Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1085764 in Books
• Published on: 1990-10-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Synopsis
Explores the avant-garde history of twentieth-century Europe through the lifestyle and music of the Sex Pistols.

From the Publisher
One of America's leading critics on popular culture
A brilliant and original investigation into underground, alternative and revolutionary movements into art, music and other cultural forms using the Sex Pistols' famous cry 'I am an Antichrist' as its starting point.

Customer Reviews

Life will never be the same again!
I bought this book about a year ago and have read it 4 times since. Despite being a huge, scolarly, intellectual work, it still manages to exite at just the same level as the music about which it speaks. Facts and ideas appear and disappear again only to resurface generations later in a different, often more potent and subversive context. Some of the ideas covered are self-evidently unworkable (as Marcus knows as well as his readers) but they still excite and energise the imagination through their sheer radicalism. Like the best Punk Music they prompt the reader to a paradoxical reaction: "I can't condone any of this intellectually, but I feel like fighting in the streets to defend it". Read it, and it will remind you how pitifully dull and conformist your life is. Obviously, you won't be manning barricades on the street, but your first reading of this towering work will blow your assumptions and preconceptions apart and regular helpings thereafter will keep your sense of intellectual radicalism alive, kicking and screaming "Destroy!!"

BEST DAMN BOOK YOU WILL EVER READ!
DO NOT WASTE ANY TIME. READ THIS BOOK. IT WILL CHANGE YOUR WORLD FOREVER. FIND THE EXTRAORDINARY LURKING BEHIND THE ORDINARY THAT YOU ALWAYS SUSPECTED WAS THERE, THE BEACH BENEATH THE COBBLESTONES.(TO PARAPHRASE THE BOOK'PROTAGONIST) IN THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY YEAR OF THE 1968 PARIS UPRISING, THIS BOOK IS MORE THAN TIMELY. I ORIGINALLY READ THIS BOOK BECAUSE IT WAS ABOUT THE SEX PISTOLS, BUT CAME AWAY WITH A THIRST TO KNOW THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL.

Music or Mayhem?
This is not your father's music history book.

If you are expecting a book about punk rock, read it. It is about punk rock in a manner of speaking. But even if you aren't a punk rocker, still read it. I know they always say this and then you think to yourself, why would I want to read a book about something I could care less about? But this book only uses punk as a kind of centerpiece or metaphor. But this book is about everything--Dadaism, revolution, Situationism, even a medieval religious fanatic who walled himself into a city with a group of followers resorting to canabalism and self-annihilation. See, it seems interesting. It is scholarly, but quite readable (and God knows, most aren't). Sometimes a little unfocused, but if it had too much structure, it wouldn't be punk.