Unknown pleasures.

Two of our fave blogs point today to Simon "I'm blissing, goddamn it!" Reynolds' forthcoming book on post-punk 1978-1984, Rip It Up & Start Again.

Per Reynolds' blog, there's the UK edition (out this week), and then the US remix (due Feb. 06), like some old school Beatles shit. Why the SST chapter would be one of the deletions stateside is beyond reasonable contemplation. Here's the Guardian review, from yesterday. Here's the more favorable Sunday Times [UK] review, from which the following:

Punk, Reynolds reasons, wasn’t the revolutionary moment of popular cliché, but rather a crude aberration, “a brief blip in an otherwise unbroken continuum of art-rock spanning the 1970s from start to finish”. Punk threw open a window of opportunity for the artists who arrived in its wake, but their musical touchstones would invariably be Brian Eno, David Bowie or the Velvet Underground rather than the two-chord numbskulls recently dispatched to deserved oblivion.

Alright, that's a thesis. Reynolds' recent deep musings on MIA --- in which (inter alia) he disdains the art-school sheen that he hears laid over her pan-continental genre-mining and terrorism-touched name dropping, coming down in favor of organic, self-feeding, grass roots scenes --- seem to make a little more sense in this context, coming off a huge book project, one that must have taken prodigious amounts of time, effort, and imagination, and that no doubt had him wallowing up to his armpits in arty pretension. A rebound move toward...ah...let's say... "authenticity" might be expected. (More on which soon, possibly.)

Anyway, here's what Reynolds is all about right NOW.