Recommendations for Cypherpunks Books

[Ken Brown]

Right of course about Nina Hagen et al. Though the argument about an age
cohort still works (& in fact could be extended to include the German
industrial rock bands & their artier (& much funnier) US followers from
Akron (*) 

But then I could argue that a lot of British punk rock from 1976/7
actually sounded very, very different from the continental & North
American precursors. A lot less sophisticated, less art-school (although
a lot of the practitioners were at art schools!), less pills & more
beer, and they actually used English accents and working-class
south-of-England accents at that. In fact that summed up a lot of the
impact of the Clash, the Damned, the Sex Pistols & all the hundreds of
less-well-remembered bands - they sounded working-class, which in those
days just Wasn't Done if you came from within a hundred miles of London.

And I could also argue that the musical roots of that kind of British
"punk" didn't include those guys so much as the noisy, thrashy, stomping
heavy bands of the early 1970s (people like Sweet & Slade who never got
to the US I guess), Reggae (especially in its early Ska mode),  football
chants, oddities like Screaming Lord Sutch (his "L-O-N-D-O-N London!"
from the late 60s isn't punk but it sounds like punk) and of course
Hawkwind (honestly, just listen to the basslines). If there is a
transatlantic component other than R&B (which is always there of course)
back in the mid-1970s it was more likely to be Patti Smith or their
older brother's Velvet's records.

And of course you could quite truthfully remind me that a significant
number of those famous punks were in fact middle-class
university-educated fine-arts types who did just as many of the wrong
sort of pills as their windy stadium rock predecessors (talking of
which, how come you Americans still pay money to listen to that stuff ?
:-)

Ken Brown


(*) and for that matter some of the kind of people who listened to Bruce
Springsteen in his more depressing moments... before the Republican's
irony module was unplugged & they started to think "Born in the USA" was
some sort of anthem. Or the kind of people who listened to various noisy
southern rock bands.



Jim Choate wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 26 Jan 2001, Ken Brown wrote:
> 
> > > Kids born in years between large bumps end up caught on the edge -
> > > perpetually too old for the ones behind, too young to ever be accepted in
> > > the society born before them.
> >
> > That more or less happens these days - there is a sort of lost
> > generation born between the late 1950s & about 1970 who  managed to be
> > the first age cohort in 200 years who were poorer than their parents, at
> > least in Britain (where else did punk rock come from?)
> 
> Actually punk rock came from Germany, look up Klaus Nomi and Nina Hagen,
> and Canada, P. Orridge and Throbbing Gristle. Klaus is also the first
> 'famous' person to die from AIDS. Then it moved to NY & Cali. (The Germs
> fuckin' rule!). It didn't get to Britian until it had already been
> established a couple of years.
> 
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