Red Wedge failed politically because its music retreated from modernist experimentation

Evidence

Part of the problem with Red Wedge was that, despite taking its name from a poster designed by El Lissitzky (Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919), its music represented a retreat from modernist experimentalism. Bragg’s blokeish neo-folk, the hamfisted jazz-funk-pop Weller made with the Style Council, the Communards’ strangely depressing party music: none of this was capable of articulating a future. It was all bogged down in the worst kind of 1980s gloss. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1367

The comparison with Red Wedge is instructive here. Part of the problem with Red Wedge was that, despite taking its name from a poster designed by El Lissitzky (Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919), its music represented a retreat from modernist experimentalism. Bragg’s blokeish neo-folk, the hamfisted jazz-funk-pop Weller made with the Style Council, the Communards’ strangely depressing party music: none of this was capable of articulating a future. It was all bogged down in the worst kind of 1980s gloss. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1367

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: why politically sincere art fails when it abandons formal risk-taking — political art must be formally new to articulate a future.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1367