A Brief History of Deathrock, Part IIby Oliver Sheppard on Apr 30, 2012 • 8: 26 UTC1 Comment

Conventional histories of deathrock dry up around 1986. There’s good reason for that. The orthodox approach to the subject is to describe it as a specific moment in Southern California punk. As a style of music, however, deathrock has persisted into the present, with interest and activity waxing and waning as the years have gone by.

The first deathrock revival began in 1998 and petered out around 2004. The second and ongoing deathrock revival began a few years ago. (Of course, bands existed during the dry spells, threading together the peaks and troughs.) Explaining this all requires some backstory. This article series deals with events that occurred on the east side of the Atlantic during deathrock’s heyday, as one branch of the British punk family tree transformed into the European parallel of American deathrock. The third and last installment will cover the evolution of deathrock over the past decade in its revivalist forms, from the late 1990s until now.

I. BRITISH PUNK TURNS DARK

Any discussion of deathrock will start with the watershed years of 1976-1977 punk. (Let’s ignore for the moment pre-punk influences on the genre, which will be mentioned later.) On the West side of the pond, the Cramps’ influence loomed large. (“I thought if we were lucky,” Rozz Williams of Christian Death mused, “people would think we were like the Cramps or Alice Cooper. That’s what I was into.”) On the British side, who mattered was the first UK punk band to release a single, an LP, and to tour America: The Damned.

In 1976, The Damned found in Dave Vanian an especially compelling, if unconventionally eerie, frontman. David Letts chose the last name “Vanian” by abbreviating the word “Transylvanian,” and used the band’s frontman spotlight to showcase his taste for dressing up like the Hammer horror films version of Dracula. Founding member and original Damned guitarist Brian James explained, “Long before there was a recognized gothic look, there were fans turning up at [Damned] shows dressed like Dave – which was brilliant at the time, because it lifted us right out of the typical punk rock band thing. Other groups had the safety pins and the spitting and the bondage trousers, but you went to a Damned show, and half the local cemetery would be propped up against the stage.” In other words, if you wanted to see a member of the undead fronting a punk rock band in 1976, The Damned were for you.

Due to early and continuous touring – including shows with bands as diverse as Minor Threat and Motorhead – The Damned’s influence was felt far and wide. In her recent Violence Girl autobiography, L.A. punk pioneer Alice Bag writes of seeing The Damned in Los Angeles in 1977, months before the Sex Pistols set foot in California: “The lead singer of The Damned, Dave Vanian, was a dark, handsome vampire who mesmerized the audience, though occasionally the spell would break and we’d be drawn into the insane world of the bassist, Captain Sensible, whose wild antics seemed slightly incongruous with those of the brooding Vanian. Somehow, the band managed to balance these two larger-than-life personalities. At the

end of the night, Captain Sensible was naked, the audience was throwing change up on the stage and the age of L.A. punk was well underway.”

Indeed, Bag’s L.A. bandmate and friend Patricia Morrison would go on to play bass for The Damned and, incredibly, marry Vanian — after enduring a very public tour of duty in goth rock juggernauts the Sisters of Mercy. Similarly, Bryan James would leave The Damned, join up with Stiv Bators from the Dead Boys and, with Dave Tregunna of Sham 69 in tow, would start the gothic rock powerhouse Lords of the New Church. Relationships like this underscore to what degree seemingly disparate phenomena as the American punk and British gothic postpunk scenes were really not that far removed.

By 1979 a sea change in British punk was underway, and this mirrored developments in the nascent deathrock scene of California. A large segment of British punks had grown tired of 3 chord thrash and were proceeding down gloomier avenues. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ second LP, 1979’s still-underrated Join Hands, premiered songs like “Premature Burial” with a heavy use of flanger by guitarist John McKay; this guitar sound would become a staple sound of dark punk and goth bands across the Atlantic. UK Decay released their first single, a split with Pneumania, in 1979, coining the term “gothic punk” in 1980. Bauhaus also arrived in a big way in 1979: The release of the Bela Lugosi’s Dead single on Small Wonder was a watershed moment whose musical and cultural repercussions can be felt to this day.

Also in 1979, Killing Joke released their first EP, “Turn to Red,” heralding a long and influential career that extends into the present. Joy Division unveiled Unknown Pleasures and set to work on their second and last LP, Closer, which producer Martin Hannett described as “dancing music with Gothic overtones.” 1979 saw the Damned release a video of the Vampira tribute song “Plan 9 Channel 7″ shortly before embarking on a brief UK tour with horror punk pioneers The Misfits (who were, interestingly enough, quickly thrown in jail in England, prompting Misfits singer Glenn Danzig to pen the song “London Dungeon” while incarcerated). In short, UK punk was evolving at light speed. Of this burgeoning, gothier direction in punk music, journalist Dave Thompson wrote, “Dave Vanian provided the look, the Banshees supplied the menace, and Joy Division the angst. Now Bauhaus provided the intellectual discipline, and the spore from which a new culture could be spawned.”

The British punks that had not gravitated to the dark side mostly held fast to a more political-tinged, streetwise type of punk, and looked with suspicion upon their postpunk cousins. In England’s Dreaming, writer Jon Savage described the split as one between the “social realists” (viz. bands like Stiff Little Fingers) and the “art crowd” (bands like Magazine or Bauhaus). In America a roughly analogous divide was occurring in 1979 as punk purists went into the nascent hardcore scene while others, like Blondie and the Talking Heads, went off into more commercial (new wave) realms. To fans of political bands like the Dead Kennedys or Discharge, bands that indulged in camphorror or occult musings might have seemed absurd, akin to retreating into escapist fantasy to avoid dealing with an ugly political reality. The era of Reagan and Thatcher was, after all, dawning. As Andy Martin of the communist-leaning Apostles would write about dark punk bands like Blood and Roses: “[T]hese colourful characters actually dared to have parties and enjoy themselves in spite of – or perhaps to spite – Britain under Thatcher. I was unable to forgive such blatant decadence!”

II. “POSITIVE PUNK”

NME music writer Richard North invented the counter-intuitive term “positive punk” to describe what was, in effect, the UK parallel to America’s deathrock scene. Published in early 1983 with accompanying photos fromAnton Corbijn, North’s article counted “Brigandage, Southern Death Cult, Danse Society, Ritual, Rubella Ballet, Virgin Prunes, Specimen, [and] The Mob” as the main standard-bearers of the new movement. (North noted Sex Gang Children and UK Decay in his piece, too.) Not a bad list of bands at all.

Although North (and especially the bands) would later express regret over the clumsy term, “positive punk” is nonetheless useful, if ironically so, as a catchall designation for early ’80s UK goth-punk. (Incidentally, North’s explanation for the term was that the newer bands were proposing a “positive” way forward for punk culture – positive and constructive, that is, as

opposed to the perceived self-destructive nihilism of the ’77 bands.) Whatever the case, the “positive punk” label immediately took a life of its own: A documentary by Michael Moorcock quickly appeared on British TV to explore the new phenomenon. Blood and Roses, named after a 1960 Roger Vadim vampire movie, featured large in Moorcock’s special; by way of a more melancholy take on punk rock, the female-fronted band gave voice to both the Thelemite philosophy of Aleister Crowley and a kind of individualist anarchism. David Tibet of Current 93 had this to say in a 1983 issue of Sounds about them: “[Blood and Roses’] Love Under Will EP sports Gothic skeletons on the sleeve and a spiel which starts and ends with Crowley’s most well-known phrases – ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of The Law’ and ‘Love is the Law, Love under Will.’ […] Suddenly the Posi-Punk bands are competing with the Heavy Metal brigade to see who can cram the most Satans and symbols on their sleeves.”

Back in Los Angeles, 45 Grave had by this point released the Black Cross EP, which indeed featured a bold, upside-down pentagram and Baphomet’s head on its cover, something usually associated with heavy metal iconography. Christian Death’s first LP, Only Theatre of Pain, sported lyrics and song titles that seemed to reference occult subjects in ways that were rarely seen outside the metal scene, too. While some punks scoffed at the “metal” imagery, others would embrace it – including the formerly political TSOL. “Dance with me, my dear / On a floor of bones and skulls / The music is our master / And the devil controls our souls,” TSOL’s Jack Grisham sang on their Dance With Me LP, a far cry from the sentiment they had expressed in “Abolish the Government.” (In fact, bands from the punk scene like English Dogs, Onslaught, and Septic Death would also eventually embrace traditionally metal motifs as the crossover scene began to cross-pollinate between the punk and metal camps.)

The Face, another British music publication, attempted a pass at “positive punk”in its own feature in 1983, saying this: “Consigned to a foul demise by the forces of cash and chaos, punk broods alone in its dark tomb. Its evolution away from the light has been a cruel and twisted one, from guerilla assault on the media to ghost dancing on the bones of Red Indian mysticism, from glue to Gothick. Naturally, unattended for so long, its hair has grown. So have its aspirations. It has risen to the call of groups like Southern Death Cult and Sex Gang Children and craves a positive communion through music.”

Stylistically, much of British positive punk music was tribal: The drumming of the newer, dark postpunk bands was generally heavy on the toms while guitarists avoided power chords and approached the songs from odd angles with slashing, screeching, razor-like effects. (It’s hard to ignore the influence of Public Image Limited’s Keith Levene here.) The tribal direction was evinced in other ways, too: A lot of bands adopted “war paint” type getups (Killing Joke, Southern Death Cult) while wrapping themselves in shambling rags, black robes, or military surplus gear. Ireland’s Virgin Prunes looked like post-apocalyptic zombies painted up in corpse paint and shrouded in layers of what looked like black, gauzy cheesecloth. Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman also painted himself white, camouflaged himself with black streaks of greasepaint, singing all the while about the impending apocalypse; the imagery of Killing Joke videos like “Fire Dances” and “New Day” generally presented painted up punks frolicking in the aftermath of nuclear war, large bonfires dotting the landscape.

Southern Death Cult presented a literal tribal image: An abiding interest in Native American culture colored singer Ian Astbury’s stage dress and lyrics that condemned Western decadence (“Fatman,” “Faith”). The imagery of movies like Road Warrior and the ever-present menace of nuclear war – expressed in popular films at the time like Threads and The Day After – contributed to the zeitgeist. Even Siouxsie Sioux, whose kabuki-like makeup greatly influenced the deathrock aesthetic, sang about “Cities in Dust.” Back in California, this dark take on tribalism exerted a smaller influence (but see Christian Death’s “Stairs – Uncertain Journey” nonetheless); the primary exponent there was Savage Republic, whose 1982 Tragic Figures LP married the imagery of exotic, windswept wastelands with a bleak, tribal sound.

Themes of paganism, the occult, the supernatural, and death were hallmarks of positive punk, as was the case in the deathrock of Southern California.

III. THE ANARCHISTS

Overlooked in most histories of deathrock is the influence exerted by the anarcho-punk scene in the early 1980s, specifically the milieu of bands in some way affiliated with Crass Records or its side imprint, Corpus Christi. Although limited in scope at the time, the impact of bands like Rudimentary Peni and Rubella Ballet on the sound and culture associated with deathrock would make itself felt later on, especially in the later revivals of the genre, into the present. Bands like The Mob and the aforementioned Blood and Roses provided an overlap between the “hard” anarchist politics of Crass and the gloomy, apocalyptic atmosphere of groups like the Virgin Prunes.

The first two EPs of London’s Rudimentary Peni were raging political thrashers, but by the time of their first LP, 1983’s Death Church, the band had slowed the tempo and had taken a serious turn towards the macabre. With imagery provided courtesy of singer Nick Blinko’s industrious and sardonic pen, Peni’s lyics were rife with witty puns: “As you walk out of the Valium of Death,” “the winning spiel goes round and round,” etc. On Death Church, Peni proclaimed the entire planet a “cosmic hearse, floating through the universe.” In 1987 Rudimentary Peni abandoned all political pretense and recorded a sprawling concept album dedicated to everything HP Lovecraft – Cacophony.

Rudimentary Peni’s friends in Part I were even creepier and also shared a fascination with HP Lovecraft. Part 1’s ghoulish, flanger-heavy Funeral Parade EP was partially financed by sales from Rudimentary Peni’s “Farce” EP on Crass Records; in turn, Part 1’s second and last release, the genuinely frightening Pictures of Painmini-LP, was put out by horror illustrator Pushead in 1985. Song titles like “Black Mass,” “The Ghost,” “The Corpse,” “Incest,” and “Salem” put none too fine a point on the band’s taste for horror. Another band associated with Peni, the S-Haters, followed a trajectory not uncommon to other bands working in this milieu: They started in the late 70s as a punk band (albeit with a grim streak – see their early “Death of a Vampire” 7”), gradually evolved into something akin to Joy Division, and left the scene in the late 80s (as The Underlings) after making a kind of gothic rock not unlike the early Sisters of Mercy.

Crass’s Corpus Christi imprint, home of Rudimentary Peni’s Death Church LP, was also briefly home to UK Decay, one of the forefathers of gothic punk. Corpus Christi released the “Rising From the Dread” [sic] EP there. In early 1981, Sounds dubbed them the kings of “gothic punk,” UK Decay also played shows with both Crass and the Poison Girls after a jaunt across America showing up on bills with the likes of the Dead Kennedys and the Adolescents. “Over here we’ve been playing with the hardcore punk bands, which is strange,” UK Decay singer Abbo told Flipside zine in an interview in 1981. Songs like “Werewolf” and “Black Cat” underscored UK Decay’s penchant for darker subject matter, even if the band often used such material to comment allegorically on the current political climate.

Crass’s influence could be felt in other, less direct ways: Southern Death Cult’s Ian Astbury moved into Crass’s Dial House where he read up on Native American mysticism. “I was a devotee of Crass and it had a huge, huge influence on me,” Astbury explained. “I remember being at Dial House – the squat where they lived just outside London – and being given a book on the sacred rights of the Oglala Sioux called Black Elk Speaks, by John Neinhardt, to read while they were having a band meeting. I sat there and flicked through it as a 19 year old kid with a Mohawk, sitting in their house. Steve Ignorant was sitting in the tepee outside – how can that not have an effect on you?” As well, Astbury adopted the animal rights outlook of bands like Conflict, evidenced in the Southern Death Cult song “Vivisection.”

While still writing for music papers, David Tibet coined the term “anarcho-punk” to describe the ideological bands affiliated with Crass, but in the US the term “peace punk” was preferred. A large percentage of the UK peace punk groups featured female singers: Lost Cherrees, Poison Girls, Rubella Ballet, Blood and Roses, the Smartpils, and The Dead are among these. A lot of these groups would be retroactively adopted into a canon one could label “deathrock fellow travelers”; contemporary California deathrock bands like Christ vs Warhol and Fangs on Fur often cite these bands as primary influences. Also central to this musical activity was the involvement of the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective, a group of anarchists and scene supporters who ran a zine and who were closely related to apocalyptic punk band The Mob (not to mention the Mob’s just-as-doomy sister band, Null and Void). To this day, members of Kill Your Pet Puppy maintain a website that serves as a priceless resource on British and American deathrock, gothic punk, and anarchist music.

The primary performance venues for these bands — which were also often operated by members of Kill Your Pet Puppy and Crass — were the Wapping Autonomy Center and the Centre Iberico. These were idealist anarchist centers that hosted shows by Rudimentary Peni, Part 1, the Sinyx, the oft-overlooked and brilliantly Joy Division-esque Lack of Knowledge, Blood and Roses, and others. This dark, funereal underbelly of early 80s anarcho-punk would provide much of the inspirational fuel for the current, newer crop of deathrock bands that have arisen mainly on the US west coast within the past 4 years.

UK Decay, Rudimentary Peni, Part 1, and Blood and Roses succeeded in finding a way to marry the horror iconography of werewolves and vampires to antiauthoritarian politics in a unique, and truly irreverent, cocktail of sound and imagery. Like the Mob, New Model Army also successfully coupled acerbic social commentary with a mournful take on postpunk — and yet the bias against this style of music as apolitical escapism continued (and does continue to this day) from folks involved with hardcore or other styles of punk. The 1990s “Gothic Rock” series of samplers by Cleopatra contained tracks by Rubella Ballet and New Model Army alongside Bauhaus and Play Dead – and despite key absences (no Killing Joke, no Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc.) the Cleopatra samplers do in fact hold up as solid samplers of the music being made in those interrelated scenes. The thematic and stylistic relevance of the “anarcho-goth” bands would present itself clearly only a couple of decades later.

IV. THE BATCAVE

The last piece of the British deathrock puzzle centers around the fabled Batcave club of Soho, London. (To be clear, again: Deathrock was an American phenomenon; what is being detailed here is the British parallel to that phenomenon, which would go on to influence its future direction.) The Batcave was essentially run by the bandSpecimen from about 1982 until 1984 — and Specimen were, in fact, the house band. “All these bands were coming together at the Batcave in London about ’81 or early ’82,” Ian Astbury recounted. “It was run by Ollie Wisdom, who was [the singer] in Specimen. The club was really mixed; it wasn’t just this dark deathrock club. Specimen was the house band, and they were very dark, but they were as much German as they were The Addams Family. They were like a Death Bowie.”

Batcave regular Pete Scathe – who has an excellent website – mentions that it “was at first envisaged as a club for people who were fed up with the commercial direction of New Romantic and wanted something new and darker.” Batcave house DJ Hamish MacDonald added in his diary at the time: “There are big differences between ’77 punks and ’83 punks. Mick Jones came to the Batcave once and stood there not knowing where he was. Old punks just want the Pistols; new punks have switched into people like Alien Sex Fiend.”

It is largely by way of Specimen that the influences of David Bowie and 70s glam rock reasserted themselves into the deathrock of the east side of the Atlantic. In fact, the recipe for Specimen’s sound is this: Mix one part David Bowie, one part Rocky Horror Picture Show, one part Alice Cooper, another part New York Dolls, and add a healthy dose of early, fetish-obsessed Adam and the Ants. Nowadays, listening to jaunty, sassy Specimen songs like Syria or Lovers, it’s easier to imagine the band on the soundtrack of a movie like Hedwig and the Angry Inch than it is to see them sharing a fanbase with a bleak band like, say, Joy Division.

The carefully cultivated image of Specimen included see-through mesh shirts, black lipstick, torn fishnet stockings, and sprayed up black hair – all accoutrements now inextricably associated with the deathrock look. Chances are that if you see a flyer for a deathrock event in your town, depicted on the flyer will be an image of Specimen keyboardist Johnny Slut (that is, if Siouxsie’s image isn’t used); his familiar face was even used on Cleopatra’s Gothic Rock, Vol. 1. Indeed, the band are iconic in the annals of deathrock: As a traveling event night, Specimen managed to tour the Batcave across US clubs in the mid-80s, playing with bands like Christian Death and Flesh for Lulu. Specimen’s angle on the genre was not so much about gloom-and-doom as it was about sheer, unapologetic camp and kitsch.

Closely associated with the Batcave scene was Alien Sex Fiend, led by the Alice Cooper-obsessed Nik Fiend. (Notably, Alien Sex Fiend would open for Alice Cooper in England on several dates in the late 1980s.) Rising from the ashes of garage punk band Demon Preacher,

Alien Sex Fiend seemed destined to go the horror punk route of the Misfits. Donned in chalk white makeup, black eyeliner and black lipstick, the four-piece band used a comic book horror font for their name similar to that used by the Misfits and the Cramps – and the early Alien Sex Fiend material is in fact guitar-driven punk rock. As the band gradually shed members throughout the ’80s, however, a drum machine and then synthesizers were introduced into the mix, resulting in the sort of club-friendly electronic take on goth seen in the form of songs like Now I’m Feeling Zombiefied. Reduced to a two-person core of Nik Fiend and his wife, Mrs. Fiend (Christine Wade), Alien Sex Fiend soldiered on into the 1990s, producing a heavily electronic style of goth that became much more favored by club owners as time went on. Alien Sex Fiend still exist and have put out a new LP as recently as 2010 (Death Trip). Early Alien Sex Fiend tracks like “Dead and Buried” and “Girl at the End of My Gun” are essential listening.

The horror goth-glam of the Batcave scene showed to what degree Bauhaus had made an impact on this darker take on punk. From the get-go, Bauhaus wore their 70s glam influences proudly on their black mesh sleeves, famously covering songs by David Bowie, T. Rex, Brian Eno, and John Cale early on. Bauhaus’ entire black-and-white silent film aesthetic, their predilection for surrealist movies like Eraserhead or b-movie horror like The Man with X-Ray Eyes – these would influence the aesthetics of dark postpunk generally. Singer Peter Murphy’s vocal style owed a lot to David Bowie, whose Low-era spectre always loomed large over the band; similarly, Rozz Williams of Christian Death always cited Bowie as his primary role model, too. “We liked Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and the Sex Pistols,” Williams explained. “So death rock, as we saw it, was taking the visual and lyrical aspect of the Cramps, and attaching it to rock ‘n roll. Only people started calling it gothic rock instead, and it ended up going to a very different place than we had intended.”

Another important patron of the Batcave was Nick Cave, member of The Birthday Party and recently (as of 1983) relocated to London from Australia. The Birthday Party did not neatly fit into the Batcave canon, even if they released a crowd favorite in the form of their song Release the Bats. (“Release the Bats” would also become the name of an event night started up in 1998 in Los Angeles at the beginning of the first deathrock revival.) Still, by way of related and similar-sounding bands like the Gun Club, Inca Babies, and The Scientists, the Birthday Party helped flesh out the more roots-rock side of the growing gothic postpunk phenomenon. Along with Cave, Robert Smith of The Cure could sometimes be found at the Batcave, too): “We used to go to the Batcave because we got in free and it was a good atmosphere and the people were really nice. But the music was awful! That whole romanticism of death! Anybody who’s ever experienced death firsthand could tell you there’s nothing romantic about it.”

A list of the top ten bands played at the Batcave in 1983, preserved by Pete Scathe, actually reveals quite solid taste in music: Killing Joke, Public Image Limited, The Cramps, Xmal Deustchland, Specimen, Alien Sex Fiend, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Virgin Prunes, Sisters of Mercy, and Bauhaus fill out the roster. The official Batcave vinyl sampler, 1983’s Young Limbs and Numb Hymns, showed a more diverse array of bands, including industrial group Test Dept. as well as Specimen, Alien Sex Fiend, Sexbeat, and James Pursey of Sham 69.

V. INTO THE ’90s

Another sampler of deathrock music can be found in the soundtrack to 1985’s tongue-in-cheek horror filmReturn of the Living Dead. Just as the early Hell Comes to Your House compilation turned into a coincidental sampler of L.A. deathrock, so the Return of the Living Dead soundtrack serves as a similarly good snapshot of the era. (Whoever assembled the collection at the time certainly knew what they were doing.) The soundtrack includes tracks by The Damned, TSOL, The Cramps, the Jet Black Berries, and the Flesh Eaters. Even Roky Erickson makes a showing, with a track from his horror rock era (“Burn the Flames”). Mystic Records chimed in in 1985 with its own remarkable Let’s Die deathrock anthology ), which featured both straight-up deathrock bands (like Burning Image or Kommunity FK’s Patrick Mata) or otherwise “regular” punk acts trying their hand at gloomy punk.

By the time Return of the Living Dead had left the theaters, the original Southern California deathrock scene was largely dissipated. A few bands like Radio Werewolf carried on into the early 90s, but by then something called “gothic rock” had supplanted everything. Southern Death Cult had become Death Cult, and then just The Cult, at every stage growing closer to

full-on arena rock. The Sisters of Mercy followed a somewhat similar trajectory, culminating with the hard rocking Vision Thing LP in 1990. The Lords of the New Church’s career was not dissimilar; they played a progressively more hard rock style, as well, until breaking up in 1989. A retroactive taxonomy of sorts was developing that by the 1990s had reshuffled categories and placed deathrock as a subniche within the larger umbrella of “goth,” when in fact the movement had existed as part of the California punk scene. (In fact, goth had also grown out of the punk scene, but willful ignorance ruled the day, then as now.)

As the 1990s progressed, a dancified version of industrial music gained ascendancy thanks to groups like Nine Inch Nails and the increasingly high profile of labels like Wax Trax. Gradually, this type of dance music, as well as the growing popularity of dark EBM, created a bizarre situation where by 2000 people who claimed to like gothic music began avoiding guitar-driven bands with acoustic, human drumming – that was “old school” and mostly irrelevant to their concerns – and gave credence to a slick and highly processed type of electronica as the new and proper form of goth (Wumpscut, Velvet Acid Christ.) This new development completely and wholly divorced “goth” from punk, both in sound and in ethos. In reality, this turn of events seemed to be a form of the age-old war between punk and disco, with fans of deathrock as the new stand-ins for punk, and an increasingly rave-like style of goth culture serving as the new form of disco. This cultural evolution paved the way for the first deathrock revival of 1998.

Next week: The first deathrock revival of 1998-2004 and the second deathrock revival of 2008-present.

Photograph courtesy of Cherry ElCamino. Published under a Creative Commons license.

The Year Goth-Punk Brokeby Oliver Sheppard on Aug 19, 2012 • 2: 47 UTC3 Comments

The very first issue of SPIN Magazine in 1985 featured a full color feature on deathrock. Titled “Is There Life After Deathrock?” the article’s tagline warns, “If you thought punk was hardcore, you’re in for a shock.” Almost 30 years later, punk bands have rediscovered the music SPIN warned about.

In some ways, the SPIN article could have been written today. And, for truebloods, deathrock never died anyway. But looking over the announcements of recent punk festival lineups, it really is remarkable to see how darker, more deathrock-influenced acts have started to proliferate, supplanting lineups that just a few years ago heavily favored d-beat acts that were primarily influenced by Japanese or Scandinavian hardcore.

The annual “Varning from Montreal” punk fest in Quebec recently announced its lineup for 2012. The Varning fest is to Quebec what the Chaos in Tejas festival is to, well, Texas. Although Zyanose from Japan, and Peligro Social (!) are the main headliners, the rest of Varning’s roster reads like a who’s who of the modern punk scene’s turn towards gothic music: Crimson Scarlet,

Belgrado, The Spectres, Dekoder, Bellicose Minds, and others are announced loudly from the show’s flyer. These are all contemporary, deathrock-infuenced punk bands, many of whom are on tour in support of recent releases.

Also of note is the annual Drop Dead Fest in Berlin, Germany, and the surprisingly similar shape that its lineup has taken. Dropdead is traditionally a straight-up gothic festival, the sort of thing that might feature a reunion of a band like Specimen or Alien Sex Fiend. It’s generally off most punks’ radar. Dropdead 2012, however, sports twin headliners UK Decay and The Mob, both gloomy bands from the early 1980s, with ties to the anarcho-punk scene. (The Mob, of course, had a release on Crass Records while UK Decay released the Rising from the Dread EP on Crass imprint Corpus Christi.)

Rounding out Dropdead’s lineup are newer, more politically oriented goth-punk bands like Tanzkommando Untergang and Dystopian Society. More traditional deathrockers, like 13th Moon and Spain’s Los Carniceros del Norte round things out. Back in the US, San Francisco’s new Subversion punk festival, which takes place in December of this year, is not ultimately much different: Lost Tribe, Arctic Flowers, Crimson Scarlet, and The Spectres all occupy prominent places on the Subversion concert roster.

Portland’s Estranged were well ahead of the curve when it came to steering their own sound away from hardcore punk down darker paths. Initially a side-project of Remains of the Day, Estranged singer Mark recently confessed mixed feelings about the new trend of punks starting gothy bands: “I think postpunk is kinda trendy just like any other music, but at least it’s inspired people to do something creative, albeit sometimes totally unoriginal.It’s okay to be inspired by other bands, but now there are so many bands playing stuff that sounds exactly like the one band they are obsessed with that it’s getting to the point where it’s turning into a played out fantasy. You don’t have to pretend that you’re in your favorite band, you are that band — which is great if makes you happy.”

Lee, the bassist for Portland’s Arctic Flowers, gave a similar explanation: “As people’s tastes change, so will the genre influences of the DIY music scene. I think also, for others as well as myself, that post-punk is some of the earliest music we were exposed to and it seems natural to revisit our roots through our own musical expressions.” Stan, Arctic Flowers’ guitarist, admits, “Our sound is a mix of punk, deathrock, post punk, and goth.” But others shy away from such specific, and often debate-causing, genre tags. Zach of The Spectresexplained, “I usually just say [we are] ‘dark punk’ to avoid having to give a lengthy description of influences that most people have never heard of or care about.”

2012 may ultimately be remembered as the year goth-punk broke. One of the major and recent innovations that bands like The Spectres, Crimson Scarlet, and others are bringing to the music is the conscious reconnecting of dark postpunk to its DIY punk roots — and especially its oft-ignored anarcho-punk side. San Francisco’sCrimson Scarlet recall UK anarcho-goths Blood and Roses while Moral Hex reminds of Rubella Ballet or Lost Cherees. New York City’s Anasazi recall Rikk Agnew-era Christian Death while Deathcharge are increasingly a lot like The Dark, Vex, or early Shadow Project (circa that band’s 1991 self-titled LP). Spain’s Belgrado put one in the mind of early ’80s UK political postpunk; Richmond, Virginia’s Lost Tribe simultaneously remind of Samhain and TSOL.

And now, new LPs by the Bellicose Minds, the Spectres (Strange Weather), Dekoder (Between the Waking and the Dying), and Blue Cross (I Am Death) have come out or are about to come out. This is in addition to substantial recent EPs by Arctic Flowers (“Procession”) and Lost Tribe (their self-titled 5-song cassette that came out in May). It’s worth taking a quick look at some of the recent releases in this genre to get up to speed.

Arctic Flowers’ 2012 “Procession” EP

Portland’s Arctic Flowers are one of the higher-profile bands working in this new milieu that is a combination of anarcho-punk, deathrock, and postpunk. Like a lot of the other bands in this genre, the frontman is in fact a frontwoman — and so it’s tempting to peg them as a “School of Siouxsie” band a la Madhouse or Hysteria. But Arctic Flowers do retain a driving punk edge, on full display on this EP hat is mainly available from them on their current Summer tour. The title track is a thumping, mid-to-up-tempo song in the vein of the Smartpils. Very good stuff.

(Interestingly, like their peers in Blue Cross, Arctic Flowers employ heavy use of the “Eye of Horus” Egyptian symbol. I remember when it seemed like goth label Cleopatra Records, the Sisters of Mercy’s Vision Thing LP, and Neil Gaiman’s Siouxsie-esque Death comic book character all seemed to brandish the symbol at the same time in the early 1990s, too. Some goth iconography never dies, I guess.)

Dekoder, “Between the Waking and the Dying” LP

Dekoder are one of my favorite recent bands. Like Arctic Flowers (and Blue Cross, for that matter,) they use mournful female vocals. Like Arctic Flowers, their punk pedigree is unimpeachable. Dekoder features ex-members of crusty hardcore band Born Dead Icons, a band that was often compared to Motorhead. After Born Dead Icons folded, the members started the slightly more postpunk band The Complications. Imagine Lemmy singing for Killing Joke. New vocalist Meghan’s vocals are incredible — like a strangely appealing mix of Gitane Demone (of whom I was never a huge fan) and Monica Richards. Her voice is the key ingredient, and they make this otherwise guitar-driven, mid-tempo new postpunk LP work wonderfully.

Lost Tribe, self-titled cassette

Confusingly, Lost Tribe have two self-titled releases: One is their excellent 2011 debut LP,and the other is this recent cassette-only EP. Lost Tribe’s sound is a compelling mixture of ’80s UK goth, dark crust punk, and Los Angeles deathrock. I’ve always personally likened them to Initium-era Samhain. On repeated listenings, you can even hear some dark psychedelia like The Doors or Music Machine in the mix, thanks largely to the effective use of swirling gothic organs and Davey Bales’ burly vocals. Three songs off the new EP are at Lost Tribe’sBandcamp page. The Richmond, Virginia band are going on a Halloween tour in October, which seems perfect for them, and the band’s arsenal of fog machines.

Like The Estranged, Blue Cross began as a postpunk side project to a much faster punk band (Germ Attak, in this case.) Unlike many other bands operating in this genre, though, Blue Cross are fairly prolific: I Am Death is their second LP in about eight months. Their first LP, Mass Hysteria, was a fairly driving macabre punk LP. There second full-length slows the tempo a bit and introduces the nuances of coldwave into the band’s sonic repertoire. A duo, guitarist Jo’s work now more closely resembles that of John McGeoch while singer Jess’s vocals have, if anything, gotten spookier and more dramatic.

I never thought I would ever, ever say this, but … there is also a very good Marilyn Manson cover song on here. The saving grace is that it sounds nothing like Manson. “Siouxsie’s an influence as we’re both fans along with a lot of the other bands that are usually associated [with this style of music],” Jo explained in a recent interview. “The big names like The Cure, Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, The Cult, or Killing Joke are long time favorites. Especially during the demo time I really had bands like 13th Chime, 1919, Sex Gang Children, Part 1, Christian Death and UK Decay in mind.”

Blue Cross’s new LP is available from the Noxious Noize! label.

Belgrado photo courtesy of Imagora. Published under a Creative Commons license.

Pioneers of Postpunkby Oliver Sheppard on Sep 10, 2012 • 7: 04 UTCNo Comments

Warsaw changed their name to Joy Division to avoid conflict with the band Warsaw Pakt. Coincidentally, the name change also served to mark the break between Joy Division’s punk phase and their later, better-known postpunk era.

Although Warsaw’s output has its fans and diehard evangelists to this day, it’s the Joy Division material that garnered their breakthrough popularity. But other bands have had the opposite problem: They are known for their punk material, but their respective postpunk phases remain neglected, or are seen as a kind of embarrassing deviation from punk purity, to be brushed under the rug. Rare are bands like Wire or Siouxsie and the Banshees, bands whose punk and postpunk material is accorded equal acclaim. (Which is also not to say those bands’ catalogs aren’t nonetheless uneven, either.)

Here are five bands whose postpunk material merits reexamination. Audiophiles will be familiar with some of the releases. However, the material warrants broader exposure, regardless.

1.) MIDDLE CLASS: Homeland LP (1982)

Yes, the same Middle Class from Southern California that pioneered the genre of hardcore punk. (And let’s not rehash the endless and ultimately unproductive debates over who invented that.) Middle Class’s 1978 Out of Vogue EP was impossibly fast, featuring rapid-fire auctioneer-style vocals courtesy of Jeff Atta. As the onlineAgony Shorthand zine remarks, “Middle Class were truly more of an ‘artpunk”’ band, even from the first record, than many of the groups [they] automatically got lumped in with.” Guitarist Mike Atta agrees: “[W]hen the definition of punk narrowed, bands like Pop Group, Gang of Four, and Joy Division would have an obvious effect on us.”

And so we have the 1982 Homeland LP, sadly Middle Class’s only full-length. The album art hints at a more nuanced and somber approach. It looks like it could have come out on Factory Records. From the get-go, the slower tempos and more intricated bass lines – which sometimes recall Peter Hook, but which at other times delved into the punk-funk of The Pop Group – catch one’s attention. Had the LP come out on the 4AD label, on the other side of the Atlantic, the very same material would be instantly recognized as classic. But as it stands,Homeland was an odd duck of an album coming out of the Orange County hardcore milieu, so it was almost instantly ignored. The material feels more British than Californian in its sensibility, except for perhaps the track “Restless Young Men,” which has a Urinals/100 Flowers vibe. “Out of My Hands” is as good a postpunk song as one can find from an American band in the early 1980s.

Middle Class’s rare Blueprint for Joy discography CD has all the band’s hardcore material and later postpunk stuff on one disc.

2.) THE PROLETARIAT: Indifference LP (1985)

Like Middle Class, Boston’s Proletariat are primarily remembered for their earlier, angry punk

material. Their lyrics and song titles were always great, showing a lefty agitprop bent: “Religion is the Opium of the Masses,” “Voodoo Economics,” “Marketplace,” and others. Early on, The Proletariat played raw, fast punk in the vein of their heroes in the Sex Pistols. In the book American Hardcore, Stephen Blush wrote, “The Proletariat played vicious hardcore fused with a jagged Gang of Four/Killing Joke edge. Frontman Richard Brown wrote poetically oblique lyrics with a distinct Marxist bent – part Burroughs, part Mao. Soma Holiday, their ’83 LP, was way ahead of its time.”

But it’s the 1985 Indifference LP I want to highlight here. To my mind it’s every bit as good as Soma Holiday, yet still sorely overlooked. A mature mix of smart songwriting and deft, accomplished instrumentation, the album hints at the early “positive punk” of UK bands like Sex Gang Children or Furyo. The influence of bands like The Dils, the Mekons, and fellow Bostonite postpunkers Mission of Burma also courses strongly through the LP’s veins. Indifference is ultimately a strange kind of kindred soul to Middle Class’s Homeland; there is even a song called “Homeland.” To my mind, Indifference is every bit as good as the strongest stuff released on 4AD or Rough Trade at the time. Like Middle Class’ Homeland LP, it seems an accident of geography (i.e. the band is from Boston, not London) that has resulted in the record languishing in obscurity.

3.) BLITZ: Second Empire Justice LP (1983)

When Crisis had their own personal Joy Division epiphany, they ultimately became Death in June. When the rowdy Oi! band The Blitz went through the same thing, they abruptly changed musical course and releasedSecond Empire Justice, alienating their skinhead fanbase almost overnight. Like Joy Division, New Order, and Death in June, Blitz’s name had sketchy political connotations; Nietzschean song titles like “New Age” didn’t help. In fact, it was “New Age” and especially its promo video, which exaggerated things just a little bit by stating the band were from Manchester (really, they were from nearby New Mills) – that signaled the sea change in the band’s sound. Suddenly the Blitz were dressed in all black dress shirts, and it sounded like Bernard Sumner was guesting on guitar. Oi! seer Gary Bushell had claimed Blitz’s 1982 Voice of a Generation LP was like The Clash’s debut album “in terms of feel, suss and relevance.” Comparisons like this came to aquick halt afterSecond Empire Justice came out.

Interestingly, Second Empire Justice was disowned by the band after they decided to return to their Oi! roots, and for a long time many people thought the Blitz of Second Empire Justice must have been a different band than the Blitz of “Never Surrender“. There is a chilly, nostalgic, very European vibe to Second Empire Justice, and there’s no doubt it belongs on the shelf next to Joy Division’s Closer, Positive Noise’s Heart of Darkness LP, and early Danse Society, not by Last Resort or The Partisans. Interestingly, Blitz’s 1989 Killing Dream LP also betrays a Sisters of Mercy/gothic rock influence. Underappreciated is the creeping Stranglers influence present even early on in such tracks as “Fatigue.”

4) SIEKIERA: Nowa Aleksandria LP (1987)

Like the American band Middle Class, Poland’s Siekiera earned their stripes in the trenches of hardcore punk. And also like Middle Class, Siekiera’s only full-length album is a surprisingly somber postpunk affair that sounds light years removed from the band’s lightning fast punk origins. Whereas Middle Class had a very palpable Gang of Four/Rough Trade influence in its music, Siekiera’s direction was full-on Killing Joke worship.

Footage from the legendary, dusty Jarocin ’84 punk fest in Poland (parts of which can be seen on Youtube, presents a Road Warrior-looking band that sounds something like a cross between The Exploited and Abrasive Wheels. In other words, UK82 all the way. But the Nowa

Aleksandria LP throws listeners a complete curveball, and, as with Blitz’s change of tune in 1983, punk fans were initially none too happy about the gothy directions the band decided to take. A different demographic ultimately discovered the dark, arty, almost coldwave-esque Polish LP and so it did achieve cult status over the years. Now that more recent Polish punk acts like Post-Regiment, Tragedia, and PESD have championed Siekiera’s lone LP, it’s been taken back in among the punk crowd – or at least accorded a kind of final and proper respect.

http://youtu.be/Y8bUGeBqqAc

5) FLIEHENDE STURME: An Den Unfern LP (1988)

The story by now probably seems familiar: A band with punk roots grows bored with three chord thrash, develops broader ambitions as well as better musical skills, and decides to chart a new and darker course. Germany’s Fleihende Sturme (“Fleeing Storms”) essentially began as the deutschpunk outfit Chaos Z. Even by the end of Chaos Z’s run, however, it was apparent the mood was changing; their intriguing, almost surf-like song “Einsam” was even included on the seminal Godfathers of German Gothic compilation.

Along with EA80, Fliehende Sturm are considered the founders of a dark German style of postpunk calleddepro-punk, short for “depressive punk.” A regional music style like Spain’s siniestro, or California deathrock, German depro-punk is traditionally guitar-driven, mid-tempo, but with an emphasis on minor notes and disaffected, melancholy vocals. It’s punkier sounding than what “postpunk” came to signify musically in the UK; nonetheless, there is a serious and gloomy cast to most music in the genre that gives songs a gothy feel. The closest musical comparisons would be with bands like Les Thugs from France, or

And that is pretty much how Fliehend Sturme sounds, even to this day. They’re considered such a fixture in the German punk scene that their newest LP, 2011’s Warten auf Raketen, came and went without much notice, even though it’s a solid addition to their catalog. Like the Ramones or Motorhead, their style has remained remarkably consistent over the decades. According to this critic, this means Fliehende Sturm are either “reliable” or “monotonous” – but I think it’s clearly the former. And it’s incredible the band are still operating at all at this point in time, with virtually no compromise in their sound or integrity.

Photograph courtesy of [carlo cravero]. Published under a Creative Commons license.

The Many Deaths of Punkby Oliver Sheppard on Oct 22, 2012 • 9: 10 UTC2 Comments

Hard-coded into punk’s DNA is a contradiction worthy of Hegel: A desire to impact the mainstream combined with a disavowal of anything that achieves success. It’s a perfect formula for self-destruction. This core tension has prevented punk from achieving its highest ideals, and has caused the movement to die out several times over.

Both Hegel and Fichte could appreciate this self-defeating, “thesis versus antithesis” dynamic. On the one hand, since the 1970s, punk has optimistically aspired to influence the direction of culture – not just underground subculture, but the actual direction of culture at large. At its most aspirational, punk has indeed wanted to change the world.

But embedded within this aspiration is a self-destruct button. From the beginning, punk has also ironically resentfully derided anything that has become popular enough to have an impact on culture in any meaningful, real-world way — even when bands with punk backgrounds have succeeded on non-commercial terms (like Fugazi or others.) When something is too successful in the punk world, it is derided by trend-seekers as “played out,” or just flat-out lame, the province of common folks, akin to pearls being cast before swine. It becomes worthy of derision. This safely – and perversely – ensures that nothing successful is ever supported by “real” punks.

This core contradiction has fueled musical progression within punk’s own jealously guarded milieu. However, it has also ensured that punk culture remains a generally and largely ineffectual cultural cul-de-sac, a secretive ghetto within which to retreat, something that covets and fetishizes its own obscurity, even if that obscurity is enforced to the detriment of social change at large, in order to preserve its own overriding coolness, an overriding coolness which — or so it seems — must trump real-world social change at all costs, to better protect itself.

Punk’s First Death

As early as February 1977, London’s International Times proclaimed “punk is dead,” as Kill Your Pet Puppy collective member, and self-described “anarcho-goth-punk” Alistair Livingston reminded a few months ago at his excellent Green Galloway blog. Thirteen years after this first of what would come to be many punk deaths, punk was chronicled by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces (1989.) This was the book in which Marcus convincingly re-situated punk within the continuum of 20th century radical history, a history that extends backwards through 1960s French Situationism, 1920s German Dadaism, and vintage, raucous American Delta blues. In Lipstick Traces, Marcus notes that by the late 1970s the punk “subculture … had already been pronounced dead by those whose business it is to make such pronouncements: a once secret society that was diffused by headlines and [cultural] tourism.”

It’s worth quoting Greil Marcus at length in this regard:

“[I]n the beginning, punk was indeed a sort of secret society, dedicated not to the guarding of a secret but to its pursuit, a society based on a blind conviction that there was a secret to be found. Was it that once the secret was seemingly discovered, once punk became an ideology

of protest and self-expression – once people knew what to expect, once they understood just what they would get when they paid their money, or what they would do to earn it – the story was ready for its footnotes? In the United States, primitive enclaves had formed across the country (nightclubs, fanzines, record stores, a half-dozen high school students here, a trio of artists there, a girl locked in her room staring at her new haircut in the mirror) though perhaps less in response to the thrill of hearing $10 import copies of the banned ‘Anarchy in the UK’ single than to newspaper and TV features about London teenagers mutilating their faces with common household objects. Real discoveries were taking place, out of nothing (‘The original scene,’ said a founder of the Los Angeles punk milieu, ‘was made of people who were taking chances and operating on obscure fragments of information.’).”

The original impetus “not to the guarding of a secret but to its pursuit, based on a blind conviction that there was a secret to be found” was forever quashed by the advent of the Internet and mp3 file sharing — something Greil Marcus had not foreseen in the 1980s, when he wrote his influential book. Marcus had successfully recast punk as the latest avatar of a century-long trajectory of undergound, subversive culture. He did not, however, predict the influence the Internet would have on making nothing — least of all, any subversive subculture — a secret any more.

Napster, Limewire, and – later – Soulseek, mp3 blogs, and Youtube, introduced access to a musical world where there are no secrets — where all secrets, indeed, are ultimately discovered. From this development, punk – or what continues to call itself “punk” – became one subculture among many other equally-situated, and equally benign, subcultures, kept alive on artificial respiration by new bands that recombined disparate aspects from punk’s past into new, Frankenstein-like creations. Whereas punk fans once suspected they were embarking on a journey where an ultimate revelation awaited them, punk per se now resembles a salad bar: Various ingredients are combined in ad hoc ways, almost always in a fashion that looks backward for guidance, rather than forward to something that awaits discovery. Look at, for example, the attempt by late 1990s “3rd wave ska-punk” bands to combine ska with street punk. Or in the more recent subgenre of “blackened thrash,” a modern combination of crust punk with black metal.

Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces is subtitled “A Secret History of the Twentieth Century,” but there will be no secret history of the twenty first century. The secrets that Marcus laid bare about punk’s roots and ideological predecessors are common knowledge today, and will forever be, thanks to blogs, bit torrent files of the most obscure underground cinema or rare footage of bands, and other new file sharing innovations. Everything will be constantly laid bare in the self-imposed Panopticon of social media sites, Wikipedia-type encyclopedia pages, and other information-sharing sites onto which people willingly reveal all, down to the most arcane minutiae and quotidian detail. This is a far cry from the prior world of snail mailing for xerox’d zines, finding random and isolated penpals across various countries, and responding to classified ads in the back ofMaximum Rock ‘n Roll in the 1980s. “The original scene,” Greil Marcus quoted, “was made of people who were taking chances and operating on obscure fragments of information.” There are no “obscure fragments of information” now.

Punk died its first death in the late 1970s, splitting – like a single-celled organism — into two subsequent life forms. As Jon Savage noted in England’s Dreaming, on one side of this split was the social realist camp, which would become the hardcore, street punk, anarcho, and Oi! movements. And on the other side of this split was the artsy camp. This would become the postpunk, goth, and new wave scenes. Punk had died its first death. The corpse was rotting by 1978.

Punk’s Second Death

Punk’s second death came about in the mid-1980s, after the hardcore scene in the US convinced folks it was the legitimate heir to the mid-70s punk explosion, and then proceeded

to itself unravel.

In fact, hardcore punk’s legitimacy as punk’s next avatar could be called into question in any number of ways. It is only one possible history of punk in a multiplicity of narratives that could be written. But the social realists won the contest of ideas, and thus hardcore, anarcho-punk, and street punk carried the sacred punk mantle forward while sloughing off the postpunk and new wave elements. Those subgenres became something else besides punk.

The movie American Hardcore, based on the Stephen Blush book of the same name, is illustrative of this. The film trails off around 1985, something criticized by latter day, would-be hardcore historians, even though bands from the early ’80s (like SSD, Article of Faith, and The Faith) will generally concede something important had changed by the mid and especially late 1980s in the direction of hardcore punk. In fact, by the late 1980s, post-hardcore (Fugazi and much of the DC hardcore scene,) crossover thrash (late ’80s DRI, Cryptic Slaughter, Corrosion of Conformity, and others,) grind (Napalm Death,) and “alternative rock” (Husker Du, Overwhelming Colorfast, etc.) had frayed the formerly monolithic movement into a million different directions. The glory days of hardcore had ended.

One important thing that happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s was the formalization of punk into definite political categories. Punk was initially an orgasmic, messy, uncategorizable cultural explosion of mutually contradictory tendencies. Visually, dayglo pinks and greens (X-Ray Spex) collided with fascist and communist imagery (Sex Pistols) and stark black military surplus (Crass) – or bondage — gear. Meanwhile, guitar-driven rock and roll (Ramones) mixed weirdly with androgynous, keyboard-driven experimentation (The Screamers;) and also, inflammatory and reactionary sentiments (Black Flag’s “White Minority,” or the original version of Siouxsie’s “Love in a Void”) were combined confusingly with Marxist and anti-capitalist motifs (The Dils’ “Class War” or anything by The Clash.) That was why punk was so genuinely scary to the public at large. It was a mess of conflicting imagery and sentiment, all of it intentionally provocative.

By the late 1970s, Jon Savage’s social realist punk camp had won the day, and punk bands like Sham 69 and Stiff Little Fingers were playing support benefits for Rock Against Racism in England, or supporting other political causes that had a formal organization. (The Sex Pistols even played a show or two for striking firefighters, as shown in Julien Temple’s The Filth and Fury.) By the 1980s, British punk bands were playing Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) rallies, and most of them had adopted an anti-Thatcher, anti-Tory stance. (Not to mention the increasingly animal rights-themed and vegetarian motifs that would pop up in punk songs throughout the 1980s.)

In the US, American hardcore bands had adopted an anti-Reagan stance, and were forming — with support from the leftist Yippies of the 1970s — Rock Against Reagan concerts. Bands like the Dead Kennedys, Discharge, MDC, Crass, the Subhumans, Conflict, and Crucifix, had all injected serious political gravitas into what had formerly been a mainly cultural – not political – musical movement. Indeed, punk had become an explicitly leftwing movement by 1984, coincidentally augmenting leftist politics in general, much as the labor folk music of the IWW (Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, etc.) buttressed the radical labor activists in the 1910s through the 1930s. In fact, Crass’s last show in 1984 was a benefit for striking miners. “Do they owe us a living?” Steve Ignorant rhetorically asked of the striking miners in the crowd of their last show, as heard on Best Before 1984. “Of course they fucking do!” Crass and the audience respond in unison.

At this time, any punk band that would have performed a pro-Thatcher benefit would not be considered “punk” at all – not for cultural or musical reasons, but for political reasons. Musically, a band could be playing Ramones-style punk rock all they wanted, but by 1984 that alone no longer made them “punk.” In fact, plenty of right-wing bands had adopted the punk musical format to advance right-wing politics (Skrewdriver and nationalist Oi!, for example.) By the 1980s, punk was not just a musical style; it was a multifaceted social movement. Bands like MDC and Crass, and fanzines like Maximum Rock and Roll, had ensured a solidly leftist political component was an essential part of punk rock.

In short, by the 1980s a dynamic had arisen within the punk scene that wanted to view punk as a teleological phenomenon. Punk had to advocate something. Punk songs increasingly took on the character of position papers. Songs were either “pro-” something (like animal rights, or

labor unions, or unilateral disarmament) or they were “anti-” something (like military intervention in Central America, or racism, or poll taxes.) Punk bands began to be viewed less as self-contained artists and more like musical think tanks, cranking out political views cloaked in the form of rock and roll songs. This particular view of punk exists to this day.

Bands that did not explicitly state their views, whether through liner notes or in song lyrics, or in playing benefit shows, were increasingly seen as “sketchy.” Bands that continued to employ the same inflammatory cultural imagery that was used with great success by punk bands in the late 1970s were “called out” for “straddling the fence,” or for not getting with the times and taking a definite stand on this or that issue. The purely artistic was expected to be subservient to the political by the time the 1980s had ended.

Taking a step back and enlisting Greil Marcus’ analysis as a cue, it’s instructive to see what happened with the Surrealist art movement of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe. A similar subjugation of the artistic to the political occurred. As fascism became ascendant across Europe throughout the 1930s, many Surrealists and former Dadaists grew convinced that their art must be placed in the service of a political message against fascism. This was most notably symbolized in Georges Bataille — a transgressive author best known for the pornographic Story of the Eye – forming the anti-fascist Contre-Attaque (“Counterattack”) group. Bataille expended what little remaining cultural capital he had with Surrealists in the 1930s to get Andre Breton, the author of the Surrealist Manifesto, to dedicate himself to ensuring Surrealist artists would put their artistic talents into political advocacy. Although important Surrealists like Salvador Dali had supported fascism, Bataille wanted to harness art and put it into the service of a political agenda.

As Michel Surya wrote in his biography of Bataille, this “would have meant reassessing everything surrealism had been: its aesthetic choices and its choice of social revolution: in other words, making an absolute conception of liberty submit to a strict ideological discipline.” By the mid- and especially the late 1980s, punk had similarly come to resemble a panoply of ideologies (straight edge, the Krishna religion, anarcho-communism, vegetarianism) that happened to have rock bands (instead of policy wonks) espousing them.

Punk’s Third Death

1991: The Year Punk Broke — a documentary released by the David Geffen Company in 1992 — presaged a general sea change in the type of attention underground music started receiving. Although the film was about a group of bands whose “punk” appellation is questionable — Gumball, Dinosaur, Jr., Babes in Toyland, and other indie-type bands — renewed attention was focused onto DIY music by major labels. Suddenly, bands as disparate as Jesus Jones, Teenage Fanclub, and Mudhoney were all being called “punk” by the mainstream media. Many bought into it and a strange era began where alternative guitar rock became acsendant, much of it being referred to as “punk” whether it was in fact punk or not.

Throughout the 1990s, with the full, culturally disruptive power of the Internet still to come, and with the music business still driven very much by things like radio airplay and producing hit singles, it finally became possible to start a punk-ish band and become a millionaire. Green Day and various mall-punk type bands would go on to prove this. As the cultural mainstream appropriated punk-type fashion, imagery, and slogans for corporate use (as was often documented wonderfully in The Baffler magazine of this era,) it became increasingly hard to remember that in the USA, the Sex Pistols’ Nevermind the Bollocks had only reached 106 on the charts in the 1970s. In fact, Nevermind the Bollocks did not go gold in the USA until the early 1990s, thanks to the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Bands like Econochrist, Born Against, Rorschach, and The Pist toughed it out throughout the 1990s, but a glut of all things punk otherwise occurred in the culture. Music critics increasingly referred to new bands in terms of their relation to punk. VH1-style documentaries about punk proliferated on cable (generally, hilariously painting the movement as something that saw its culmination in early 1990s grunge;) the phenomenon of the “punk academic” became possible — that is, punks in grad student programs, or who began authoring critical books about punk and hardcore history — something that before the 1990s was simply not possible. Labels proliferated, as did cases of bands selling out to major labels.

In 1996, the Sex Pistols reunited for a twentieth anniversary tour, playing with odd bands like the industrial rock unit Gravity Kills. Ska-punk bands like the Suicide Machines, post-rock like Neurosis, rap-metal like Downset, cartoonish skate punk like Lagwagon, powerviolence like Dropdead, and sludgy metalcore like Earth Crisis — all of it was somehow “punk.” If Greil Marcus had once described punk as a secret society, the 1990s had killed any hope of secrecy, and thus of any true sort of punk.

Punk’s Fourth Death

The advent of mp3 file sharing and the phenomenon of blogs themed around previously obscure, niche areas of music opened the floodgates for a corrective to the excess of the 1990s, promising to reign in the sorry sight of, for example, metal hip-hop bands like 25 Ta Life being included on documentaries about New York hardcore. Filesharing has, on the one hand, reintroduced a cult of obscurity into punk while ironically ensuring that nothing is really obscure. Vinyl collecting had always been fairly fetishistic, but it was also practical: To hear a record in the 1980s, you had to own it (or borrow it.) Now, owning or physically possessing a record or CD was no longer a prerequisite to enjoying music, and vinyl collecting’s fully fetishistic character has come into its own.

Thanks to Internet filesharing, previously quasi-obscure punk bands like Rudimentary Peni have come to be regarded as “entry level” bands by younger teens and tweens, who are used to being able to immediately listen to the most limited edition, small label releases from the 1980s. The literal accessibility of the music has caused punk to assume an increasing nostalgic and backwards-looking character. Bands generally try to mimic the way a certain band sounded from a certain scene sometime in the 1980s, seemingly to confuse the listener into thinking that that band is actually from the past. In the 1980s, punk bands like Bad Religion or Abrasive Wheels did not care to try to sound like bands from twenty years’ previous. Indeed, the future awaited and nostalgia — which is what their parents had for days of listening to classic rock — was to be avoided at all costs.

Rather than forging ahead to completely uncharted territory, punk bands nowadays either act as basically cover bands, or they recombine various elements from past bands’ sounds into a new, cobbled-together whole, unlike the original punk bands from the 1977-1982 era. Stubbornly, like rock and roll itself, punk refuses to ultimately die. As with the genres of the blues, jazz, or country, there will probably always be punk bands, and there will always be a built-in fan base for bands that play that style of music. But unlike the 1980s and early 1990s, when it seemed as if punk could become a catalyzing protest music that would help lead the way to genuine social change, nowadays the genre, which will turn forty in five years, has become something wherein “people know what to expect [and] just what they will get when they pay their money” (or download) a new punk product.

Alice Bag and the Cambridge Apostles photo courtesy of Alice Bag. Published under a Creative Commons license.

Tags: 1977, Alistair Livingston, American Hardcore, Bit Torrent, Blackened Thrash, Blogs, Born Against, Crass,Dead Kennedys, Econochrist, England's Dreaming, Fichte, Filesharing, Georges Bataille, Greil Marcus, Hegel,IWW, Jon Savage, Kill Your Pet Puppy, Labor Folk, Lipstick Traces, Malcolm MacLaren, Maximum Rock and Roll,Michel Surya, mp3s, Punk, Rock Against Racism, Rock Against Reagan, Rorschach, Rudimentary Peni, Sex Pistols, Soulseek, SSD, Surrealism, The Clash, The Screamers