At 600 pages, Chris Sullivan and (mostly) Stephen Colegrave's oral history is certainly fat. And they definitely cast a wide net to snare up whatever might be considered punk. Along with the expected punk rock bits, Punk: The Last Word also spews a lot of ink on fashion, venues, lifestyles, beatniks, underground theater, and old, dead philosophers and poets.
This is all to define punk as that which does not give two fucks, that which tramps out its own path, that which kicks over barriers while looking good and smelling awful. But didn't we already know that?
We also knew all about Andy Warhol and the Velvets, and Christ, we knew alllllll about the Sex Pistols, who may be as influential as it gets but are pretty tedious otherwise. That doesn't stop the gatekeepers from yielding page after page after page to those guys and their oft-told tale.
Fortunately they didn't yield all 600 pages, so there's lots of interesting stuff about artists who often find themselves shut out of books of this sort. We get nods to punk in attitude if not in sound specimens like The B-52s, Sonic Youth, The Selecter, Bowie, and Devo. We get reggae and hip-hop placed in a punk context. We get profiles of each and every member of the Pistol entourage known as the Bromley Contingent, and not just Siouxsie and Severin and Billy Idol. We learn about how thoroughly awesome Vivienne Westwood was. We get Colegrave's pretty damn punk interjections to flesh out the story, which makes this the rare oral history that gives the reader a sense of the author's personality. We also learn all about heroin. Did you know that Bayer sold bottled heroin tablets in the early twentieth century? I did not until I learned it in Punk: The Last Word!
Does that mean this book earns its title? Well, I guess any book can be the last word on a particular topic if you've already read a bunch of other books on that topic. So be sure to read a book about The Misfits and the LA hardcore scene, because there's nothing about those key subtopics in this book. Be sure to read books about The Buzzcocks and The Damned, because there isn't much about either of those crucial punk bands in this book. Be sure to read a biography of John Waters too while you're at it. After all that can you call Punk: The Last Word the last word on punk? Well, I'm sure I'm missing something.
