Why This Book Actually Matters More Than You Think
Rip It Up And Start Again is Simon Reynolds' massive follow-up to his earlier generational study, picking up where the punk moment left off and tracking the explosion of post-punk from roughly 1978 through the early 1980s across the UK and US. It covers bands like Gang of Four, Joy Division, Public Image Ltd, The Pop Group, Suicide, Television, Devo, and a whole lot more. The book runs over seven hundred pages and it shows. I picked this up back when I was working in a record shop and trying to actually understand why certain records from that era sounded the way they did. A lot of people dismiss it as just another music history book with too many quotes, but it's genuinely useful if you're trying to map out how the scene actually connected. The problem is that Reynolds can get lost in his own citations sometimes. He'll drop you into a paragraph with three different secondary sources and zero narrative glue.
What Rip It Up And Start Again Simon Reynolds Gets Right
The strongest part of this book is the cultural mapping. Reynolds does a better job than almost anyone else at showing how art school ideology, gay subcultures, punk economics, and various European philosophical influences all crashed into each other during that period. He explains why Joy Division sound the way they do without reducing it to cliché. He gets into the studio techniques, the gear choices, the actual production decisions that made these records different from what came before. One thing he handles really well is the regional breakdown. Most people think of post-punk as this monolithic movement centered on London. The book shows how much the scene varied depending on where you were. Manchester had a completely different texture than Birmingham, Bristol, or Leeds. Glasgow was its own thing entirely. Reynolds maps this out thoroughly and most other histories skip it.
Where The Book Falls Apart
There are real problems with the writing. Reynolds has this habit of writing extremely long sentences that seem designed to fit as many ideas as possible into a single grammatical structure. Some of them go on for eight or nine lines before the period finally arrives. This makes dense sections nearly unreadable on a first pass. Another issue is the source material. He relies heavily on now-deleted magazine archives from NME, Melody Maker, and Sounds, which were often written by people who had more interest in being clever than being accurate. I remember spending months trying to verify a specific claim about the Pop Group's recording process because Reynolds cited a Melody Maker piece that turned out to be contradicted by another article from the same week. The workaround I found was tracking down the producers themselves where possible and checking session documentation rather than trusting the press coverage. It saved me from perpetuating an error that showed up in at least two other books. The biggest limitation of this book is that it draws a pretty hard line between what counts as post-punk and what doesn't, and that line moves depending on which chapter you're in. Reynolds includes Suicide and Television in the American section but spends very little time on related scenes like krautrock or dub reggae, even though those influences are plainly audible in the music he's praising. If you're coming at this cold and want to understand the full lineage, you're going to need supplementary reading.
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How To Actually Use This Book
Don't read it cover to cover on the first go. It's structured thematically in long chapters that each run forty to sixty pages, and each one stacks enough context to make linear reading exhausting. I found the most effective approach was to pick a region or a band cluster you already know and start there. Once you understand what's happening in a specific context, the broader analysis clicks into place. The discography and references at the end of each chapter are worth more than most of the main text. Reynolds points you toward the actual primary sources, and some of those lead to obscure fanzines and interview collections that no one's digitized yet. If you're serious about this period, bookmark that section and use it as your research roadmap. The book is still in print and available through most major retailers. There's no official free download, and pirated copies tend to be OCR scans of the PDF with broken kerning that make the already-challenging prose even harder to parse. Buy a used copy if you can find one. The hardcover editions from the early 2000s sometimes come with the original appendixes that got trimmed from later printings.
If you want something that complements this but fills in the gaps Reynolds leaves, try Mark Fisher's work on the same era. His writing is tighter and he covers the dub and electronic angles that post-punk heavily drew from. It's not as comprehensive, but it goes deeper on the production side. Reynolds gives you the map. Fisher gives you the microscope. Most of the bands covered here are well documented on streaming services, so I'd recommend listening while you read. Reynolds assumes you know the records, and if you don't, the prose loses half its force. The gap between what he's describing and what you're hearing is where the book becomes frustrating rather than illuminating.
