The Song Fight Bulletin Board

So I just finished reading this, a 500 page tome chronicling the history of post-punk from 1978 right up to Frankie Goes to Hollywood in '84, via PIL, Pere Ubu, No-Wave, Electronica and New Pop. It has some great anecdotes and a really interesting set of hypthoses on the psychology of the period.

It's pretty brilliant, with a few reservations

1. The author never misses a chance to have a sly dig at the Clash. Personal opinion and all, but it starts to smack of sourness on the 17th or 18th time.

2. Occasionally his argument threads contradict each other, usually when he's looking for a way to belittle punk in relation to post-punk. Like (correctly) pointing out that Punk was almost entirely a white european's music, and that post-punk deliberately tried to bring the rhythm back into it, but then later, in another context, quoting some of those same post-punkers saying they were deliberately avoiding the style of popular Black R&B artists ...

3. The first 300 pages are mind-blowingly good. Once he gets past 1982 however, interest tails off. I'm not so interested in heaven 17 or Culture Club so maybe that's just me. Fortunately it picks up again towards the end of the book.

4. Occasionally it falls into 'snapshots of loads of bands' - I guess even 500 odd pages isn't really enough to do them all justice.

I reccommend it to anyone interested in this era of music (that's enjoying something of a renaiisance at the moment, what with Franz Ferdinand et al) - I have a long list of albums I now want to track down just from reading about them, starting with James Chance & the Contortions ...

j$

do pere ubu get the 'snapshots' treatment or more focus?

Actually they get a fair chunk, thankfully - they share half a chapter with Devo - some interesting anecdotes about that unique synth sound too. However David Thomas comes across as a bit of an arse, which surprised me greatly (having seen him in concert and thought he was the best thing since sliced bread)

Also learnt soemthing about Devo which I never knew - from that chapter that Casale and Mothersbaugh were at Kent State during the 'riot' and in fact two of Casale's closest friends died. Then goes on to throw new light on their rejection of straight forward protest / expression of anger in their music, which confused the hell out of a lot of punks. (i know it wasn't a riot by the way, I can't think of le mot juste right now)

j$

Somebody I knew in college, who I didn't really respect the opinion of (simply because he just wasnt as awesome as myself or my friends back home) was reading this, like on the last day before I moved back home, and I naturally assumed it was one of those self-righteously-hip books where the author presents a history of something he doesn't really understand, or wasnt around for, or honestly could give two shits about. ie:

Last summer my younger brother picked up a book at the library about emo, which I thumbed through and found a very brief mention of "the history of emo": About 5 pages with a few nods to stuff like Rites of Spring and Dag Nasty, (no mention whatsoever to uber-indie, sorely forgotten stuff like Moss Icon, Mineral, Joan of Arc, Clikitat Ikatowi, etc) but littered with way too many Minor Threat mentions (!?).. Then they followed it up with nine chapters about Dashboard Confessional and Thursday.

Now that I've read your post, and a couple of Amazon user reviews; I actually want to go check this one out.