From Punk to Rave in the Thatcher Era

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Popular Music and Society Vol. 30, No. 1, February 2007, pp. 1–18

‘‘Everyone’s Given Up and Just Wants to Go Dancing’’: From Punk to Rave in the Thatcher Era Neil Nehring

Some adherents of dance musics such as acid house argued in the last half of the Thatcher era (1979–90) that ‘‘rockism,’’ including the belief of punk rock that music could play a transgressive social role, should be abandoned. Dance and rock music, however, were interfused throughout the period and, far from surrendering to Thatcherism, steadfastly opposed it. The historical perspective on punk rock continues to be tainted by antirockism nonetheless, and thus it is important to understand the rather ludicrous origin of the latter in academic postmodernism.

In 2002 I visited Great Britain for the first time in a decade. I was surprised to find that the biggest musical buzz there was ‘‘garage rock,’’ basically punk rock, epitomized by the assonant international trinity of Hives (Sweden), Vines (Australia), and White Stripes (United States). These groups had prospered in the wake of the Strokes, whose commercial breakthrough the previous year occurred not in their hometown, New York City, but in Britain, where they had been lionized by the music press. The reason for my surprise was that I had spent the previous decade enduring bemused abuse by exchange and graduate students from Britain for my ‘‘rockism,’’ at base a preference for music played by musicians. As Philip Tagg sums up the antirockist perspective of rave culture and its numerous subgenres of dance music, ‘‘There is no guitar hero or rock star or corresponding musical-structural figure to identify with….You are just one of many other individuals who constitute the musical [and social] whole’’ (219). (Considering, however, that DJs often become stars—most of my exchange students were from Sussex University, located in Brighton, headquarters of a dance scene including the internationally renowned DJ Fatboy Slim—this would seem to be still another case in popular music in which the more things change, the more they stay the same.) From the anti-rockist view of my British students, anyone with any sense knew that rock and roll, especially punk rock, ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) # 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/03007760500453176

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was stone dead, and that belief in any potential social significance in popular music was therefore a delusion.

The sort of fatalistic observation in my title, offered by a British student in 1996, originated at the end of the Thatcher era (1979–90) and early rave culture. The comments of an understandably chagrined rock musician in 1990 mark the origin of this state of affairs: ‘‘There’s a whole generation of people so bombed out all the time that they don’t actually care about anything else. The number of people I know that I can have a political conversation with I can count on one hand now—people have just lost interest’’ (Jon Marsh, qtd in Russell 143). Another musician complained in the same year that ‘‘[p]eople in clubs aren’t worrying about the ozone layer; they’re just out for a good time’’ (Gillespie, qtd in Russell 164). The occasion for my student’s very similar assertion six years later was discussion in a course on the avantgarde of punk rock circa 1977, the point at which the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren, assisted by cohorts such as Jamie Reid, improbably popularized the Situationist International (SI) in the Anglophone world. When McLaren wasn’t scared out of his wits by the controversy the band created, he had the presence of mind to claim that the furor resulted from their quasi-Situationist manipulation and expose´ of the machinery of the news media and the music industry. This story has been recounted in a number of studies, most notably Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces (1989) and Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming (1991), so I trust it can be taken for granted that punk represents a significant event in the history of popular music.

And as cynics have pointed out for two decades now, in short order Margaret Thatcher came to power nonetheless. From this view, typically, by the early 1980s punk had led only to exorbitant claims by i-D and The Face, slick descendants of fanzines, for the radical consumerism of the audience for New Pop (or electro-pop or ‘‘haircut’’) bands such as ABC and the Human League. As a result, younger music journalists emerging in the mid-’80s felt compelled to repudiate any notion that the first wave of punk had had some subversive impact, and attacked very specifically any lingering interest in the SI. Their absolutism on this account, to which I will return, reflects in part their having attended college just when postmodern skepticism of a theoretical sort became the cutting edge in the academy, a gloomy response in its own right to the rise of neo-conservatism in Britain and the United States. It is difficult to gauge the actual influence of the new postmodern journalism on musicians and fans in the Thatcher era; clearly people didn’t give up since there is no more politically volatile period in the history of popular music. The postmodern camp concerns me nonetheless because of the creeping, long-term absorption of its ideas, which still persists unabated (see Nehring), whatever the success of garage rock—this is not simply an ’80s matter, nor an exclusively British one either. In the first decade of the new millennium, a ‘‘new class of music writers is on the rise,’’ in the form of ‘‘a disturbing number’’ of academic and journalistic ‘‘curmudgeons … decrying the death of rock’’ (Dettmar B10). The most important reason to return to the Thatcher era is to understand the origin of attitudes that are still very much with us, and to see how grotesquely flawed they were from the outset.

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The influence of the repudiation of punk in the ’80s was evident, a decade later, in the vehemence with which my student prefaced the comment on dance and surrender by asking ‘‘How can you talk about punk any more?’’ Six years after Thatcher left office, the premise of this objection to any reference whatsoever to punk had become so familiar that it went without saying: the increasing popularity of dance music in Britain in the 1980s and ’90s was a logical capitulation to the triumph of Thatcherism, with the rampant hedonism of dance fans paralleling the prevailing politics of self-interest. Lauding the supremacy of everything private and casting out any notion of the public good, Thatcher proceeded to sell off publicly owned industries, savage the social-welfare state, and destroy nettlesome opponents, ranging from trade unions, undermined by astronomic unemployment, to the Greater London Council. Eventually, in 1987, she had ripped apart the social fabric so successfully that she could announce: ‘‘There is no such thing as society.’’ Dance culture may have included rhetoric about community, sometimes pitted against Thatcher, but to hipsters like my students, as well as a number of academics and journalists, the devotion of dance fans to personal pleasure clearly belied expressions of a collective sensibility.

I had suspected for some time that my students’ views were not universally held in Britain, however. After an exchange student in the mid-’90s mocked the anarchistpunk band Chumbawamba as a bunch of laughable losers, for example, the group shortly thereafter reached number one with ‘‘Tubthumping.’’ The emergence around that time of British bands such as Elastica and Fluffy made up entirely of women also seemed to confirm the continuing potential of punk to empower insubordinate voices. Rock music in general could hardly be said to be defunct, either, considering that Oasis was enjoying unprecedented commercial success. If the development of British popular music prior to the ’90s in the Thatcher era is examined very closely at all, furthermore, there is not really much question about whether the increasing popularity of dance music means that young music fans did indeed ‘‘give up,’’ in general and on rock music, after punk. Despite the prominent claims of some antirock ideologues of dance culture, trading in highly suspect theories poached from academic postmodernism, the adherents of dance music hardly shared a unanimous desire to transcend any concern with confronting authority. I will stick strictly to Thatcher’s reign, which takes the story only as far as the early development of rave culture out of the ‘‘summer of love’’ of 1988 and the quickly suppressed Acid House scene. But the seeming disengagement and hedonism of dance culture has been an unsettled, ambiguous matter from the start: the most sensible analysts at the time found both a partial capitulation to Thatcherism and a total affront to it.

Dance and rock music, moreover, have continually been interwoven in actual musical performance since the immediate post-punk developments of the early 1980s, when a number of punk artists seeking new directions turned to disco and other forms of dance music: ‘‘danceable rock was one response to the question of how punk would develop and resist becoming stagnant after the dramatic gesture of 1976 and 1977. Punk splintered into dozens of new styles and movements, and

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several of these (such as synthesizer pop and the revival of ska music) embraced dancing’’ (Straw 170). The notion of an unbridgeable chasm between rock and dance (when the two are actually difficult to disentangle) has no historical basis, which comes as no surprise considering the disdain for history of the postmodern academic sources underlying the more extreme claims for the uniqueness of dance music, such as those of Simon Reynolds, who began his career parroting postmodern rhetoric about the end of history.

After the long ascendancy of dance music in Britain, though, the backlash against punk urged by some critics in the ’80s has become so deeply entrenched (see Sabin) that it does seem at times ‘‘like punk never happened,’’ as the title of a book on Culture Club once put it. In a celebrated account of British pop culture in the ’80s, England Is Mine (1997), Michael Bracewell writes at some length on glam rock in the early ’70s, the immediate precursor to punk, and lingers over the New Romantic subculture, the immediate, far more narcissistic successor to punk, which reduced style to a grey, robotic alienation, an ‘‘autistic obsession with unadulterated style’’ that flirted with fascism. In the process he elides punk altogether, leaving it, astonishingly, a merely transitional blip in music history: ‘‘In 1976, punk rock would be the catalyst that turned the fans of David Bowie and Roxy Music into the stars of post-punk, New Romanticism and electro-pop’’ such as ABC and Spandau Ballet (202, 206). Bracewell condemns ‘‘pin-up pop’’ and the New Romantic subculture as ‘‘the triumph of cosmetics and computers over [punk’s] convictions’’ (212), but his emphasis on both the prelude to punk and its aftermath seems to affirm the question ‘‘How can you talk about punk any more?’’ Simon Frith and Howard Horne, in Art into Pop (1987), also treat punk as little more than a transition to the New Pop, in which ideas about ‘‘subversive business’’—such as those of McLaren, and Tony Wilson of Factory Records in Manchester (the subject of the film 24 Hour Party People)—led only to the celebration of consumption: ‘‘political interest moved from the forces of production to the moment of consumption…when spectators realized themselves, [an] argument indistinguishable from that of advertising’’ (144, 151).

The confrontational Sex Pistols presumably begat only the pretty boys in Duran Duran.

But there are other more positive, musical respects in which punk mutated between 1979 and 1982, a period in which, according to Bracewell, little more occurred than ‘‘dandyism and technology [becoming] the pop accessories for the end of time’’ (206). (I have noticed that middle-aged people who came of age with punk often say rock music was never any good after 1981, indicating that something worthwhile came after the first wave of punk.) The term ‘‘New Pop,’’ first of all, is a shortened form of the original coinage ‘‘New Pop Entryist,’’ which stressed a continuity with punk and the do-it-yourself (or DiY) ethos, a democratization of music by rejecting virtuosity. New Pop performers gained ‘‘entry’’ to the music business not by limiting guitar playing to barre chords as punk did, on the model of the Ramones, but by minimizing even that scintilla of musicianship even further, to noodling on synthesizers. (In this respect dance musics such as techno were simply

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the next logical step, eradicating the musician altogether by relying on samplers and drum machines.) The original Depeche Mode, on stage, featured every single member playing a Casio keyboard with one or two fingers while performing bouncy pop songs

by Vince Clarke, whose reputation grew steadily throughout the ’80s as he created first Yaz and then the dance-pop Erasure. Bracewell detects a morbid fascination with technology in the lyrical content of songs like Ultravox’s ‘‘I Want to Be a Machine’’— which was actually released in 1977—but in terms of musical performance ‘‘technology’’ like the synthesizer had a perfectly healthy democratizing effect, quite consistent with the best of punk values.

I was an engaged music fan in the immediate post-punk era, and I can testify that when, in 1981, I picked up singles like Depeche Mode’s ‘‘Dreaming of Me’’—on a subsidiary of Rough Trade Records, along with Factory a bellwether of independent (or ‘‘indie’’) labels—Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s ‘‘Enola Gay,’’ and Soft Cell’s ‘‘Tainted Love,’’ they made sense as an outgrowth of punk, particularly after the Young Marble Giants’ truly spare pop on the Rough Trade release Colossal Youth (1980). The drum machines, minimalist keyboard playing, and lower-register voices resembling a less morbid Bryan Ferry all suggested musicians making something out of very modest talent, like the best of punk (e.g. the Television Personalities)—Soft Cell became notorious in the United States for shows that ended when the drum machine broke down. New Pop songwriting was also very much in keeping with punk’s re-establishment of the three-minute song with a hook and catchy chorus in the mid-’70s, at a time when major rock performers released albums with only three or four bloated songs on a side. ‘‘Tainted Love’’ was a cover of a ’60s soul hit

by Gloria Jones, of course, but this, too, was in keeping with punk’s revivalism, which dated to its origin with the Ramones doing surf songs and Blondie reproducing girl groups, another component of punk’s resuscitation of rock and roll.

This is an important point also to bear in mind when judging the indie ‘‘revivalists’’ in Britain in the late ’80s, who recycled older rock genres, most prominently ’60s psychedelia.

Punk itself, moreover, was hardly dead in Thatcher’s first years in office; in fact, some of the now-classic standards of indie rock appeared at that time, such as Rough Trade’s eclectic collection Wanna Buy a Bridge? (1980), featuring music as diverse as Stiff Little Fingers (Pistols-like punk about the Troubles in Northern Ireland) and Kleenex (joyous, monosyllabic noise by a group of women from the Continent). The Gang of Four’s Entertainment! (1980) remains a milestone both musically, in its jagged, off-kilter but infectious playing, and lyrically, in its Situationist-inspired assault on the mass-culture industry, which is far more elaborated than anything that emerged from the Sex Pistols camp. The original all-female British punk bands, the Raincoats and the Slits, released their first albums in 1979, as did Joy Division, the apocalyptic Manchester band that supplied the gloomy musical tone for the Goth subculture. Robert Smith of the Cure, who was responsible in part for the Goths’ pallid, vampiric look, released in the same year the song that gained him notoriety, ‘‘Killing an Arab,’’ based on Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Bracewell points out that

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the Goth subculture also owed something to the vampiric Dave Vanian of the Damned (a first-wave punk band that had persevered by gravitating towards heavy metal), and credits those similarly posing as the ‘‘Living Dead’’ with embodying ‘‘Thatcher’s teenage victims’’ as well as soon becoming ‘‘post-punk refuseniks of the brighter [synth-pop] disco boom that was just around the corner’’ (119). At the poppier end of punk, the brilliant Undertones had only just appeared in 1979, and the Buzzcocks, the first of the string of influential Manchester bands running through the next decade, remained vital, as did XTC. The Psychedelic Furs’ first album in 1980 was greeted as a second coming of the Sex Pistols, although in retrospect the Furs mark the last gasp of the first punk era despite persisting quite creatively through the mid-’80s (until film director John Hughes used their song ‘‘Pretty in Pink’’ as the title of a teen flick and mainstream acceptance ruined them).

The Clash released what is typically considered their classic album, London Calling, in 1980, although the diversity of the songs posed a distinct contrast to their unrelentingly frenetic first album, the greatest punk album ever, and the subsequent releases Sandinista! and Combat Rock threatened to fly apart altogether, as the group itself certainly did. The later Clash albums shared the common interest of all the leading punk bands in finding new musical directions—which led a number of them to dance music, including disco. In 1978 Blondie’s disco tune ‘‘Heart of Glass’’ had become the first song by a nominally punk band to hit number one in the United States, as it did in the U.K. as well. Post-punk music ‘‘over the next decade would be marked by a series of more-or-less danceable musical styles’’ such as ‘‘militant funk’’ (the Gang of Four), ‘‘white-boy soul’’ (Dexy’s Midnight Runners), gothic rock, ‘‘stark industrial electronics’’ (Cabaret Voltaire), and ska (Straw 170). John Lydon, formerly Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, re-emerged with Public Image Limited performing dub, a stripped-down, rhythm-heavy derivative of reggae; their apogee, Second Edition (the conventional version of the earlier literally titled Metal Box), was also released in 1980. When the Slits, who had toured with the first wave of British punk bands in 1977, were finally able to release an album, Cut, they had migrated to dub as well, and after Pete Shelley left the Buzzcocks he immediately had a dance-floor hit with the overtly gay disco anthem ‘‘Homosapien’’ (1981). Most significantly, after singer Ian Curtis’s suicide the remaining members of Joy Division renamed themselves New Order (still another suitably dark borrowing from Nazism) and fused punk and disco—as well as the guitar and the synthesizer—thereby predating the celebrated rock-dance ‘‘crossover’’ music of the later Madchester scene by several years. ‘‘Blue Monday’’ is widely considered the group’s breakthrough and an important historical influence (though another, faster song on the 1983 album Power Corruption & Lies, ‘‘Age of Consent,’’ is more exhilarating), and was one of the biggest-selling independent records ever released. Along with continuing posthumous releases of Joy Division, New Order’s success bankrolled the Factory project, including the construction, in 1982, of the Hacienda Club, later the Mecca of dance culture.

But if there was a great deal of wonderful music made in Britain by punks and their pop inheritors between 1979 and 1982, not one bit of it could be said to be remotely

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politically challenging, to Thatcherism or otherwise. The one exception among the groups above is the Clash, and songs of theirs like ‘‘Guns of Brixton,’’ about meeting the police oppressor with a gun in hand, were hard to take very seriously in the mouths of international rock stars. The period of electro-pop and New Romantics, however, actually featured the most intense musical politics that Britain has ever seen, as Bracewell acknowledges in passing: ‘‘In the early 1980s, when politicized post-punk music seemed poised to pitch Red Wedge,’’ an attempt to promote the Labour Party through music, ‘‘against Oi and the National Front, there was a sense that urban popular culture was echoing the confrontation defined by, for instance, the Spanish Civil War.’’ He quickly writes off the situation, however, reiterating once again that the prevailing ‘‘sub-cultural response to Thatcherism’’ was ‘‘ironic glamour,’’ apparently like that of the haircut bands and Goth subculture, an unopened ‘‘Trojan horse of protest’’ that went ‘‘wholly underground’’ in the case of the ‘‘burgeoning dance music scene’’ (96).

But this description of the sorry extent of musical politics in the early ’80s leaves out Rock Against Racism (RAR)—later consigned to ‘‘temporary fashionability’’ (174)—and the 2-Tone stable of racially integrated second-wave ska groups. Such a glaring omission of the fraught political tension in music over race must be attributable to the fact that it revolved, for both better and worse, around direct outgrowths of punk. RAR was founded in 1976, at the same time as punk emerged, after Eric Clapton disgraced himself by expressing admiration for Britain’s leading racist, Enoch Powell, and the fairly quick success of RAR resulted from a mutually beneficial relation with punk. The latter politicized popular music, albeit in a scattershot way; RAR supplied punk with at least one coherent agenda. The first of a number of large RAR carnivals, in 1978, featured the first appearance before a mass audience by the Clash, whose enthusiasm for reggae made them logical exponents of racial tolerance, along with X-Ray Spex, featuring mulatto singer Poly Styrene, and the openly gay Tom Robinson Band. The event ‘‘was a spectacular success,’’ sending the ‘‘unequivocal message that, should National-Front activists attempt to capitalize on the mood mobilized by Mrs. Thatcher, they would be opposed by a hefty segment of the day’s youth.’’ By 1979, unfortunately, RAR had already begun to deplete its political capital through ‘‘hardline rhetoric…in reaction to the National Front’’ (Savage 482, 518), though the RAR remained viable through 1982.

In terms of musical genres, 2-Tone represented the progressive end of racial politics in the early ’80s, while the masculinist, working-class-identified Oi movement presumably served only to inflame racism, although in reality the latter hardly consisted entirely of one-dimensional neo-fascism. The impact of 2-Tone, in fact, may well have been more profound than that of RAR in counteracting racism.

Anti-racism was a matter of an express political message (or content) in the case of RAR, but 2-Tone Bands like the Specials, Beat, and Selecter, beyond being racially integrated, embodied racial diversity in the form of their music. The second wave of ska is distinguished by playing faster than the originals did in the ’60s in Jamaica; audiences heard the influence of punk in that speed (not that punk was necessarily

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fast, just unrelentingly forward-moving) and thus a simultaneously black and white sound. In this respect 2-Tone’s triumph lay simply in making anti-racism more fun than neo-fascism.

The recourse to ska shared the common post-punk interest in dance music, of course, but also owed a great deal to still another form of punk revivalism, a recreation of the Mod subculture of the ’60s spearheaded by Paul Weller of the Jam. The original Mods craved black music outside mainstream tastes, and found a ready source in the music of West Indian immigrants. The hard Mods of the late ’60s, who would evolve into the skinhead subculture, were especially fond of ska by the likes of Prince Buster, and the historical result, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, was a distinct overlap between 2-Tone, Oi, and the skins in their mutual affinity for ska. The allwhite group Madness, whose first single was released by 2-Tone, had a substantial skinhead following, and the other 2-Tone groups, particularly the Specials, faced the dilemma of ‘‘a seesaw between the leftist bands and the rightish audience’’ that often saw live shows end in violence (Bracewell 100). Oi groups faced the same problem: the 4-Skins released ska recordings and repudiated racism, but the violence that resulted from their literally inflammatory booking for a gig in the Southall district of London, which led Asian youths to burn down the venue before the show ever took place, contributed to mounting tension which erupted several days later in riots in Liverpool.

Oi was christened innocently enough by the New Musical Express (NME), which was desperate to duplicate its importance in promoting punk by discovering the next big thing. Punk had initially (and erroneously) been described by some critics as ‘‘dole-queue rock’’ because a numbers of singers had a Cockney accent—legend has it that Joe Strummer of the Clash, the son of a diplomat, took lessons to develop one— above all the hard-edged Sham 69 singer Jimmy Pursey, with whom all accounts of Oi begin. Sham 69 had attracted a skinhead following early on, leading the band to play major RAR concerts in an effort to dispel any linkage with racism (with the unfortunate effect of bringing along its violence-prone fans). When it became apparent the neo-Nazi, racist British Movement and National Front were attempting to recruit among working-class punk fans, Oi acquired the unsavory reputation that persists to this day, though truly reprehensible groups like Skrewdriver were the exception rather than the rule. Thatcher’s own racist appeals, dating to comments in 1977 about Britain being ‘‘‘rather swamped by people with a different culture’’’ (qtd in Savage 480), effectively defused the situation by appropriating the racism of the far right. But the seriousness with which the original moment of Oi was taken is indicated by the unusual literary interest in it: after the riots of 1981—in which youths of different colors and ideologies actually joined together, against the police— playwright Trevor Griffiths wrote the alarmist teleplay Oi for England (produced in 1982); the poet Tony Harrison, in contrast, was surprisingly empathetic in V. (1985), carrying on a dialogue with the part of himself that shared the skinheads’ aggro.

Both 2-Tone and Oi, finally, produced some of the finest, most direct antiThatcher anthems of the ’80s. Thatcher had been in office for only a year when The (English) Beat issued the demand ‘‘Stand Down Margaret’’ on their breakneck-paced

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first album I Just Can’t Stop It (1980), the finest ska album ever released. During the urban youth riots of 1981, the Specials released ‘‘Ghost Town,’’ which promptly went to number one and has remained linked with those events in historical memory. ‘‘Ghost Town’’ concerns the aridity of urban life, from the dilemma the band faced over violence at live shows to the youthful ghosts ‘‘haunt[ing] the ruins of an England…laid waste by Thatcherism’’ (Bracewell 208). Oi inveighed against Thatcherism so frequently that a punk compilation entitled Maggie, Maggie, Maggie; Out! Out! Out! (1987) includes seven different Oi-identified groups, most notably the Angelic Upstarts (‘‘Woman in Disguise’’) and Peter & the Test Tube Babies (‘‘Keep Britain Untidy’’). The chief rivals to 2-Tone and Oi in skewering Thatcher are protests against the Falklands War by the anarchist-punk collective Crass, on the unsurpassed scabrous shard ‘‘Sheep Farming in the Falklands’’ (1983), and Elvis Costello, on ‘‘Shipbuilding’’ (1983), along with the general summing-up of the Thatcher era by the briefly, partially reformed Clash, ‘‘This Is England’’ (1985), perhaps the finest political rock song ever recorded thanks to the utterly convincing vitriol with which Joe Strummer snaps and snarls. As rock critic Dave Marsh summed up the achievement in the last song, it could be about ‘‘anyplace where public policy has left a community to rot….I don’t know half the words—and that’s the point’’ (747).

At this point, having reached the apogee represented by ‘‘This Is England,’’ it should be clear that rock music was hardly missing in action in the early years of Thatcher’s tenure, and in fact was more politically volatile than at any time before or since. I have dwelt on that period in part because of the increasing tendency of music histories, as I have noted, to portray it as an era of banality in music, to reduce it to flamboyant haircuts (which reached their literal apogee with a Flock of Seagulls, immortalized by Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction). But I have focused at length on the energy of the early ’80s for another, more important reason as well: to highlight the oddity of the appearance in the mid-’80s of a new school of music journalism, based in academic postmodernism, that counseled the futility of social engagement on the part of popular music. Bracewell refers to postmodernism as ‘‘the ubiquitous black polo-neck of the New Look in cultural theorizing,’’ although the basis of his remark is musicians such as the Pet Shop Boys and their ironic celebration of consumerism in love songs about paying the rent (212–13). I have in mind, instead, a troika of writers at Melody Maker, Paul Oldfield, Simon Reynolds, and David Stubbs.

Simon Frith, well-known in both academia and music journalism, hailed Reynolds as the finest young music journalist in Britain, though Frith had described postmodern theory (on the impossibility of exercising agency, etc.) as merely a reflection of academics’ own condition, and essentially all Reynolds had done was to regurgitate a college syllabus of postmodern theorists. I assume Frith’s endorsement resulted from his own admitted pessimism over the music scene; the new postmodern school was certainly fatalistic. That attitude might be explained by having endured several years of Thatcherism, and by a slightly increased historical distance from punk, but, after the very recent volatility of the music scene, the suddenness and completeness of the

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surrender make no sense. I can only ascribe it to the desire of younger journalists to differentiate themselves from their predecessors, which in essence meant repudiating the legacy of punk. Ideas about postmodernism simply happened to be the available, suitably new tools to do this with, however much newly minted journalists shared the pessimism of postmodern academics over the ascent of neo-conservatism.

An explicit part of Reynolds’s postmodern project was a dismissal (co-authored with Oldfield) of the Situationist premise of Malcolm McLaren and other punks and post-punks, including the New Pop Entryists, that the spectacle (or mass culture) could be demystified and undermined by putting contrivance and hype on display. In accordance with one of the more dire tenets of postmodernism, that with ‘‘the death of linear, sequential thought’’ the world had reached the end of history (or the possibility of change), Reynolds declared the end of rock (114, 169). In articles written between 1985 and 1989, collected in Blissed Out (1990), he promoted a postmodern preference for indeterminacy and irrationalism, citing (in sound bites) a skein of academics including Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, and Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, as well as postmodernism’s favorite modernist (indicating how little has changed), Friedrich Nietzsche. Jameson is cited on the waning of ‘‘depth and meaning,’’ though Reynolds celebrates what Jameson regrets. An American post-punk group, the Pixies, is purportedly an example of the demise of meaning: ‘‘All that remains is the urge to holler, shriek, and whoop it up for the arbitrary, unnegotiable hell of it’’ (147). Reynolds insists, referencing Foucault as well, that the idea of directly opposing power is therefore a delusion that serves only to buttress the dominant order. Postmodernists seldom bother to explain how opposing power reinforces it, so I will supply the premise as best I can: opposition is always absorbed in a closed loop of exploitation, by enabling power to conduct either a charade of tolerance or a demonization of deviance, and to purloin useful ideas and forms of expression, as in entertainment, where opposition is presumably only fodder for the commercial machine (or commercial ‘‘incorporation’’). Thus Reynolds, echoing Umberto Eco, says that carnival—or laughing and cursing at authority, as the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin describes it—is only ‘‘a brief intermission’’ actually reinforcing ‘‘the other side of normality and control’’ (112).

Reynolds also cites Foucault on how ‘‘power operates by inculcating us in the art of self-policing’’; hence the upshot of Reynolds’s work as a whole is that one escapes power only by escaping one’s own self—through drug use. Reynolds’s favorite groups, such as My Bloody Valentine and A.R. Kane (co-authors of the landmark dance hit ‘‘Pump Up the Volume’’), appeal to him because, in his view, their electronic wash of sound approximates an acid trip, like the original psychedelia of the ’60s, and their lyrics are disjointed to the point of schizophrenia, which he celebrates while citing still more postmodern theorists, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The effect of psychedelic music, claims Reynolds, is somehow to ‘‘dissolve systems’’ by being ‘‘eager to be spellbound, to succumb to oceanic feelings, to go with the flow,’’ and to take ‘‘trips out of yourself’’ (135). By the time rave appeared, still younger writers were extolling a ‘‘surrender to a void, a Dionysian ritual of dance and

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hedonism…whereby the established ‘self’ is undone’’ (Rietveld 58). But even shamblers and shoegazers such as My Bloody Valentine and its fans continued, in reality, to represent something oppositional. As Reynolds acknowledged, British indie-rock bands in the late ’80s shared ‘‘a common legacy derived from punk—a hatred of anything hippy (long tracks, virtuosity…mysticism).’’ Unsurprisingly, he considered that ‘‘anti-hippie consensus’’ part of a ‘‘stifling orthodoxy’’ (qtd in Redhead End-of-the-Century Party 81), and instead quite highly esteemed the ’60s and drug-enhanced bacchanals.

The notoriety of this vapid nostalgia for the ’60s—in academia, at least, where its postmodern cynicism originated—is attested to by the inclusion of Reynolds and his colleagues Oldfield and Stubbs in Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses (1989), a collection edited by cultural-studies maven Angela McRobbie. She meant to bring a new form of cultural journalism to academic attention, but in the case of the Melody Maker boys there was very little that academics would have considered new. The most interesting thing about these postmodern journalists, instead, is how clearly they reproduce old-fashioned romantic, elitist attitudes. Blaming punk (as Reynolds does) for making rock music somehow ‘‘small and common’’ by giving people expectations that music could pose a social ‘‘threat’’ (which I consider a pretty large ambition), Stubbs wishes to rekindle ‘‘mystery and fascination’’ in the form of ‘‘function-less, far-out noise—a new ‘purity’’’ (275, emphasis added). In Blissed Out, Reynolds confesses at one point that he seeks mystery as well, or ‘‘certain ancient truths,’’ rather than anything postmodern. Those truths would seem to lie in references to musicians who have ‘‘the Gift’’ accorded by ‘‘the unequal distribution of brilliance,’’ an elitist formulation one would have to return to the 19th-century origin of modernism to find stated so explicitly (e.g. in Mallarme´). At least Reynolds’s call for ‘‘perpetual aesthetic innovation’’—constantly making it new in order to stay ahead of the hoi polloi, as Ezra Pound would have it—could be dated to the 20th century.

Only when Reynolds advocates a ‘‘remystification’’ of art that would restore its ‘‘worship’’ does his warmed-over romanticism truly become contemporary, in resembling the worst of the neo-conservatives (e.g. Lynne Cheney, Hilton Kramer) trying to detach art from democracy. It is no exaggeration to say that Reynolds and his ilk, in the final analysis, were collaborators with Thatcherism. Revolution, he says, means an ‘‘endless, discontinuous…psychedelic experience [that] can’t be turned into a new order’’ (106, 168).

While I find no indication that many musicians or fans took any of this to heart, it certainly affected academic studies of the remainder of the Thatcher era, which treat any and all developments in indie rock as banality. Steve Redhead, in The End-of-theCentury Party (1990), argued that the term ‘‘counterculture’’ can be said to refer only to the shop ‘‘counter’’ over which fans purchased music. He seems suspiciously similar to Reynolds (whom he cites) in repudiating punk circa 1977, which was supposedly ‘‘easily incorporated after a few months’’—most critics are more generous—and insisting that ideas of ‘‘radicalism, rebellion and resistance were confined to the dustbin of history’’ in the ’80s. Like Reynolds, Redhead found that at

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the end of history, ‘‘‘music to end the world to’ is increasingly the only music which makes much political sense’’—in eschewing politics altogether, that is. There are only ‘‘new practices of the self,’’ namely relinquishing the self, in the ‘‘rapidly changing velocity of Pop Time,’’ a typically hyperbolic bit of postmodern theorizing that leads to clearly insupportable claims that bands were having a harder time getting noticed and a harder time staying on the top thanks to that velocity. Arguing that rock music in the ’80s had become dislocated from any social context, Redhead created out of whole cloth a transition in the middle of the decade from ‘‘Political Pop’’ to ‘‘PostPolitical Pop,’’ the latter a supposedly postmodern music practicing either a pastiche of styles, as in house music and its derivatives, or else a childlike naivete´, with some degree of irony, ranging from punk girl groups to a so-called ‘‘Northern folk’’— obviously a problematically wide range of music. He acknowledges that rock music has always been a pastiche of sources, but during the ’80s, supposedly, the pace of ‘‘increasingly speedy change and transformation’’ meant that political deviance could only consist of play with ‘‘new subjectivities’’ (17, 44, 84, 89–90, 103, 105–06). How the dissolution of identity could be a form of assertion is, typically, not explained.

Redhead’s ‘‘Political’’ and ‘‘Post-Political’’ categories, though the latter and hence the schism do not hold up to close scrutiny, do allow me to pick up the story of British rock and dance music in the mid-’80s. The performers he includes under the ‘‘Political Pop’’ rubric—Billy Bragg, the Communards, the Housemartins, the Redskins, the Style Council (fronted by Paul Weller), and UB40—indicate that Thatcherism continued to be challenged in popular music, even if a certain indirection had set in; none of these musicians played punk music. UB40 was an integrated reggae band, all the other groups (except the Housemartins) played disco and/or soul, and Bragg was a solo folkie who played electric guitar. The bite may have been subtle, but it was vehement nonetheless; the Housemartins’ attractive, bouncy pop came on the albums London 0, Hull 4 (1986), a blow against the prospering south of England on behalf of the perpetually depressed North, and The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death (1987), which describes Thatcher taking a broken bottle to the average person in the street. The Housemartins’ bassist, Norman Cook, later became Fatboy Slim, still another instance of the extremely fluid boundary between rock and dance.

The array of performers lumped together under the spurious rubric of ‘‘PostPolitical Pop’’ includes, in reality, a number of perfectly dissident groups. Redhead’s examples of a somehow postmodern Northern folk are two groups that began in the first punk era, the Mekons, from Leeds, and the Fall, another influential Manchester group, though it remained steadfastly detached from other musical developments in the city, incorporating genres like Jamaican dancehall instead. The Mekons’ acclaimed album Fear & Whiskey (1985) is essentially a concept album about the misery of living under Thatcher, and brokered the original marriage of punk and country that remains a hugely popular genre in the United States, where most of the Mekons now live as a result; a critic writing a decade later described the group as ‘‘the only 1977 leftovers with an answer to Reagan-Thatcher’’ (Weisbard 248). The Fall

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included William Blake’s indictment of ‘‘dark Satanic mills’’ in ‘‘Jerusalem’’, probably the most famous British protest poem, on the album I Am Kurious Oranj (1988; composed in 1984–85), and leader Mark E. Smith, a former communist, once described the group as ‘‘the prole art threat.’’ ‘‘Jerusalem’’ is combined with a seemingly mocking original song, ‘‘Dog Is Life,’’ a much smaller tale about a crank disappointed in the settlement he won from the government for tripping on the sidewalk, but Bracewell reads the sum total as a parable of ‘‘England in decay’’ and its ‘‘descent into self-pity,’’ which sided with ‘‘the dispossessed [through] a delight in contrariness’’ (181, 183–84), as on ‘‘Carry Bag Man,’’ who turns out to be Smith himself. Smith had as little use for Labour as for the Conservatives, but he was steadfastly on the side of the North, summing up the Fall as ‘‘Northern crap that talks back.’’

Redhead’s license for treating the Fall and the Mekons as a postmodernism beyond politics was their association with ‘‘shambling’’ bands by none other than ‘‘Simon Reynolds, shambling’s most articulate…media defender.’’ The term ‘‘shambling’’ was originally coined by the influential radio DJ John Peel, an important supporter of the Fall (as well as many other worthy groups like the Undertones), who combined the words ‘‘shambolic’’ and ‘‘rambling.’’ The high-point of shambling’s notoriety was 1986, the year often cited as an originating point for younger indie-band revivalists.

Redhead, following Reynolds, described shambling as a ‘‘childlike innocence and ‘a refusal to grow up’’’ (End-of-the-Century Party 81), which seems laughable applied to the jaundiced world-weariness of the Fall and the Mekons. It also did a disservice to newer punk bands like the Shop Assistants, who, I suspect, were treated as waifs—even compared to lightweight folkie Judy Collins, on the authority of Simon Frith—because the group was led by young women. From a non-academic, nonpostmodern standpoint, in contrast, the Shop Assistants were credited with ‘‘doing the impossible: recreating punk’’ (Christgau 368). A song like the bracing numberone hit ‘‘Safety Net’’ seems as worldly as the Mekons and Fall, addressing someone who has security, shuts out love as well as death, and is about to get tripped up anyway. Since a safety net is something someone else has, it’s tempting to speculate whether the song is an allegory about eroding social services, but the Shop Assistants’ subsequent songs had a strictly personal—though quite bitter—romantic context.

Redhead did credit shambling groups with one indirect response to Thatcherism: playing at childlike innocence, though largely ironic, was a form of resistance to the disciplining of ‘‘youth,’’ especially the many economically obsolescent youth, going on in forms such as job training programs (87). There are arguments that youth culture confronted Thatcherism in much more direct, material ways, though, as we will see in the case of rave; the necessity of reverting to childhood was in fact a far more prominent theme in the work of Simon Reynolds than in that of any musical group.

Another of Reynolds’s complaints about the indie-band revivalists, also called the ‘‘C86’’ movement after a compilation cassette released by the NME in 1986, concerned their fondness for the guitar. The success of the Smiths (still another

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Manchester band), dating to 1983, had supplanted synthesizer-based New Pop and set the stage for the return of the guitar by returning to the traditional band format of guitar, bass, and drums, as part of a general eschewal of fashion in favor of ‘‘ordinariness,’’ as the band’s name suggests. Although Morrissey’s voice was as arch as that of any New Pop singer, the Smiths’ musical approach helped make him seem to be ‘‘reclaiming realism,’’ including the ‘‘undisguised sincerity of awkward emotions’’ such as loneliness and frustration (Bracewell 219), as opposed to the smug, narcissistic London style-mongers of the early ’80s. The Jesus and Mary Chain, Scots who combined surf music with feedback reminiscent of the Velvet Underground, had a considerable impact in 1985, such that there was talk once again of a new Sex Pistols, especially after the group caused riots by playing 20minute shows with its backs to the audience. This confrontational approach to its audience extended to the music itself: ‘‘Never Understand’’ perversely buried a hit song under grinding noise. In this respect the Jesus and Mary Chain were more like precursors to the later boom in psychedelia, since other C86 bands typically reverted to more melodic ’60s guitar pop, as in the ecstatically received channeling of the Beatles by the La’s. Fellow Mancunians Liam and Noel Gallagher, whose work along the same lines led to Oasis, have confessed to being taken aback by the discovery at live shows that Lee Mavers of the La’s had beaten them to the punch. But Mavers’s perfectionism, along with drug addiction, eliminated any competition he posed, allowing Noel to describe Oasis’s primary motivation, once it was on top several years later, as finishing what the La’s started.

The ‘‘Class of ’89,’’ including ‘‘Madchester’’ scene bands such as the Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, and Stone Roses, drew more strictly on the noisier, swirling guitar sound of late ’60s psychedelia, which My Bloody Valentine would most fully and ingeniously modernize. The psychedelic musical element served ‘‘marketing visuals’’ more than it did the chief purpose of many bands: to fuse the revivalism of indie rock with a ‘‘new quest for danceability in music’’ in response to Acid House and rave, which had ‘‘no ’60s revival connected’’ to them (Russell 136, 147–49). (24 Hour Party People depicts an archetypal moment when an early Happy Mondays show at the Hacienda is met by incomprehension, which leads Tony Wilson to wonder aloud why the audience can’t tell the band is playing ‘‘dance music’’ and to throw a friend of the band on stage to do a demonstration dance.) Beats were more important musically, in the attempt at a crossover between rock and dance; the function of the psychedelic sound lay in its sonic parallel to the visual revival of ’60s style in Manchester, in the form of tie-dyed t-shirts and elephant bell bottoms, as well as to the ’60s-like centrality of hallucinogenic drugs—Ecstasy rather than LSD, of course. The forms in which revivalism was fused with danceability quickly expanded beyond Manchester’s basic formula, and by late 1989 had become so widespread the phenomenon was labeled ‘‘bandwagon.’’ The signal release in this extended genre was Primal Scream’s ‘‘Loaded’’ (1989), a lazily-paced, hypnotic rip-off of the Rolling Stones’ ‘‘Sympathy for the Devil’’ that became familiar in the United States through a jeans commercial. Part of the crossover effect of ‘‘Loaded’’ resulted from a tactic that

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would become commonplace in the ’90s, using rave DJs to remix songs to emphasize rhythm.

Another development in British indie rock by the end of 1989 was the discovery of grunge (termed ‘‘Sub Pop’’ after the American record label), thanks in no small part to Everett True’s enthusiastic reports from Seattle in Melody Maker. When grunge was later at its peak, in 1994, American music critic Robert Hilburn criticized the ‘‘over-30 crowd’’ for closing its ears to ‘‘what is proving to be one of rock’s golden ages.’’ I think that the same could be said of the anti-rockism crowd of all ages in Britain; the sum total of bands such as the La’s, My Bloody Valentine, the Pooh Sticks, Primal Scream, Ride, and Teenage Fanclub (authors of the aptly titled Bandwagonesque, a brilliant knock-off of Big Star’s ’70s power pop) made Thatcher’s last days in office a rock renaissance. The problem is what kind of case can be made that these groups provide the ‘‘insights into the disillusionment’’ of contemporary youth that Hilburn (7) found in the American grunge scene. This is not a liability of rock revivalism per se; its history extends beyond the forms of revivalism dating to the first punk era that I have noted, to the British beat groups of the ’60s covering the original rock and rollers such as Chuck Berry. Rock music has obviously not died just because—like every other art form—it reached a stage at which self-consciously mining its history became a necessary part of injecting new life into it. If the C86/ Class of ’89 bands do not register any particularly strong sense of resistance to Thatcherism, perhaps that can be credited to the critical insistence after the mid-’80s that ideas about opposition in popular music had become obsolete; obviously many rock groups turned towards dance culture, the basis and/or source of such claims. Yet even the spearhead of the quest for danceability, the Madchester bands and ‘‘scallydelia,’’ posed some sense of ‘‘challenge from the North to the North/South cultural and financial divide’’ (much like that in the work of the Fall). On the whole, though, Kristian Russell concluded, the various ‘‘fads’’ in rock and dance music were essentially only ‘‘ways of escaping the dull, daily reality of living and working’’ (149, 167).

There are other ways of understanding that escapism, however. In the case of rave culture, the charge of escapism ‘‘does little justice to the feeling of elation that a rave event could give to its participants’’ (Rietveld 57–58). As still another British exchange student of mine once observed about rave culture in the North of England, ‘‘They were having fun when they were supposed to be miserable.’’ Of course it was resistance, in other words, whether it was dance or rock that supplied the fun; it sounds a lot like Bakhtin’s idea of carnival: Tony Wilson described rave as a form of ‘‘community and collective strength. There is power in people being lovely to each other’’ (qtd in Foote 62). That collective solidarity has been attributed to repugnance at the ravages of Thatcherism (Russell 127), and certainly seems subversive in light of Thatcher’s encouragement of selfishness. (Jesus’s self-sacrifice was just his personal choice, she opined—not a model of any sort, in other words.) There have been doubts about claims like Wilson’s; Philip Tagg, writing in the Cambridge journal Popular Music, described the possibility of rave becoming ‘‘a radically different

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musical expression of a radically…new form of collective consciousness,’’ but also asked whether ravers were perhaps only ‘‘hedonistic defeatists who have abandoned all hope of being heard as individuals in this oppressive society,’’ rather than ‘‘ a protest against [the] totally compromised notion of individual freedom’’ as Thatcher defined it, in the form of self-interested entrepreneurship (219). Dave Hesmondhalgh subsequently offered a bleak answer to the question, pointing out the retreat into individual experience of music evident in ‘‘people in clubs where techno and house are played…who fascinatedly watch their own hands’’ (263). But it was possible to discern quite direct forms of resistance, as well, such as that involved in moving the Acid House scene outdoors, the origin of raves. The heavy policing in 1988 even of nominally private parties featuring Acid House—music stripped to the mesmerizing beat of a drum machine and a bass line, as in American House, augmented by the ‘‘acid’’ of swiped samples of different instruments and sounds—led to ‘‘a subpolitical protest out of squatting rurally obscure locations reached by convoy in complex cat-and-mouse games with the police’’ (Bracewell 233). There were also organized protests against the licensing laws used to harass dance-music gatherings.

Another, more general point about escapism involves something I have noticed for a long time now, that one critic’s escapism is inevitably another’s resistance (and vice versa). In her conclusion on the futility of late ’80s music, Russell cites Judith Williamson on the lack of control ordinary people have ‘‘over their productive lives’’ (167); escaping (or breaking out of) that predicament sounds pretty radical to me.

And the specific issue of control over one’s ‘‘productive life’’ was, in fact, where the strongest argument could be found for the resistant qualities of popular music at the end of the Thatcher era, an argument specifically about the commercial organization of rave culture. This was not the common view after rave emerged in 1989, when the various commercial activities revolving around rave events were often characterized as little more than ‘‘an affirmation of Thatcherite enterprise culture’’ and its rhetoric about the virtues of petit entrepreneurship. This mimicry of Thatcherism could be witting as well as unwitting: when Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays proclaimed that ‘‘‘We are Thatcher’s children’’’ (Rietveld 57), presumably he may have intended some irony since the band was composed of drug dealers.

A very different perspective eventually emerged, however, when the frequency of dismissive attacks on rave commerce led Angela McRobbie to ask just how ‘‘a cultural politics of youth in the 1990s’’ ought to be defined in the first place, given the lack of unity and direction in youth culture as a whole. In her view the issue of control over one’s productive life was paramount: subcultural enterprises like those involved in rave culture—graphics, fashion design, retail, music production, publishing—were not a capitulation but instead an ‘‘empowering experience.’’ The idea of resistance ought to include seemingly mundane ‘‘choices about how to live’’ when they result in attempts to earn a living (and master new digital technologies, I would add, in the case of rave) ‘‘in a way which is frequently in opposition to those available, received or encouraged images or identities.’’ Rather than avoidance and pure abandonment, politically speaking, rave culture, precisely in its commercial aspects, might be ‘‘better

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considered as angry ripostes to the rhetoric of Thatcher. If she said be enterprising then their enterprise was pursued in precisely those ‘soft’ art areas, unprofitable but personally rewarding, which have always found little favor with Conservatives.’’ The scenes organized around every genre of music need to be regarded in a similar light, as offering non-conformist identities on a personal level, and by extension the possibility of ‘‘change and social transformation’’ more generally. They are certainly not the sort of commercial low ebb perceived by intellectuals still in thrall to the traditional, impossible romantic ideal of non-commercial authenticity, who deem all but the original members of a scene or subculture politically suspect (McRobbie 411–13).

It seems safe to say, finally, that not everyone gave up over the course of the ’80s (and ’90s) as rock and dance music enacted some sort of steadily deepening despair in the face of Thatcherism, and that the supposed obliteration of rock music by dance culture never really occurred except in the minds of celebrants of a lame academic postmodernism. Thus it should come as no surprise that whatever spell Thatcher cast over the ’80s and early ’90s has evaporated. If what postmodern gloom did exist in the Thatcher era and for some time afterwards can be attributed to her, perhaps the recent rock renaissance in the British music scene can be interpreted as a jubilant counterpart to the successful return of the Labour Party (a subject I leave to someone else). On my last trip to England, in any case, none of the students I met asked me how I could talk about punk rock any more; all I heard, instead, was the mantra ‘‘Hives, Vines, White Stripes!’’

Works Cited Bracewell, Michael. England Is Mine: Pop Life from Wilde to Goldie. London: Flamingo, 1998.

Christgau, Robert. Christgau’s Record Guide: The ’80s. New York: Pantheon, 1990.

Dettmar, Kevin J. H. ‘‘Is Rock ‘n’ Roll Dead? Only if You Aren’t Listening.’’ Chronicle of Higher Education 11 May 2001: B10.

Foote, Jennifer. ‘‘Stark Raving Madchester.’’ Newsweek 23 July 1990: 62–63.

Frith, Simon and Howard Horne. Art into Pop. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Hesmondhalgh, Dave. ‘‘Technoprophecy: A Response to Tagg.’’ Popular Music 14 (1995): 261–63.

Hilburn, Robert. ‘‘It’s Still All the Rage.’’ Los Angeles Times 25 Dec. 1994: 7.

Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.

Marsh, Dave. Review of ‘‘This Is England,’’ by the Clash. Nation 27 Dec. 1986/3 Jan. 1987: 747.

McRobbie, Angela. ‘‘Shut Up and Dance: Youth Culture and Changing Modes of Femininity.’’

Cultural Studies 7 (1993): 406–26.

Nehring, Neil. Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism: Anger Is an Energy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.

Redhead, Steve. The End-of-the-Century Party: Youth and Pop towards 2000. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

———, ed. Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture. Aldershot: Avebury, 1993.

Rietveld, Hillegonda. ‘‘Living the Dream.’’ Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture. Ed. Steve Redhead. Aldershot: Avebury, 1993. 41–71.

Reynolds, Simon. Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990.

Russell, Kristian. ‘‘Lysergia Suburbia.’’ Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture. Ed. Steve Redhead. Aldershot: Avebury, 1993. 91–174.

Sabin, Roger, ed. Punk Rock: So What?. New York: Routledge, 1999.

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Savage, Jon. England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

Straw, Will. ‘‘Dance Music.’’ The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. Ed. Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 158–75.

Stubbs, David. ‘‘Fear of the Future.’’ Zoot-Suits and Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music. Ed. Angela McRobbie. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. 267–75.

Tagg, Philip. ‘‘From Refrain to Rave: The Decline of Figure and the Rise of Ground.’’ Popular Music 13 (1994): 209–22.

Weisbard, Eric. ‘‘Mekons.’’ Spin Alternative Record Guide. Ed. Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks. New York: Vintage, 1995. 248–49.