Post-punk and the way it handles class in its imagery and lyrics is one of the things that distinguishes it from other rock traditions.

Blues-based rock has its own relationship to working-class experience, but it's a different relationship than post-punk's. The blues tradition mythologizes working-class suffering as a source of authentic artistic experience. Post-punk is more analytical and more critical — it doesn't romanticize the working-class condition so much as describe it with a level of clarity that's uncomfortable.

The Gang of Four approach is probably the most explicit: lyrics that analyze the economic and social structures that produce the experiences being described. This is Brechtian in a specific way — the music is creating a critical distance rather than an empathic immersion. You're not supposed to simply feel the experience; you're supposed to understand it.

This critical distance is part of what distinguishes post-punk lyricism from folk or blues lyricism. It's making a different kind of argument about what music should do.