Punk Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk. Edited by Roger Sabin. Routledge, 236pp, £13.99 in UK
Patti Smith Complete: Lyrics, Notes and Reflections. Bloomsbury. 246pp, £20.00 in UK.
Punk ain't dead, mister. Its corpse may have been taken to the morgue and positively identified as far back as 1979, but it's been spotted more times than Elvis since. While it may be true that the physical embodiment of punk these days is just a tourist attraction on the King's Road (as big a draw as the Tower Of London, apparently), the idea of punk has spread through the culture like a virus on speed. Literature, cinema, music, art have been affected, as, too, have the "lower" likes of television, comedy and high-street fashion. If you honestly thought that punk rock was all about Mohican hair-styles, safety pins through the nose and nasty bands swearing on television (at teatime!) - or worse still that it was a form of "youthful rebellion" - then you're probably the very reason why punk reared its snarling head in the first place.
Ostensibly a musically-based movement that reigned supreme from 1976 to 1979, punk was part artistic statement, part political ideology. And if the preceding sentence reeks of high-brow revisionism, try telling that to some of the lecturers, historians, publishers, art critics, professors and respected newspaper columnists who all contribute essays to this anthology on the lasting legacy of the punk movement. You don't need a PhD in Advanced Cultural/Media studies to trace the likes of Damien Hirst, Irvine Welsh, The Prodigy, Alexander McQueen, Richard Allen and Courtney Love back to the primal generational scream that echoed around the council estates and suburbs of the US and Europe back in 1976. Originally a subculture, it was primarily driven by a healthy iconoclasm ("No Beatles, No Stones in 1977," read the T-shirt Johnny Rotten used to sport) coupled with a marvellous spirit of DIY creative adventure - a page in the music papers of the time was given over to showing three basic guitar chords over the exhortation "Now go and form a band!" That punk used music as its virus carrier was no coincidence. Before the punk wars of 1976, popular music had gone from being subversive and suggestive (think Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show and those wonderful headlines about the antics of The Rolling Stones - "would you let your daughter marry one?") into a safe, corporate entity where bands like Yes and Barclay James Harvest were about as radical as your average hunt ball and the main lyrical concerns were tortuous odes on the Arthurian legend or addled hippy nonsense about "communicating with nature."
As the oil price-based world recession kicked in around 1976, watching a man in a flowing purple cloak playing a flute and singing about lay-lines didn't have much relevance to a disaffected 16-year-old living in a high-rise, with 18 years of Tory rule just a grocer's daughter away. There was a tremendous sense of participation and democracy to punk - it liberated people from the sense of slavery to the "Celebrity Watch," something which is so pathetically prevalent today. And the music was damn good. It provided the soundtrack for a generation, while still, 20 years on, albums by The Pistols and The Clash are to be found up there with The Beatles and Bob Dylan in the "Best Albums Ever" lists. If you want to explore the origins of punk and understand how it so dramatically altered the cultural zeitgeist, there are some definitive accounts out there, as in Jon Savage's England's Dreaming and Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces. This collection, though, assumes a lot of prior knowledge on the part of the reader and at times reads like something a groovy polytechnic lecturer discussing "the semiotics of the Sex Pistols" might come up with. There are essays on the role of women in punk, how punk influenced the visual arts, its effect on cinema (transgressive films as "punk celluloid") and much heated debate (as Mrs Merton would have it) on the London-centric nature of punk reportage, past and present. The best contributions come from the editor himself, Roger Sabin, who writes, shockingly, about the filthy racist strain to parts of the movement, and journalist Suzanne Moore who brings a sense of perspective to the whole exercise by eloquently exploding the "romantic myth" of punk.
Overall, it's punk-rock-meets-academia, with the two getting on famously.
As the official "godmother of punk", Patti Smith's contribution to the movement was immense, drawing punk away from fatuous tabloid headlines into something a bit more artistically resonant. It's not just that she opened the door for present-day acts like Courtney Love and Alanis Morrissette, she's also the single most important influence on R.E.M. (according to the band itself).
Always a fascinating figure, Smith was more of a poet and sculptor than a musician but her debut album, the magnificent Horses (1975) saw her at the vanguard of the punk "revolution". A close friend and sometime collaborator with such figures as Robert Mapplethorpe, Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, Smith may have retired prematurely in 1979 to go and live in suburbia, but on the death of her husband in 1993, she came out of retirement and is now back releasing records and performing live.
In Patti Smith Complete (Lyrics, Notes and Reflections), she has gathered together the complete lyrics to all her albums but perhaps more illuminating are the personal reflections which are drawn from her own extensive journals. An example from her "Notes, New York City, 1976" pretty much sets the tone throughout: "August 9th. A hurricane coming up on the city. New York boarded up like a rat house. Record Plant, Studio A. Aural aquarium for Mermaid Turn The Tides. The air black. The wind whistling. Windows rattling. Jack Douglas stuffing rags beneath the doors. Up above us, the moon was full. Setting up for the night of the Lion. The emblem of Ethiopia. The Kingdom of Sheba. The true earth of Rimbaud".
Illustrated with nearly 150 photographs as well as original artwork, this is an illuminating guide to one of the most interesting and challenging artists of her generation. Still though, at £20, there is a "coffee table" aspect to this book, and if you're not a hardcore fan, you'd be better off spending your money on a copy of Horses.
Brian Boyd is a freelance journalist
