Rip It Up & Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984

Product Description [Amazon]

Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdote and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.

Panel Discussion

Feb 28 2006. To promote the release of the USA edition of his book ‘Rip It Up & Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984’ author Simon Reynolds held a panel discussion at Mo Pitkin’s on NYC’s Lower East Side.

Contort Yourself: No Wave New York [i was probably searching the internet for James Chance/James White]

(a review by Simon Reynolds of some James Chance reissues/live album for Mojo probably 1995)
Sick muthafunker James White was a key player in all this miscegenated mayhem. Swiftly following up the 1979 debut Buy, White changed his band’s name from the Contortions to the Blacks, and released Off White on the ultra-hip Ze label. The opener Contort Yourself encapsulates White’s sonic and lyrical shtick. Over brittle funk guitar, neurotic bass and a hissing hi-hat disco beat, James spurted the infantile squall of his bebop sax and rapped nihilistic nursery rhymes: “now is the time/to lose all control/distort your body/and twist your soul”. Next came the vile misogny of Stained Sheets, a duet juxtaposing Stella Rico’s needy, orgasmic whimpers with White’s sadistic contempt. A blankly ironic cover of Irving Berlin’s (Tropical) Heatwave segues into Almost Black, the most dubious homage to blackness-as-primitivism since Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay The White Negro. That said, Off White’s febrile funk remains queerly compelling, even if you’re left feeling so soiled you have to take a bath afterwards.

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