At the dawn of the 1990s, as the United States celebrated its victory in the Cold War and sole superpower status by waging war on Iraq and proclaiming democratic capitalism as the best possible society, the 1990s underground punk renaissance transformed the punk scene into a site of radical opposition to American empire. Nazi skinheads were ejected from the punk scene; apathetic attitudes were challenged; women, Latino, and LGBTQ participants asserted their identities and perspectives within punk; the scene debated the virtues of maintaining DIY purity versus venturing into the musical mainstream; and punks participated in protest movements from animal rights to stopping the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal to shutting down the 1999 WTO meeting. Punk lyrics offered strident critiques of American empire, from its exploitation of the Third World to its warped social relations. Numerous subgenres of punk proliferated to deliver this critique, such as the blazing hardcore punk of bands like Los Crudos, propagandistic crust-punk/dis-core, grindcore and power violence with tempos over 800 beats per minute, and So-Cal punk with its combination of melody and hardcore. Musical analysis of each of these styles and the expressive efficacy of numerous bands reveals that punk is not merely simplistic three-chord rock music, but a genre that is constantly revolutionizing itself in which nuances of guitar riffs, vocal timbres, drum beats, and song structures are deeply meaningful to its audience, as corroborated by the robust discourse in punk zines.

Winner of the 2010 Non-Fiction National Book Award Patti Smith's definitive memoir: an evocative, honest and moving coming-of-age story of her extraordinary relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe 'Sharp, elegiac and finely crafted' Sunday Times 'Terrifically evocative ... The most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late '60s and '70s that any alumnus has committed to print' New York Times 'Render, harrowing, often hilarious' Vogue In 1967, a chance meeting between two young people led to a romance and a lifelong friendship that would carry each to international success never dreamed of. The backdrop is Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, Scribner's Bookstore, Coney Island, Warhol's Factory and the whole city resplendent. Among their friends, literary lights, musicians and artists such as Harry Smith, Bobby Neuwirth, Allen Ginsberg, Sandy Daley, Sam Shepherd, William Burroughs, etc. It was a heightened time politically and culturally; the art and music worlds exploding and colliding. In the midst of all this two kids made a pact to always care for one another. Scrappy, romantic, committed to making art, they prodded and provided each other with faith and confidence during the hungry years--the days of cous-cous and lettuce soup. Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. Beautifully written, this is a profound portrait of two young artists, often hungry, sated only by art and experience. And an unforgettable portrait of New York, her rich and poor, hustlers and hellions, those who made it and those whose memory lingers near.

In the 1980s, the charts overflowed with what felt to many like the most boring pop music ever made--and the underground exploded. The postpunk scene was a diverse collection of bands brought together by independent releases and aided by reportage in fanzines and airplay by John Peel. This is the first time this era of music has been analyzed in such depth, exploring the loose confederation of noisenik outfits including Three Johns, the Membranes, the Ex, Wedding Present, A Witness, Bogshed, and Big Flame.

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.

`I must find my own complicated junkie to have violent sex with. In 1994, nothing seemed like a better idea, save being able to write about it later.' Michelle Tea is our exuberant, witty guide to the hard times and wild creativity of queer life in America. Along the way she reclaims SCUM Manifesto author Valerie Solanas as an absurdist, remembers the lives and deaths of the lesbian motorbike gang HAGS, and listens to activists at a trans protest camp. This kaleidoscope of love and adventure also makes room for a defence of pigeons and a tale of teenage goths hustling for tips at an ice creamery in a `grimy, busted city called Chelsea'. Unsparing but unwaveringly kind, Michelle Tea reveals herself and others in unexpected and heartbreaking ways. Against Memoir is the winner of the 2019 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Best known as writer of fiction and memoir, this is the first time Tea's journalism has been collected. Delivered with her signature candour and dark humour, Against Memoir solidifies her place as one of the leading queer writers of our time.

For centuries many have pondered the prospect of an afterlife and feared what came to be known as 'hell'. In the near future, we map the elusive 'dark matter' around us, only to find out that it is hell itself, and it is very real... As the satanic President Razour attempts to bring forward Armageddon to prevent humanity repenting, the fate of us all rests in the hands of Cleric20, a hedonistic loner with a chequered past, and his robot sidekick, GiX. An action-packed literary shock to the senses that mixes flights of comic fantasy with bouts of brutal violence. Mankind's only hope seems to be having a very bad day. Can Cleric20 halt Razour's devilish plans after an experimental bioweapon deployed to kill him accidentally gives him superpowers? Has the Devil inadvertently created a hero who could actually stop him? See why this was voted as one of Den of Geek UK's Top Books of 2019. Little can prepare you for this spiritually-charged, cyber-noir thrill ride.

As one of the people who defined punk's protest art in the 1970s and 1980s, Gee Vaucher (b. 1945) deserves to be much better-known. She produced confrontational album covers for the legendary anarchist band Crass and later went on to do the same for Northern indie legends the Charlatans, among others. More recently, her work was recognised the day after Donald Trump's 2016 election victory, when the front page of the Daily Mirror ran her 1989 painting Oh America, which shows the Statue of Liberty, head in hands. This is the first book to critically assess an extensive range of Vaucher's work. It examines her unique position connecting avant-garde art movements, counterculture, punk and even contemporary street art. While Vaucher rejects all 'isms', her work offers a unique take on the history of feminist art. -- .

Provincial punk iconoclasts turned pan-global maverick legends of music and art, the Mekons walk tall into their second quarter century - still impossible to pigeonhole, still kicking against the pricks, still burrowing feverishly beneath the soft white belly of the rock beast. Hello Cruel World contains the lyrics to 125 Mekons songs, many of them illustrated by the band in stunning fashion. Also included are numerous handwritten drafts of songs (often very different from the final versions) and a portfolio of candid pictures of the band on the road by photographer Anne L. Lehman. Gleeful and despairing, withering and poetic, sexy and poignant, rollicking and grim, the Mekons' expressive lyrics and art offer rich insights into the band's collective creative alchemy, fierce humor, and caustic world view.

With his critically acclaimed "Rip It Up and Start Again," renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds applied a unique understanding to an entire generation of musicians working in the wake of punk rock. Spawning artists as singular as Talking Heads, Joy Division, The Specials, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gang of Four, and Devo, postpunk achieved new relevance in the first decade of the twenty-first century through its profound influence on bands such as Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, and Vampire Weekend. With "Totally Wired" the conversation continues. The book features thirty-two interviews with postpunk's most innovative personalities--such as Ari Up, Jah Wobble, David Byrne, and Lydia Lunch--alongside an "overview" section of further reflections from Reynolds on postpunk's key icons and crucial scenes. Included among them are John Lydon and PIL, Ian Curtis and Joy Division, and art-school conceptualists and proto-postpunkers Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren. Reynolds follows these exceptional, often eccentric characters from their beginnings through the highs and lows of postpunk's heyday. Crackling with argument and anecdote, "Totally Wired" paints a vivid portrait of individuals struggling against the odds to make their world as interesting as possible, in the process leaving a legacy of artistic ambition and provocation that reverberates to this day.

From 1976 to 1978, the young photographer Simon Barker was a member of the "Bromley Contingent"--a group of avid Sex Pistols fans who comprised the group's inner circle at the height of the punk movement. Many of them, such as Jordan and Siouxsie Sioux, were notorious for their daredevil dress sense, and several--such as Sioux, Steven Severin, Adam Ant, Poly Styrene, Billy Idol, Viv Albertine and Ari Up--went on to form some of the most important bands of the era. This compilation of previously unseen photographs by Barker shows these founders of punk in their earliest incarnations--in bedrooms and kitchens, at public gigs and private parties--before media and commerce sunk their claws into punk's iconoclastic look and class politics. Taken with the simplest and cheapest pocket cameras, the photographs in this collection constitute Barker's "family album for the years 1976 to 1978." In the spirit of the Pistols' "God Save the Queen," the volume closes with a photographic sequence taken by Barker during the 1976 Jubilee celebrations, which shows Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu hobnobbing with the Queen of England in the royal procession.

The colorful "Punk Professor", new-wave musician, and critic/filmmaker spins a dazzling survey of women in punk, from the genre's inception in 1970s London to the current voices making waves around the globe. As an industry insider and pioneering post-punk musician, Vivien Goldman's perspective on music journalism is unusually well-rounded. In Revenge of the She-Punks, she probes four themes-identity, money, love, and protest-to explore what makes punk such a liberating art form for women. With her visceral style, Goldman blends interviews, history, and her personal experience as one of Britain's first female music writers in a book that reads like a vivid documentary of a genre defined by dismantling boundaries. A discussion of the Patti Smith song "Free Money," for example, opens with Goldman on a shopping spree with Smith. Tamar-Kali, whose name pays homage to a Hindu goddess, describes the influence of her Gullah ancestors on her music, while the late Poly Styrene's daughter reflects on why her Somali-Scots-Irish mother wrote the 1978 punk anthem "Identity," with the refrain "Identity is the crisis you can't see." Other strands feature artists from farther afield (including in Colombia and Indonesia) and genre-busting revolutionaries such as Grace Jones, who wasn't exclusively punk but clearly influenced the movement while absorbing its liberating audacity. From punk's Euro origins to its international reach, this is an exhilarating world tour.

What does a hemispheric Americas look like when done through the lens of punk music, visuals and literature? That is the core premise of this book, presented through a collage of analytical, aesthetic and experiential takes on punk across the continent. This book challenges the dominant vision of punk - particularly its white masculine protagonists and deep Anglocentrism - by analysing punk as a critical lens into the disputed territories of 'America', a term that hides the heterogeneous struggles, global histories, hopes and despairs of late twentieth and early twenty-first century experience. Compiling academic essays and punk paraphernalia (interviews, zines, poetry and visual segments) into a single volume, the book seeks to explore punk life through its multiple registers, through vivid musical dialogues, excessive visual displays and underground literary expression. The kaleidoscopic accounts include everything from sustained academic inquiry and photo portraits to anarchist manifestos and interview excerpts with notable punk figures. The result is a radically heterogenous mixture that seeks to reposition punk and las Americas as intrinsically bound up in each other's history: for better and for worse. Out of critical pasts, within an urgent present and toward many different possible futures. This volume critically refashions punk to suggest it emerges from within the long-term historical experience of las Americas in all their plurality and is useful as a mode of critique towards the hegemonic dimensions of America in its imperial singularity. The book is rooted in a theory of 'radical heterogeneity' and thus represents a collage-like juxtaposition of punk perspectives from across the entire hemisphere and via divergent contributions: academic, experiential and aesthetic. Readership for this collection will include both academic and general readers. Primary readership will be academic. It will appeal to researchers, scholars, educators and students in the following fields: American studies, Latin American studies, media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, history, music, ethnomusicology, anthropology, art, literature. General readership will be among those interested in the following areas - anarchism, music, subculture, literature, independent publishing, photography.

On their debut, The Clash famously claimed to be "bored with the USA," but The Clash wasn't a parochial record. Mick Jones' licks on songs such as "Hate and War" were heavily influenced by classic American rock and roll, and the cover of Junior Murvin's reggae hit "Police and Thieves" showed that the band's musical influences were already wide-ranging. Later albums such as Sandinista! and Combat Rock saw them experimenting with a huge range of musical genres, lyrical themes and visual aesthetics. The Clash Takes on the World explores the transnational aspects of The Clash's music, lyrics and politics, and it does so from a truly transnational perspective. It brings together literary scholars, historians, media theorists, musicologists, social activists and geographers from Europe and the US, and applies a range of critical approaches to The Clash's work in order to tackle a number of key questions: How should we interpret their negotiations with reggae music and culture? How did The Clash respond to the specific socio-political issues of their time, such as the economic recession, the Reagan-Thatcher era and burgeoning neoliberalism, and international conflicts in Nicaragua and the Falkland Islands? How did they reconcile their anti-capitalist stance with their own success and status as a global commodity? And how did their avowedly inclusive, multicultural stance, reflected in their musical diversity, square with the experience of watching the band in performance? The Clash Takes on the World is essential reading for scholars, students and general readers interested in a band whose popularity endures.

Few bands in the past three decades have proven as affecting or exciting as the Misfits, the ferocious horror punk outfit that lurked in the shadows of suburban New Jersey and released a handful of pivotal underground recordings during their brief, tumultuous time together. Led by Glenn Danzig, a singer possessed of vision and blessed with an incredible baritone, the Misfits pioneered a death rock sound that would reverberate through the various musical subgenres that sprung up in their wake. This Music Leaves Stains now presents the full story behind the Misfits and their ubiquitous, haunting skull logo, a story of unique talent, strange timing, clashing personalities, and incredible music that helped shape rock as we know it today. James Greene, Jr., maps this narrative from the band's birth at the tail end of the original punk movement through their messy dissolve at the dawn of the 1980s right on through the legal warring and inexplicable reunions that helped carry the band into the 21st century. Music junkies of any stripe will surely find themselves engrossed in this saga that finally pieces together the full story of the greatest horror punk band that ever existed, though Misfits fans will truly marvel at the thorough and detailed approach James Greene, Jr. has taken in outlining the rise, fall, resurrection, and influence of New Jersey's most frightening musical assembly.

New Wave: Image is Everything traces the evolution of the often neglected pop music genre, new wave. Using artists from Elvis Costello to Cyndi Lauper as illustrations, the book argues that new wave was among the first flowerings of postmodern theory in popular culture.

'If you stay alive long enough, people eventually catch up' Born in rural Georgia in 1947, Jayne moved to New York and became part of the 60s art scene surrounding Andy Warhol's Factory. Jayne's story follows the arc of LGBT liberation in the US - she came of age living hand-to-mouth, faced off against police at Stonewall and came out as a trans woman while she was touring Europe with her band. She went everywhere and met everyone and lived to tell the tale. Man Enough to Be a Woman is the funny, fierce memoir of Jayne's extraordinary journey, now including a new epilogue where she reflects on how the world has (almost) caught up with her.

Taking us back to late ’70s and early ’80s Hollywood—pre-crack, pre-AIDS, pre-Reagan—We Got the Neutron Bomb re-creates word for word the rage, intensity, and anarchic glory of the Los Angeles punk scene, straight from the mouths of the scenesters, zinesters, groupies, filmmakers, and musicians who were there.

“California was wide-open sex—no condoms, no birth control, no morality, no guilt.” —Kim Fowley

“The Runaways were rebels, all of us were. And a lot of people looked up to us. It helped a lot of kids who had very mediocre, uneventful, unhappy lives. It gave them something to hold on to.” —Cherie Currie

“The objective was to create something for our own personal satisfaction, because everything in our youthful and limited opinion sucked, and we knew better.” —John Doe

“The Masque was like Heaven and Hell all rolled into one. It was a bomb shelter, a basement. It was so amazing, such a dive ... but it was our dive.” —Hellin Killer

“At least fifty punks were living at the Canterbury. You’d walk into the courtyard and there’d be a dozen different punk songs all playing at the same time. It was an incredible environment.” —Belinda Carlisle

Assembled from exhaustive interviews, We Got the Neutron Bomb tells the authentically gritty stories of bands like the Runaways, the Germs, X, the Screamers, Black Flag, and the Circle Jerks—their rise, their fall, and their undeniable influence on the rock ’n’ roll of today.