rocker654 wrote:
Were Wire punk? I hear them classified as post-punk, but they were putting out records in 1977, when punk was current, and fitted in well with punk comps of that era.

a band can still be post-punk while punk is current. "post" doesn't mean "after" in this context.

as far as what they were, it depends on the record. you can easily pass Pink Flag off as a punk record (though it's certainly a unique one), but you'll have a harder time doing so with 154. Chairs Missing is where they start to experiment a bit more with sounds and song structures.

Half the people talking about "punk" are talking about a genre of music, and the other half are talking about a group of ideas, so there's a lot of miscommunication, because the term means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. "Post-punk" means much less to many fewer people. But some of the groups that are smeared with that genre-tag are pretty good. We're so far into the future now, that nothing makes sense.

rocker654 wrote:
Were Wire punk?

WIRE did one of the most punk things I think you could do, in my opinion. When the drummer Robert Gotobed/Grey didn't want to play , they changed their name to WIR, out of respect for his contribution as a democratic member of the band.

BClark wrote:first off, what does it have to do with punk rock? i hear NO similarity. perhaps thats because the punk i listen to is the louder punk, like bad brains, the exploited, dri, discharge. but even so, early punk rock like the uk subs sounds NOTHING like, say, joy division. similarly, people always claim that new wave grew out of punk and again i hear no similarity.

and also, isnt the term "post-" kind of a highbrow/high-society/high-culture term? doesnt this kind of clash with the "punk ethos," whatever that is? i doubt that anyone living in anarchist communes uses the term "post-"anything....

I find similarities between punk and post-punk : like Husker Du , making
ultra-fast punk/hc at their beginings , and in the end , some depressing indie-folk-rock .( I'm not sure they are labeled as post-punk though)
But the Pixies were influenced by them , and they're called "post-punk" , so there's a link.

About Joy Division , they made a demo in 76 , I guess , when they called themselves Warsaw , and it's very raw , the most violent stuff I know from these old days.

For the new wave stuff , I agree there's no link between Human League or Psychedelic Furs and punk ( but New Order and Magazine do have one)

I won't pretend i'm exactly highly informed on punk, post-punk, etc. but I hold the impression that post-punk refers to exactly what it seems to - after punk. In the sense that the people who were thrown into the category were influenced by the ideas of punk - importantly the DIY ethos and exploring new areas (though I don't know how strong the latter is) - and that showed in their music.

It's kind of hard to discuss this topic though when you realise that it's just a name. As with any genre (which will usually seem to just get coined by some guy and will happen to stick) it's very general and there's always going to be mistakes in the groupings, etc.

I wouldn't place too much importance on it - I use it sometimes as a shortcut instead of listing a load of artists.