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Rip It Up and Start Again
Simon Reynolds
(Faber)

In the shape of his evocative sortie through rave and dance culture, Energy Flash, Simon Reynolds has already made a contribution to the sparsely-populated bookshelf of great music books. Now he’s gone and done it again, as Rip It Up and Start Again achieves the considerable task of pulling together innumerable strands of creative pop music after the solar flare of punk had burned itself out. Concentrating on the British and American manifestations of post-punk, Reynolds analyses the peak work of bands – Talking Heads, PiL, Devo, Throbbing Gristle et al – who often had little common ground creatively, but who were inspired by punk’s failure to give artistic boundaries a good kicking. The constant stream of record titles and potted biographies that this kind of book demands can easily be rendered dull, but Reynolds’s scrupulous research is matched by a delicious turn of phrase; Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘Fuse Mountain’, for example, conjures up for the author the image of “a crosslegged circle of hippies playing flutes and recorders on a slag heap outside a steel mill”. Rip It Up... is so compelling that the only downside is likely to be a hefty tab at Amazon as you plug gaps in your collection
David Davies

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