Post-punk and the way the genre has been mythologized by music writing has distorted our understanding of what it actually was.

The critical narrative of post-punk centers on a small number of canonical bands — Joy Division, Wire, Gang of Four, the Fall, Magazine — and treats them as the genre. This selection is defensible; these bands were genuinely important. But the selection also creates a false picture of post-punk as more unified and more critically intentional than it was.

Post-punk in real time was a mess — bands experimenting with half-formed ideas, records that didn't work next to records that were revolutionary, scenes that existed in tension with each other. The critical coherence of the canon is a retrospective construction, not a description of the genre as it existed.

Understanding this doesn't diminish the canonical records. But it makes the genre more interesting as a historical object, and it suggests that the current moment's messy experimentation is more connected to the original tradition than the mythologized version would suggest.