Cut off from a mass audience, a cultural fraction attempts to replace a treatment of fantasy in realist technique with an investigation of the real by critical technique. The project is to represent the inauthentic in an authentic fashion, to represent the authentic by a sequence of erasures and dazzle burns carved onto the surface of the inauthentic code, as if to recode it. The one feature which could differentiate this age-group from the stage before 1977 is disorder and noise, and is inseparable from the Punk movement. This distinctiveness of the outset was profoundly eroded over the years which followed. Punk, which was seen as a gateway to the future, actually made, within a couple of years, everyone so saturated and fed up with its methods that it became quite unlistenable.
Depletion follows excess.
The path taken out was partly regression to the stylistic poles variously represented by Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher, or Andrew Crozier. This beauty has also, written on its other face, the foreshadowing of Socialist plenty and of a culture of humanism. Punk shifted the grounds of song towards politics, in the belief that romance was a myth multiplied by the sociocultural organs as a way of selling more kitchen units. The palaeographic residue of the Punk phase is the absence or ironic masking of the lyric voice. This V-Effekt is the negation of the emotional bond between writer and reader, slowing down and attenuating the process of identification into an endless seeping tunnel, like the terrible Mincer in Tarkovsky's film Stalker .