When I started to think of post-punk was when it went dark side. Then it was just obviously avant-garde, this sick, mind-bending, sensually deranging music. I talked about being scarred by "Death Disco," but when rave shifted toward the dark side, that was one of the biggest head-swerve moves ever. To be on [Ecstasy] in some room where songs are going on about death . . . you're very vulnerable on E, and the music started taking on all these strange fucked-up rhythms and weird creepy sounds. That was a major head-fuck.
SW: Your writing about rave culture drew on a lot of academic critical theory. How much of that stemmed from post-punk?
Jez Reynolds
Simon Reynolds
Jez Reynolds
Simon Reynolds
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Reynolds: I got really into critical theory after, but I started picking up on it because of post-punk critics. The main theory guys were Ian Penman and Barney Hoskyns, who were au fait with all the French stuff: Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva, Bataille. By the time I had assimilated it, music had changed, so I started adopting it for this neo-psychedelic music—My Bloody Valentine, A.R. Kane, all these groups that were in some ways the opposite of post-punk. I was trying to react against post-punk at that point, espousing this quite apolitical, escapist music. By the time of rave I had read Deleuze and Guattari, and it all just seemed to genuinely be there in the music, at the heart of how it operated. The idea of rhizomatic networks applied to the world of white labels and pirate radio and record shops serving as hubs. And also the dementia involved. Deleuze and Guattari came out of the idea that normal life screws you up and that madness is a sane response to our civilization.
In Rip It Up, I only used theory to explicate the bands who were using it. A lot of these concepts in the past have genuinely helped me come up with new ways of thinking. But I think, in other ways, I've often used theory as a sort of rubber stamp for something I could have just left in my own words. It's funny—for the first time in my life, people are calling my writing unpretentious.
Gang of Four: "Why Theory?" (2005) from Return the Gift (V2)
Reynolds: Segue. This is very much about Antonio Gramsci. "Each day seems like a natural fact"—that's a paraphrase of Gramsci, who talked about how you have to use theory to question everything that happens in your life. Everything that seems natural and immutable and common sense should be dismantled, or at least questioned.
SW: In a piece about this album—for which Gang of Four rerecorded their own songs—you talked about the idea of "anachronesis."
Reynolds: [laughs] I think that might be another ugly coinage of mine. The simplest expression of anachronesis is Lenny Kravitz, a prime example of music in this limbo where it's referring back to the past but it's not there, and [it's] not in the present, either. There are so many things like that today, like Steve Martin pointlessly remaking Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther. It's a really unpleasant sensation. Things under the sway of anachronesis are just nothing. You might as well be dead.
SW: You were hard on Gang of Four in that article. Was it dispiriting to come to terms with what happened to a lot of the post-punk bands past their prime?
Reynolds: There were a lot of dissonant moments. With all pop-music stories, if you follow the story long enough it gets to be ignominious. My attitude was at least they tried to do something interesting, even if they failed. It's difficult, because on one hand you can say they didn't really change anything. The record industry is the same as it ever is. The conglomerates are still there. Politics didn't go their way. But it was the striving more than the failure of it that was more important. The striving is worth something in itself. There's a certain value, a sort of a quickening of the mind, these cultures produce. The fact that nothing changes, in some ways, is irrelevant.
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