Rating: 
Summary: Erik is So Right!
Review: Oh Erik Selvia - you are so right! The focus of this book is so narrow and exclusionary that one never gets the full picture of the so-called "punk movement". What movement? Please! The 60's music scene represented a social movement, but this punk thing pales in comparision. Savage tries to elevate it to the same level of significance (as far as social change is concerned). Real changes occurred in the 60's - the late 70s and 80s punk music scenes merely voiced a rude and crude complaint. Don't get me wrong - a lot of great music was generated out of the complaint, but its level of historical significance, outside of contributing to the development of new musical styles and presentation, is minimal to be sure.
Rating:
Summary: Erik is So Right!
Review: Oh Erik Selvia - you are so right! The focus of this book is so narrow and exclusionary that one never gets the full picture of the so-called "punk movement". What movement? Please! The 60's music scene represented a social movement, but this punk thing pales in comparision. Savage tries to elevate it to the same level of significance (as far as social change is concerned). Real changes occurred in the 60's - the late 70s and 80s punk music scenes merely voiced a rude and crude complaint. Don't get me wrong - a lot of great music was generated out of the complaint, but its level of historical significance, outside of contributing to the development of new musical styles and presentation, is minimal to be sure.
Rating: 
Summary: Punk As Sociology 101: England's Dreaming
Review: Punk Rock is an oft-misunderstood musical genre, usually seen as one-dimensional, inarticulate, and musically incompetent, made by angry young kids who have no regard for anyone but themselves. This all may be true, but to dismiss it as such is to miss a vital element of rock'n'roll. 'England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond' stands as the best book on its subject, and as one of the finest books on the sociology of music in general. Jon Savage was prescient enough to have kept his teenage journal from those long-ago days of London in the mid-to-late-70s, he is able to present us with a thorough, first-hand account to spice up his in-depth journalism. Throughout this work he quotes from it, giving us impressionistic, colorful glimpses of the time: "30.10.76: I go see my first proper punk group. I know what it's going to be like: I've been waiting for years, and this year most of all: something to match the explosions in my head. The group are called the Clash; everybody I talk to says they're the best.... Within ten seconds I'm transfixed; within thirty, changed forever. 23.11.76...fascism here won't be like in Germany. It'll be English: ratty, mean, pinched, hand in glove with Thatcher as mother sadist over all her whimpering public schoolboys. 25.12.76: A party... in the kitchen downstairs, members of the Damned, the Clash and the Sex Pistols sit around a large table.... Halfway through the evening, the Heartbreakers arrive, and install themselves in a tight corner near the telephone, which Johnny Thunders uses to make hour-long calls to the US. Not collect. 25.12.78: Public Image Ltd, Rainbow Theatre, London. this, as expected, is mainly Rotten's show. Except now there is a new element of whining and self-justification...." Savage goes so much deeper than just his own observations, deeper than any writer on British punk ever has or ever probably will. First he examines the British pop/youth cultural movements after World War 2, like the Mods and the skins and the Teddy Boys, before coming to that little shop at 430 King's Road. We get some myth-destroying insights into the origins of Malcolm McLaren's relationships with the burgeoning Sex Pistols; namely, that it originally was 18-year-old guitarist Steve Jones' band. Savage debunks the notion that the Pistols were--as is the common, popular perception today--the *NSync of their day. McLaren was great at hindsight, saying "Oh, I meant that to happen" when really it was all out of control. Quite a bit of the book deals with the utter contempt and frustration with which Johnny Rotten and later Sid Vicious felt towards this Fagin-esque character. Savage also looks the punk scene in surrounding towns, such as the Buzzcocks in Manchester; the difficulty in getting clubs to book the bands; the sudden liberation (but not quite) young women felt, resulting in "stars" such as Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, and the Slits; the (sometimes fake, sometimes real) competition between the Pistols and their rivals the Clash; the utterly disastrous tour of southern American states by the Pistols; the fashion, the art, the impact the movement had on the rigidly structured British class system. His account of the Jubilee summer (1977 was the 25th year of Queen Elizabeth's reign), and the attendant boat ride up the Thames--the Sex Pistols performed "God Save the Queen," their inflammatory anti-royalty statement just as the boat passed Parliament--makes you realize that Punk gave a new meaning to "civil disobedience." The self-immolation of the notoriously doomed Sid Vicious (and McLaren's ultimate exploitation of it) is dealt with by Savage tenderly: "What happened next will always be a blur. In an account given by Vicious shortly before his death, he woke up from a Tuinol stupor in the light of the morning to find a trail of blood leading from a soaked bed to the bathroom.... he found Nancy lying under the sink with a hunting knife sticking in her side... Vicious went into complete shock--from which he would barely recover for the rest of his life. As the realization of what had occurred sank in, he panicked totally: the only person had ever cared for him was dead, by his knife, and he couldn't remember a thing." Whew. Another interesting aspect of the book are the analogies made between Punk--Savage capitalizes the word--and the major art movements of the 20th century. Sometimes this comes off as intellectual puffery, and yet in my thoughtful moments I think Savage is quite right to link McLaren's ideas with Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism. Rotten is compared to the young Rimbaud; the Clash wore Army fatigues splattered with colored paint a la Jackson Pollock; Subway Sect and other bands created music that seemed defiantly anti-music; and one cannot deny the primitive, art brut beauty of Xeroxed 'zines like Snffin' Glue, the flyers and the record sleeves. Now more than ever punk is my favorite music--'70s punk, let me clarify--the Clash, the Pistols, the Buzzcocks, etc. just don't ever seem to lose their edge or their aura of chaos narrowly avoided. England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond is, ultimately, an inspiring testament to the creative powers of oppressed youth everywhere--may that flame never die. Contrary to what the Pistols said, there IS a future: you just have to know how to throttle it with your bare hands....Rrrrrright--Now!
Rating:
Summary: The sometimes funny and sad, informative punk book
Review: So many photos, so many interviews, its a long book, but also
the best book you will ever read. Its open minded, so punk
fans can love it, or people who hate those U.K. punks can hate them more. Its not just the Sex Pistols, its the Clash and Ramones
in the spotlight also. I laughed to myself while reading some quotes,
but you'll be in tears when reading about how Sid Vicious was accused
of killing the only person he had, then slowly killed him self. jon Savage
had acess to all of the archieves of the Sex Pistols, so its accurate.
Rating:
Summary: Too much and too little
Review: There's a big difference between a book that is *exhaustive* and one that is *exhausting*. This one manages to be both. With much difficulty, Savage walks the line between a definitive written history of punk and a messy collection of pseudo-sociological essays (of the type John Lydon warns in his own collected reminiscings of the same period). For all of Savage's excrutiating attention to detail and accuracy, he completely misses the human story behind the punk movement. Yes, punk can be described with various hyphenated terms that scream "intellectual" ("Anglo-French deconstructionism," anyone?), but punk is also the story of four teenagers who wanted to be rock stars, drank too much, and could barely hold themselves together long enough to record a single studio album. By over-intellectualizing every moment of the Sex Pistols' existence, Savage turned the band members into puppets -- not of Malcolm McLaren, but of some imaginary, radical social force that somehow pulled all of their strings. Only when the book reaches the end of the Pistols' era, culminating in the death of Nancy Spungen, does Savage begin to write convincingly about the personal interactions between John, Sid, Paul, Steve, & Malcolm and how personalities -- not various groups of European malcontents -- drove the band off the cliff. As a compendium of facts, this book has no peer. Use this book as an encyclopedia, however, not a story book. There's a real story out there about punk, and this isn't it.
Rating:
Summary: Filling, But Not really So Great!
Review: This Book is Now Considered a "Definitive" Sourch for the Origins of the Punk Rock Movement, as it was Written by someone "Who Was There" Well, Its Trys to be Soooo Intellectual it Usually Misses the Point of the Whole Movement! I Usually Turn to Better & more Entertaining Books of the Era. Jon Savage is so much like Malcolm Mclaren it becomes an egotistical set of Opinions rather than a Well rounded tome. Sometimes just the Humorless-ness comes through. There are also many Holes where many a Group, People, or Event has fallen into, perhaps Never to be seen again... I hope there will be Many more books of this Very Exciting & Very Viable time of Rock'n'Roll, but not only to prevent this from being that Only "definitive" source. It Would be Great to see a London Version of Please Kill Me Oral History! I have come to Dread seeing Jon's name on CD Liner Notes & Magazine Articles!
Rating:
Summary: Filling, But Not really So Great!
Review: This Book is Now Considered a "Definitive" Sourch for the Origins of the Punk Rock Movement, as it was Written by someone "Who Was There" Well, Its Trys to be Soooo Intellectual it Usually Misses the Point of the Whole Movement! I Usually Turn to Better & more Entertaining Books of the Era. Jon Savage is so much like Malcolm Mclaren it becomes an egotistical set of Opinions rather than a Well rounded tome. Sometimes just the Humorless-ness comes through. There are also many Holes where many a Group, People, or Event has fallen into, perhaps Never to be seen again... I hope there will be Many more books of this Very Exciting & Very Viable time of Rock'n'Roll, but not only to prevent this from being that Only "definitive" source. It Would be Great to see a London Version of Please Kill Me Oral History! I have come to Dread seeing Jon's name on CD Liner Notes & Magazine Articles!
Rating: 
Summary: Pretentious account of meaningless events and people...
Review: This book is pretty bad. And so long! The worst thing about it is the cod intellectualism. It really is too much. I am not a contemporary and care nothing for punk music new or old (I can still appreciate a good yarn though!) but I still strongly suspect that most of it is justification AFTER THE FACT. I mean the philosophical stuff: situationism, social-realism and suchlike. This may not be true for the other punk-groups but as far as I can tell the Sex Pistols wanted to be old-fashioned rock stars just like the rest. The only way in which they wanted to overturn the old order is to construct it again with them at the top! What a bunch of vapid phonies. And the the reams of prose wasted on the charletan McLaren-- it's too much! Basically the guy reads too much into the Sex Pistols. You can especially tell with the foreword (which deals with events with which I am familiar). I think he suffers from that 30-something delusion that he was part of something 'authentic' whereas kids of today are part of something 'fake' and kids of his parents generation were part of something that was just the build-up to the 'real' movement which he experienced. Savage builds up the mythology of this scene so that he can then say "I was part of THAT" (it's never quite clear how...) and bask in the reflected glory. Get over yourself!
Rating:
Summary: Punk fans must buy this.
Review: This is the Punk - Rock and Pop Culture Bible. Plan and simple! If you what your looking for happends to be a history of just just plan old anarchy in England in the early and late 70's. Than you are looking at the wrong soures of info. The book ties in Punk Rock music, culture and life styles in almost everything Jon Savage talks about. I think fans of the Sex Pistols will also love this very, very big and offensive book, because they talk alot about the classic Sex Pistols, and their history. Even though I am not a huge Sex Pistols fan I was not let down. Jon Savage is also a very good writer.
Rating:
Summary: Door Stops R Us
Review: This weighty tome would put most loaves of bread to shame. The cover blurb proclaims "Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond." What it really is, is an obsessively detailed work about the Sex Pistols, with punk as a background theme. Several chapters are mired in minutiae that really should have stayed in Savage's research folder, and the repetitive deeper meanings that the he reads into things such as song lyrics, clothing, and behavior are often embarrassingly psuedo-academic. What disappointed me most about the book, was the abrupt ending and the feeling it left of lack of closure. Oddly enough though I largely enjoyed reading the book, since it was often a pleasant trip down memory lane, but I could have enjoyed it far more it had lived up to the lofty claims of the cover.
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