Nice collection of essays on punk:. Well written but not enough about music and bands that interested me, so skipped through most of it.

I'm pretty sure that I always gonna be a punk teenager in my heart, so this books give me a lot of joy....or something like that. Punks was the same kind of philosophy than Mexican Revolution: was creted by ideals, not by trades or books, aqnd this books hightligh that spirit, so qudos,

I received a copy of CJ Gleave’s Allkoryn Chronicles part 2 under the title of Punk is Dead. Therefore, I can only guess at the contents of the book I thought I was getting.

Really interesting collection of essays - I really enjoyed the mix of topics covered. A lot of the time books on the punk scene tend to focus almost exclusively on the music, but there was a good mix of lifestyle/notable persons/events in there as well. As with most anthologies, the quality of writing varied a bit from essay to essay and I found myself really enjoying some and skipping over others.

Last October marked the 40th anniversary of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, an epochal release that, depending on whom one asks, served as either the first wave of punk’s loudest clarion call or its epitaph. But even without such historical conveniences, the spirit of 1977 was clearly alive and well in 2017. A moribund global economy, a Transatlantic slide into authoritarian nativism and a general sense of apocalyptic doom; the prospect of “no future” hadn’t seemed so apt, or so grimly appealing, in decades.

Perhaps that’s why this anthology, Punk Is Dead, published on the eve of Never Mind the Bollocks’ 40th, feels so relevant. Punk may be, as co-editor Andrew Gallix admits, “probably the most analyzed youth cult ever,” but its resonances with the contemporary zeitgeist make it ripe for such analysis—even if, he is also quick to add, it continues to resist tidy theses. Gallix, the founder of literary webzine 3:AM, and his fellow editor, music journalist turned playwright Richard Cabut, are wise enough not to attempt any grand summations. Instead, they curate and contribute to an eclectic, dialectic collection of 28 short essays, juxtaposing historical testimonies from the eye of punk’s hurricane with more critically distanced analyses of its aftermath.

The result admirably captures punk’s fractured, anarchic early spirit—if also, inevitably, some of its clannishness and opacity to newcomers. Those without a primer in punk’s critical canon, particularly Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces and Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming, may find themselves lost in the weeds. For the initiated, however, there’s plenty to dig into: a historical analysis by Barney Hoskyns of the connections between punk and its less-appreciated forebear, glam rock; a reprinting of Crass drummer Penny Rimbaud’s 1977 essay “Banned from the Roxy,” newly annotated by the author; an etymology tracing the evolution of the word “punk” by the aforementioned Savage. Most of these readings have been published before, but like any good anthology, the whole of Punk Is Dead gives new meaning to its parts. Its overall effect is collagelike: representing punk as essentially heterogeneous, a mishmash of musical, sartorial and subcultural styles brought briefly into collision and, for a glorious instant, seemingly poised to turn the late 20th century on its head.

As its title implies, the ultimate failure of this revolution in the head is the closest thing the book has to a running theme. Virtually every contributor avers that punk, in its most exciting form, was over before it ostensibly began. As Gallix writes in his essay “The Boy Looked at Euridyce,” the movement died “as soon as it ceased being a cult with no name… Punk—in its initial, pre-linguistic incarnation… was the potentiality of punk.” By enshrining these six months or so of ferment, before the cult became a commodity, Punk Is Dead embraces what is, on its surface, a decidedly un-punk emotion: nostalgia. But this is not the ineffectual, ideologically empty nostalgia of events like 2016’s “Punk London” celebration, presided over by the city’s then-mayor, Conservative politician and chief Brexit cheerleader Boris Johnson. Cabut, Gallix and the other contributors use their critically productive nostalgia to correct decades’ worth of the former variety: to prevent punk from being, as Judy Nylon puts it in her foreword, “reduced to a coffee-table book of white English boys spitting.” At its best—such as scholar David Wilkinson’s excellent essay on “the undeniable queerness of early punk”—Punk Is Dead excavates the fascinating counter-narratives more conventional histories leave unexplored.

The nostalgia of Punk Is Dead is also, of course, a nostalgia for a time when our contemporary dystopia, so similar to 1977’s, seemed vanquishable by culture: a time, Cabut writes, “before the PoMos et al. sneered (like punks!) at any supposed dissimilarities between the Real and the Spectacle… before the gist of meaning and truth became but a haze… before attention to a ‘new kind of superficiality’ and depthlessness, buzzing with numbing codes and signs, assumed theoretical urgency.” It’s impossible to read Punk Is Dead without realizing on some level that the likes of punk will never happen again: The contemporary cultural landscape is at once too diffuse and too adept at absorbing insurgent trends and attitudes; the current youth cultures are both too diverse and, frankly, not naïve enough to view mere aesthetic affront as a viable revolutionary tool. It’s almost quaint to read about Siouxsie Sioux’s affectless appropriation of the swastika in the wake of rallies by punk-age white nationalists who, to quote Rotten et al., “mean it, man.” But if reading these essays in early 2018 brings any solace, it’s the knowledge that punk has retained its vitality as an ideal, even if it has long since failed as a movement. “Once we were part of punk,” Gallix writes. “Now punk is part of us.”

This is a well-selected collection of essays about punk and its cultural impact, which mixes contemporary accounts with more academic reflective approaches (sometimes in the same chapter). This means it's quite uneven but that seems appropriate given its subject. You do come away with some kind of feel how exciting it must have been to be involved in what was happening in 1976 and 1977 and how quickly the excitement seems to have dissipated. A good companion to books like Jon Savage's England's Dreaming.

A very fascinating book if you are interesting in what the punk scene was. Not only music but the lifestyle as well. Not all the essay are at same level but on the whole a very entertaining reading

Interesting, but pretentious, essays and memoirs about punk rock's beginnings in England.

The essays here vary tremendously in readability and point of view. Quite a few emphasize the punk "scene" and how awesome it was for the writer to be a part of it. Others interpret punk as a reaction to glam (think New York Dolls and David Bowie in the late 70s). Some suggest the private school uniforms frequently worn by punk rockers at the time represent a rejection of the old fogies (30-year-olds) of 60s rock like the Rolling Stones.

Some of the ideas are good but a reader must wade through a lot of pretension to get to them. As a former punk rocker in 80s Los Angeles, I do recall that enthusiasm for making the music was more important than real talent for playing an instrument or singing. However, punk rockers were not pretentious at all. In fact, they were rebelling against the arrogant rich and those striving to be rich (like on the hit television shows of the time Dallas and Dynasty). The biggest negative for this collection is the absence of the music. Even the Sex Pistols, arguably the first punk rock band, were mentioned more for their appearance and lifestyle than their music.

I would recommend Punk is Dead more as a research source for a college class than for former punk rockers like myself. Sometimes it is best to leave the past in the past. 3 stars.

Thanks to the publisher, Zero Books, and NetGalley for an advanced review copy.

So i've only read abour a third of the book before my galley expired, sadly. I wasn't in the right mood when I got it and when I did it was too late.
I did love most of the articles and stories I read - this is very much a non-fiction history-based collection of Punk related stories - hut that first third, at least, is very Sex Pistols/Malcolm McLaren centric.
I loved reading about the origins of Punk and all the little known players of the movement, but I hope the rest of the book is a bit more inclusive, if I ever get to read it.

What a self-serving stream of consciousness. For people that don’t want to be labeled, they sure love giving themselves labels. The punk scene will not help its elitist image with this piece. It was just a place for a couple of claimed originals to the punk scene to brag about being originals in the punk scene.

DNF @ 35%

I think I was expecting this to be more music-focused. As someone who wasn't alive during punk's heyday, the music and documentaries are I have to connect me to it. I'm glad books like this are being published, hopefully bringing the spirit of punk to a wider audience.

That said, this book was not for me. This isn't about the music at all, but about the SCENE. I had no idea punk was a SCENE. And oh my god, it was just as pretentious and annoying as any other scene you can think of. There were specific types of artists (Situationists), specific places to be (SEX), certain clothes to wear (straight jeans, one-of-a-kind shirts), and certain people to know (Malcom McLaren).

I actually wanted to quit after just a couple of essays. I have no idea who the people writing them were and don't care to dig deep enough to find out, but man, most of them couldn't write worth a damn. They have big ideas and know big words, and they were THERE, but it seems they can't string thoughts together in any coherent manner. They write as if the reader were there too and knows exactly what they were talking about—the exact location of a club that no longer exists, who this random person is, the significance of this artsy idea that most people have never heard of. Clearly they have this context already built in their mind but didn't feel the need to explain that context in the actual essay. Sometimes I had no idea what I was reading or why.

There was so much name-dropping of people and places and brands that I was completely put-off. And I wonder how the people who contributed to this can remember the exact outfit they wore on some random night forty years ago. I guess I didn't realize punk was, at least initially, so materialistic and scenester-y. I'm sure these contributors would say otherwise, but that is EXACTLY how it felt reading these essays.