Post-punk bands staged primitivist returns to music to reject arty cosmopolitan pop

Evidence

The sound on Grotesque is a seemingly impossible combination of the shambolic and the disciplined, the cerebral-literary and the idiotic-physical. The obvious parallel was the Birthday Party. In both groups, an implacable bass holds together a leering, lurching schizophonic body whose disparate elements strain like distended, diseased viscera against a pustule and pock-ridden skin (“a spotty exterior hides a spotty interior”). Both the Fall and the Birthday Party reached for pulp horror imagery rescued from the white trash can as an analogue and inspiration for their perverse “return” to rock and roll (cf. also the Cramps). The nihilation that fired them was a rejection of a pop that they saw as self-consciously sophisticated, conspicuously cosmopolitan, a pop which implied that the arty could only be attained at the expense of brute physical impact. Their response was to hyperbolically emphasise crude atavism, to embrace the unschooled and the primitivist. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1139

Categorization

• XREF: The primitivist ‘return’ as counter-reaction connects to the reader’s interest in how avant-garde and vernacular impulses collide in art and cultural reclamation. — connects to: British post-punk largely erased America from its pop imagination — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1013; Revival bands replaying post-punk signal both its defeat and its undead demand for reinvention — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1278

Broader Connections

• Revival bands replaying post-punk signal both its defeat and its undead demand for reinvention #complicates (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1278