Jeffrey Cudlin on Rock Post Rock (H+S)
“….Hyperbole aside, this leads me to a question: Are there actually any legitimate punk bands that formed after, say, 1983?
Certainly we could posit a number of different timelines and genealogies for a punk era in popular music…but I think most of them would terminate somewhere in the mid-1980s, after the splintering of the movement into various forms: Post-punk; hardcore; indie, industrial, dance, or experimental rock hybrids.
Any band playing buzzsawing bar chords in a stripped-down two-minutes-or-less format from that point on seems to me to be attempting a period style revival, and is not participating in a vernacular form with any forward momentum or vitality connected to the present historical moment.
Saying that a current band of pre-tweens is the “best new punk band” is a bit like asserting that the “best new Impressionist painter” is an American. It’s neither here nor there because there are no new Impressionist painters, merely painters who like or emulate the long-since-ended movement of Impressionism.
You can be in a jazz big band in 2010…but you can’t be a part of the Swing Era, because that ended sometime in the late 1940s.
People at Renaissance festivals do not actually live in the Renaissance.
Now I can see some objections to this: If the demarcation where punk rock ends is really only 25 or so years ago, it may be possible that there are late adherents still around who, while operating past the moment of real vitality, still have some grasp of/relation to the present moment. Art schools are full of painting professors who produce work as if it were still 1960, or earlier, and as if a kind of hermetically sealed academic abstraction–referring only to the painter’s practice, and to a small number of painters living and working a half a century ago–had some bearing on what’s happening in contemporary galleries today.
The problem with this thought is that the members of The Black Sparks were not even alive in the 1970s or ’80s…”
To read the entire post, which also includes a number of video examples, click here.
