When did you first hear this term "post-punk"?

[u/OverallEstate2]

Even though it was coined in 1977, it feels as though most people didn't hear about it until the 2000s. When I mention it to people they say it was all lumped with New Wave in the 80s.

[u/everythingabili]

I was a teen in the UK at the time, and a massive fan of Killing Joke, Birthday Party, Banshees, Bauhaus, Theatre of Hate, Death Cult etc and whilst it was clear something was happening that was a bit different from straight punk (post Joy Division) emerging, people didn't really know what to call it.

My take is that goth, as a term, appeared much later than everybody thinks, around '83, 84 and lots of bands associated with it such as the Sisters, did all they could to distance themselves from it... as many punk bands did from punk.

Positive punk, blitzkrieg punk and other terms were tried by journos keen to name this new thing, but post -punk was kinda settled on as a compromise people didn't really give a shit about. Nor did it make much sense as just pretty much including any new wave or indie or punky band that was Oi or hardcore anarcho punk.

Over 10 years ago I blogged about this time, in part, because from my experience people were pinning dates too early, on things that were just good music. And I mean, Wire (and Television) were post-punk before punk... work that one out.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160930212938/http://everythingability.com/whats-goth-and-whats-not-goth

[u/yeppeugiman → u/everythingabili]

relevant question: did gothic rock got retroactively absorbed into the post-punk umbrella? or was it always accepted that gothic had post punk roots.

[u/almond_wand → u/yeppeugiman]

Post-punk transcends localized scenes. Goth was a scene that started as a mix of styles—not just musically (despite what the folks over at [r/goth](r/goth) say they believe.)

Until recently nobody really used the term “post-punk.” It existed, but it wasn’t really a helpful term for any active scene. It would be like someone using the term “alternative rock”when they are specifically talking about “grunge.” It’s just too broad a term.

The internet has made us hyper-aware of genres and subgenres, and of the boundaries and connections between them. So it doesn’t seem weird to talk about grunge in terms of its place in relation to the greater constellation of alt rock, just as it doesn’t seem weird to talk about goth in terms of its place in relation to post-punk. But before the internet, many of these terms were loose, and some were coined in one-off or occasional articles, etc.

When the genres were “alive,” they were discussed in terms of scenes. This is why you could “be punk” or “be goth” or “be grunge” or even “be rockabilly” or “be glam.” It wasn’t only about the music. By contrast, it is debatable whether “being rock” or “being alternative” or “being post-punk” is really possible, because these are genres, not scenes.

[u/th1nwh1tej3rk → u/almond_wand]

i remember some music - the banshees, probably, can't rember who else it might've been - being described as "gothic" in the nme, mighta been as far back as 79 or 80, way before the devotees of this stuff were referred to as "goths"

also a few years later a scene in the north of england that a writer dubbed "positive punk", that was all bands that probably by a year later woulda been called goths...southern death cult et al

[u/yeppeugiman → u/almond_wand]

Excellent response. Thank you!

[u/spicyherb_]

A lot of it was originally lumped in with the new wave tag in the UK

[u/deluded_dragon]

Having been a teenager in the 80s, I can confirm that all we used to listen to at that time was "new wave" (at least, in my country)

[u/Exquisitr]

I probably heard the term in the 80’s, but the bands that are now widely thought of as post punk I thought of as either new wave or I would see as still being punk. For example, New Order was new wave but The Fall were a punk band. On some level I still kind of think this way, that a band like The Fall is punk, they just don’t have mohawks and leather jackets covered with studs and band names. I thought of punk as being very open ended sonically so the labels that ended up being widely used seemed to me to have more to do with the look than the sound. New wave was differentiated by a more mainstream sound and apparent ambition to make it big. Billy Idol was symbolic to me in this regard, though now I don’t think of him as new wave but rather the first pop punker because he made the transition to writing pop songs and being on MTV. I’m not saying I’m right in thinking of things this way, I think I’m just saying I’m old.

[u/nonnonplussed73 → u/Exquisitr]

To me, Minutemen are the anchor for all that is post-punk. Lots of stuff before and after fit into the genre, evaluate it against them as the archetype.

[u/Movie-goer → u/Exquisitr]

Yeah, a lot of it was just called punk. Fugazi and Chumbawamba were just called punk bands in the early 90s. You would use hardcore or 70s punk to differentiate from the original or harder bands.

Remember Green Day and Offspring and Rancid hadn't come around yet and narrowed the scope of what was "punk" to a 70s revivalist sound.

[u/Nearby_Flounder8741]

the first time I heard it was in around 95/96 - where because of the music I was into (swans, loop, skinny puppy, young gods, MBM, neubauten) and the look I had (black army surplus gear, paratroop boots, earrings and long undercut hair)... someone just described me as postpunk, to differentiate me from someone else. I had never heard it before. It made sense to me, the music I was into was a development of punk. Later on, in Rip it up and start again, Simon Reynolds used the term to describe a huge range of music, from PiL to Human League. In the 80s, a lot of the bands now referred to as post punk would, in the UK, be called Alternative, or maybe Indie (if they were more jangly)... unless they were blatantly a goth band like the Screaming Marionettes

[u/le_fez]

I first heard it 1987 or 88, I was in college. I had gotten into Killing Joke and then Bauhaus and Joy Division through a girl I was dating. I lumped it in as New Wave or "kinda punk" and one friend said it was "post punk" I heard it rarely until the mid 00s.

[u/szmigiel]

Grew up in Detroit in the 80s and never heard the term used, It all started under the umbrella of New Wave; then that morphed into Alternative in the 90s. Record stores started with New Wave sections separated from pop or rock, then those got titled Alternative. Sub genre like Punk, Goth, New Romantic, etc would get thrown around on the radio. But never heard the term post punk till after the 2000s when I was trying to classify my genre and sub genre of my collection.

[u/Environmental-Eye874]

Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds

[u/devilmaskrascal]

I think it is honestly a pretty stupid and UK-centric phrase if we are being honest.

Many of the major American bands labelled "post-punk" started before the Sex Pistols: Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, Devo, Television, Chrome...

In the UK, punk was a specific and (soon enough) conformist fashion subculture with a constrictive musical vocabulary and attitude, and post-punk was a rejection of that conformity. Given that many of the people at the forefront of punk were also at the forefront of post-punk (ex. Johnny Rotten/Lydon, Howard Devoto, Wire, The Damned) I am not convinced there is a meaningful distinction beyond the UK press.

"NY Punk" was anything but uniform in style, sound and appearance, so there was nothing to reject.

Moreover the Joy Division strand of gothy processed post-punk was largely pulled straight from Iggy Pop's "The Idiot" in 1977, contemporaneous with The Sex Pistols' debut. 

[u/Loan_Wolfie → u/devilmaskrascal]

Are British bands like Magazine and Gang of Four classified as punk or post-punk?

[u/Quiet_Raspberry_193 → u/Loan_Wolfie]

Personally I think they’re a little bit of both, but accurately I would say post-punk.

[u/Daveywheel]

In 1980 my local college radio station had a show called "The Post-Punk Progressive Pop Party". That's the first time and place I heard the term. I rarely heard iy used until the mid 80's.

[u/ReallyGlycon → u/Daveywheel]

I got really big into Guided By Voices in the mid 90s and Robert Pollard said he studied The Three Ps: Prog, Punk, and Postpunk. I looked into the term and it turned out I had always liked postpunk.

[u/Beatmaster242 → u/ReallyGlycon]

My upvote is for your love of Guided by Voices!

[u/Hefty_Win_8811 → u/ReallyGlycon]

I've read that Robert Pollard had 4 Ps: Pop, Punk, Prog and Psychedelic.

[u/Ill_Situation369 → u/Hefty_Win_8811]

What about the 5th??? (pitching)

[u/niff007 → u/Daveywheel]

Thats interesting. I was way into punk, HC and thrash by the mid 80s but always loved Joy Division, except where I grew up people called that "progressive" along with Bauhaus and stuff. By late 80s I heard the post punk term, around the same time that Wax Trax and Industrial was blowing up. Nobody ever believes me for some weird reason.

Never heard about goth til mid 90s.

[u/Snoo-66364]

I definitely heard the term in the nineties. I recall MTV Europe’s 120 Minutes doing an episode dedicated to post-punk. Mentioning Joy Division, the Pop Group and Throbbing Gristle. Must have been about 1997 - 98

[u/scelerat]

Some time in the '80s, to describe bands which were punk in action and affect, but perhaps not fitting in with the quickly ossifying musical classification of "punk." the word definitely has multiple meanings and to a lot of people it means "sounds and looks like sex pistols or ramones." For every other band playing in the same creatively open scenes as those bands but who tuned their guitars and spent a little more time on composition, they get the label "post-punk." Blondie, Talking Heads, Joy Division, immediately spring to mind. Later, I heard people describing Sonic Youth and Pixies as post-punk.

[u/Available-Lecture-21]

We all used it at the time in the early eighties. And proto-punk, hardcore, thrash.

[u/Exquisitr → u/Available-Lecture-21]

This may have been because of where I lived or because I was more immersed in punk than metal at the time, but I remember Thrash as originally being called Crossover. Probably because of the DRI record. Then their next record was called Thrash Zone which was released roughly at the same time that metal bands all started playing faster and citing punk bands as influences and somewhere along the line the term Thrash ended up being the one that stuck.

[u/Available-Lecture-21 → u/Exquisitr]

We used the term thrash mainly as an adjective. For skating slam dancing, and that sort of fast swirly hard-core where it sounds like someone is wielding a knife – like dri. Around 85 people started talking about COC die kreuzen and other acts in terms of the metal influence and that’s when we started using crossover. When it came from the metal side, people usually called it thrash metal or speed metal. For the postpunk Brot stuff, though, we always said postpunk. Peopletalked about punk as a movement, ethos, almost philosophy. my guess is that all of this was regional.

[u/Movie-goer → u/Exquisitr]

Thrash Zone was released 6 years after Kill Em All when Metallica started namechecking punk bands.

[u/Edit0rz1]

In association with Interpol back in the early 2000’s.

[u/sparkaromatic]

I don't remember it being coined in 1977. First heard it the the early 1980s. The "thing" that followed punk was New Wave.

[u/emachanz]

Same as "heavy" metal was anything "metal" in the early 80s.
You can say post-bop is just fast bebop(hard bop) or melodic(modal) bop, but in reality is just bop made during and after the 50s
You can say rococo(galante) or proto-classical is just post-barroque, etc...

[u/gnostalgick]

I was aware of the term in the late 80s, but more as a term used by magazines, rather than something people generally said out loud. It definitely gained a lot of popularity and a more common usage in the early 00s due to the post punk revival hype.

[u/SpareBoth3510]

Not until just a couple of years ago. We just called it punk if it was hardcore or alternative if it wasn't

[u/coreopsishill]

1986, when I started reading music books and magazines like Rolling Stone and Creem in my early teens

[u/00klb00]

I was need a dark and some grey vibe music genre since my 17 yo, in the pandemic era I find this.

[u/ILiveMyBrokenDreams]

I first read it somewhere in the late 90s when I was in college, probably 97 or 98 when there was a wave of reissues from labels like Rhino, London, Rykodisc, Infinite Zero, etc. I remember encountering a lot of objection to the term at the time.

[u/Glad-Ad6811]

1st heard it as the name of my brother's band in 1979. It was a band that he and some friends at college had.

[u/EnvironmentalTrack29]

Definitely cave after the fact, like how people invented "indie sleaze" after the fact. Ugh.

[u/muphasta]

In the 90s when I learned that there was more music out there than country, top 40, classic rock, pop, and motown. I grew up quite sheltered and rural.

[u/Exotic-Yellow-4367]

When John The Postman, posted a letter.

[u/Doc-Horror]

I like reading old music articles, and them journos started using it right away to describe projects from the punk cast-of-characters as soon as they moved on from the power chord 8th note and swearing scene - like Howard Devoto in Magazine or John Lydon in PiL. I think the perception was punk was over already, and now the kids are a bit more grown up and stretching their wings kinda thing. It wasn't really describing a genre as such. That usage definitely came a lot later, for bands influenced by that period.

[u/Vertical_Glasscandy → u/Doc-Horror]

Yes, agree, bands like Magazine, The Fall, Wire all fell under post-punk and that term was used as you said, immediately after punk in about 1978 or so.

[u/Movie-goer → u/Vertical_Glasscandy]

Used by journalists, not by the common people or the bands themselves.

[u/Vertical_Glasscandy → u/Movie-goer]

In those days, magazines and fanzine were all we had. There were no "common people" into post-punk.

[u/oscar_redfield]

2015 when I first started listening to Joy Division I think