Critiques and manifestos

Aiming to break the trance of rock-business-as-normal and jolt the listener into awareness, postpunk teemed with metamusic critiques and mini-manifestos, songs such as the Television Personalities' "Part Time Punks" and Subway Sect's "A Different Story" that addressed punk's failure or speculated about the future.

Television Personalities - Part Time Punks - 1978


Subway Sect - A Different Story - 1978

Nuclear anxiety

Singles like Kate Bush's "Breathing" and UB40's "The Earth Dies Screaming" brought nuclear anxiety into the Top 20, and countless postpunks, from This Heat on their concept album Deceit to Young Marble Giants with their classic single "Final Day", sang about Armageddon as a real prospect, impending and imminent.

Kate Bush - Breathing - 1980


UB40 - The Earth Dies Screaming - 1980


This Heat - Makeshift Swahili - 1981


Young Marble Giants - Final Day - 1980

Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express & Donna Summer - I Feel Love

For many of the postpunk persuasion, 1977's most significant singles weren't "White Riot" or "God Save the Queen", but "Trans-Europe Express", a metronomic, metal-on-metal threnody for the industrial era by the German band Kraftwerk, and Donna Summer's Eurodisco smash "I Feel Love", made almost entirely from synthetic sounds by producer Giorgio Moroder, an Italian based in Munich.
Kraftwerk's serene synthpop conjured glistening visions of the Neu Europa-modern, forward-looking, and pristinely postrock in the sense of having virtually no debts to American music.

Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express - 1977


Donna Summer - I Feel Love - 1977

Sex Pistols - Johnny B. Goode

Perhaps the first example of Berry-phobia occurs as early as the Sex Pistols demos exhumed on The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. The band begins jamming on "Johnny B. Goode". Johnny Rotten-the group's closet aesthete, who'd go on to form the archetypal postpunk outfit Public Image Ltd-halfheartedly jabbers the tune and then groans, "Oh fuck, it's awful. Stop it, I fucking hate it. Aaarrrgh".

Sex Pistols - Johnny B. Goode - 1976