Review: 'Punk: The Last Word'

When you call your book Punk: The Last Word, you better be pretty damn comprehensive. A title like that yawps "Here's all that's left you'll ever need to know and everyone else can shut it."

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. 

Review: 40th Anniversary Edition of Billy Idol's 'Rebel Yell'

It didn’t really matter what tube you were in. In the eighties, you could grok Billy Idol if you were a metal head, a top-40 fluff head, a new waver, or even a less dogmatic goth or punk, particularly if you’d been following Idol since his Generation X days. With his cross-over appeal, personal style that felt more like a personal brand (the bleached spikes; the leather wardrobe; the Elvis sneer), and a sound that was really more pop than anything else, Billy Idol could have been little more than generic “Rocker” for the eighties if he and his hits didn’t exude so much personality.