“This Is Not Post-Punk”

Writing under the name Chinese Postpunk Anthology, one occasionally receives comments along the lines of “this is not post-punk.” Quite right, of course. It is not post-punk, it is indie rock. It is not post-punk, it is emo. It is not post-punk, it is shoegaze. It is not post-punk, it is noise rock. It is not post-punk, it is darkwave. It is not post-punk, it is no wave. And so on, and so forth.

For them, something called “post-punk style” apparently exists. What they are saying, in effect, is this: “dark, cold, jagged guitars, propulsive basslines, and literary lyrics are what make post-punk post-punk.” How extraordinary. Anyone who can identify the common denominator among Cabaret Voltaire, Killing Joke, Pere Ubu, Throbbing Gristle, Swell Maps, Magazine, Devo, Ultravox, Orange Juice, Mission of Burma, Subway Sect, ESG, The Birthday Party, The Monochrome Set, The Slits, Wire, The Human League, Joy Division, Suicide, Gang of Four, Aztec Camera, Soft Cell, Cocteau Twins, This Heat, Public Image Ltd., and Bauhaus is warmly invited to do so.

The Etymology of Post-Punk

The term “post-punk” was coined by the British music press in the latter half of 1977, at the height of punk rock’s assault on the record industry, as a way of grouping together the diverse new acts that had begun to appear in punk’s wake, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees. The original formulation was “post punk”. The two words have since been compounded; post-punk, or simply postpunk, is now the standard spelling.

What Is It About Punk?

But what, precisely, is punk?

According to Rudy Rucker, an American writer, punk is objectively defined by two qualities: fast and dense. Its value is determined by a single question: How fast are you?

Speed here has nothing to do with tempo, and density has nothing to do with literary depth. Both are measures of information. The velocity of thought, conversation, transmission. The compression of anger, noise, anxiety, humour. Punk is the sensory mode of an accelerated information society, the capacity to process and generate with intensity. Slowness — clinging to fixed ideas, past glories — is to be held in contempt.

What Is Post-?

The prefix post- derives from classical Latin as the preposition post, denoting position or time “behind” a given reference point. It later became a productive prefix signifying “after” a particular event or condition. In the modern period, it was further abstracted, assuming the function of a historical periodising marker. More than simple sequence, it designates a relationship to a prior system: an era defined as “after” that system, while remaining dependent upon it. The system may be criticised, expanded, forced to change — but the earlier stratum is never simply erased. It is preserved.

Post-punk does not merely denote “the era after punk.” It implies a situation in which punk has been co-opted: its poses and fashions commodified, its energies reduced to safe cliché. The original impulse was anti-institutional, but once that impulse had calcified into mere style, it was already spent. Information density falls. Stasis is another word for death.

What Makes Post-Punk Post-Punk

Post-punk is not a fixed genre. It is, rather, a self-destructive movement that carries the seeds of its own negation. Its core value lies not in perpetuating punk style, but in the relentless dismantling of stylisation itself — from within. Or, to put it another way: it is the unceasing attempt to recover the insurgent energy punk possessed before it was rapidly stylised.

Funk, dub, jazz, electronic music, noise, the avant-garde. Post-punk is best understood as a mongrel practice that refuses generic fixity. What is at stake is not stylistic diversity as such, but the use of diversity to resist consolidation. The point is not to fuse styles into something new, but to prevent any style from solidifying at all.

In point of fact, the origins of many artists now considered to be original post-punk acts — and of the styles associated with them — predate punk entirely. David Bowie, The Stooges, Television, Pere Ubu, Frank Zappa, Talking Heads, Captain Beefheart, Red Krayola, Roxy Music, Neu!, The Residents, Throbbing Gristle, Devo, The Modern Lovers, Can, and The Velvet Underground.

Post-punk cannot be understood as a linear development from a point of origin. It is a series of independent eruptions — each born of its own context and conditions — that break open hardened forms, dissolve them, and rebuild. An ethos of acceleration and decomposition. Post-punk recurs everywhere, without warning.

The Post-Punk Nature of the Godfather of Chinese Rock

On 9 May 1986, at a charity concert organised under the banner of the International Year of Peace, 崔健 Cui Jian performed “一无所有 (Nothing to My Name)”. Chinese rock began there.

For nearly everyone present, it was a style unlike anything they had seen or heard. It was met with astonishment. Some denounced it as 牛鬼蛇神 — ox-demons and snake-spirits, monsters and freaks — and walked out. For ears shaped by revolutionary songs and pop ballads, the introspective lyrics alone were a shock. Beyond the music itself, Cui Jian stood on stage in an oversized work jacket, sleeves rolled up — conspicuously plain beside the other performers. Threadbare would not be an unfair description. In every respect, Chinese rock arrived as something foreign to its surroundings.

What made the moment significant was not simply that rock music — rarely performed openly in China until then — had been played in a public forum. The music gave concrete form to ideas that had lacked one. It offered a new mode of expression: the tension between the individual and society rendered as a personal, interior problem. A line runs directly from that moment to these lines by 窦唯 Dou Wei:

矛盾 虚伪 贪婪 欺骗 幻想 疑惑 简单 善变 好强 无奈 孤独 脆弱 忍让 气愤 复杂 讨厌 嫉妒 阴险 争夺 埋怨 自私 无聊 变态 冒险 好色 善良 博爱 诡辩 能说 空虚 真诚 金钱

contradiction, hypocrisy, greed, deception, fantasy, doubt, simplicity, fickleness, stubbornness, helplessness, loneliness, fragility, forbearance, anger, complexity, disgust, jealousy, malice, contention, grievance, selfishness, boredom, perversion, recklessness, lust, kindness, universal love, sophistry, eloquence, emptiness, sincerity, money

Such expression had not been entirely absent from Chinese culture before. But the framework for sharing it publicly, with others, did not exist within the official musical culture of the time.

Some read the music as a servile imitation of Western pop. Others said, “This is not rock.” To ears accustomed to Western rock, it did indeed sound strange. Cui Jian was not simply transcribing Western music. The introduction of Chinese elements is unmistakable. But to call this East-West fusion, or localisation, is to miss the point. What is operating here is a double estrangement: Chineseness introduced into rock; rockness introduced into Chinese music.

The homology between Cui Jian and Talking Heads is frequently remarked upon. White New York intellectuals used African music and funk to defamiliarise the conventions of Western pop. Cui Jian — working the other axis, combining Chinese music with Western rock to expose the contours of Chinese popular music — is their mirror image. The relationship is less one of musical influence than one of shared method applied in opposite directions. Cui Jian drew on the vocal traditions of the northwest and introduced the suona, the traditional wind instrument of the north. His background is worth noting: he is of ethnic Korean (Chaoxianzu) heritage.

China in the mid-1980s was a society in search of a new image of itself. The revolutionary ideological consensus had weakened; the reform and opening-up era had begun. In that context, the yellow loess plateau of the northwest had been installed as the nation’s imagined heartland. A young man born in Beijing to a family rooted in the northeastern ethnic-minority culture arrived wearing that imagery and became the voice of a new generation. His symbolic position demonstrated that rock could give expression to Chinese inner life.

Cui Jian is often cast as a martyr to state censorship, a symbol of resistance. He is not averse to performing at state-sponsored events, however — the 1986 concert being a case in point — and this remained true even during the silence that followed 1989. Nor, on the other hand, is he a compliant instrument of the system or a spokesman for its programmes. He does not accept demands to alter his lyrics. He does not sing the praises of national pride. He keeps his distance from the Northwest Wind trend, despite — or because of — its quasi-official currency. The ambivalence between accommodation and resistance marks out the strange ground he occupies.

He deploys political imagery freely and refuses to explain it. Silence permits interpretation; it withholds resolution. Some read political defiance into the work; others find personal anguish. The listener’s own experience and thought crystallise around it, and the work makes no attempt to arbitrate between them. There is no correct reading.

As Chinese rock moved toward the mainstream — and successive acts carried it further into popular culture — what Cui Jian pursued was not the style of rock but the logic of its making. He understood early that contemporary Western rock was not generated by surface fashion but built upon an alternative, underground substrate. His engagement with Western music extended beyond rock toward rap and experiment, as the work of the 1990s makes plain. That disposition toward the underground has been inherited and repeated; it persists as a structural condition of Chinese indie rock to this day.

Chinese rock was born as a form that deviated from existing institutional norms. If post-punk is the form that connects disparate contexts and surfaces a different self in each, then the following can be said: Chinese rock began as post-punk.

“This Is Not Post-Punk”?

Doubt may persist. But consider what post-punk has always been: an interzone, a space where the street finds its own uses for things, where the institutional and the insurgent operate beneath the threshold of recognition. The name arrives late.

Suicide, the New York duo, were the first act in history to be described as “punk.” They began performing in 1970 — before The Ramones. The disruption punk brought to the record industry invented a name for strange music that had previously gone unnamed. And to date, no more fitting name than “post-punk” has been found.

“This is not post-punk”? Quite possibly. The names we have are imperfect. They always were.