Although the polemic of Rip It Up entails de-privileging the exalted status of punk in rock history (all those books, documentaries, etc etc) and elevating both the "aftermath" (postpunk/New Wave) and the preceding period (the absurd myth of the early Seventies as wasteland, when it fact it was diverse and fertile right up until about 1975), I really should here acknowledge (more than I do in the book itself!) A/ the absolute necessity of punk as a purgative and galvanizing intervention, and B/ the fact that I really love a lot of punk rock, from proto-punk (Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Sixties garage punk) to the classic UK punk (Buzzcocks, Pistols, X Ray Spex, The Undertones, the Ruts, some Clash, even some of the proto-Oi! like Angelic Upstarts) as well much of the New York stuff (although Television hardly seems to fit the word ‘punk’) right through to the classic early US hardcore (Black Flag, Angry Samoans, Descendents, Negative Approach etc etc). The trouble with punk rock in the narrow UK 1977 or Ramones sense, however, is that its premises were so basic that it couldn’t be turned into a long term music culture without becoming very samey and dulling, a new conformity/orthodoxy.

In an early conception of the book I intended to include Oi! and anarcho-punk, but for reasons of time and space, wasn’t able to. But Oi! a/k/a "real punk" figures as an unseen backdrop to this story—the very definition of getting it wrong, as far as the postpunk vanguardists were concerned.

Either the entirety of Cranked Up Really High or a prototype version of it is available cached here: link

Home also puts forth some interesting ideas about Seventies punk as a mere coda to the 1960s freak-rock (Deviants, MC5) and argues for Oi! as the real deal in this interview with Lucy O’Brien: link

• American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Paperback)
  by Steven Blush, link
• Banned In DC: Photos And Anecdotes From The DC Punk Underground (79-85)
  by Cynthia Connolly (Photography), Leslie Clague (Editor), and Sharon Cheslow (Editor) link
• We got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk,
  by Marc Spitz and Brenden Mullen (Three Rivers),

"Punk" would be a key example of American critic Frank Kogan’s concept "Superword", his term for names whose contested nature is their very point and essence, a concept first aired publicly in his Why Music Sucks fanzine of the late Eighties. From Kogan’s book Real Punks Don’t Wear Black (University of Georgia Press, 2006), the Superword is defined as "a word that causes controversies, that gets fought over, that sometimes runs on ahead of its embodiments; a word that seems to jettison adherents"

However I can claim to have come up with this idea (well, more or less!), if not the terrific snappy name itself, independently back in 1986 with a piece in the final issue of Monitor (#6) which looked at the punk diaspora and the dozen or so different versions/visons of punk that had spiraled off it, which conceived of punk as "a trick of language". In it I argued that "the movement’s unity only really existed on the printed page--in the music press’s torrid rhetoric, in the panic headlines of newspapers. There never was a consensus over punk’s aims or motives"—and that what held punk together at all was not a positive definition but an identity based in being AGAINST, a vague anger, a bored yearning for some kind of disruption of rock business-as-usual. As I further argued, "In some ways, punk was really the opening up of a conversation whose topic was "what’s punk?"." That question could further be unpacked as "what’s rock for? what power can music have? How best to direct our dreams and our dissatisfactions? Is this area&mdashrock, youth culture—still worthy of our energy and ardour, or should we just close it down?" In effect, post-punk 1978-84 was the grand sum of all the questioning that took place, and of all the answers and provisional conclusions people came up with in response.

Another way of looking at the Superword is to appropriate Lyotard’s idea of the tensor, where a word or name becomes massively charged with energy (libidinized is one way of describing that investment, although that’s too narrow for the range of emotions that could be involved, many of which are not the least bit erotic but more to do with rage, frustration, etc). Although Lyotard’s context is individual pathology (Freud’s analysis of the paranoid delusions of Daniel Paul Schreber) there are obviously cases of collective cathexis—the shared delirium of fans (pop, obviously, but also sports), the process of subcultural mobilization around a genre name (jungle, metal, etc). The tensor term is a trigger for intensity, an instigator of contention (competing definitions, rival attempts to provide the signified for the hallowed signifier). The tensor is also a fracture point, the cutting edge at which schisms occur, the fork (two, three, or X-number pronged) in the road that sets people who were once united by "one vision" vision down different paths and on increasingly divergent quests.

To use another set of metaphors, derived from astrophysics, you could see punk as a Big Bang. The old rock universe—decrepit, dispersed, depleted of energy—collapsed into a white-hot singularity (summer ‘76 to summer ’77) then re-exploded to form a freshly re-energized and "brand new" cosmos. This was the postpunk universe, whose galaxies and solar systems were the genres and scenes—No Wave, punk-funk, 2-Tone, industrial, Oi!, Goth, and more—that proliferated in the volatile aftermath of 77-as-Year-Zero-Ignition-Point.

Or one last metaphor: Punk as a Reformation. Once the first schism (Catholicism versus Protestantism = Old Wave versus New Wave) took place the way was opened for further disintegration: an endless succession of squabbling Protestant sects (that classic syndrome of Leftist factions fighting most acrimoniously with those closest to themselves). The great dissensions that convulsed postpunk culture all through the 1978-1984 period covered in this book were a struggle over what to do with the demographic spoils of punk: the vast reservoirs of idealism and energy mobilized during 1976/77.