Post Post
Meta Meta EP
Awkwardcore Records
I want to start this review off in a sort of stupid direction. I don’t want to begin with some dissection of this band’s style, musical ability, message, or anything like that. I don’t want to rattle off reference points and mark off what scene they belong to and who should listen to this. I want to open this thing with something relatively superficial. I want to talk about signifiers… about names.
At first blush, Post Post just struck me as “clever,” you know? Generic indie rock wordplay, minor intellectual fronting with a liberal arts sense of humor… the usual thing. Normally, I guess I’d stop paying attention at this point. Most of the time, band names are little more than the least stupid thing the group could agree on when they started playing shows. They’re usually kind of throwaway, a put-on, without much relationship to the actual music (cough… I’m looking at you, Dismemberment Plan). Who the fuck cares about a name?
This is usually a sane way to approach things, but as I got into Post Post and grew to love the music that they make, their name kept coming back to me. It’s almost like I’d made up a story about these two words, a story that helps me understand and position this band in a context that’s bigger than the usual “sounds-like,” “looks-like” fodder that most record reviews are built on. As crazy as it may sound, in this story, the words “Post Post” take on the weight of almost perfectly summing up the moment that I hope we’re moving into right now musically, culturally, and politically. In this story, “Post Post” is what it means to grow up out of post-modern nothingness, and to become something new, meaningful, and beautiful. “Post Post” is to move past the recent fad of declaring history to be over, of declaring that the forces, struggles, and positions that defined our old historical progression have magically evaporated or become too unfashionable to take seriously… that the contradictions that once burned bright and hot in our lives and in our social reality have been finally resolved. And artistically, it means a renewal of the premise that art can serve as a means of honest expression that takes sides, provokes, reveals truths, and creates strength through an acknowledgment of vulnerability.
To give context for this idea, once upon a time folks risked their lives and their material comfort fighting for justice, freedom, control over their work, and liberation along lines of race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class. Behind the scenes, the state brutally repressed those movements, killed a few folks, bought off a few more, and put most everybody else in jail. Commentators, corporations, and all the people in power took the moment of relative quiet to announce that the slate had been wiped clean, that the benevolent few at the top had voluntarily transcended the blood and bad manners of the past. The world had supposedly blossomed into a utopia of “post-racial,” “post-feminist” social harmony. Whatever narratives survived about the past struggles were cleaned up and turned into inspirational bedtime stories. The activists and revolutionaries left standing found themselves reduced to cartoon characters in the popular imagination… curiosities at best. Whatever problems remained in this new order could only be accounted for through the failings of individuals and a few constantly redefined “bad elements.” This mirage of social peace was sold to us at a heavy cost: we had the same problems, but now we had only ourselves to blame. The songwriter David Bazan hit the full depth of this deception when he sung the lines “the class war is over / and everyone wins” in a song that was ultimately about suicide. This is roughly how they drowned history.
As a suburban punk coming up in the late 1990s, I stood in the wake of this transformation… the heyday of the post-modern condition. The same systemic forces that were erasing memories of resistance and committing genocide in urban ghettos were producing alienation and psychological dysfunction on my relatively privileged side of the class lines. On a cultural level, this translated into the full-blown retreat of the broader alternative (aka “indie”) music scene from functioning as a real site of resistance. Though the scenes I was a part of were filled with kids like me—full of pain, social anxiety, and desperately looking for connection and a different life—the spaces I found myself in weren’t centered around liberation or even bringing people together to gain strength from shared experience. What pervaded the scene at that time was estrangement on the deepest possible levels, a feeling like we not only had to keep space between each other, but publicly we had to put space between ourselves and anything we might feel or believe. We played out the script that we were given: there was nothing wrong, there was nothing that needed to be taken seriously, no causes to be joined, no fights to be waged, this crushing alienation that drew many of us into the scene could be remedied through vapid socializing and cool points.
Irony, that great chicken-shit strategy for making statements the ultimately state nothing, became an essential cultural currency during this period. To admit anything, to even put something serious on your fucking t-shirt was to be vulnerable to ridicule or sideways glances. Except for small tribes of fanatics—anarcho-punks, some straightedge kids, the few emo kids that wanted more from their scene than self-indulgent melodrama, and the riot grrl true-believers that had survived its commodification—it felt like everybody was just hiding in view. Where the punk rock nation once had the symbolic and emotional character of being at total war with society, the 1990s indie rock scene it helped spawn often felt disconnected from a coherent grasp of even personal/emotional struggles. There were places in the scene, places as vast as they were utterly lifeless, where truth had been abandoned in favor of pure artifice. Too much of the art that was coming out of our community was sustained with a core of little more than dumb jokes and fashionable posturing. The outsiders had made outsiders of themselves. Our post-modern rock scene was devouring itself, and as I got older, it only got worse.
In 12-step programs, there’s a notion that change doesn’t come until you first recognize that your life has become unmanageable: that the shit you need, you ain’t getting; the shit you do to fulfill your needs, it ain’t working. On a cultural level, I’d like to think that we’re getting to this point: that those of us that take a conscious approach to engaging this generation’s music scene are beginning to recognize that in order to have art and community that meets our needs and our desires, we have to do things differently. Philly’s Post Post may not be an outwardly conscious band (they’re certainly not as outwardly political as this batshit review I’m writing), but in my view they are doing something differently than a lot of the indie rock bands out there… namely, the songs they write, the music they play, it all feels honest to me. The tracks on Meta Meta are emotionally rich, often heartbreaking, but without self-pity. As lyrics go, lines like “I wish I wasn’t this way” and “I don’t ever want to be sober” are about as straightforward as you can get in expressing what it feels like to hurt. Michelle Zauner’s delivery—belted out in impassioned crescendos—only serves to drive the point home. As beautifully lush as Post Post’s sound is, as gifted as these musicians are, and as much as their music conjures up similarities to well-marketed bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there’s a plainness and a directness here that stands apart from other easy-on-the-ears acts who are more comfortable hiding behind wit and intellect than they are getting up on stage and just communicating who they are and what they feel.
On Meta Meta, there’s a kind of fearlessness and a willingness to stand exposed that is rarely heard from a pop-inflected indie rock group. It’s fearlessness like this that makes me hopeful. The post-modern conditions of our reality taught many us to deride truths, deride the deeper narratives that frame our individual and social lives, and took away many of the ways we had to partially understand and communicate the validity of our experiences with each other. Today, we cannot go back: we cannot rebuild old struggles, rewrite old love songs. But we can evolve. We can find new ways to express meaning, new methods to come together and get what we need. The phrase “Post Post” describes our situation—historically we stand in the aftermath of an aftermath. And it also raises the obvious questions: What do we do now? Where do we go now? To me, the band Post Post implies an answer: we write new love songs, and we go forward.
Post Post’s demo ep, Meta Meta, came out Fall 2009 and is available for download (with donation) or purchase from Awkwardcore Records (http://www.awkwardcore.com). On August 7th, they will be having the release show for their newest ep, Residents, at Kungfu Necktie.

hey ARTNOISE faithful. this has nothing to do with punk rock but also EVERYTHING to do with punk rock and i wanted to help spread the word. – germ
Leatherface – live Brooklyn/Philly, March 5/7, 2010
Layers/Quake
My Mind
Leatherface



