Punk culture is currently having a revival worldwide and is poised to extend and mutate even more as youth unemployment and youth alienation increase in many countries of the world. In Russia, its power to have an impact and to shock is well illustrated by the state response to activist collective and punk band Pussy Riot. This book, based on extensive original research, examines the nature of punk culture in contemporary Russia. Drawing on interviews and observation, it explores the vibrant punk music scenes and the social relations underpinning them in three contrasting Russian cities. It relates punk to wider contemporary culture and uses the Russian example to discuss more generally what constitutes 'punk' today.

Humour, as much as any other trait, defines British cultural identity. It is 'crucial in the English sense of nation,' argues humour scholar Andy Medhurst; 'To be properly English you must have a sense of humour,' opines historian Antony Easthope. Author Zadie Smith perceives British humour as a national coping mechanism, stating, 'You don't have to be funny to live here, but it helps.' Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten concurs, commenting, 'There's a sense of comedy in the English that even in your grimmest moments you laugh.' Although humour invariably functions as a relief valve for the British, it is also often deployed for the purposes of combat. From the court jesters of old to the rock wits of today, British humorists - across the arts - have been the pioneers of rebellion, chastising society's hypocrites, exploiters and phonies, while simultaneously slighting the very institutions that maintain them. The best of the British wits are (to steal a coinage from The Clash) 'bullshit detectors' with subversion on their minds and the jugulars of their enemies in their sights. Such subversive humour is held dear in British hearts and minds, and it runs deep in their history. Historian Chris Rojek explains how the kind of foul-mouthed, abusive language typical of British (punk) humour has its antecedents in prior idioms like the billingsgate oath: 'Humour, often of an extraordinary coruscating and vehement type, has been a characteristic of the British since at least feudal times, when the ironic oaths against the monarchy and the sulfurous 'Billingsgate' uttered against the Church and anyone in power were widespread features of popular culture. Rojek proceeds to fast forward to 1977, citing the Sex Pistols' 'Sod the Jubilee' campaign as a contemporary update of the Billingsgate oath. For Rojek, the omnipresence of British caustic humour accounts for why the nation has historically been more inclined toward expressions of subversive rebellion than to violent revolution. 'Protest has been conducted not with guns and grenades, but with biting comedy and graffiti,' he observes. As an outlet for venting and as an alternative means of protest, Brit wit, not surprisingly, has developed distinctive communicative patterns, with linguistic flair and creative flourishes starring as its key features. Far more than American humour, for example, British humour revels in colourful language, in lyrical invective, in surrogate mock warfare. One witnesses such humour daily in the Houses of Parliament, where well-crafted barbs are traded across the aisle, the thinly veiled insults cushioned by the creativity of the inherent humour. Such wit is equally evident throughout the history of British rock, where rebellion has defined the rock impulse and comedic dissent has been a seemingly instinctual activity.

What Britain refined, America defined. Assembled by two key figures at the heart of the movement and told through the voices o musicians, artists, iconoclastic reporters and entrepreneurial groupies, PLEASE KILL ME is the full decadent story of the American punk scene, through the early years of Andy Warhol's Factory to the New York underground of Max's Kansas City and later, its heyday at CBGB's, spiritual home to the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television and Blondie. PLEASE KILL ME goes backstage and behind apartment doors to chronicle the sex, drugs and power struggles that were the very fabric of the American punk community, to the time before piercing and tattoos became commonplace and when every concert, new band and fashion statement marked an absolute first. From Iggy Pop and Lou Reed to the Clash and the Sex Pistols (the first time around), McNeil and McCain document a time of glorious self-destruction and perverse innocence - possibly the last time so many will so much fun in the pursuit of excess.

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?

Punk bands have produced an abundance of poetic texts, some crude, some elaborate, in the form of song lyrics. These lyrics are an ideal means by which to trace the developments and explain the conflicts and schisms that have shaped, and continue to shape, punk culture. They can be described as the community's collective 'poetic voice,' and they come in many different forms. Their themes range from romantic love to emotional distress to radical politics. Some songs are intended to entertain, some to express strong feelings, some to provoke, some to spread awareness, and some to foment unrest. Most have an element of confrontation, of kicking against the pricks. Socially and epistemologically, they play a central role in the scene's internal discourse, shaping communities and individual identities. The Poetry of Punk is an investigation into the Anglophone punk culture, specifically in the UK and the US, where punk originated in the mid-1970s, its focus being on the song lyrics written and performed by punk rock and hardcore artists.

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.

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.

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.

ESG were one of the first bands to sign to British indie label Factory Records, working with famed producer Martin Hannett on their early EPs. The band's signature guitar sound from iconic single 'UFO' has been sampled in hundreds of hip hop records, and everyone from Karen O to Kathleen Hanna lists the South Bronx group as a direct influence. So why do the Scroggins sisters appear as nothing more than a footnote in the 1980s music scene? Through interviews with founding member Renee Scroggins, alongside cult-figures from 1980s New York and North England, this book follows the story of a group of sisters who made it out of the New York projects and into the heart of the dancefloor. Come Away With ESG repositions ESG in their rightful place as punk pioneers and explains how their primal beats have paved the way for modern dance music today.

Praise for the Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die exhibition: "A fascinating look at how punk and new wave music met the eye" New York Times "An absolute joy" Financial Times The largest unique collection of printed memorabilia from the punk and post-punk movements. Andrew Krivine began collecting punk memorabilia in 1977 when punk exploded onto the scene. Since then, Andrew has amassed one of the world s largest collection of punk graphic design and memorabilia. This book features a carefully curated selection of over 650 posters, club flyers, record covers and adverts from the collection. Together they represent the prime years of punk which changed the world of graphic design forever with its do-it-yourself aesthetics. The artworks are put into context by graphic design experts, academics and commentators. Among them former art director of New York Times Steven Heller, reader in graphic design at the London College of Communication Dr Russ Bestley, graphic design writer Rick Poynor, designer Malcolm Garrett and Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Michael Wilde. The book spans the growth and evolution of punk on both sides of the Atlantic including The Clash, The Buzzocks, Iggy Pop and The Stooges, Television, The Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Devo, Blondie, Flying Lizards, Public Image Ltd, The Only Ones, The Slits, New Order, REM and Joy Division. A collectable item itself, the book is beautifully produced with front and back cover artwork by Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville, the designers behind some of punk s most memorable album covers. Arguably the most essential and final work on the graphic design revolution within the punk and post-punk movements of the UK and America, Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die will appeal to punk fans and graphic designers alike. Part of Andrew s collection is currently touring the world as the Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die exhibition and has been on display at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York among other museums.

Totally Wired features 32 interviews with the post-punk era's most innovative musicians and colourful personalities. From Ari Up, Jah Wobble, David Byrne, Edwyn Collins, it also includes conversations with the most influential of label bosses, managers, record producers, DJs and journalists - such as John Peel and Paul Morley. Crackling with argument and anecdote, these conversations bring a rich human dimension post-punk's exceptional characters, from their earliest days to their glorious and sometimes disastrous musical adventures. Along with interviews, we get 'overviews': further reflections by Simon Reynolds on key icons and crucial scenes, including John Lydon and Public Image Ltd, Ian Curtis and Joy Division, and the lineage of glam grotesquerie running from Siouxsie & The Banshees to the New Romantics to Leigh Bowery.

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.

Under the Big Black Sun explores the nascent Los Angeles punk rock movement and its evolution to hardcore punk as it's never been told before. Authors John Doe and Tom DeSavia have woven together an enthralling story of the legendary West Coast scene from 1977-1982 by enlisting the voices of people who were there. The book shares chapter-length tales from the authors along with personal essays from famous (and infamous) players in the scene. Additional authors include: Exene Cervenka (X), Henry Rollins (Black Flag), Mike Watt (The Minutemen), Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey (Go-Go's), Dave Alvin (The Blasters), Chris D. (The Flesh Eaters), Robert Lopez (The Zeros, El Vez), Jack Grisham (T.S.O.L.), Teresa Covarrubias (The Brat), as well as scenesters and journalists Pleasant Gehman, Kristine McKenna, and Chris Morris. Through interstitial commentary, John Doe "narrates" this journey through the land of film noir sunshine, Hollywood back alleys, and suburban sprawl, the place where he met his artistic counterparts Exene, DJ Bonebrake, and Billy Zoom and formed X, the band that became synonymous with, and in many ways defined, L.A. punk. Focusing on punk's evolutionary years, Under the Big Black Sun shares stories of friendship and love, ambition and feuds, grandiose dreams and cultural rage, all combined with the tattered, glossy sheen of pop culture weirdness that epitomized the operations of Hollywood's underbelly. Readers will travel to the clubs that defined the scene, as well as to the street corners, empty lots, apartment complexes, and squats that served as de facto salons for the musicians, artists, and fringe players that hashed out what would become punk rock in Los Angeles. L.A. punk was born from rock 'n' roll, from country and blues and Latin music, the true next step in the evolution of rock music. It was born of art, culture, political, and economic frustration. It spoke of a Los Angeles that existed when regionalism still reigned in the USA. It sounded like Los Angeles. For the first time, the stories and photos from this now-fabled era are presented from those on the front lines. Stories that most have never heard about the art that was born under the big black sun

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.

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!

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!

The fourth installment in Ian Glasper's legendary journey into the heart of UK punk and hardcore explores the punk underground's transformation as the gritty 1980s gave way tothe 1990s

Glasper leaves no stone unturned when exploring the inspirations and motivations that drove the acts of this overlooked era of punk. From Therapy?, Understand, and Lostprophets, who all went on to major label success after starting in underground bands, through to groups who released just one demo or a lone 7" single, this history examines almost 100 bands, allowing them to tell their own stories in their own words, and is brimming with previously unseen photographs and long-lost memorabilia. The many subgenres of the scene are examined, from pop-punk (Goober Patrol, Panic) and ska-punk (Citizen Fish, Spithead), through raging hardcore (Voorhees, Assert), militant SXE (Withdrawn, Ironside) and old school punk rock (Sick On The Bus, Police Bastard), on to the birth of metalcore (Stampin' Ground, Above All) and emocore (Fabric, Bob Tilton). The leading lights and many more are explored, along with the politics, underground fanzines, and DIY labels which were synonymous with the scene. A must for anyone who enjoyed the first three books, all of which have become must reads for anybody with an interest in punk, this "fourth book in the trilogy" pulls together many of the threads of those volumes and brings Glasper's celebration of the UK's underground punk heritage to a satisfying, informative conclusion.

Following hard on the explosion of British punk, in 1979 Gang of Four produced post-punk's smartest record, Entertainment! For the first time, a band wedded punk's angry energy to funk's propulsive beats-and used that music to put across lyrics that brought a heady mixture of Marxist theory and situationism to exposing the cultural politics of everyday life. But for an American college student from the suburbs-and, one expects, for many, many others, including British youth-Jon King's and Andy Gill's mumbled lyrics were often all but unintelligible. Political rock 'n' roll is always something of an oxymoron: rock audiences by and large don't tune in to be lectured to. But what can it mean that a band that made pop songs as political theory actively resisted making that theory legible? Coming to terms with the impact of Entertainment! requires us to take the mondegreen-the misunderstood lyric-seriously. The old joke has it that the title of R.E.M.'s debut album should have been not Murmur, but Mumble: true, so far as it goes. But that's the title, too, of rock 'n' roll's Greatest Hits compilation-and that strategic inarticulateness itself, which creates such an important role for the listener, has an important politics.

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.