Start It All Over Again

One of the most important music critics not lumped in with old-guard icons like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, Simon Reynolds started writing for English music weeklies in the 1980s. His early work, collected in the 1990 anthology Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, embraced new sounds and challenged orthodoxies that had grown musty in the rock canon. Soon thereafter, his ear for noise and rupture led him to the burgeoning and largely unchronicled world of electronic dance music, which he surveyed in his 1998 hallmark, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. Between the two came The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock 'n' Roll, a treatise co-authored with Joy Press.

Common to all of Reynolds' work are the workings of an agitated mind and a rigorous approach to charting the ideas floated among those who spend countless hours considering all that music could mean. To that end, he's back on book lists once more with Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1977–1984 (Penguin, $16) the first comprehensive history of the era when punk evolved beyond regressive three-chord nihilism. Post-punk trafficked in notions that Reynolds has championed for years—rock bands delving into disco and dub, shadow economies birthed by independent record labels, musicians engaging with politics and critical theory—and his passion is evident as he traces the movement from the gray noise of Public Image Ltd. to the bright swirl of new-wave pop. The Jukebox was conducted in New York, where Reynolds has lived since 1994.

Led Zeppelin: "Good Times Bad Times" (1969) from Led Zeppelin (Atlantic)

Simon Reynolds: Is this early Led Zeppelin? It sounds a bit flower-childy.

Seattle Weekly: At the start of your book you dismantle the punk idea that '70s rock was all bad. How much were you trying to negotiate a rethink of how "punk" gets talked about?

Reynolds: I wasn't trying to expand the definition of punk as much as deprivilege it. It's been so successful as a narrative that the early-'70s prequel to punk, in the most extreme versions of rock history, has been cast as a total wasteland. Then what came after punk is historically considered an aftermath, a diminuendo of energy, because punk was so dramatic in the headlines. I wanted to talk about how some of the most interesting and radical things that came out of punk, as much as they were inspired by it, were a repudiation of punk's narrow rock and roll reading.

SW: In an article trying to reposition Led Zeppelin in different contexts, Sasha Frere-Jones called this song their "first punk-funk single."

Reynolds: One of the weird things I realized after I finished the book was that punk's year-zero effect made people forget what came right before. We write off the '70s as a waste, and then say punk broke from tradition to embrace funk and disco. But only two years earlier, the Rolling Stones did funk and disco records; Eric Clapton did a Bob Marley cover; the Eagles played with pseudo-reggae rhythms; Robert Palmer played with the Meters. The cultural myopia of the year-zero story benefited the post-punk bands because it made people forget everything. At the time it did seem radical that PiL did disco and Gang of Four did funk, but that was partly an illusion. It was more interesting when the post-punk groups tried because they got it slightly wrong.

Public Image Ltd.: "Death Disco" (aka "Swan Lake") (1979) from Metal Box (aka Second Edition) (Virgin)

Reynolds: Well!

SW: This track crops up a lot in your book, in which PiL serves as a post-punk bellwether. When did you first hear this?

Reynolds: It must have been on the radio a few times, but I really remember when they went on the TV show Top of the Pops. It was usually a fun show, people dancing and balloons in the studio, and the announcer's face went pale as he talked about "Death Disco." It seemed to me then that this pop reality was quaking a bit, and that gave me the idea that pop music could be subversive. It's a track that scarred me for life, in a good way.

At the time I didn't know anything about microtonality or harmonics, but I think that was what I was responding to: this stuff that seems to be going on between pitches, smeared and sprayed sounds. They were doing a kind of modal thing with the melodies, and there's a kind of Celtic/Arabic thing in [John] Lydon's singing. It was also my first exposure to the whole bass aesthetic, bass being the center of the melody. And a lot of it just carried over from the enormity of the Sex Pistols and Johnny Rotten doing something next that nobody expected. It's one of the great switches in rock, being in the most important band in the world and then going on this total art trip.

SW: Did you feel betrayed as a kid who was into punk?