Post-Punk: Joy Division, Closer

The term ‘post-punk’ is generally taken to refer to the period from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, when punk helped to shape the direction of a wide variety of popular music forms, from electronica to art rock. Signalling the enduring musical and cultural significance of punk, the term memorialises punk and confers on it the status of a legacy genre; but while punk marked a sea change in popular music, drawing in new subjects, new fashions, new people, this was a legacy that many of the bands of the period self-consciously sought to free themselves from. The musical influence of punk, for example, was often negative — with bands kicking against the grain of its blues rock roots — rather than positive, in the sense of a deliberate continuation of punk rock traditions. While post-punk classifies the music retrospectively, in terms of punk’s influence, the extreme musical and lyrical experimentation and technical innovation that marked much of the music of this period bears all the hallmarks of a forward-looking artistic avant-garde. Above all, post-punk broadly restored a respect for musicianship that the early DIY three-chord punk bands had derided. Using the term ‘post-punk’ to refer to a specific time period still usefully historicises the concept, allowing for the kind of broad consideration of musical, cultural and social factors that marks studies such as Simon Reynolds’s influential Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978–1984 (2005). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.