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In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992

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To find that no one has yet reviewed this book surprised and excited me. Surprise because I find it incredible that such a definitive, poetic and unique document could pass the world by unnoticed. Excitement because the pleasure, dare I say honour, of having my name next to the first review is genuine.

Let me put my cards on the table: this is my favourite book. One may have read a work that is the most enjoyable they have experienced, or another which seems the most accomplished and towering, but these criteria shouldn't, I think, define such a judgement. What it rest on is less the distant appreciation of greatness than the ability of the work to both excite and persist in exciting, years after one has put it down. Just to think of the best passages in this book excites me: their sense of possibility, of the value of creativity, of the politics that go hand in hand with creation and the burden of those who take them on.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. What is this book about? A collection of pieces about punk? Certainly, but more than that: a mirror held up to a life lived with rock music as a constant companion. A view of a cultural earthquake by a man who, by the time the Sex Pistols were provoking tabloid hysteria, was past the age when many would consider an obsession with pop comprehendible.

Thus, the first piece in the book is not about punk at all, at least not in the spittle-fuelled generic sense. Writing for Rolling Stone Magazine in 1969, the author blends his review of The Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed with his thoughts on a coffee-table thome of David Bailey portraits. Out of this seemingly bizarre scramble Marcus pulls a remarkably prescient picture of a decade fizzling away - a time when dreams are turning sour as people struggle to remember how alive with possibility those very dreams seemed a few short years ago, a time when aspirations of change and fulfilment turn into mere hopes for survival. In Bailey's portraits of Christine Keeler and The Stones Marcus finds a wistful nostalgia for a time that has yet to fully pass, while in the longing cries of Gimme Shelter he hears men confused about where they have reached, wondering what ever got them there, what ever set them on the journey, but knowing that the journey is all they have, that they can never go back now.

His view of the decade is perfectly, poetically expressed in another, much later piece, as he pulls Oliver Stone's film of The Doors from the critical dustbin:

"[it contains] a vision of the Sixties as a time that, even as it came forth, people sensed they could never really inhabit, and also never really leave."

That sense of displacement, of people fighting to find meaning in the dreams they have created, of the danger of those dreams, for them and maybe for us, is the transcendent quality that informs his work and takes it far beyond the level of an ascetic treatise or even a cultural history.

To punk then. The opening salvo is delivered from the heart of the arena just as the theatre burns down- the Sex Pistols last concert in San Francisco. I have never read any piece of writing, let alone any this short, that describes a scene of anger, violence, confusion and confrontation so vividly. His description of Rotten's stage manner is followed by an almost wistful sign off.

"His teeth were ground down to points... he held his microphone like a man leaning into a wind tunnel... [at the end of the concert] he gathered up the debris around him, took one final look and was gone, and we may never see his like again."

Perhaps the Pistols had punched the hole, but many others would flood through the breach. As this writing moves through the late Seventies and in to the Eighties in becomes a parallel story of the way `real life' - politics both personal and public - inform creativity and shape its reception, of how these politics can often seem to define the borders of what is relevant in pop and how sometimes, just sometimes, that equation can seem reversed.

Inevitably the cold, hard gloom of Thatcher and Reagan becomes the backdrop and, though they are rarely mentioned explicitly, the transformation in public discourse they unleashed becomes the all-consuming concern. In this climate Marcus makes the most free-wheeling of connections seem not merely plausible, but vital. In the book's most moving passage the murder of John Lennon seems like a logical coda to the election of Ronald Reagan, and a dollar comic book seems to truly seal the shame of the age. Some of the figures he writes of move within this new climate, others kick and scream, some dig themselves in and are fated to become cranks, fighting lost battles.

Ending with the improbable resurgence of punk in the form of Nirvana et al, and finally bookending the volume with further thoughts on the shadow that the Sixties can still often cast over us, this writing resurrects years now as distant in memory as the other more celebrated eras of pop.

As for the artists, perhaps their final question becomes: how does one find meaning in a world that has been transformed into everything one once set face against? Therein lies the dilemma posed by the title, but you'll have to read this wonderful book yourself to understand that conundrum.

A collection on punk and related matters from 1977 through 1992, including what was left out of Marcus' earlier book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. In the author's own words, it's about "records, performances, twists of the radio dial." It moves from the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy" to Nirvana's "Nevermind" in this illumined golden thread. Marcus writes about what moved, scared and disgusted him and what made him feel so privileged to be part of the punk audience. His views of punk encompassed a wide horizon, to include the likes of Bruce Springsteen, early Prince, Laurie Anderson and David Lynch's film Blue Velvet. His point is that punk made wonderful things like Anderson's "Superman" possible even though Superman itself isn't punk. In other words, punk's liberating effect caused sea changes in the perception of pop. A major weakness of the book is that it ignores the entire New York scene, because, as he puts it, "most [New York] punks seemed to be auditioning for careers as something else." So no Patti Smith, no Richard Hell, a cursory mention of Talking Heads, but you WILL find Blondie here. Fascist Bathroom follows many avenues (The Clash, Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello) but maybe its most precious contribution is rescuing from obscurity some lower-profile such as Laura Logic, The Mekons, Marianne Faithfull. It's a joy to read, chronologically arranged and ending with Nirvana and grunge in the 90s. The text swarms with relevant quotes from rock lyrics and references to other rock journalists like Lester Bangs. For anyone with a passionate interest in rock/pop music and youth culture, it's required reading.

These are brilliant essays, many of them indeed discussing punk's effect on mainstream culture, but some of them bother me. Marcus is original and insightful, but can be overly academic. That is, sometimes his theses take precedence to the truth, or even common sense.

It's not uncommon for brilliant thinkers to be intuitive and obsessive. But Marcus tends to focus on one tiny wrinkle in a work, and to blow it up into an explanation for all the artist's motives, intentions, and finally the whole Western Dilemma. By the time he reaches the end of his inspired flight, we are miles away from the original subject.

One example is his interpretation of the album "Los Angeles" by the band X as a Raymond Chandler story set to music. This approach is clever, and gives him a chance to indulge in some retro literary criticism, but the two works really have nothing in common besides their L.A. low-lifes.

A more inexplicable example is his essay on the L.A. punk scene. In apparent (and inferior) imitation of a famous piece by Lester Bangs, he abandons all logic to portray the L.A. punks as proto-fascist. He describes the Black Flag song "White Minority" as racist, while ignoring the fact that the singer is Hispanic and the song clearly ironic. He interprets a punk's hostility to "hippies" as master-race thuggery, when it's clear that by "hippies" the boy means the long-haired metal fans who preyed on the punk minority. Both of these facts are established in the film Marcus is describing.

There are other examples, many of them explicable by the vagaries of a powerful mind and the journalist's need to find an original "handle" on a subject. But if such a goal is pursued too far we get Yellow Journalism, which has caused physical harm in the past and will do so again.

"The facts we hate / you'll never hear us / I hear the radio is finally gonna play New Music / ya know, the "British Invasion" / But what about the Minutemen, Flesh Eaters, DOA, Big Boys and the Black Flag?..." -- X, "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts"

Greil Marcus is engaged in an endless quest for the musical epiphany, and he's at his best when he's unravelling the mystery of why and how a particular song heard at a particular moment can crystallize into something with the power to forever change the life of the listener. And he is one of the few scholarly American music writers of his generation who (sometimes) looks to punk rock for those moments.

Superficially, American punk has been about physical energy, naïve rage, and alienation, while its UK counterpart has often engaged more explicitly with political ideology. In these essays (originally published as "Ranters & Crowd Pleasers") Marcus gravitates toward the latter, especially bands that were on the Rough Trade label and their close relatives: Gang of 4, Mekons, Delta 5, Au Pairs, Essential Logic. Many of these were mixed gender groups, and they weren't afraid to seriously address issues of class struggle and sexual politics in their music or in their interviews. But while these bands may have given Marcus something to sink his intellectual teeth into, they also distracted him from important developments in his own backyard.

There are some conspicuous gaps here. Marcus admits as much, but that doesn't excuse him. A self-proclaimed champion of the rant, it's odd that he has nothing to say about The Fall, who practically define the genre. But I'd especially like to know what he might have to say about American groups from the same time period, especially the many worthy smaller bands from the various regional scenes around the country: Avengers, Noh Mercy, Minutemen, Pylon, Neo Boys, Wipers, and plenty of other great bands are MIA. Sadly, he seems to use the distasteful violence that stigmatized some SoCal punk as an excuse to write off most everything that happened in the US scene. Instead there are awkward, unconvincing efforts to pull non-punk items into the discussion. Fleetwood Mac? Van Morrison? Springsteen? Granted, this is a collection of magazine articles, and one can only hear and respond to so much music, but I wish he'd cast his nets wider.

Another issue is that Marcus writes about punk but never to it. In spite of his enthusiasm, he remains here a spectator, a pop anthropologist who maintains a careful, scientific distance from those he is studying. He pays attention, asks questions, takes notes, and then goes back and reports his findings to the civilized world - the readers of Rolling Stone, New West/California, Harper's, Artforum, the Village Voice -- none of them likely to reach a punk audience. Which is too bad, because Marcus has things to say that the punk community should hear; he has the right amount of critical distance and belief in the possibilities of the form to offer some useful observations. Of course, writing in punk zines won't pay the bills...

Ultimately, this is flawed as a history of punk because like all histories it shares the blind spots of the writer. No matter how much empathy Marcus feels, he's still a 60s kinda guy looking for 60s-style rock heroes and gestures, clinging too much to the similarities he sees between the youth culture of his own generation and the one he's writing about, and not really dealing with the differences which are so important and interesting. Which perhaps explains his tendency to write about the same people over and over (Costello, Mekons, Springsteen, the Clash, Gang of 4, Dylan). This need to keep an eye on his heroes long after they've ceased to be worth watching occasionally turns up something poignant, as in his heartbreaking portrait of the meltdown of The Clash. But mostly it gives one the feeling that Marcus is caught up in his own obsessive hero worship -- exactly the sort of sentimentality which punk has always resisted (at least in theory). Still, Marcus does his best to take punk seriously on its own terms, and he's worth reading in spite of the flaws. Now it's up to the younger generation to produce some critics who can fill in the gaps and set the record straight. But I'd also be curious to see what would happen if Marcus were to write about the era in hindsight himself, and return to some of the stuff he skipped over the first time around.

I found this Book under it's original Title. I think it is a great collection of Greil Marcus's Writings of Music outside the mainstream. Not Pretentious, but not Dumbed down for some average Music Joe. Post Punk Groups are treated with the respect & relevance that they deserved, at the time of their exhistance! Less convuluted than Lipstick Traces, and more enjoyable. I sought out these different group's music with new insight. Made even more enjoyable by Greil's added depth of his words. I like my Rock writers to actually Love their Subjects, without Jealousy or rancor.

Marcus' writing on punk and its' effects may or may not be the smartest rock journalism out there. But this book is no mere compendium of record and show reviews.

Marcus is obsessed with art history, and the social/historical contexts surrounding them, and in varied other works he draws links between dada, surrealism and punk, or invesitgates the social aspects of the conflicted American South that also spawned the primoridal forms of just about all forms of American music.

In smaller doses, Marcus does the same here - these short essays were published initially in more mass-audience publications, but Marcus is fairly uninterested in simple reviewing. Instead he - in a fashion that occasionally seizes upon Zen-like epiphanies - scrounges through the depths of the most easily overlooked moments of anything from the Gang Of Four, The Mekons, X or The Buzzcocks to Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk." And then he elaborates what he's found in such moments, crafting Barthes-like meditations upon the more obtuse meanings of culture, art and commerce in the process.

Marcus doesn't nail his varied theses 100% of the time - his write-off of New York (and Cleveland/Detroit) punk is the great, vast hole in this book. But I do agree with his take on the thuggishness of LA punk - a controversial contention open to much debate, though one could endlessly debate the ironic value vs. the ugly realities within the race and class tensions that floated through the work of X, Gun Club, Fear, et. al., especially in light of the early multi-ethnic and queer aspects of punk that have largely been written out of most official histories.

-David Alston

Long John (the lst reviewer of this book) hit the nail on the head. Marcus was a big part of my life in the 80's at the time I was in college. While I could go on about how wonderful this book is, the bottom line is, if you love music and challenging ideas, this is a must read. Highly recommended.