Ralph's Corner (Explorations of American Popular Music Genres): Punk

Punk Press by Vincent Bernière; Mariel Primois The punk movement sprang up on the east coast in the late 1960s. It crossed the Atlantic and virtually exploded in London and Paris. This dynamic counter movement churned out heaps of photocopied, hand stapled fanzines that expressed ideas, music and works of art. Some became professional magazines. By creating its own press, the punk movement secured its place and its voice in the history of 20th century art and culture. The book Punk Press compiles the stunning graphics created by these publications, spanning from the East Village, to East London, to the Left Bank, featuring multiple collages, cutouts and handcrafted typography, standing as a visual tour through one of music's most influential movements.

The Stooges : how "I wanna be your dog" uncovers the ascension of younger Boomers and older Gen Xers by Marci Cohen Explores the legitimacy of punk rock music within the Baby Boomer and Gen X generations by considering the original recording, two cover versions and the 2010 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony's live performance of the Stooges' song "I wanna be your dog".

Punk by Stephen Colegrave; Chris Sullivan Recreating the complete story of the punk phenomenon -- including where it came from and what it turned into -- Punk is a massive and visually stunning record of five years that changed the world: from 1975 to 1979. Collecting the testimony of more than 260 artists, record producers, designers, and journalists -- including John Cale, Debbie Harry, Joe Strummer, Maureen Tucker, Gerard Malanga, Lou Reed, Johnny Rotten, Danny Fields, Legs McNeil, Bob Gruen, David Byrne, Iggy Pop, Tommy Ramone, William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, Cherry Vanilla, and Malcolm McLaren, former manager and ringleader of the Sex Pistols -- Punk brings to life the profound effect punk music had on global popular culture in the words of those who created it. With reverberations in style, fashion, attitude and philosophy, the birth of punk music released the greatest shockwaves in the popular culture since The Beatles. Punk tells the story through the words of the people who were closely tiedto the mania and through hundreds of contemporaneous color and black-and-white photographs.

Anyone Can Do It by Pete Dale For more than three decades, a punk underground has repeatedly insisted that 'anyone can do it'. This underground punk movement has evolved via several micro-traditions, each offering distinct and novel presentations of what punk is, isn't, or should be. Underlying all these punk micro-traditions is a politics of empowerment that claims to be anarchistic in character, in the sense that it is contingent upon a spontaneous will to liberty (anyone can do it - in theory). How valid, though, is punk's faith in anarchistic empowerment? Exploring theories from Derrida and Marx, Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground examines the cultural history and politics of punk. In its political resistance, punk bears an ideological relationship to the folk movement, but punk's faith in novelty and spontaneous liberty distinguish it from folk: where punk's traditions, from the 1970s onwards, have tended to search for an anarchistic 'new-sense', folk singers have more often been socialist/Marxist traditionalists, especially during the 1950s and 60s. Detailed case studies show the continuities and differences between four micro-traditions of punk: anarcho-punk, cutie/'C86', riot grrrl and math rock, thus surveying UK and US punk-related scenes of the 1980s, 1990s and beyond.

We Got Power! by Jordan Schwartz; David Markey As teenagers in 1981, David Markey and his best friend Jordan Schwartz founded We Got Power, a fanzine dedicated to the hardcore punk music community in their native Los Angeles. Their text and cameras captured the early punk spirit of Black Flag, the Minutemen, Social Distortion, Youth Brigade and many others at the height of their precocious punk powers. In the process, the duo's amazing photographs also captured the dilapidated suburbs, abandoned storefronts and dereliction of the era - a rubble strewn social apocalypse that demanded a youth uprising!