a few thoughts on what makes a track Essential and Canon Worthy

one of the things with a music like jungle is that as a cultural formation it was so new, different, bracing that on a certain level ALL of it sounded amazing - because the fundamental proposition of the music is challenging, head-disrupting, life-rearranging. Such that virtually any instantiation of those generic properties done reasonably well is exciting to a fan.   In such circumstances the difference between a Classic and a solidly executed tune is less clear; only the truly sub-par, not-up-to-snuff, verging on defective tune rules itself out of consideration and contention.

When time elapses, though, the newness factor fades, and the canon starts to settle into shape

Seems like there's two bases on which a candidacy of canon-worthiness can be mounted

1. EXEMPLARY-NESS

absolute conformity to what the genre is about - not just essential but essentialist. Consummate genre-icity that approaches the definitive, in the sense of defining what this music and how it works. Example - "Terrorist" by Renegade.

2/ DIFFERENCE

the tracks that stretch the format, bend the form, renew the music, strange-ify it, push it forward into new spaces, open up unexpected possibilities - or become odd one-offs, that are never followed by anyone else. The quirky, the bent, the unusual groove, the uncommonly atmospheric or abstract-leaning. Example - "Drowning In Her" by Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse aka Foul Play - a track for which there is no like in all of jungle.

 "John Peel, he's OK, but I wish he wouldn't play so much reggae." - Alan Rankine 

 A few thoughts:

1/ It's a mistake to get caught up in semantic distinctions and genreological quibbles unless there is something really important at stake -- and I wasn't at all clear what was at stake in your proposal of refolding postpunk into "punk" -- what would actually be gained except to make punk itself meaninglessly expansive? A historical sense of punk itself is best served -- and I think is actually more flattering to punk -- by the idea of it as a short sharp shock. That a lot of people got stuck on that particular moment (Oi! etc) is not necessarily to the detraction of punk itself!

2/ Swimming against the tide of "post-punk" as a discursive fact is futile at this point-- this term is in use (and was in use from about 1979 onwards, in the UK music press; it was well established long before I wrote Rip it up ) and therefore it has meaning.

It covers

 A/ the music that would never have been made without punk but that didn't sound like clash/pistols/ramones 

B/ the music that never would have found an audience without punk/independent label culture  (ie. pere ubu, devo, suicide, throbbing gristle etc groups who had been going long before pistols/ramones) even though it wasn't that punk rocky and was sometimes more extreme, antimusical, noisy etc than punk itself had been.

The post in postpunk refers above all to idea of the next stage from punk; it is not necessarily the refutation or cancelling or reversing of punk, but an attempt to move on from it, meaning not leaving it behind but using that (sex pistols or whatever) as the point of departure, the launching pad. 

But because people disagreed with what "the next stage" would be, and indeed disagreed about what the really important element of punk was, you got a panoply of directions, an ever-widening delta…

You might say that postpunk is the actualization of the internal contradictions of punk, or of the dissensus that for a year or so was actually contained within the consensus of the word "punk"

Eventually that actualization of contradictions/differences leads to entropy but the prime phase of it -- 78 to 82 is rich enough to be considered both a period and, if not a genre, then a space of possibility in which genres formed

The "post" in postpunk is similar to the post in postmodernism  -- the latter isn't the cancelling of modernism, but a kind of relaxing off its strictures, a kind of selective betrayal of its tenets, an attempt to move to the next stage or sidestep certain blocked paths and dead ends.  

The original impetus of modernism subsists in the very demand to keep on innovating; postmodernism was not about a simple return to tradition or classicism; it was a response to the becoming-tradition, becoming-canonical, becoming-institutionalised of modernism after WW2.   

A similar kind of complex set of reactions and relationships with the precursor informs postpunk activity; there is a simultaneous move of  keeping faith and breaking faith. 

From this point of view staying true to punk as a form  (Oi!) or indeed in terms of a narrow idea of its content (anarcho-Crass) would be to betray its  spirit (change). 

 "It had that mystical quality of an actual decision: doneness" - Andrew Sullivan (on Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan)

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

- William Blake

"Notable qualities of this music, whether electronic or not, are monotony and the irritation that accompanies it. The monotony may lie in simplicity or delicacy, strength or complexity. Complexity tends to reach a point of neutrahzation; continuous change results in a certain sameness. The music has a static character. It goes in no particular direction. There is no necessary concern with time as a measure of distance from a point in the past to a point in the future, with linear continuity alone. It is not a question of getting anywhere, of making progress, or having come from anywhere in particular, of tradition or futurism. There is neither nostalgia or anticipation" - Christian Wolff, 1958

“The past doesn’t influence me, I influence it” – Willem de Kooning

 Well, I’m with you with the analysis of our brittle, spiritually denuded, out of joint /out-of-balance... for a while my blog had the subtitle ‘very far from grace’ which is how I feel about the way I live my life. The internet has been a disaster for me and then when my wife encouraged me to get a smartphone that was like more or less injecting smack direct into my veins.

However I think the truth is we don’t know how pre-industrial people felt.  They lived closer to nature and natural cycles, daylight hours, the seasons – but they were also at the mercy of them.  Terrible weather or pestilence would be catastrophic.  They might have had mythology that made them feel integrated with reality in a way that was psychologically beneficial – but they also had superstitions, fear of evil spirits, scapegoats and sacrifices.

With pre-industrial societies, for the majority of the population it was a grim struggle for basic survival and shelter etc.

 Going back isn’t an option anyway.

 I have been rereading Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex which I first read when I was 19 -  came across these passages... 

“Reproduction of the species cost women dearly, not only emotionally, psychologically, culturally but even in strictly material (physical) terms: before recent methods of contraception, continuous childbirth led to constant ‘female trouble’, early ageing, and death.”

 In other words, for half the population, the hunter-gatherer life wasn’t particularly Arcadian.

 Shulamith Firestone thought the only way forward was to go through the technological

 “Humanity can no longer afford to remain in the transitional stage between simple animal existence and full control of nature. And we are much closer to a major evolutionary jump, indeed, to direction of our own evolution, than we are to a return to the animal kingdom through which we evolved. Thus in view of accelerating technology, a revolutionary ecological movement would have the same aim as the feminist movement: control of the new technology for human purposes, the establishment of a new equilibrium between man and the artificial environment he is creating, to replace the destroyed ‘natural’ balance”