Kids’re Forming Bands: Making Meaning in Post-Punk

As a critical category, post-punk is sufficiently diverse that its organizing principle is not to be found in its stylistic unity. As a set of musical styles, its organizing principle is not audible. Nonetheless, I propose that its core exemplars represent a coherent movement, in the art-historic sense. Within popular music, post-punk represents a shift away from punk’s romantic expressionism to a modernist commitment to use verbal-musical interplay for the expression of ideas, particularly the idea of democratization. As a working out of aesthetic theory, its commitments correspond closely to Immanuel Kant’s model of genius.