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False Prophet: Field Notes from the Punk Underground (Music Culture)

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Steven Taylor's "False Prophet: Fieldnotes from the Punk Underground" succeeds on multi-levels. As anthropology, it is a comprehensive cultural study, as musical history it is a much needed document and as personal memoir it is wholly compelling. Taylor is a singular artist. While most rockers can't write about music and most rock critics can't tune a guitar, Taylor has the intellect, theoretical chops and the musical cache to cover all the bases. The story alone is riveting: accomplished musician signs on with band during Lower East Side punk explosion; band runs up against American corporate music biz and tours Europe while that part of the globe is undergoing intense upheaval. I can't recommend this book enough and it should prove riveting to not only a national, but an international audience.

The first part of this book is an attempt at a history of punk rock with a sociological slant, with many of the worst features of academic prose prominent (as well as the fuzziness that tends to accompany attempts at dealing with sociology as a hard science). Readers who are unfamiliar with the histroy of punk rock are likely to find it tedious, as well as excessively dry.

The second portion is an account of the author's involvement with the False Prophets in the latter part of their career, taken from his diaries with personal recollections and portions of another member's diary filling gaps. There is, fortunately, no attempt to maintain the academic tone of the first part of the book, and the ongoing dramas and crises of the band will be of interest to those who, like myself, find band dynamics amusing.

Steven Taylor joined the band "False Prophets" in the late 80s and before you can say "Never Again, Again," he was a full-time member and central player; a band with both a fanatical cult following and a general disregard for the market. Much of Taylor's extravagantly detailed memoir is based on a diary he kept for several years of one night stands and vivid encounters in the capitals of Europe--the seedy underbelly of several dozen cities on the edge of a revived Common Market. He has the eye of a born poet and will always see something odd and picturesque in whatever squat he happens to land in; he makes even the individual currency of these blurred nations sharp and glittering, like a newly minted penny. And the characters he meets are uniformly colorful and individuated--in fact I wonder how he gets away with such frankness about his fellow human beings--it made me wonder, well, maybe she's dead, or maybe he's a composite.

The adventures of False Prophets are inlaid into a general history of the punk scene in London, Paris, and New York, so we always have access to a broader social landscape as well as individual gigs, i.e, the book sports a political dimension and is never satisfied until no further questions can be wrung from the material. Negotiation and the engineering of process occupies band members more than they do the individual artist, yet even the most solo among us has to recognize and handle the pressures and desires of the other, no matter how configured, and this is where Taylor really shines. Well, and on the CD that accompanies this book, a lovely and unexpected addition to a book that gives on so many levels.

Okay, from time to time I got weary of lists and letters of the endless detail of band touring, for my own travel problems bore me and nothing's worse than reading about someone else's. Yet looked at in another light, these calculations and restrictions are mere analogues for the fundamental problems Taylor is on about--the difficulty of communication, the strength needed to break through into another place of consciousness, the increased shadow of globalization. I recommend this book to everyone interested in the places where economy and power clash with the human need to know and perform.