Live Oak Blues What happens.

I swear I’m not using my blog to realize my thwarted desire to be a Music History professor, but when a listener last week suggested a “Post-Punk” show to bookend my “Proto-Punk” one, I figured I might need to do some explaining before I hit the airwaves–if for no other reason than to figure out what it means myself.

First of all, Post-Punk is a critic’s invention (thanks, Greil!) and quickly became a way to lump the tidal wave of bands inspired by punk, but who didn’t necessarily sound punk. And it came quickly: if punks hits in 1976, post-punk arrives less than a year later. Most folks preferred to call all of it “New Wave” (a term I despised from the git-go) but that is a misnomer. Although there is some overlap, New Wave was its own style of music, and anything that wasn’t Journey or Genesis or Molly Hatchet and had a synthesizer was called New Wave by the masses. For instance, I was almost fired from a job waiting tables in 1983 for shaving my head up to the crown because the manager said I looked too “New Wave” and was “scaring the customers.”

So what is it then? Well, it’s mostly British, often bleak (but melodic), and hit listeners like a sledgehammer. We’d been prepared for punk by a generation of 3-chord rock and roll, but nothing prepared us for bands like Joy Division, Gang Of Four, and Pere Ubu–unless, of course, you happened to grow up in West Berlin and suckled at the teat of Kraftwerk and Neu! I remember actually being scared by some of this stuff. Post-Punk? More like Post-Apocalypse. But I also remember never feeling so free as when I dropped the needle on a New Order record for the first time, knowing that no one else in Virginia Beach (besides Chris Bonney) was listening to them.

Some of it doesn’t sound as shocking as it did then, but some of it sounds even more so.  Tune in to “Left Of The Dial” on Grow Radio this Monday from 3 to 5.