Día Gris.

George Grosz. Grey Day. 1921.

Oil on canvas. 115 x 80 cm. Staatsliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

Reseña de libros

Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, by Simon Reynolds
Review by JIM WINDOLF
Published: New York times Book Review, March 5, 2006

Punk rock was great and it made for a great story. The Ramones and other upstart bands came out of nowhere, playing songs that were loud, fast and obnoxious. With more passion than skill, they made the established rock stars look like pompous windbags. The movement came to a fitting end with the self-destruction of the Sex Pistols in 1978. Johnny Rotten turned back into John Lydon, Sid Vicious overdosed and everybody else pulled their safety pins out of their cheeks. Since then, scores of writers and filmmakers have been attracted to punk's outrageous characters and shapely plot.

The story of punk's aftermath is more fragmented, with no clear beginning, a mixed-up middle and a whimper of an ending. Pop-culture historians have found it easy to avoid. With "Rip It Up and Start Again," the brainy music critic Simon Reynolds steps forward to accept the challenge. He is a brave man.

He begins with the demise of the Sex Pistols and the start of John Lydon's next band, the innovative Public Image Ltd. After following the careers of various British and American groups, like Joy Division, the Fall, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, Devo, Pere Ubu, the Specials and the Human League, he reaches an anticlimactic ending with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Liverpool act responsible for the repetitive 1984 hit "Relax." (Charges are still pending.) David Bowie pops into the narrative from time to time in the role of postpunk's worldly uncle.

This music was the soundtrack of the author's teenage years in suburban England, and he still has great affection for it. "Being as impartial and detached here as possible," he writes, "it seems to me that the long 'aftermath' of punk running from 1978-84 was way more musically interesting than what happened in 1976 and 1977, when punk staged its back-to-basics rock 'n' roll revival." Just in case fans of rock's supposed golden age feel left out of this barroom argument, he also writes: "The postpunk era makes a fair match for the 60's in terms of the sheer amount of great music created, the spirit of adventure and idealism that infused it, and the way that the music seemed inextricably connected to the political and social turbulence of its era."

But "postpunk" proves to be a slippery label. If Reynolds wasn't aware of this when he started his research, he learned it the hard way while talking with various postpunk musicians for this book. "A lot of them, when I mentioned postpunk, didn't quite understand what I meant," he said in an interview posted on his Web site. "Which is odd, because I did all this research in the music papers, and that was what people called it, even then. . . . It's not something I've invented!"

Reynolds loves obscure genre labels. He has coined at least one ("postrock") and in this book he embraces countless others with a straight face, among them "funk punk," "punk funk," "folk punk," "anarcho-punk," "Hi-NRG," "psychobilly," "angst rock," "trad rock," "death rock," "death disco," "mutant disco," "Teutonica," "Goth," "proto-Goth," "post-Goth," "Oi!" "New Romanticism," "New Rock," "New Americana," "New Pop," "electropop," "synthpop," "synthpop noir," "synthfunk," "avant-funk" and, deep breath, "neopostpunk." Will there be a quiz? Strangely, given Reynolds's zeal for taxonomy, a theme running through his books — which include the authoritative "Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture" — is that the most exciting music releases its listeners from the intellect's hold, delivering them into a primal state.

A majority of his new book's subjects started out creating punklike music and went on to develop a sophisticated, dance-oriented sound. As they matured, they abandoned their amateurish or experimental beginnings to make polished records meant to sell in great numbers. That's how it went for Talking Heads, the Fall, Devo, Gang of Four, Joy Division, Scritti Politti and the B-52's, whose careers are analyzed here.

That's also how it went for the Clash, which made a rude noise in 1977 and sold big in 1982 with a brand of expensively produced pop that borrowed from funk and reggae. But the Clash doesn't make Reynolds's postpunk list. Neither do similar acts of the era, like the Jam, the Police, X, Elvis Costello and Blondie, all of whom began by making raw music only to end up turning out more sophisticated fare tinged with soul, funk, reggae, disco, hip-hop or Latin touches.

It's easier for a critic to attack than to praise, but Reynolds takes more pleasure in expressing passion for the music he loves than in putting down what doesn't fit his program. The author finds his perfect subject in the one-named Green, the Marxist leader of Scritti Politti. The band lived in a collective at first. Then Green had a breakdown, followed by a vision of himself as a subversive star disrupting the pop charts from within. He wrote a manifesto laying out his justifications for what might be called selling out and made his way into Britain's Top 10 with the 1984 release "Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)." The hit album that followed spun off a No. 11 single in the United States, "Perfect Way."

Describing Green's lyrics, which sound like the stuff of conventional love songs on first listen, Reynolds is overwrought: "On closer inspection, though, they turned out to be pretzels of contradiction, with an aporia (the poststructuralist term for voids in the fabric of meaning) lurking in the center of every twist of language, sweet nothings that could wreck your heart." The windy phrasings bring to mind the fatal flaw of many pop music critics: because they write about things not considered high art, they panic and break out the 99-cent locutions. Naturally, Reynolds keeps it real by dropping in expletives between references to Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. "Rip It Up and Start Again" is exhaustive and exhausting in equal measure. Jim Windolf is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.