[Wise, David] The End of Music. Glasgow: GPP, n.d. [1978?]. 36p.; ill.; 18 x 26 cm.; white wrappers with text in pink.

Contents:  “The Revolution of Everyday Alienation”; “White Dopes on Punk”; “Rebel Music and State Morality”; and “Music All Day Helps You…Work & Play”

Written by David Wise (formerly of King Mob), this is an important pamphlet that lays out the problematic relationship between Punk music and Situationist ideas. “Part of the genesis of punk goes back 10 years to the English section of the Situationists and the subsequent King Mob group, a loose affiliation (hardly a group) of disparate though confused revolutionary individuals in England in 1968”

Initially published in a typescript format, “this text was written around 1978 and came to be circulated in the U.K. by an informal network of revolutionaries who used the text as a focus for discussion in order critically to uncover the ‘social glue’ that maintains capitalist society.” (p. 34).

This “pirate” reprint is interesting in that, laid-in within the facsimile reproduction of the original typescript is a smaller-sized pamphlet that reproduces part of the content with a critical assessment by the authors of this edition: “We have indicated our differences with the author’s formulations at this time, in terms of an attachment to Marxist categories. While those passages dealing with the evolution of the English ‘pro-Situ’ scene are, in our opinion(s), among the most interesting in the text, we don’t view the pamphlet as accounting fully for the development of Punk or Reggae. Like Council Communism, ‘Situationism’ is the creation of a particular era in social struggle, and nostalgia bordering on mystification can only act as a brake on the re-vision of new revolutionary perspectives” (p.34).

“The End of Music” was later reprinted as part of Stewart Home’s “What is Situationism” (AK Press, 1990). It was also reprinted as part of David Wise’s “King Mob: a Critical Hidden History” (Bread and Circuses Publishing, 2014). The full text can be found on David and Stuart Wise’s website at http://www.revoltagainstplenty.com/index.php/recent/216-the-original-copy-of-the-end-of-music.html

For Stewart Home’s (very critical) assessment of the pamphlet, see https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ass/punk.htm

Ford 318. We locate 4 OCLC copies (Leeds, National Art Library, University of London Research Services, IISG), none of which of this particular edition.