What’s on your bookshelf next to your copy of PUNK UNDER THE SUN? Here are several suggestions from Chris, ranging from fascinating to fun. This is the first in an occasional series.

Thirsty and Miserable: A Critical Analysis of the Music of Black Flag by Tim Murr
54 pages, 2019, St Rooster Books (not sure where located)
This slim-but-impactful collection of strong opinions about Black Flag albums/cassettes and even their music in movies starts out with a suitably blunt personal declaration by this big Flag fan: “I hate the notion of ‘it used to be better,’ ‘it was better when I was a kid.’ You know what? No it wasn’t.” The angry edge throughout is probably appropriate for the subject, and ten times better and more appreciated than a deconstruction of Flag music by academics. Some things just shouldn’t be broken down into their parts when the whole is so powerful. For a hot take, this book is thorough. The author also wrote “Kids of the Black Hole: A Punksploitation Anthology,” not reviewed here.

 

Post-Punk Then and Now, edited by Gavin Butt, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher
304 pages, 2016, Repeater Books, London, UK
Speaking of academics…. Yeah, I know what I just said but these three are surprisingly dialed in to true punk concepts. The content is a transcription of a series of lectures presented at the University of London in 2014. Each chapter/lecture covers a different idea/band/art sense/scene/political stance in decently deep detail. A very satisfying read that offers surprising insights, especially so long after punk and post-punk’s heyday, such as:

“Punk is ultimately just a stripped-down form of rock music, but the shift into post-punk didn’t involve a simple setting aside of those rules, it entailed a constant renegotiation.” (MF)

“Post-punk was an amateurist and autodidactic project that created a context for a belief in your own incapacity rather than training or skill. What emerges is a drive towards self-authorisation in which people make up rules as they go.” (KE)

“The paradoxical routinisation of the exceptional in the post-punk period seems impossible to imagine now.” (MF)

And, on our digital age: “A smartphone fuels an auto-affection that depletes the discontent which fuels a movement like Riot grrrl….”

If you have more than a passing interest in the following bands/performers/topics then check out this paperback, there is lots in here to fire up your mind: post-punk as a political idea, New York No Wave music, art schools as breeding grounds for punk bands, punk in Poland, the Jam, Crass, the evils of Reaganism and Thatcherism, meaning-filled locations replaced by generic neighborhoods, Scritti Politti, punk in Brazil, an illustrated history of the punk zine Vague.

 

Glory Guitars: Memoir of a ’90s Teenage Punk Rock Grrrl by Gogo Germaine
284 pages, 2022, University of Hell Press, Portland, OR
OK, so this is the memoir of a rocker girl post-’80s, but the ’80s set up all that was to come, right? In face the book is thick with mentions of music by ’80s bands in the section breaks throughout, including the Cramps, the Descendents, the Bags, Joy Division, Dead Boys etc. etc. etc. Ms. Germaine was inspired by punk and post-punk music/attitude, it seems, to commit all kinds of adolescent debaucheries, and good for her, seems as if she had a blast. She also seems to have a great sense of humor, and a talent for remembering what it was like, and writing. The book seems well edited too, so check out this publisher’s other titles. But back to Gogo: She had me nodding in agreement at numerous points throughout. Again, a few examples of her witty writing to illustrate how right-on about feeling free she can be:

“We just loved being old men together. Listening to Led Zeppelin and the Moody Blues on her [a friend’s] tinny car stereo drinking PBR like muscle-shirt dads. Sunlight and breeze catching a lock or her golden hair as we drank in a dirt parking lot in folding chairs. We wanted to transcend our roles. We wanted to do what we wanted to do. We wanted to like what we wanted to like, no matter how unlikeable it was.”

“While I’m glad for the health of today’s youth, I almost feel bad they won’t ever experience the dirtbag tang of indoor smoking.”

“Back in the time when there were no text messages, showing up unannounced at a party was the closest thing to feeling famous.”

“Sometimes, my tendency to go with the flow can get me in unsavory situations. On the flip side, this quality exposes me to beautifully dark places, places that people with more agency might never experience.”

“I considered being a nun. A chain-smoking, foul-mouthed teenage nun who didn’t believe in God. Is that allowed?”

There are lots more good moments and good writing. Unsavory situations too, and some of those are too bad, but this girl survived despite the consequences of her freedom, as we all have. Recommended. BTW, the action unfolds mostly in Fort Collins, Colorado, just one of the dozens and dozens of smaller-city scenes, like Miami’s, that sustained the punk-rock spirit years after.

 

Immersion Into Noise by Joseph Nechvatal
270 pages, 2011, Open Humanities Press, London, UK
This is one of several intense music-theory books that influenced the writing in PUNK UNDER THE SUN in subtle ways, particularly the writing of chapter 7, “Beyond the Bands.” Nechvatal appears in chapter 7 in the “Art, Miami Style” section as one of the NY-based artists who participated in the infamous “Miami>New York Exchange Show” that was on view in Miami at Artifacts Art Salon on South Beach in 1988. He’s a Downtown NYC historical figure–read more in chapter 7 or online.

This book will blow you away with its heaviness if you let it. Go for it! The writing is super dense, with lots of references that might go over your head, but that’s OK, it’s worth it. If you went to even a two-year college you should be able get enough out of this. Skim over the densest stuff if you need to, I did. But there are so many sentences that boggle the mind (in a good way), like this one on the final page:

“Noise has no inherent value. It can be awful for you, or grand. It can be grand when it reminds us of the marvellous: that pre-eminent primal energy that surrounds and forms us, both beneath and beyond us–and when it de-metaphors our techno-mechanical society. But mostly, it is gradational and, as such, a conceptual tool for the judicious revolutionary….”

Noise. Noise has EVERYTHING to do with not only punk music but punk attitude, punk thinking, punk being. Noise is a way of interacting with, working through, and finally accepting the world, in a nonlinear way of course. Isn’t that what you liked about punk music, the noise element? For me the answer is YES. If for you too then maybe take this book with you on a vacation and lose yourself in its verbal dazzling depths.