It's no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s (in the punk and postpunk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities. Since then, the decline of social housing, the attacks on squatting, and the delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy available for cultural production has massively diminished
Mark Fisher, The Slow Cancellation of the Future
Killing Joke, Fad Gadget, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gang of Four, et al were products of a unique cultural moment that resulted in some of the most inventive music to ever grace popular radio.
The political significance of working-class creativity in popular music was that it gave us vivid glimpses and tastes of this other world, a world that, via these anticipations and rehearsals, at least intersected ith ours, or became ours, intermittently yet insistently… a world in which the old dandy-flaneur ambition for life to become a work of art would be democratised, where the mass-produced and the bespoke would combine in unexpected ways, where no detail was too small to be attended to, and fashion would be as significant as fine art. This was the future that popular modernism prefigured and made available in flashes.
Mark Fisher, Going Overground
There were unique conditions in place that allowed post-punk to manifest itself in the late 70s. This video essay on the fortuitous overlap of free education, social democracy and punk rock sensibilities calls the resulting attitude and period "popular modernism", a term coined by the late Mark Fisher.
If reading "Rip it up and start again" or "Post-Punk Then & Now" is too much of a time commitment, this Jonas Čeika essay on the subject is a fascinating summary of the unusual sociopolitical environment that made post punk possible. Just listen to what he's saying and forgive his Twitter handle, please.
