A blog about Bloomsbury Academic's 33 1/3 series, our other books about music, and the world of sound in general.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-82

We've just sent Nick Rombes' wonderful book off to the printers, so it should be on sale from early-mid July onwards.

And Publishers Weekly clearly enjoyed the book, too:

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A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974–1982

Nicholas Rombes. Continuum, $24.95 paper (320p) ISBN 978-0-8264-2779-3

At a cursory glance, Rombes’s compendium has the form of a dictionary, covering punk bands from the Adolescents to the Zeroes, but scratch the surface and you’ll discover a profoundly weird document, where the notion of “punk” expands to include discussions of Angela Carter, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Barry Hannah—although even Rombes (Ramones) admits the last is stretching the point. The tone veers from the academic to the confessional: “How can you hesitate about a song that has saved you more than once from the black depths you are prone to fall into?” Rombes asks in an entry concerning the British band Wire. There are several forays into the fictional, including stories about imagined versions of Patti Smith and Joey Ramone, as well as entries written by “Ephraim P. Noble,” who is almost certainly a fictional alter ego. If it were touted as a definitive guide to punk culture, the dictionary’s omissions would be glaring—but this is something altogether different: a personal investigation into the significance of punk rock, an attempt to inject critical studies with “a big dose of chaos and anarchy” and thereby create a compelling cultural narrative.

***

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

That looks great, is it getting a UK release.

David said...

Yes, will be available in the UK and Europe from August onwards...

Todd Mason said...

Sounds like an excellent antidote to Greil Marcus, to say nothing of Ed Ward.

Jun Loayza said...

Congratulations on the book! Send me a link so that I can purchase it when it comes out.

Just stumbled and submitted your site to Viralogy. Hope you get some great traffic from it.

- Jun

PĆ¼ppi said...

yeeeeaaah
im a big fan of punk rock!
punks rulezzzz:)