Culture
VICE Publishes List of Three Songs Required Before Loving an Entire Genre
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
NEW YORK, NY, A music publication this week informed its readership that post-punk, a genre that has existed since approximately 1978, may not be loved by anyone who has not first consumed a curated selection of three songs chosen by a staff writer who described Joy Division as "surprisingly listenable."
The piece, published Tuesday on VICE under the headline "3 Post-Punk Songs You Should Know Before Saying That You Love Post-Punk," represents the latest development in what cultural historians are calling the Gatekeeping Industrial Complex, in which people who discovered a genre fourteen months ago explain it to people who discovered it thirteen months ago.
The three songs selected are, by the article's own framing, the songs you need to know. Not four. Not twelve. Three. The author has triaged forty-five years of angular guitar music into a lunch break, and if you do not complete the homework, your love is fraudulent and the editors will know.
"We just want people to come into this with the right foundation," said the article's author, Tyler Brandt, 26, who has a Siouxsie and the Banshees poster he bought in October. "Post-punk is having a moment right now, and we want to make sure that moment is being had correctly."
The three songs themselves are fine. Gang of Four's "Damaged Goods" is on the list, which is defensible. Wire's "Three Girl Rhumba" is also present, which will cause Wire fans to feel briefly superior before remembering that Wire themselves have released seventeen albums that sound nothing like Wire. The third slot goes to a track by Bauhaus, a band that has broken up and reformed so many times that Peter Murphy has legally required each reunion to be filed as a new entity with the state of California.
What the article does not address is what the post-punk newcomer is supposed to do next. There is no Part Two. Having consumed the three approved songs, the reader is released into the wild to love the genre, presumably standing in a field somewhere in a trench coat, emotionally prepared but geographically uncertain.
The piece also does not mention Television, Talking Heads, Public Image Ltd, The Fall, Magazine, Subway Sect, or approximately two hundred other bands, a curatorial decision the author described as "keeping it accessible" and which Mark E. Smith would have described in terms unprintable in a family publication, had he survived long enough to be omitted from a VICE listicle, which honestly might have killed him faster.
"I think three is the right number," said Derek Hollis, 31, a reader who found the article through an Instagram algorithm that had previously served him advertisements for weighted blankets. "I listened to all three on my commute. I feel like I get it now. I feel like I could say I love post-punk at a party and be okay."
Derek has not yet been to a party where this has been tested.
The post-punk resurgence the article references is real, driven largely by bands like Fontaines D.C., Wet Leg, and Yard Act, none of whom are mentioned in the piece because they are not from the founding era, which raises the question of whether the article is about post-punk or about the specific three songs the author happened to know when the editor asked for something by Thursday.
VICE did not respond to a request for comment, which is the most post-punk thing they have ever done.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3-post-punk-songs-you-should-know-before-saying-that-you-love-post-punk/