John at Counago & Spaves links to a rather severe review by Ben Watson of Simon Reynolds' splendid history of post-punk, Rip It Up and Start Again. Watson criticizes Reynolds for, among other things, not having read Adorno ("Unversed in Adorno, Reynolds is unaware that the crisis of Western metaphysics has social roots"). But the conception of music's critical power which Watson attributes to Adorno is there too in Reynolds, if not in the sleekly dialectical form Watson demands.
According to Watson, "Adorno emphasized psychic liberation, mimesis, mad love and musical freedom.... Despite his pessimism about formal politics, Adorno understood that capitalism is creating the preconditions for freedoms undreamt of in antiquity. Hence his depressive mania: a new world is possible, yet baulked." And, as far as I can tell, he's criticizing Reynolds for lacking such a conception, which means he (Reynolds) is "unable to function as a critic". But this seems to me simply wrong: I read Reynolds' book in its entirety as an argument, admittedly not in the idiom of Frankfurt School Kulturkritik, for the liberatory impulse behind post-punk's sonic innovations. Reynolds writes:
It felt like the culture's eyes and ears were trained on the future.... The new records came thick and fast, classic after classic. And even the incomplete experiments and 'interesting failures' carried a powerful utopian charge ...
Watson chastises Reynolds for not grasping the nature of those experiments. But I can't accept this either. "The black hole in pop opened by the Sex Pistols", Watson argues, "led more adventurous punks to explore dub reggae, Free Improvisation and revolutionary politics". But that, surely, is why Reynolds insists on the distinction between punk and post-punk (which Watson unhelpfully obscures in his review). It's very odd that Watson can't see that Reynolds is making just this point - over and over again. For instance:
[T]he more experimental post-punk bands responded to reggae as a purely sonic revolution: an Africanized psychedelia, shape-shifting and perception-altering. During the half-decade from 1977 t0 1981, reggae's spatialized production and sophisticated-yet-elemental rhythms provided the template for sonically radical post-punk - a privileged position rivalled only by funk.