“PUNK: Chaos to Couture” opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this Thursday

book cover - chaos to coutureThe Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s new book, PUNK: Chaos to Couture, is an LP-sized tome, so I suppose it makes sense I’m listening to The Roxy London WC2, an LP that compiles many of the early punk bands performing live in their native environment.

The LP’s a deluxe reissue on Earmark, with 180-gram vinyl, a PVC protective sleeve, and all manner of accoutrements. It’s dressing up something that was most likely originally kicked around, beaten up, scratched, and treated poorly in all manner of extras befitting proper art, rather than something tossed together to entertain and shock — much in the same way that the fashion presented here uses high-end fabric to recreate or hearken to something once made in a rush before heading out for the night.
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Jon Savage’s newest a reference work, not a story

book-cover-englands-dreaming-tapesJon Savage‘s England’s Dreaming is pretty much the book on punk rock. Considering Savage started work on the book just ten years after punk first appeared, he was able to get interviews with the musicians, producers, club owners, and assorted hangers-on like the Bromley Contingent while their memories were relatively fresh. Also, quite a few of the folks interviewed are now either gone from this Earth or unable to be contacted.

Now, roughly 20 years since he dropped England’s Dreaming on the public, Savage has returned to the topic with The England’s Dreaming Tapes. Subtitled as “The Essential Companion” to England’s Dreaming, it follows the path of Totally Wired, presenting the transcribed interviews of the folks with whom the author spoke for a prior book.
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MacLeod’s history of SoCal punk stops short

book-cover-kids-of-the-black-holeIn his book Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock In Postsuburban California, Dewar MacLeod brings together elements of Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me and Teenage by Jon Savage to argue that as well as being an aesthetic of youth culture, punk is art, not just music.

Kids of the Black Hole tarces the evolution of SoCal punk from the art-damaged rock of the Germs and the power-pop championed by Bomp’s Greg Shaw to the hardcore that the region became known for. It’s an artful examination and looks just as closely at the societal implications of sprawl and the growth of the suburbs as it does at the “scene.”
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