It is a strange experience to read “‘Total Trash’: Analysis and Post-Punk Music” at a distance after all these years. When I originally wrote this article, I was a wide-eyed master’s student at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who had just discovered popular music studies through an incredible graduate seminar with the composer Peter Winkler, one of the first scholars to introduce issues of music theory and analysis into IASPM. I was determined to write about music that I found compelling and felt was under-represented in the popular music studies literature that I had encountered up to that point. Post-punk fit the bill perfectly. As a music historian, I also wanted to explore the context surrounding the genre through its various representations and explanations in the popular music press, an approach to which I am still committed.
I am grateful to Elizabeth Lindau for her thoughtful...
University of California Press