What Is Post-Punk?: Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82

Haddon, Mimi

ISBN 10: 0472039210 / ISBN 13: 9780472039210

Published by University of Michigan Press, 2023

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 401494162

Bibliographic Details

• Title: What Is Post-Punk?: Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472039210
• ISBN 13: 9780472039210
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Popular music in the US and UK during the late 1970s and early 1980s was wildly eclectic and experimental. “Post-punk,” as it was retroactively labeled, could include electro-pop melodies, distorted guitars, avant-garde industrial sounds, and reggae beats, and thus is not an easily definable musical category.

What Is Post-Punk? combines a close reading of the late-1970s music press discourse with musical analyses and theories of identity to unpack post-punk’s status as a genre. Mimi Haddon traces the discursive foundations of post-punk across publications such as Sounds, ZigZag, Melody Maker, the Village Voice, and NME, and presents case studies of bands including Wire, PiL, Joy Division, the Raincoats, and Pere Ubu. By positioning post-punk in relation to genres such as punk, new wave, dub, and disco, Haddon explores the boundaries of post-punk, and reveals it as a community of tastes and predilections rather than a stylistically unified whole. Haddon diversifies the discourse around post-punk, exploring both its gender and racial dynamics and its proto-industrial aesthetics to restore the historical complexity surrounding the genre’s terms and origins.

About the Author

Mimi Haddon is Senior Lecturer in Music in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex.