Good books on Punk / DIY / etc?

Check out "Verschwende deine Jugend", edited by (although he calls himself the author, it's an oral history) Jürgen Teipel.

check out
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
by Legs McNeil
-- Rocco (mikey_big...) (webmail), February 13th, 2004 3:32 PM. (later) (link)

Made up entirely of interview quotes!

Nik Cohn--Rock from the Beginning
and
Richard Meltzer--Aesthetics of Rock

sort of define punk way ahead of Punk.

I'm asking because if you have a legitmate argument, I'll need to address it in my writing.

Which is - when you really think hard about it - an interesting way to approach a piece of recorded music.

Especially for the photo on page 143: the expression on Marco Perroni's face.

And the photos of the young Vivienne Westwood - she was beautiful once.

I missed the signing in Borders in London, because I had to work late (probably covering for some idle f*cker i suspect), and had to content myself with this account of how it went:

hey people...well i waited in line at hmv to get my punk book signed!
i've never participated in a signing ever before and was mildly
embarrassed. the only reason i forced myself was because howard
devoto and steve severin were there. as well as them i got helen
wellington lloyd, leee black childers, tony james and the authors and
someone whose name i can't make out. also paul cook and glen matlock
had pre-signed some of them so i got one of them. leee black childers
wrote 'i love paul cook' on the guy's in front of me. anyway it's a
lovely book. read loads of it last night. it's really great they
start off at the factory and go through the early 70's with a lovely
wee bit on jonathan richman, who i love. got to about half way
through the maclaren/westwood shops bit before bed. watched a bit of
the tinseltown repeat; still one of the most ludicrous programs ever
on tv.....also bought some singles: harlot by felix da housecat from
my favourite album of the year and with extended mix; black rebel
motorcycle club ep (i love people who release ep's) which is good;
the mis-teeq single which i haven't listened to but was heartily
recomended by our chelsea.....phew that's a long post!

Well, I'll certainly try, although I'm conscious that my attempts at explaining why it's impossible to complete this exercise will be by definition as futile as any attempt at the exercise itself!

Let me make it clear that I'm only talking about the UK scene - I don't know anything about the US scene other than ....ummmm.... what I've read in books!

Really the key thing to understand is that there wasn't really any one single unified belief in anything; there were as many different versions of what punk was about as there are / were punks (and exactly how many genuine "punks" you believe there were is a MAJOR issue all in itself, which is likely to alter any potential conclusions beyond recognition!)

As regards the main figures involved in the UK punk scene in the late '70's, I was lucky enough to speak to / interview many of them in the late '70's and early '80's (I still speak to a few of them occasionally) and I would say every single one of them had / has a different take on what it was all about; because it was about different, often entirely personal, things for each of them.

For most - but not all (so there are some major inherent sources of contradiction to begin with!) a major part of it was about freedom of self-expression and self realisation (and of course the signifiers and objectives of all those things are by definition personal!).

They also often had (or appeared to have) radically different, revised views just a few months later - so I'd suggest those views are likely to have been reviewed and revised beyond all recognition by the time any of them got to the stage of trying write any of it down!

Also, of course, for a huge number of them, it was all just (in every different sense possible) a fucking great joke!

One of the crucial defining feature of the "punk" attitude for many people was a sense of deliberate perversity and unpredictability: so they'd often deliberately exaggerate, fabricate, lie and contradict themselves and each other in interviews (particularly with the mainstream press!) either out of a sense mischief; to attract attention, interest and intrigue; to deflect attention; or for all sorts of other reasons all of their own.

For most people it had both a serious and a frivolous side - sometimes they'd be serious about it; sometimes they'd be flippant about it; sometimes they'd pretend to be serious about it when they weren't; sometimes they'd pretend to be playing the fool, when their motives for dong so were actually to make quite a profound point. Usually their motives were misunderstood; but since that was often the intention, they couldn't really complain too much.

Finally, there was a prevalent interest in confronting and confounding people's preconceptions: so when too many people started to get preconceptions about punk itself (i.e. they started to develop the sorts of theories and definitions that I think you're looking for) the rules would often be comprehensively revised.

Hence why the vast majority of the original punk bands who had actually sounded like the media stereotype of "punk rock" to begin with (a relatively small proportion even then, of course) still sounded recognisably like "punk rock" by 1980: they'd abandoned the sound and the image punk to those who understood it so little as to believe you could pin it down to a sound and an image and a set of rules.

Of course, it's entirely possible that I'm making all this up to mislead you.

re: Carducci. good luck getting past all this painful anti-pop bs. most certainly *not* the 'best book on punk ever' unless you are looking at it as part of a warped '80s first person idiot savant sociology text.

Also did anyone mention 'England's Dreaming" by Jon Savage...a good companion to Lipstick Traces.

"Punks read books?"

I know of someone (a punk) who's about 19-20 years old, and has only read one book - 'Flat Stanley'. He's proud of it.

Stewart - although superficially the US scene may look a bit more tribal, subdivided and genre-based, I've never got the impression most of it means a fuck at the end of the day. In any case, I don't see why this should be a barrier to discourse. The "deliberate perversity and unpredictability" is as much a unifying factor as in similarly intentioned art movements, I think - and no-one says theses about them are irrelevant.

Also - cos he's on sabbatical and can't pimp himself - Mark Sinker's "Concrete:So As To Self-Destruct", which was published in a book about punk rock but is online in vaster form somewhere.

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Joe Carducci's is probably the best book on punk ever. In my opinion. Because it sort of deals with, like, human beings playing instruments with each other, and the sounds that they produce.
Which is - when you really think hard about it - an interesting way to approach a piece of recorded music.

-- Broheems (electrifyingmoj...), February 14th, 2004. (later)

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I mean, god forbid the TRL crowd trouble themselves to train their ears thusly. But yeah.
-- Broheems (electrifyingmoj...), February 14th, 2004. (later)

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Everyone in England should be locked in solitary confinement with a copy!
-- dave q (scrape10...), February 14th, 2004. (later)

b-but its out of print!!! and I've read some Stewart home. he's very funny.

*AHEM*

http://web.pitas.com/tashpile/punk.html
-- J.D. (aubade8...), February 13th, 2004.