One of the albums that soundtracked my summer was DIIV’s Frog in Boiling Water. It’s full of classic shoegaze sounds—floating guitar arpeggios set against a comfortable buzz with a mellow voice rising out of the murk. The lyrics, however, are clear-eyed in their discontent, targeting the desolation of capitalism and modern technology. This is unusual. Astute lyrics are a rarity in the shoegaze genre, in which the texture of the often unintelligible vocals usually matter more than what they’re saying. When listening to Frog in Boiling Water, I could hardly make out anything, nor did I want to. The ambiance of the sound was far more present and intricate than the vague impression of words underneath—the lyrics simply didn’t invite much attention.
Upon discovering the political critiques offered by Frog in Boiling Water by way of a podcast episode, I began to wonder how the album could have brought me to its themes sooner. Striking lyricism is the obvious answer. Yet, in this case, I’m not sure it would have helped; the aesthetics of Frog had already colored my understanding of the album. I listened to Frog when I craved something pacifying, something reliable. Something normal.
Such sentiment was alien to my main musical obsession over the summer: early punk and post-punk. The two genres are fertile ground for politically conscious art, though much of what I listened to was no more lyrically compelling than Frog. The difference, I believe, lies in the way that punk’s aesthetics actively defied those of their predecessors. In the early days, punk was the antithesis of normal.
Punk rock is often described as a reaction to elitist, self-indulgent art rock made by art school aesthetes and the rock ’n’ roll establishment of the early seventies. The scene made waves through its abrasiveness and rejection of the music industry and polite society, and its messaging and aesthetics were markedly untraditional for the time. Indeed, the British punk scene decisively severed themselves from the past by declaring 1976 to be Year Zero. This philosophy was best pitched by the Clash in their song “1977”: “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977.”
Punk’s loud, verbal eschewing of tradition was reinforced by how the genre manipulated music from previous decades. A cornerstone of the genre is the back-to-basics rock setup of a singer, guitarist, bassist, and drummer. All frivolity was expunged and no genre-mixing was allowed. At the same time, punk musicians disregarded conventions when playing their instruments. Instead of tightness and feel, punk valued amateurish roughness. This was a conscious aesthetic choice; as Keith Levene, guitarist for the Clash and post-punk band Public Image Ltd stated, “There’s a lot of people in punk who could play guitar much better than they made out.”
This sloppiness was tied to punk’s do-it-yourself ethos. Anyone could and should make and distribute music, record labels be damned. By mixing the popular accessibility of fifties rock ’n’ roll instrumentation with radical accessibility concerning who could play rock music, punk maximized its ability to recruit people into its movement, which often crossed over with contemporary politics. Much of this involvement was spearheaded by individual acts; bands like The Clash, Tom Robinson Band, and Crass promoted a staunchly left-wing agenda, though Crass distinguished themselves through their commitment to direct, on-the-ground action. A particularly prominent example of punk’s broader involvement with activism was Rock Against Racism. Beginning as a one-off concert in 1976 in response to rising support for the National Front, a far-right fascist political party, it evolved into a cultural movement, frequently featuring leading British punk bands as performers and organizers.
By the summer of 1977, punk had splintered. Early releases in the genre that came to be known as post-punk trickled in. Punk purists, on the other hand, refined the rawness of punk in the Oi! subgenre in the United Kingdom and hardcore punk—or hardcore—in the United States. The two camps went in opposite directions: while post-punk backtracked from purism of genre, bringing in sounds from electronic music, funk, and reggae, hardcore emphasized a bare-bones setup and doubled down on pace and aggression.
The extreme nature of hardcore’s sound and the genre’s strict boundaries helped define the community that built up around it. In other words, hardcore’s aesthetics separated itself further from the mainstream and thus strengthened the bond between its fans. Now that the genre is nearing a half-century old, the pure hardcore sound has become a model for modern acts to adopt or call back to, connecting themselves with a lineage of firebrand truth-tellers.
Post-punk, on the other hand, was more fragmented. Many inclusions into the genre were defined more by their deviation from the norm than their adherence to any particular strictures. However, it is this experimentation that allowed artists to contemporize their aesthetics. Post-punk artists in declining industrial centers strove to capture their surroundings by pushing stylistic boundaries. For instance, instead of limiting the synth to the functionality of a keyboard, acts like Devo explored the way it could reproduce raw environmental noises like “blood flow” and “brain waves,” as they detailed in a 1982 interview. These artists also tended to be more oblique in their messaging, which at times let their aesthetic idiosyncrasies overshadow their commentary.
The angular-sounding guitar that eventually became a post-punk staple could partially be attributed to the innovations of Gang of Four. The band searched for a radical spininess in their sound to accompany their unsentimental questioning of social constructs, which were inspired by neo-Marxist theory. Andy Gill, the group’s co-founder, summarized their attitude when discussing his approach to the guitar: “[Valve amplifiers] are what every guitarist today wants—they’re the prerequisite for…the ‘warmth’ that people talk about. I had transistorized amps—a more brittle, cleaner sound, and colder. Gang of Four were against warmth.” According to music critic Simon Reynolds, this was adopted as the “‘sonically correct’ format for politically conscious post-punk music” in the U.K. Again, this once-unconventional approach would go on to be canonized, although the absence of an insular community behind it à la hardcore allowed it to be more easily depoliticized.
Music cannot be separated from its context. The politicization of the aforementioned was heavily influenced by the circumstances of the time—Devo and Gang of Four’s opposition to consumerism, for instance, were especially conspicuous against the backdrop of Reaganism and Thatcherism, respectively. Still, that does not mean that aesthetic choices do not matter.
None of this is to say that albums such as Frog are devoid of value; rather, they represent another excellent entry in a familiar arena. Such familiarity, however, allows the music to blend in with its pedigree, to carry with it memories of acts of old. There was no tribute to memory in the early world of punk and its offspring. Whether an artist embraced brash noisiness or icy minimalism, their aesthetic choices nonetheless belied their vision for what music can be outside of the established sounds of their era. This vision injects the present with a sense of meaning, of urgency—it makes the world as it is, right now, matter. As Reynolds put it when describing post-punk’s prime from 1978-82, “I’ve never been so utterly focused on the present.”
Olivia Zhao is a sophomore in the MSB. She is currently studying Business & Global Affairs and is a Reviews Editor for the INDY. If you want to learn more about post-punk, please read Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up and Start Again (ideally the UK edition)!
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