Chapter
4
Break-Down, Break-Up, Break Apart
unpublished & unfinished; written
in 1989
As
should have become increasingly obvious by now, the seventies
is notable for its general lack and absence of rock. It
was an era where rock survived only by extreme means - material
fossilization, ritual mummification, electrical reanimation,
artificial respiration, spiritual evocation, etc. All means
which at their root knew rock had gone elsewhere and become
something other, something lost. If anything, rock served
throughout the seventies as a grid, a matrix, a chart or
a framework for referential construction. Throughout this
article I've been trying to illustrate this by evidencing
the various constructions made throughout the seventies,
all of which built upon rock either (a) archeologically
- upon its remains, ruins and rubble; (b) photographically
- upon legitimate documentation of what it was like before
its decay; or (c) architecturally - upon idealized designs
and plans for its new formation.
If
all this smacks of certain museographic principles, it was
then no wonder that punk came on like a vandal in the museum,
smashing all of rock's historical edifices in order to clear
some space for the present. But as can easily be appreciated
now, punk's energy was primarily a cathartic release of
pent-up anger and thus should never have been viewed as
politically positivist and ideologically watertight as many
serious rock commentators wished it to be. More important
than any of its proposed or implied advocacies, punk did
change the sound of rock by rechannelling its sonic course
and realigning its aural comprehension, presenting new standards
of noise, speed, style, conglomeration, appropriation and
production through which one could re-listen to rock history
and by which one could make new rock. Out of all the punk
tangents exploded at the end of the seventies, one group
stood out via its combination of politics, theory, execution
and production : The Pop Group.
Their
name was more cynical than most other punk bands' attempts
at shock and affrontory, because The Pop Group didn't even
acknowledge the existence of rock as it had been happening
up until that point - indeed, implicit in their name was
the likelihood that rock had become the province of anonymous,
generic pop groups. To make this non-existence of rock more
manifest, The Pop Group aimed to detonate all those maps,
charts, matrices and frameworks which continued to prop
rock up throughout the seventies - a manouevre which separated
them from many other modernist and postmodernist artistic
exercises which exposed and played with rock's frameworks.
Of course, The Pop Group were destined to succeed by failing,
because the only way they could do this was by not sounding
'rock' at all. But to the willing and perceptive ear, their
work could only have been shaped the way it was by their
handling of rock's core and myriad energies - its drive,
its clash, its pulse. Their method was simple : dub.
By
1979, apreciating reggae and releasing dub B-sides became
commonplace for many English punk bands. The Pop Group went
one further and got Dennis Bovel to produce their first
album Y (1979). Through his production the whole album becomes
a dub mix of itself, never alluding to either an original
whole or a partial version but instead flowing between the
two. This is an important feature of the album : it realizes
the possibilities of sound that can arise once one accepts
the lack and absence of prescribed structures - something
that distinguishes the Carribean dub process from virtually
all other European-derived forms of musical production.
This view is synchronous with The Pop Group's refutation
of seventies' rock frameworks, and by allowing Bovell unprecedented
reign over their compositions they thus derprived themselves
of those frameworks in the finished album.
