1979 ZigZag Reader’s Poll!
From Chapter 1
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What Is Post-Punk? combines a close reading of the late-1970s music press discourse with musical analyses and theories of identity to unpack post-punk's status as a genre. Mimi Haddon traces the discursive foundations of post-punk across publications such as Sounds, ZigZag, Melody Maker, the Village Voice, and the NME, and presents case studies of bands including Wire, PiL, Joy Division, the Raincoats, and Pere Ubu. By positioning post-punk in relation to genres such as punk, new wave, dub, and disco, Haddon explores the boundaries of post-punk, and reveals it as a community of tastes and predilections rather than a stylistically unified whole. Haddon diversifies the discourse around post-punk, exploring both its gender and racial dynamics and its proto-industrial aesthetics to restore the historical complexity surrounding the genre's terms and origins.
From Chapter 1
Figure 1. The 1979 ZigZag Readers’ Poll listing the most hated people and the sexiest people. ZigZag, July 19, 1979, 22.
From Chapter 4
Figure 2. The front cover of ZigZag magazine previewing the upcoming two-part cartoon about the Runaways. December 1977. Cartoon by Tony Ghura.