Features
Thursday, April 3 2008
Live Fast, Die Young, or Get Off the Stage
Why wouldn't they burn out instead of fade away? Berman examines the sad spectacle of punk-rock reunions and shows how they destroy the two elements that actually made punk attractive: sex appeal and impermanence.
Columns
Monday, November 28 2011
Simon Reynolds Redux: A Conversation from the Past About Post-Punk
Simon Reynolds discusses Joy Division and The Ramones, sex and politics, and punk's blatant localism and latent racism around the time of the release of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.
Reviews
Monday, August 8 2011
'Retromania': You’d Throw It Against the Wall If You Weren’t So Immersed in It
Retromania is about the anxiety of influence; how our present moment is feeding into it, how it emerged framed as a historical inevitability, and how its necrotic collateral is any futurism that may have the audacity to disregard the past.
Friday, October 21 2005
Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds
Focusing primarily on British and American music between 1978 and 1984, Reynolds emphasizes the idea that the glossed-over post-punk years were not marginal to the history of rock: they actually spawned a range of sounds that were more revolutionary than punk itself and that left a far more significant legacy, laying the foundations for the subsequent emergence of alternative music in all its myriad forms.
Blogs
Monday, June 27 2011
Retromania Vs. Innovation: An Interview with Simon Reynolds
PopMatters talks with music critic Simon Reynolds about his new book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, as well as the modern state of pop futurism, the changing nature of music criticism, and the post-punk historian's favorite '80s alt-rock bands.
