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Rip it Up and Start Again:

Postpunk 1978-1984
Front Cover
132 Reviews
Penguin, 2005 - Music - 416 pages

Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdotes and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up and Start Again re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.

  

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Review: Rip It Up and Start Again

User Review  - Drew - Goodreads

Unlike Jon Savage's remarkable England's Dreaming, this book is fatally flawed due to its lack of any kind of structuring narrative device. In the place of a story line, we start with the bomb known ... Read full review

Review: Rip It Up and Start Again

User Review  - Steven - Goodreads

one of the best music books around Read full review

All 132 reviews »

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Contents

The Unfinished Revolution
1
Public Image Belongs to
15
Autonomy In the U K
27
No Wave flew York
139
Cabaret Hoir and Theater of Cruelty in Postpunk San Francisco
197
Mutant I
261
and the Rise of MTV
332
Index
403
Copyright

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Page 411 - Lautreamont's is probably the most famous surreal image: the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.

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About the author (2005)

Simon Reynolds is the author of Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, and The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock 'n'Roll (coauthored with Joy Press). A senior contributing writer for Spin, his pop culture writings have also appeared in many other major publications.

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