|
Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Contemporary popular music > Rock & pop > Indie
Blondie's Parallel Lines mixed punk, disco and radio-friendly FM
rock with nostalgic influences from 1960s pop and girl group hits.
This 1978 album kept one foot planted firmly in the past while
remaining quite forward-looking, an impulse that can be heard in
its electronic dance music hit "Heart of Glass." Bubblegum music
maven Mike Chapman produced Parallel Lines, which was the first
massive hit by a group from the CBGB punk underworld. By embracing
the diversity of New York City's varied music scenes, Blondie
embodied many of the tensions that played out at the time between
fans of disco, punk, pop and mainstream rock. Debbie Harry's campy
glamor and sassy snarl shook up the rock'n'roll boy's club during a
growing backlash against the women's and gay liberation movements,
which helped fuel the "disco sucks" battle cry in the late 1970s.
Despite disco's roots in a queer, black and Latino underground
scene that began in downtown New York, punk is usually celebrated
by critics and scholars as the quintessential subculture. This book
challenges the conventional wisdom that dismissed disco as fluffy
prefab schlock while also recuperating punk's unhip pop influences,
revealing how these two genres were more closely connected than
most people assume. Even Blondie's album title, Parallel Lines,
evokes the parallel development of punk and disco-along with their
eventual crossover into the mainstream.
 |
Jubilee
(Paperback)
Derek Jarman, James Whaley, Chris Goode
|
R390
Discovery Miles 3 900
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
Faith in the establishment collapsing everywhere. The far right on
the march. Culture wars and random violence - all decked out in
red, white and blue. But a spirit of anarchy hangs in the air, the
desire to burn it all down and start over. Derek Jarman's iconic
film captured punk at its giddy height: a riot of music, DIY
fashion, and every kind of sex - with a little pyromania thrown in.
Forty years on, this new stage adaptation of Jubilee remixes it for
the social and political turmoil of 2017. The cast of the original
production at the Royal Exchange Manchester was led by one of the
film's original cast members, legendary punk warrior Toyah Willcox.
Centred around a marauding girl gang on a killing spree and a
time-travelling Queen Elizabeth I, it's a story of what happens
when creativity and nihilism collide.
The Jesus and Mary Chain's swooning debut Psychocandy seared
through the underground and through the pop charts, shifting the
role of noise within pop music forever. Post-punk and
pro-confusion, Psychocandy became the sound of a generation poised
on the brink of revolution, establishing Creation Records as a
tastemaking entity in the process. The Scottish band's notorious
live performances were both punishingly loud and riot-spurring,
inevitably acting as socio-political commentary on tensions
emergent in mid-1980s Britain. Through caustic clangs and feedback
channeling the rage of the working-class who'd had enough,
Psychocandy gestures toward the perverse pleasure in having your
eardrums exploded and loudness as a politics within itself. Yet
Psychocandy's blackened candy heart center - calling out to
phantoms Candy and Honey with an unsettling charm - makes it a pop
album to the core, and not unlike the sugarcoated sounds the
Ronettes became famous for in the 1960s. The Jesus and Mary Chain
expertly carved out a place where depravity and sweetness entwined,
emerging from the isolating underground of suburban Scotland
grasping the distinct sound of a generation, apathetic and
uncertain. The irresistible Psychocandy emerged as a clairvoyant
account of struggle and sweetness that still causes us to grapple
with pop music's relation to ourselves.
Welsh post-punk band Young Marble Giants released one LP in 1980
and then, like their vanishing portraits on the album's cover,
disappeared. Even though Colossal Youth received positive reviews
and sold surprisingly well, Young Marble Giants quickly slid into
the margins of rock 'n' roll history-relegated to cult status among
post-punk and indie rock fans. Their lasting appeal owes itself to
the band's singular approach and response to punk rock. Instead of
employing overt political ideology and abrasive sounds to rebel
against the status quo, Young Marble Giants filled their songs with
restraint, ambiguity, and silence. The trio opened up their music
to new sounds and ideas that redefined punk's rules of rebellion.
Where did their rebellious ideas and impulses come from? By tracing
Colossal Youth's artistic origins from Ancient Greece to the
20th-century avant-garde, Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero uncover
the intricacies of Young Marble Giants' idiosyncratic take on music
in the post-punk age. Emerging from the gaps in between the notes
are new ways of hearing the history of punk, the political and
economic turbulence of the late 1970s, and the world that surrounds
us right now.
Global Punk examines the global phenomenon of DIY (do-it-yourself)
punk, arguing that it provides a powerful tool for political
resistance and personal self-empowerment. Drawing examples from
across the evolution of punk - from the streets of 1976 London to
the alleys of contemporary Jakarta - Global Punk is both
historically rich and global in scope. Looking beyond the music to
explore DIY punk as a lived experience, Global Punk examines the
ways in which punk contributes to the process of disalienation and
political engagement. The book critically examines the impact that
DIY punk has had on both individuals and communities, and offers
chapter-length investigations of two important aspects of DIY punk
culture: independent record labels and self-published zines.
Grounded in scholarly theories, but written in a highly accessible
style, Global Punk shows why DIY punk remains a vital cultural form
for hundreds of thousands of people across the globe today.
In Punk and Revolution Shane Greene radically uproots punk from its
iconic place in First World urban culture, Anglo popular music, and
the Euro-American avant-garde, situating it instead as a crucial
element in Peru's culture of subversive militancy and political
violence. Inspired by Jose Carlos Mariategui's Seven Interpretive
Essays on Peruvian Reality, Greene explores punk's political
aspirations and subcultural possibilities while complicating the
dominant narratives of the war between the Shining Path and the
Peruvian state. In these seven essays, Greene experiments with
style and content, bends the ethnographic genre, and juxtaposes the
textual and visual. He theorizes punk in Lima as a mode of
aesthetic and material underproduction, rants at canonical cultural
studies for its failure to acknowledge punk's potential for
generating revolutionary politics, and uncovers the intersections
of gender, ethnicity, class, and authenticity in the Lima punk
scene. Following the theoretical interventions of Debord, Benjamin,
and Bakhtin, Greene fundamentally redefines how we might think
about the creative contours of punk subculture and the politics of
anarchist praxis.
As noted in the description of the first volume of this book, every
punk book seems to be about the bands, about the 'faces', about the
music. Volume 2 of All The Young Punks brings you more stories from
the frontline, from the trenches. Stories from the foot soldiers
who made punk what it was without turning it into a career. Born
too late for the inner circle, but shining like a thousand comets
nonetheless - this is the story of the punks. "It felt like pure
energy - like a Sherbet Dip, when you have the first mouthful and
your face scrunches up" "Punk Rock had saved me and I dedicated
myself to it's glory" "there was music I could relate to for when I
was feeling sad, happy, funky or whatever, but nothing for when I
felt angry... until THIS." "Then there was the day a bunch of us
painted my mate's Woolworths acoustic guitar white then set light
to it in the local park while another mate filmed it with his dad's
Super 8 Camera as a 'Dada-ist Performance Piece'. Unfortunately we
didn't tell the bloke who's guitar it was, and when he found out we
had to go into hiding for a couple of weeks as he recruited a bunch
of local 'hard nuts' to 'sort us out'...." "Records with swearing
in " "It was like a story with no pre-ordained ending. I still get
a electrical twinge when a band hits that first note or chord, what
will happen next." "bum flaps fashioned from an old kilt of my
mum's, black bondage trousers with the baby reins I had worn as a
toddler attached behind, hastily marker penned anarchy armbands."
"I remember buying a white catering jacket (on which I pinned a
Crass badge with the 'broken gun' image in day-glo orange on white)
that I fancied looked a bit like the tuxedo that Sid wore in the My
Way video. Margate being a seaside resort, though, I was always
being asked if I'd got a job as an ice cream seller." "Its naive to
think that society could change, but to a certain extent, in the
early years and with the optimism of youth I believed it could
happen." "I still had long hair and was wearing a 'Tales From
Topographic Oceans' teeshirt. The guitarist of Slaughter came up to
me after the gig and said "Do you like Yes then?," I very nervously
mumbled "Er I suppose so," to which he replied "Me too mate,
fuckin' great band " "It came along just at the right time though
and gave me somewhere to belong, which was a lifesaver." "I'm still
in awe of the sex, style and subversion that the original Punk
Explosion thrust upon unsuspecting England and if I'm not out
smashing the system then I'm doing my bit to resist it's clammy
clutches." "He said, "This album can't be any good. It's got 14
tracks on it." I love that quote."
They had just a few hundred pounds, one band missing a drummer, a
sock drawer for an office, more dreams than sense and not a clue
between them how to run a record company. But when Alan Horne and
Edwyn Collins decided to start their own label from a shabby
Glasgow flat in 1979, nobody was going to stand in their way.
Postcard Records was the mad, makeshift and quite preposterous
result. Launching the careers of Orange Juice, Aztec Camera and
cult heroes Josef K, the self-styled 'Sound of Young Scotland'
stuck it to the London music biz and, quite by accident,
kickstarted the 1980s indie music revolution. Simon Goddard has
interviewed everyone involved in the making of the Postcard legend
to tell this thrilling rock'n'roll story of punk audacity,
knickerbocker glories, broken windscreens, raccoon-fur hats,
comedy, violence and creating something beautiful from nothing,
against all the odds.
 |
Lobotomy
(Paperback)
Dee Dee Ramone, Veronica Kofman; Foreword by Legs McNeil, Joan Jett
|
R531
Discovery Miles 5 310
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
Lobotomy is a lurid and unlikely temperance tract from the
underbelly of rock 'n' roll. Taking readers on a wild rollercoaster
ride from his crazy childhood in Berlin and Munich to his lonely
methadone-soaked stay at a cheap hotel in Earl's Court and newfound
peace on the straight and narrow, Dee Dee Ramone catapults readers
into the raw world of sex, addiction, and two-minute songs. It
isn't pretty. With the velocity of a Ramones song, Lobotomy rockets
from nights at CBGB's to the breakup of the Ramones' happy family
with an unrelenting backbeat of hate and squalor: his girlfriend
ODs; drug buddy Johnny Thunders steals his ode to heroin, "Chinese
Rock"; Sid Vicious shoots up using toilet water; and a
pistol-wielding Phil Spector holds the band hostage in Beverly
Hills. Hey! Ho! Let's go!
|
|