Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
The definitive account of the best ever period for Pop, 26 April 2005
Rip up:1. The idea that the best period for Pop was the Sixties. Simon Reynolds' elegantly and urgently written survey of post-punk puts that complacent baby boomer myth to rest once and for all. All of Reynolds' books have been essential reading for anyone serious about Pop, and this is no exception. If you are at all interested in how Pop could be challenging, weird and yet compulsive, you really will not be able to put this book down. 'Rip it Up' eloquently and exhaustively makes the case that the 1978-84 period was a pop cultural treasure trove. Reynolds lets us see the usual suspects (PiL, Joy Division, The Fall, The Raincoats, The Slits, Throbbing Gristle, Gang of 4, Cabaret Voltaire) from unusual angles (the anecdote about Martin Hannett making Steve Morris record each drum separately is a wonderful insight into the way in which Joy Division's sound was produced, for instance), as well as re-focusing attention on the forgotten or barely remembered (This Heat, Tuxedomoon). 2. The idea that Pop is essentially to do with music. Reynolds demonstrates that this was a period in which politics, theory and sonic innovation fed into each other in a now scarcely imaginable cocktail of mutual intensification. 3. The idea that Pop has to be entertainment. Reynolds' analysis of postpunk is an implicit broadside against contemporary pop's compulsory trivialization. Pop then was a way of living, not simply a style of consuming. ...and start again: The book inevitably poses the question - could we ever have it so good again? Can Pop ever return to a Now this urgent, or will it always be yesterday once more? Well, part of what made post-punk so powerful was its unashamed intellectualism. Such intellectualism came from the critical culture that surrounded the groups as much as from the artists themselves. Reynolds, inspired to write by the confluence 'Rip it Up' describes, has kept the faith with that mode of theoretically-engaged criticism. Is it too much to hope that the book will contribute to a climate in which expectations about what Pop can be are raised?
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
A fascinating collage, 7 Jun 2005
I loved this book. The coverage is incredibly broad, and the sheer fascination of the music really comes alive through Reynolds's writing. The other reviewers sum up the great things about this book well, and I agree with what they said. So here are a couple of criticisms: he doesn't contextualise the music in the political and cultural context of the day as well as Jon Savage did for punk 1976-1978 in "England's Dreaming". That's not a surprise, since he is covering so many different, overlapping musical scenes in the UK and the UK, with nods to Germany and Australia. But it does make it more of a music fan's book and less of a cultural history than it promised to be. A second related criticism is that this is definitely a history of the producers of music, not of its consumption. So we get very little insight into the subcultures formed around these musical scenes (such as round Two Tone or Gothic), and the interpretation of the music is very much from the point of the switched on 20 something who went to gigs, rather than the bulk of the record buying or radio listening publics aged 10 to 30. The sheer excitement of hearing "Gangsters" or "Pretty Vacant" or "Sensoria" on your little transitor radio for the first time doesn't quite come across. Nor do you get much of a feel for why, when the Human League or Depeche Mode popped up on Top of the Pops or Radio 1, it felt just like the obvious way to make pop records and nothing would need to change again now we'd got it right! Related to this, thirdly, this is a guy in his late 30s (maybe a shade older) telling us that music was better in his day (and I know he has written about 90s rave culture too, but he says that has gone off as well). Hence the historicising. All musical trends have a rise and a fall; and to read this book you get the sense that postpunk, once it had burned out, left nothing worthwhile in its wake (save the rediscovery of its legacy by The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand and co). But that's just a perspective problem - I have a feeling that had he been five years younger, and written about how brilliant the Smiths were, the arc would have started later and ended later. Compare Paul Stump's rather wonderful "The Music's All That Matters" - a history of prog rock with a similar structure, and the same tendency to see the rise and fall of a movement as the rise and fall of "intelligent" or "engaged" or "art" music as the rise and fall of pop as such.But what the heck - I loved it anyway (and that's in part because I'm the same age group, and I still get a frisson listening to my old Cabaret Voltaire and Fall records). Down with rockism! Up with looped samples of American televangelists!
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
A Gem, 30 Jan 2006
I guess it depends on how old you are. From my early 40s I can still look back at the glory of Post Punk as a true golden age. I suppose you youngsters out there just can't believe anything important happened 20 years ago.(Plus, how many kids today want to know anything about the Lemon Kittens ?)
Sadly, the best bits in the book are the descriptions of the now mind boggling amount of dissention and sheer aggro that went along with this 'scene'. I can't see anything today (maybe some aspects of rap) which challenge the prevailing status quo either politically or culturally like these bands did at the time. The descriptions of the Associates and Scritti Polliti alone are worth the price of the book for any aspiring musician. How refreshing to remember there were once 'artists' who didn't think - How can I copy someone and make money ? but did think 'At this point I don& | |
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