Revival bands replaying post-punk signal both its defeat and its undead demand for reinvention

Evidence

Wilkinson’s show was timely because post-punk was one of the spectres that loomed over the past decade. Its history was extensively catalogued in Simon Reynolds’ book Rip It Up and Start Again; the music was pastiched by lumpen plodders such as Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs, and served up again by originals such as Gang of Four, Magazine and Scritti, all of which reformed. The return of the post-punk sound had a double effect. At one level, it constituted the music’s final defeat — if conditions were such that these groups could come back, thirty years after the fact, and not even sound particularly out of date, then post-punk’s scorched-earth injunction that music should constantly reinvent itself must be as dead as its hopes for a revivified politics. Yet even the most degraded simulations of post-punk style carry with them a certain spectral residue, a demand — which these simulacra themselves betray — that music be more than consolation, convalescence or divertissement. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1278

Categorization

• QUESTION: Fisher frames nostalgic reformation tours as proof of post-punk’s defeat while still crediting the simulation with a spectral demand — worth chasing what distinguishes living tradition from zombie pastiche.
• XREF: connects to: Post-punk bands staged primitivist returns to music to reject arty cosmopolitan pop — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1139; Attempted revivals of past traditions accelerate their decay — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1454; Punk inverted 68 by repudiating pleasure and exposing interiority as ideology — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1018

Broader Connections

• Punk inverted 68 by repudiating pleasure and exposing interiority as ideology #expands (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1018
• Attempted revivals of past traditions accelerate their decay #corroborates (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1454