ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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

REVIEWS

"Mimi Haddon’s What Is Post-Punk? dismantles a deceptively simple question with care, beginning a long-overdue conversation that, as Haddon herself reveals, has already been happening online and in the music press for years. . . . Haddon’s approach is academic but not prescriptive, carefully introducing a diverse set of critical frameworks that will be invaluable for future writers."
—Punk Post-Punk

— Claudia Lonkin, Punk & Post-Punk

"A fascinating insight into a musical label that—more than 40 years on—still defies categorisation."
—Record Collector

— Allan Glen, Record Collector

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Introduction

1. Dividing the New Wave: Emergence, Genealogy, and Signification

2. Dub Is the New Black and the Post-Colonial Politics of Sonic Space

3. Post-Punk or Death Disco? Dance, Rhythm, and White Masculinity

4. Post-Punk Women and the Discourse of Punk Amateurism

5. Between Flesh and Machines: “Modern” Music and the “Industrial” Sound of Post-Punk’s Regional Cities

Epilogue: The “Post” in Post-Punk

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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