Kiss This: Punk in the Present Tense

Gina Arnold thoroughly understands the music business and brings the hard facts from that understanding to bear in analyzing the development of punk rock from an underground entity to its current popularity and acceptance into the mainstream. Her objectivity also makes this a good book, since she is able to show the contradictions in punk philosophy. The only two areas in which I was disappointed were her failure to analyze the sexual politics of punk, which I thought should be included since she writes a great deal about punk politics. Also, her chapter on rap music was purely lame, as it just about ignored the lyrics of the genre and just toed a guilty white liberal line.

Ms. Arnold has always been an insightful and interesting writer and this book is no different. Anonymous stone throwers referring to her as a hack should perhaps learn to spell "quality" so as not to be chuckled at when they are trying to be vicious.

I feel that there is some confusion about what this book sets out to do. It isn't a review of todays underground punk scene. It is a look at todays commercial punk scene. Unlike other reviewers I never felt that Arnolds was trying to claim that Rancid, Green Day, and the Offspring are real punk bands. She was using them as examples of bands that started off with punk roots and then followed them to see what happened when they went comercial. Will you like this book? Well it depends what you want. If you want a look at how punk went from an underground sub-culture to the phony commercial MTV and Snow-board trend it is today, then this is a good book for you. If you want a book about todays underground punk culture look elsewhere

There's a weird sorta nostalgia you get when you were a punk kid, regardless of whether you still spin the discs these days. Being thirty and having been punk is a juxtaposition that a lot of us are really weirded out in dealing with. Apparently the former reviewers grew up on MTV pablum and like their revolutions prepackaged. These are the kids who never heard Bleach. Or grew up with the Replacements and X and the Pixies. Real punk is not something that you give up when you hit thirty and get a job and take a bath. Gina does a brilliant job of speaking to those of us who grew up on the Clash and the Sex Pistols and later PiL and X and the Replacements and REM. Perhaps the negative response to this book is from people who are scared to think that one day they might grow up. Deal. You grow up or you die. Gina's book is about the recent commercialization of punk which in the eyes of a lot of us who came of age in the 80's is a complete travesty of the ideology and th! e music which has been so important to us for longer than a lot of 'current' punks have been alive. If you're inclined to the angry and eloquent spoken word tour of Jello Biafra, then you'll probably like this book. If you want to go out and ram a nail through your nose and call yourself punk, shut up and do it. In ten years you'll look back nostalgically at the scars and maybe then you'll appreciate this book.