Late-1970s cinematic Vietnam trauma shaped British post-punk’s psychedelic soundscape
Evidence
If Smith’s guitar on Pornography often sounds Eastern, it calls up a fantasmatic East in which all of the hippie dreams of free-your-mind exotica have been napalmed into oblivion. Pornography was famously recorded on LSD washed down by alcohol (the band would skulk in a pub waiting for the effects of the acid to wear off before they went into the studio) but it is psychedelic in the same way that Apocalypse Now is. (There are grounds for claiming that Apocalypse Now — with its warporn media overload, its schizophrenic delirium, its sense that The End is only minutes away — was the post-punk film; 23 Skidoo, for one, seemed to have emerged fully-formed from its vision.) Pornography’s delirium is a Jacob’s Ladder bad trip, a psychic Indochina fever dreamt in a Crawley bedroom, the hallucinogens giving distended and distorted shape to anxieties conjured from the suburban heart of darkness. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1067
Categorization
- XREF: The claim that war/media overload defined post-punk connects to the reader’s interest in how cultural panic and media frames shape art, and to Fisher’s broader writing on hauntology and the 70s television-memory complex. — connects to: The 1970s UK crisis fused economic, cultural and ethnic traumas into one ruptural conjuncture; Post-punk’s conceptual-cultural richness was a brief historical contingency
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: was Apocalypse Now genuinely formative for UK post-punk beyond 23 Skidoo, or is this a critic’s retrofit?