Depending on whom you ask, punk rock could be a sound, an aesthetic, a dead scene or a fashion. It was instantaneous. It was long-gestating. It was created by The Ramones. It was created by The Sex Pistols. It’s three chords and nothing more. It started with three chords and a couple of hooks and ignited youthful minds and became part of every musical genre ever.
The cop-out answer is that it’s all of these things and a wee bit more. The longer answer has been provided, to some extent, by writer Holly George-Warren. In her new book Punk 365, the latest installment in the 365 series, readers get to see the good, the bad and the new wave about punk. George-Warren has assembled a thorough photographic collection of the genre’s ’70s years, going to great lengths to fit punk into a rock ‘n’ roll context by explaining the genre’s godfathers, bands like Velvet Underground, The Stooges and MC5, as well as its effect on ’80s music. From there, she covers punk’s pandemic spread from New York over to the U.K. and then back to the states in California.
The 365 series is more of a photo collection with captions than a full-on text book, and George-Warren makes the most of the format. Her book is like a shopping list for music fans. Sure, there’s plenty of love for the unholy trinity of The Ramones, The Clash and The Sex Pistols, but where George-Warren truly succeeds is in her celebration of lesser known acts like The Mumps, Steel Tips and Teenage Jesus and The Jerks (best band name ever?). With as little as a single sentence, she puts the reader into the time frame, with some photographic help, of course.
The iconic photos, taken by the likes of Bob Gruen, Stephanie Chernikowski and Jenny Lens, vividly capture punk’s energy and fun. The predominance of black and white may make the reader feel removed from the time, but the subjects could’ve come from today. Leather jackets, hair dye and X-Men T-shirts are still kinda cool. As color saturates the later chapters, the years melt away as well. Either way, you get sweet shots of Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Joy Division and Wire.
Where Punk 365 fails, however, is in its attempt to explain punk’s impact. Post-punk, hardcore, new wave, goth, metal, alternative and hip-hop all took something from punk, and the restrictions of a 744-page book that’s split in half by photos catches up with George-Warren here. Still, she does her darndest to include love for Devo, The Cure, Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Go-Gos, Black Flag and even Madonna. Metal gets the biggest shaft with no photos whatsoever, while hip-hop receives a few pages about Beastie Boys and the bond between hip-hop and punk over urban settings and graffiti art.
On a symbolic level, though, that’s kind of the point. It’s unreasonable to expect Punk 365 to contain within it everything punk, because the thing is too widespread. It’s inextricable from the musical water. Punk 365 is still a great overview of the genre, though, and serves as an excellent visual companion to more specific works like England’s Dreaming, American Hardcore and We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk. And again, on its own, Punk 365 is a killer mix tape.
Time to go check out The Flamin’ Groovies (or is this the best band name ever?) and 13th Floor Elevators. But before I go, some personal favorites from the book: The foreword from Richard Hell of Voidoids/Television fame is the perfect punk intro; every shot of X is awesome; and I’m pretty sure that’s The Bouncing Souls’ Bryan Kienlen wearing a Sticks and Stones T-shirt in the background of the photo on page 363.
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