[MUSIC] Five music links: Pete Shelley, Kate Bush, Joy Division, P.M. Dawn, East German punk

[rfmcdonald]

• Pete Shelley, of the Buzzcocks and a star in his own right, has died at 63, BBC reports. The 1981 Pete Shelley song "Homosapien" is one of my favourite overlooked post-punk songs. (The queer visibility is also nice.)


• The Economist makes a case for the historical importance of Kate Bush.


• Dangerous Minds asks a question, mostly rhetorically: Was Peter Sutcliffe a Joy Division fan? If nothing else, the overlap does show interesting things about patterns in northern England's cities.


• This Anil Dash essay at Medium about P.M. Dawn, a hip-hop musician so big in the 1990s and so overlooked now, provides a really useful perspective on this artist.


• Rolling Stone interviews Tim Mohr on the subject of the punk scene in East Germany, a cultural alternative that he argues helped undermine the dictatorship.