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: 'Alternative Anthems' LP

The alternative scene feels like the great forgotten era in rock history. Although it was the most potent period in my own "coming of age"--the only rock movement I fully embraced as it was happening (although I lived through the new wave era, I didn't fully appreciate it until the eighties were a fart in the breeze), there are scant references to it today. There are no jukebox musicals that feature the songs of Pavement, no Belly biopic. They won't even put the goddamn Pixies into the idiotic Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, even though nineties rock would have been nowhere without their influence.