Post Punk Then And Now

what people did in rural Ireland when they weren’t allowed to have parties in any villages, they would all meet at the crossroads and dance there to escape the police telling them they couldn’t part

phallocentric rock music

think when sportswear ceases to be fashionable, that’s when capitalism will start to fall!

The music industry everywhere is in big trouble. In Poland, now everything is dominated by various mutations of horrendous “Polish rock”, or uninspired versions of American commercial pop. It’s all globalised formats, like Pop Idol.

But what’s really interesting about the scene in Poland since the 90s is hip-hop. Hip-hop has become the “next punk” or post-punk

You can’t communicate with people in your own country if you sing in another language

when I worked there, I saw a dramatic increase in Polish bands singing in English, which our editor saw as a sign of titanic collapse.

In socialist, supposedly classless Poland, those who managed to create artsy post-punk were often kids from the intelligentsia and privileged bourgeois backgrounds, who used their sense of entitlement to make art from the milieu of their educated, book-filled homes.

Neither art nor music exist in a social void; it depends heavily on your class whether you are entitled to create it.

Peter Hook’s recent book on Joy Division showed very well how crap the group’s lives were; how poor they were. Until the very last moment actually, they were having so many difficulties it’s a miracle there was something like Joy Division at all. But in their optimism they saw their class as victors