Courtney Love has never been less than notorious. Her intelligence, ambition and appetite for confrontation has made her a target in a music industry still dominated by men. As Kurt Cobain's wife she was derided as an opportunistic groupie; as his widow she is pitied, and scorned, as the madwoman in rock's attic. Yet Hole's second album, "Live Through This," awoke a feminist consciousness in a generation of teenage girls."Live Through This" arrived in 1994, at a tumultuous point in the history of American music. Three years earlier, Nirvana's "Nevermind "had broken open the punk underground, and the first issue of a zine called Riot Grrrl had been published. Hole were of this context and yet outside of it: too famous for the strict punk ethics of riot-grrrl, too explicitly feminist to be the world's biggest rock band. And then Kurt Cobain shot himself, four days before the album's scheduled release."Live Through This" is an album about girlhood and motherhood; desire and disgust; self-destruction and survival. There have been few rock albums before or since so intimately concerned with female experience. The album is a key document of third-wave feminism, but the conditions that produced its particular aesthetic have disappeared. So where did the energy of that feminism go? And why is Courtney Love's achievement as a songwriter and musician still not taken seriously, nearly twenty years on?

A pioneering "horror-punk" band, the Misfits are legends in their own time. This discography tells the story of the band in all of its incarnations through all of their recorded output-both official and unauthorized releases. Discographies are provided for both present and former members' solo projects and bands, along with a wealth of rare record sleeves, photos and vintage posters documenting the evolution of the band and the brand.

Although nobody realised it at the time, the historic importance of the MC5 is vast. Often considered a 'post-punk' band, their influence reaches far and wide, with everyone from Green Day, The White Stripes, Motorhead, Ramones, Rage Against The Machine and Bad Brains citing them. Fuelled by the radical politics of the White Panther party, the MC5 preached revolution and were often a target for the authorities. Having released three albums between 1969 and 1971, two of the band passed away and guitarist Wayne Kramer spent time behind bars for drug-related offences. Thirty years of low-key solo projects followed, before the band reunited in the new Millennium for a one-off show that turned into a full-on reunion. It details not only the seismic impact that they've had on music, but also the social climate in which they evolved.

As a performer, songwriter and actor, Will Oldham has carved a singular path through the worlds of indie folk and cinema. Now the critically acclaimed, enigmatic artist presents his life's work: the lyrics to more than two hundred songs spanning the 1980s to the present, each with annotations that impart new meaning to his music. Oldham's aphoristic meditations-on death, patience and turning carelessness into a virtue-are, like his lyrics, profound, earthy and often funny. They reveal flashes of Oldham's philosophy, the sources and circumstances that inspired his lyrics and the literary ambition of his songwriting. Separated from their aural form, Oldham's lyrics become a new kind of poetry-candid, awkward and wise-with influences as diverse as Rabindranath Tagore and The Mekons. A book that will delight his longtime fans and inspire young songwriters, Songs of Love and Horror reveals an artist who has captured extraordinary poetry in music despite being "a stranger among my own language".

Finally in paperback, the story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan Eighties - when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations and other subversives re-energised American rock with punk rock's d-I-y credo and created music that was deeply personal, often brilliant, always challenging and immensely influential. OUR BAND COULD BE YOUR LIFE is a sweeping chronicle of music, politics, drugs, fear, loathing and faith that is already being recognized as an indie rock classic in its own right.

Among the legendary bands featured are: Black Flag, the Minutement, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Husker Du, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr., Fugazi, Mudhoney and Beat Happening.

This original collection of insight, analysis and conversation charts the course of punk from its underground origins, when it was an un-formed and utterly alluring near-secret, through its rapid development. Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night takes in sex, style, politics and philosophy, filtered through punk experience, while believing in the ruins of memory, to explore a past whose essence is always elusive.

Despite releasing records only on independent labels and receiving virtually no radio play, Dead Kennedys routinely top both critic and fan polls as the greatest punk band of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Their sound was inventive and tetchy, and front man Jello Biafra's lyrics were incisive and often scathing. This chronicle--the first in-depth book written about Dead Kennedys--uses dozens of firsthand interviews, photos, and original artwork to offer a new perspective on a group that was mired in controversy almost from its inception. It examines and applauds the band's key role in transforming punk rhetoric, both polemical and musical, into something genuinely threatening and enormously funny. Author Alex Ogg puts the local and global trajectory of punk into context and, while not flinching from the wildly differing takes the individual band members have on the evolution of the band, attempts to be celebratory--if not uncritical.

Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making. In this book, Rachel Garfield breaks new ground in exploring the rebellious, feminist punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s, tracing its roots and its legacies. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick, Sandra Lahire, Betzy Bromberg, Ruth Novaczek, Sadie Benning, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child and Anne Robinson offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new "punk audio visual aesthetic". A vital aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audio visual culture, Garfield argues, can be traced back to the techniques and forms of these feminist pioneers, who like their musical contemporaries worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless influenced the emergent digital audio visual culture of the 1990s and 2000s.

"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Karl Marx might have been thinking of punk rock when he wrote these words in 1847, but he overlooked the possibility that new forms of solidity and holiness could spring into existence overnight. Punk rock was a celebration of nastiness, chaos, and defiance of convention, which quickly transcended itself and developed its own orthodoxies, shibboleths, heresies, and sectarian wars. Is punk still alive today? What has it left us with? Does punk make any artistic sense? Is punk inherently anarchist, sexist, neo-Nazi, Christian, or-perish the thought-Marxist? When all's said and done, does punk simply suck? These obvious questions only scratch the surface of punk's philosophical ramifications, explored in depth in this unprecedented and thoroughly nauseating volume. Thirty-two professional thinkers-for-a-living and students of rock turn their x-ray eyes on this exciting and frequently disgusting topic, and penetrate to punk's essence, or perhaps they end up demonstrating that it has no essence. You decide. Among the nail-biting questions addressed in this book: Can punks both reject conformity to ideals and complain that poseurs fail to confirm to the ideals of punk? How and why can social protest take the form of arousing revulsion by displaying bodily functions and bodily abuse? Can punk ethics be reconciled with those philosophical traditions which claim that we should strive to become the best version of ourselves? How close is the message of Jesus of Nazareth to the message of punk? Is punk essentially the cry of cis, white, misogynist youth culture, or is there a more wholesome appeal to irrepressibly healthy tendencies like necrophilia, coprophilia, and sadomasochism? In its rejection of the traditional aesthetic of order and complexity, did punk point the way to "aesthetic anarchy," based on simplicity and chaos? By becoming commercially successful, did punk fail by its very success? Is punk what Freddie Nietzsche was getting at in The Birth of Tragedy, when he called for Dionysian art, which venerates the raw, instinctual, and libidinous aspects of life?

Comics and the punk movement are powerfully and inextricably linked. Each has a do-it-yourself ethos and a rebellious spirit to defy authority that complements the other. Though this link seems obvious, this collection of insightful and provocative works provides for first time a thorough analysis of the intersections between comics and punk. It also seeks to expand the discussion beyond the standard US and UK punk scenes to include the influence punk has had on comics produced in other countries, such as Spain and Turkey. Exhaustively researched, this collection is an invaluable work for scholars and fans of comics and punk.

The Damned are forever in the history books as the first UK punk band to get an album out. Damned Damned Damned was a flamethrower of a record, led by the incendiary violence of "New Rose" (first UK punk single as well) and "Neat Neat Neat," two shocking punk anthems that defined the golden era of the new wave more purely pogo-mad than anything outta The Clash or the Sex Pistols. And the mayhem never let up, with the band already breaking up and reforming (another first!) by 1979 for one of the greatest punk albums of all time, Machine Gun Etiquette (by the way, The Damned were also the first UK punk band to tour America). More punch-ups and gratuitous vandalism ensued as the band expanded its palette through the years. Popoff has wanted to write Lively Arts: The Damned Deconstructed for decades, and now that it's finished, he's been all over video and radio calling it his favourite and best book he's ever done. For in it, Popoff got to analyse monastically - headphones and repeat button at the ready - every damned Damned song across all the albums and every EP and single. This herculean task represented a joy of an exercise from a penmanship point of view, but it was most satisfying in a proselytizing sense - Martin wants everybody joining him in poring over The Damned catalogue in minute detail. Let this long-suffering band of scrapping, scratching cats in a sack know how important and beloved they are before they're all dead!

'No Feelings', 'No Fun', 'No Future'. The years 1976-84 saw punk emerge and evolve as a fashion, a musical form, an attitude and an aesthetic. Against a backdrop of social fragmentation, violence, high unemployment and socio-economic change, punk rejuvenated and re-energised British youth culture, inserting marginal voices and political ideas into pop. Fanzines and independent labels flourished; an emphasis on doing it yourself enabled provincial scenes to form beyond London's media glare. This was the period of Rock Against Racism and benefit gigs for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the striking miners. Matthew Worley charts the full spectrum of punk's cultural development from the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks and Slits through the post-punk of Joy Division, the industrial culture of Throbbing Gristle and onto the 1980s diaspora of anarcho-punk, Oi! and goth. He recaptures punk's anarchic force as a medium through which the frustrated and the disaffected could reject, revolt and re-invent.

Described, variously, as the perfect fusion of poetry and garage band rock and roll (the original concept was "rock and Rimbaud"), Horses belongs as much to the world of literary and cultural criticism as it does to the realm of musicology. Thus, while due attention will be given to the record's origins in the nascent New York punk scene, the book's core will be a detailed analysis of Patti Smith's lyrics - the book will approach Horses as a work of performance poetry more than anything else.The book's centrepiece will be a track-by-track breakdown of the original album sequence, together with detailed discussion of outtakes and early recordings. There will be sections that focus on a specific lyrical preoccupation: love, sex, gender, death, dreams, God, metamorphosis, intoxication, apocalypse and transcendence. Philip Shaw demonstrates how Horses transformed the possibilities of both poetry and rock music; how it achieved nothing less than a complete and systematic derangement of the senses.

We remember the 1980s as the era of Ronald Reagan, a conservative decade populated by preppies and yuppies dancing to a soundtrack of electronic synth pop music (the "MTV generation"). But the decade also produced some of the most creative works of punk rock - not just the music of bands like the Minutemen and the Dead Kennedys, but also visual arts, literature, poetry, and film. Kevin Mattson documents what Kurt Cobain once called a "punk rock world." He shows just how widespread the movement became, and how democratic (not at all New York-centric), due to its commitment to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethics. Mattson puts this movement into a wider context, telling about a culture war that punks opened up against the sitting president. Reagan's talk about end days and nuclear warfare made kids panic; his tax cuts for the rich and simultaneous slashing of school lunch program funding made punks seethe at his meanness. The anger went deep, since punks saw Reagan as the country's entertainer-in-chief - his career (from radio to Hollywood and television) synched to the very world punks rejected. Through deep archival research, Mattson reignites the heated debates that punk's opposition generated - about everything from "straight edge" ethics to anarchism to the art of dissent. By reconstructing the world of punk, Mattson shows that it was more than just a style of purple hair and torn jeans. And in so doing, he reminds readers of its importance and its challenge to simplistic assumptions about the 1980s as a one-dimensional, conservative epoch.

The German edition of the AK Press book "Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise!," Additions include a preface by Joachim of OX fanzine.

This is the first book to give an inside look at the thriving subculture as an important present day movement and a way of life. Covering such topics as skinheads, fanzines, anarchism, homosexuality, and, of course, punk rock! Includes over 70 photos and graphics.

Joy Division's career has often been shrouded by myths. But the truth is surprisingly simple: over a period of several months, Joy Division transformed themselves from run-of-the-mill punk wannabes into the creators of one of the most atmospheric, disturbing, and influential debut albums ever recorded. Chris Ott carefully picks apart fact from fiction to show how Unknown Pleasures came into being, and how it still resonates so strongly today.
EXCERPT
The urgent, alien thwack of Stephen Morris' processed snare drum as it bounced from the left to right channel was so arresting in 1979, one could have listened to that opening bar for hours trying to figure how on earth someone made such sounds. Like John Bonham's ludicrous, mansion-backed stomp at the start of "When The Levee Breaks"-only far less expensive-the crisp, trebly snare sound with which Martin Hannett would make his career announced Unknown Pleasures as a finessed, foreboding masterpiece. Peter Hook's compressed bass rides up front as "Disorder" comes together, but it's not until the hugely reverbed, minor note guitar line crashes through that you can understand the need for such a muted, analog treatment to Hook's line. Layering a few tracks together to create a six-string shriek, Hannett's equalization cuts the brunt of Sumner's fuller live sound down to an echoing squeal, revealing a desperation born of longing rather than rage. This is the way, step inside.

Celebrating a wide range of punk design in vinyl cover art, posters, flyers, fanzines, and other ephemera, The Art of Punk highlights the movement primarily within graphic design and print, while also considering its impact on wider popular culture. Punk was based on immediacy-an often-inspired amateurism and underground, close-knit communities that burned brightly but were not intended to extend beyond the gig, the event, the scene, the moment. Punk songs by such legendary bands as the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Damned, the New York Dolls, the Germs, and the Clash tended to be short, fast, and aggressive, and the oft-repeated credo "If it can't be said in three minutes, it's not worth saying" was adopted as standard practice, extending in turn to an entire ethos for the whole subculture. The book is arranged chronologically, and by genre, and features more than 900 visual examples both by uncredited artists and internationally renowned designers and design groups, alongside interviews with, and commentary by, many of the artists concerned.

A ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A joy to read' Guardian 'I loved this book' Irvine Welsh 'What a story! I adored it' Lauren Laverne As a DJ and broadcaster on radio, tv and the live music scene, Annie has been an invigorating and necessarily disruptive force. She walked in the door at Radio One in 1970 as its first female broadcaster. Fifty years later she continues to be a DJ and tastemaker who commands the respect of artists, listeners and peers across the world. Hey Hi Hello tells the story of those early days at Radio One, the Ground Zero moment of punk and the arrival of acid house and the Second Summer of Love in the late 80s. Funny, warm and candid to a fault, including encounters with Bob Marley, Marc Bolan, The Beatles and interviews with Little Simz and Billie Eilish, this is a portrait of an artist without whom the past fifty years of British culture would have looked very different indeed.

From activist, Pussy Riot member and freedom fighter Maria Alyokhina, a raw, hallucinatory, passionate account of her arrest, trial and imprisonment in Siberian jail for standing up for what she believed in. 'One of the most brilliant and inspiring things I've read in years. Couldn't put it down. This book is freedom' Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick 'A women's prison memoir like no other! One tough cookie!' @MargaretAtwood 'Once you begin reading, you are completely disarmed, unable to put it down until the last page' Marina Abramovic People who believe in freedom and democracy think it will exist forever. That is a mistake. What happened in Russia - what happened to me - could happen anywhere. When I was jailed for political protest, I learned that prison doesn't just teach you to follow the rules. It teaches you to think that you can never break them. It's inevitable that the prison gates will open at some point. But this doesn't mean that you leave the 'prisoner' category and go straight into the category of 'the free'. Freedom does not exist unless you fight for it every day. This is the story about how I made a choice.

SOON TO BE A LIMITED SERIES DIRECTED BY DANNY BOYLE _____________________ Foreword by Chrissie Hynde Without the Sex Pistols there would be no punk rock, and without Steve Jones there would be no Sex Pistols. It was Steve who formed Kutie Jones and his Sex Pistols, the band that eventually went on to become the Sex Pistols, with his schoolmate Paul Cook and who was its original leader. As the world celebrates the 40th anniversary of Punk - the influence and cultural significance of which is felt in music, fashion and the visual arts to this day - Steve tells his story for the very first time. Rising from the streets of Hammersmith, Steve Jones was once a lonely, neglected boy living off his wits and petty thievery. Given purpose by the glam art rock of David Bowie and Roxy Music, he became one of the first generation of punks taken under the wings of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. For the very first time Steve describes the neglect and abuse he suffered at the hands of his stepfather, and how his interest in music and fashion saved him from a potential life of crime. From the Kings Road of the early seventies, through the years of the Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and the recording of Never Mind the Bollocks (ranked number 41 in Rolling Stone magazine's Best Albums of All Time), to his self-imposed exile in New York and Los Angeles where he battled with alcohol, heroin and sex addiction - caught in a cycle of rehab and relapse - Lonely Boy, written with music journalist and author Ben Thompson, is the story of an unlikely guitar hero who, with the Sex Pistols, changed history.

'Brilliant biography of an undersung late-blooming treasure . . . subtly profound as well as wickedly entertaining, this biography does its subject scintillating justice' Mojo Cruel to Be Kind is the definitive account of Nick Lowe's uncompromising life as a songwriter and entertainer, from his days at Stiff Records, to becoming the driving force behind Rockpile, to the 1979 smash hit 'Cruel To Be Kind'. Nick's original compositions have been recorded by the best in the business, from enfant terrible of the New-Wave, Elvis Costello, to 'The Godfather of Rhythm and Soul', Solomon Burke; from household names, including Engelbert Humperdink, Diana Ross, and Johnny Cash, to legendary vocalists such as Curtis Stigers, Tom Petty, and Rod Stewart. His reputation as one of the most influential musicians to emerge from that most formative period for pop and rock music is cast in stone. He will forever be the man they call the 'Jesus of Cool'. 'Nick's poise as a singer, his maturity, and his use of tone is beautiful. I can't believe it's this guy I've been watching since I was a teenager' Elvis Costello, 2013 'The master of subversive pop' Nick Kent, NME, 1977 'Nick Lowe is such a f*cking good songwriter! Am I allowed to say that?' Curtis Stigers, 2016