jmtd → log → Rip it Up and Start Again

I've just — finally — finished reading Simon Reynold's dense "Rip it Up and Start Again": a history of post-punk music from 1978-1984.

I often think of music journalism in the terms that Zappa famously phrased as (roughly) "people who can't write, writing for people who can't read". This book sometimes suffers from that syndrome, of attempting to describe audio in terms of other senses, which sometimes wanders deep into synesthesia territory, but for the most part the book is coherent and enjoyable.

It's also very "dense": you leave each page with another half-dozen songs or bands of music genres to go and investigate. I'm surprised that there isn't a commercially-released anthology counterpart to the book. There are, however, several playlists, many of which are locked away on Spotify, but via this review I found these two which are web-based (powered by opentape, an interesting piece of AGPL software).

The book has helped me to discover a lot of music that I hadn't heard of before and now love, which I will probably write about in different contexts over the next few months.