In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992

Marcus' writing on punk and its' effects may or may not be the smartest rock journalism out there. But this book is no mere compendium of record and show reviews. Marcus is obsessed with art history, and the social/historical contexts surrounding them, and in varied other works he draws links between dada, surrealism and punk, or invesitgates the social aspects of the conflicted American South that also spawned the primoridal forms of just about all forms of American music. In smaller doses, Marcus does the same here - these short essays were published initially in more mass-audience publications, but Marcus is fairly uninterested in simple reviewing. Instead he - in a fashion that occasionally seizes upon Zen-like epiphanies - scrounges through the depths of the most easily overlooked moments of anything from the Gang Of Four, The Mekons, X or The Buzzcocks to Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk." And then he elaborates what he's found in such moments, crafting Barthes-like meditations upon the more obtuse meanings of culture, art and commerce in the process. Marcus doesn't nail his varied theses 100% of the time - his write-off of New York (and Cleveland/Detroit) punk is the great, vast hole in this book. But I do agree with his take on the thuggishness of LA punk - a controversial contention open to much debate, though one could endlessly debate the ironic value vs. the ugly realities within the race and class tensions that floated through the work of X, Gun Club, Fear, et. al., especially in light of the early multi-ethnic and queer aspects of punk that have largely been written out of most official histories. -David Alston

A collection on punk and related matters from 1977 through 1992, including what was left out of Marcus' earlier book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. In the author's own words, it's about "records, performances, twists of the radio dial." It moves from the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy" to Nirvana's "Nevermind" in this illumined golden thread. Marcus writes about what moved, scared and disgusted him and what made him feel so privileged to be part of the punk audience. His views of punk encompassed a wide horizon, to include the likes of Bruce Springsteen, early Prince, Laurie Anderson and David Lynch's film Blue Velvet. His point is that punk made wonderful things like Anderson's "Superman" possible even though Superman itself isn't punk. In other words, punk's liberating effect caused sea changes in the perception of pop. A major weakness of the book is that it ignores the entire New York scene, because, as he puts it, "most [New York] punks seemed to be auditioning for careers as something else." So no Patti Smith, no Richard Hell, a cursory mention of Talking Heads, but you WILL find Blondie here. Fascist Bathroom follows many avenues (The Clash, Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello) but maybe its most precious contribution is rescuing from obscurity some lower-profile such as Laura Logic, The Mekons, Marianne Faithfull. It's a joy to read, chronologically arranged and ending with Nirvana and grunge in the 90s. The text swarms with relevant quotes from rock lyrics and references to other rock journalists like Lester Bangs. For anyone with a passionate interest in rock/pop music and youth culture, it's required reading.

These are brilliant essays, many of them indeed discussing punk's effect on mainstream culture, but some of them bother me. Marcus is original and insightful, but can be overly academic. That is, sometimes his theses take precedence to the truth, or even common sense.It's not uncommon for brilliant thinkers to be intuitive and obsessive. But Marcus tends to focus on one tiny wrinkle in a work, and to blow it up into an explanation for all the artist's motives, intentions, and finally the whole Western Dilemma. By the time he reaches the end of his inspired flight, we are miles away from the original subject.One example is his interpretation of the album "Los Angeles" by the band X as a Raymond Chandler story set to music. This approach is clever, and gives him a chance to indulge in some retro literary criticism, but the two works really have nothing in common besides their L.A. low-lifes.A more inexplicable example is his essay on the L.A. punk scene. In apparent (and inferior) imitation of a famous piece by Lester Bangs, he abandons all logic to portray the L.A. punks as proto-fascist. He describes the Black Flag song "White Minority" as racist, while ignoring the fact that the singer is Hispanic and the song clearly ironic. He interprets a punk's hostility to "hippies" as master-race thuggery, when it's clear that by "hippies" the boy means the long-haired metal fans who preyed on the punk minority. Both of these facts are established in the film Marcus is describing.There are other examples, many of them explicable by the vagaries of a powerful mind and the journalist's need to find an original "handle" on a subject. But if such a goal is pursued too far we get Yellow Journalism, which has caused physical harm in the past and will do so again.

To find that no one has yet reviewed this book surprised and excited me. Surprise because I find it incredible that such a definitive, poetic and unique document could pass the world by unnoticed. Excitement because the pleasure, dare I say honour, of having my name next to the first review is genuine.Let me put my cards on the table: this is my favourite book. One may have read a work that is the most enjoyable they have experienced, or another which seems the most accomplished and towering, but these criteria shouldn't, I think, define such a judgement. What it rest on is less the distant appreciation of greatness than the ability of the work to both excite and persist in exciting, years after one has put it down. Just to think of the best passages in this book excites me: their sense of possibility, of the value of creativity, of the politics that go hand in hand with creation and the burden of those who take them on.But I'm getting ahead of myself. What is this book about? A collection of pieces about punk? Certainly, but more than that: a mirror held up to a life lived with rock music as a constant companion. A view of a cultural earthquake by a man who, by the time the Sex Pistols were provoking tabloid hysteria, was past the age when many would consider an obsession with pop comprehendible.Thus, the first piece in the book is not about punk at all, at least not in the spittle-fuelled generic sense. Writing for Rolling Stone Magazine in 1969, the author blends his review of The Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed with his thoughts on a coffee-table thome of David Bailey portraits. Out of this seemingly bizarre scramble Marcus pulls a remarkably prescient picture of a decade fizzling away - a time when dreams are turning sour as people struggle to remember how alive with possibility those very dreams seemed a few short years ago, a time when aspirations of change and fulfilment turn into mere hopes for survival. In Bailey's portraits of Christine Keeler and The Stones Marcus finds a wistful nostalgia for a time that has yet to fully pass, while in the longing cries of Gimme Shelter he hears men confused about where they have reached, wondering what ever got them there, what ever set them on the journey, but knowing that the journey is all they have, that they can never go back now.His view of the decade is perfectly, poetically expressed in another, much later piece, as he pulls Oliver Stone's film of The Doors from the critical dustbin:"[it contains] a vision of the Sixties as a time that, even as it came forth, people sensed they could never really inhabit, and also never really leave." That sense of displacement, of people fighting to find meaning in the dreams they have created, of the danger of those dreams, for them and maybe for us, is the transcendent quality that informs his work and takes it far beyond the level of an ascetic treatise or even a cultural history.To punk then. The opening salvo is deli

Very readable, good essays on The Clash, Bikini Kill, Sonic Youth, etc., you'll probably be glad to have it around if (70's-)80's(-'90s) pop-rock-punk is your thing and you go hunting for info on each new-old band you discover.