map, rather than the tracing) that comprise the post-punk collaboration with, and elaboration upon, modernism.
In Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, cultural theorist Mark Fisher examines the state of twenty-first century popular culture, caught in a perpetual cycle of nostalgic revivalism and recombination, unable to produce cultural forms that manage to express our current, bleak, “capitalist realist” experience. Expanding upon Fredric Jameson’s writing about postmodernism as a “cultural logic” of late capitalism, Fisher critiques our depleted twenty-first-century pop cultural landscape by revisiting cultural objects from the 1970s and ‘80s that channel the modernist spirit. Fisher names this impulse popular modernism, a kind of late-postwar-era popular culture crafted with modernist themes, methods, and aesthetics in mind:
The cultural ecology that I referred to above—the music press and the more challenging parts of
public service broadcasting—were part of a UK popular modernism, as were postpunk, brutalist
architecture, Penguin paperbacks and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In popular modernism,
the elitist project of modernism was retrospectively vindicated…Particular modernist techniques
were not only disseminated but collectively reworked and extended, just as the modernist task of
producing forms which were adequate to the present moment was taken up and renewed. (Fisher
22-23)
For Fisher, popular modernism is a “tendency” of culture at the postmodern juncture that welded high culture and theory to pop culture—post-punk, brutalist buildings, and Penguin paperbacks, for example, which distributed modernist thought and its representative works to people outside of academic and elite circles. Post-punk, as a popular modernist form, utilized iconic modernist aesthetics and revived modernism’s prevalent themes (alienation, man vs. machine, socialism, pacifism, futurism, the unconscious, irrationality, anxiety, self-expression, etc.). Post-punk’s portals, to use another Fisher term, led listeners into realms beyond music (literary, theoretical, cinematic, artistic, political), enacting popular modernism by making this high culture available to all listeners, irrespective of class background.
Post-punk genres like Industrial and New Romantic could be highly intellectual and self-aware, which is part of what drew people to them—these genres were culturally perceptive, they were critical without being clichéd, and they offered an expanded cultural and historical awareness to listeners. What drove this notable intellectualism and nostalgia among musicians in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, then? Post-punk appeared at the dawn of the neoliberal era, marked by Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister of the UK and Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the US, when political mechanisms of the early postwar era that, according to Fisher, enabled creative production (welfare, state-funded universities and art schools, affordable housing, space for creation and subcultural exchange) vanished, due to industry privatization, economic deregulation, and attacks on trade unions. Against this dismal political backdrop arose popular modernism, one last grasp at the social democratic and modernist projects, right at the moment when British culture appeared on the verge of being swallowed up by corporate, neoliberal capitalism—when it felt as though any modernist future would be lost.
Fisher adopts Marxist theorist Franco Berardi’s phrase, “the slow cancellation of the future,” to describe his concept of lost futures, those which we were led to expect but were “cancelled” by neoliberalism. With the late-postwar-era shift in the UK and the US to post-industrial economies came the subsequent corporatization and gentrification of cities and spaces once conducive to artistic production, as well as the elimination of social programs and institutions that financially enabled artists to experiment. Fisher attributes our current musical stagnancy to the loss of both time and space in late capitalist society:
It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late
1970s and early 80s (in the punk and post punk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted
and cheap property in those cities. Since then, the decline of social housing, the attacks on
squatting, and the delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy
available for cultural production has massively diminished. (Fisher 15-16)
The early ‘80s saw the arrival of neoliberalism, culminating in the privatization and gentrification trajectories that have since displaced countless artists and contributed to a slowing in musical innovation by the new millennium, according to both Fisher and music journalist Simon Reynolds. In this sense, “the slow cancellation of the future” began during the post-punk period. Fisher elaborates, “What should haunt us is not the no longer of actually existing social democracy, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialised. These spectres—the spectres of lost futures—reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world” (Fisher 27). Fisher’s looming “specters of lost futures” are what post-punk musicians responded to in their work and what they confronted in their environments. These musicians processed the onset of the neoliberal era through popular modernist creativity, mining history for cultural artifacts, styles, concepts, movements, political manifestos, and aesthetics with which to reinvigorate their crumbling realities.
In the same way that modernism strongly connotes Europe (via Dada, Bauhaus, Futurism, German Expressionism, Russian avant-garde, etc.), capitalism perhaps connotes the United States, with its constant stream of commodified entertainment exports—Rock music, Hollywood films, and the like. Keeping in mind the US’s cultural dominance at the time, the UK and West German post-punk movements in music can be understood as a return to European modernist roots and a distancing from those mainstream, somewhat corrosive American influences. Establishing a distance from American music was particularly important for West German post-punk musicians, who were inundated with American cultural and economic influence in the postwar period—American films, music, and consumer goods flooded West German markets, tampering with efforts to construct a new, non-fascist German cultural identity. In response, post-punks in West Germany experimented with charged signs and German-language vocals as both provocations and attempts to create a new German contemporary culture by forcing discussions about the Nazi history after decades of silence. Interestingly, British post-punks took much inspiration from pre- and interwar German intellectual and artistic production (Weimar cinema, German Expressionism, Dada), captivated by its aesthetic, methodological, and political capacities. West Germany’s electronic music pioneers, Kraftwerk, also offered an entry into the possibilities of retro-futuristic aesthetics. By the mid-‘70s, as a result of Kraftwerk’s groundbreaking electronic music and Bowie’s seminal “Berlin trilogy” (two fundamental influences for UK post-punk acts), what was “German” or “European” held a certain symbolic intrigue, by virtue of its proximity to early-twentieth-century modernism. Ultimately, British and West German post-punks shared a reflective inclination towards aesthetics, impulses, methods, and themes of the modernist period.
Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, written by music journalist and author Simon Reynolds, tracks the repetitive quality of contemporary pop culture, which Reynolds claims escalated in the late-eighties, when musical portals became self-referential, leading more often to other music than to a range of non-musical media (Retromania 133). Since the post-punk period, Reynolds argues, retro has been a permanent, recurring aesthetic and sonic component of music culture: “Retro thus becomes a structural feature of pop culture: it’s the inevitable down phase to the preceding manic phase, but it is also a response to the build-up of ideas and styles whose potentials have not been fully extracted” (Retromania 197). This pattern is essential to understanding the appeal of modernist objects and theories for British and West German post-punk musicians—modernism represented, for them, material still ripe for reinterpretation. The extent of modernist artistic, cinematic, and literary explorations of human alienation and change had not yet been entirely processed—modernism had not yet fulfilled its inspirational and radical potential. The early twentieth century was characterized by war and rupture that reverberated throughout the postwar decades—there was a second-wave alienation that these musicians, coming of age as late as the ‘70s, still felt to varying degrees. For Germans, the trauma of World War II and collective responsibility for Nazism required extensive processing that was largely suppressed in the immediate postwar period, a time referred to as the “Stunde Null” (zero hour), when most Germans were primarily concerned with survival and rebuilding. The secondhand guilt that West German post-punk musicians born in the postwar period felt must have compelled them to address their inherited responsibility for Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”) through musical experimentation with charged signifiers. For both British and West German post-punks, European modernism offered a vast well of culture from which to extract aesthetic, mood, and meaning. Through their dialogue with the modernist era, post-punk musicians embraced nostalgia, came to terms with traumatic pasts, practiced radical, modernist artistic experimentation, established new subcultures, assembled subculture-specific symbolic realms, and processed looming lost futures.
(1) For Mark Fisher, capitalist realism is our current state of collective existence, in which we believe there is no alternative economic system to capitalism. Paraphrased from Fisher (and attributed to Slavoj Žižek and Frederic Jameson), it is easier for us to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980.
University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. Zero Books,
2014.
Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. Farrar, 2011.
Ultravox. Vienna (Deluxe Edition: 40th Anniversary). 1980. Chrysalis, 2020, CD.