When the people with the power to publish books set the standards of quality and when the people writing books internalise those standards to the extent that everyone involved even uses the same language to talk about it, it smacks of the kind of entrenched elitism that the punk rock movement was rebelling against. It feels like EMI and Sony and Warner telling musicians what is good and what is bad and musicians doing their best to live up to those judgements. It feels like we should be fighting it, taking a stand against it, starting a ‘punk write’ movement. Here’s a three-act plot, a website, and an iPhone. Now go and write a book.Punk Write!
The band Wire particularly inspire me. Their relentless innovation took them from run-of-the-mill punk group to lean pop conceptualists in the space of months. The band had a ruthless disregard for heritage, throwing out all assumptions and rebuilding with a whole new set of techniques. Guitar solos were rejected, narrative was next. In its place were lyrics based on nature documentaries or map references. It sounds cerebral but it was still clearly pop. They learned to strip a song down to its essential components. If it only took 53 seconds to say, that’s how long it lasted.
Furthermore, the post-punk scene offers a model which can be replicated. It’s not necessary to fight the power, just to set up alternatives which circumvent the traditional model. In many ways, it sounds very much like the internet. Post-punk publishing
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