In the world of party politics, the working class seemed newly up for grabs. Yet Penman’s ’80s writing left an ambiguous political legacy. At a time when much pop and punk culture felt new and estranging, these interventions scrambled the high-low cultural binary, challenging - to quote Fisher again - both “the middle-class assumptions of Continental Philosophy” and “the anti-theoretical empiricism of mainstream British popular culture.” Notoriously, these theory-minded pop reviews were authored by two writers, Ian Penman and Paul Morley, though in the years following they would spawn many imitators, both at NME and in other music magazines like Melody Maker. The NME, the magazine that invented the weekly pop charts, transformed itself into a magazine of regional dispatches on the DIY scenes in Manchester and Belfast, attacks against apartheid and Thatcher, and long-form essays on pop culture that sought not just to apply poststructuralist theory to pop music and movies, but to see pop music and movies as themselves coursing with ideas and novel ways of seeing. Punk gave way to post-punk regional styles proliferated, often outside the mainstream gaze and a renewed sense of oppositional political commitment suffused the air, as Labour Party socialists took over London’s municipal government while Margaret Thatcher rose to power on the national stage. The late ’70s and early ’80s blew new winds into the music press. “No sob stories, but for someone from my background, it’s difficult to see where else that interest would have come from.”
“My interest in theory was almost entirely inspired by writers like Ian Penman,” the late cultural theorist and working-class autodidact Mark Fisher wrote in 2005, in a piece explaining the motivations behind starting his famed blog k-punk. If you grew up working-class in England in the ’80s and happened, somewhat improbably, to cook up an interest in the cultural theory wafting over from the continent (Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan), there really was only one obvious source: the popular music press. For others, he was the greatest writer from the magazine’s greatest era, the vanishing, too-good-to-be-true years in the early English ’80s when socialist politics, French theory, and novel reveries in pop music all seemed to linger on the same corner, and to play off each other in the tossed-off pages of the same daring magazine. Before long he’d given up on art school and begun writing for the popular music magazine that rode the postwar waves of succeeding rock styles to new heights: the New Musical Express or NME.įor some of the magazine’s historians and fans, Penman’s entrance marked the beginning of its downfall: the paper’s finger slipping from post-punk’s pulse and embracing instead an overly intellectual navel-gazing. The sound of punk left him cold, but the culture’s radicalism lured him. He found a record store run by a soul aficionado in the drowsy port town of King’s Lynn and fashioned a lifelong love for black American music, pop, and its subcultural tangents more generally. Like many working-class teens in the punk and post-punk years, he appeared bound for art school. Up until then, the great love of Penman’s life was painting. The meeting was more or less random, occasioned by the drift and cloistered openness of Royal Air Force family life the music, rough and transporting, was more or less transformational.
One day in the mid-’70s on an air force base in “flattest, dullest” Norfolk, England, an African-American airmen shared some of his deep Southern blues records with a young, white English boy named Ian Penman. Review of Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman, (Semiotext(e), 2023)
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