Punk Snot Dead

1981: The cities of England are aflame with widespread rioting. One in ten of the population is unemployed. The Specials' Ghost Town is at number one in the charts. Too much fighting on the dance floor. But don't worry, there's a royal wedding to keep you all distracted, Charles and Diana exchanging worthless vows before a multitude of flag-waving tourists. Meanwhile, a 17-year-old punk rocker, young, dumb, and full of...curiosity, decides to flee the boredom of small village life and a mindless factory job to follow his favourite bands - Siouxsie and the Banshees, Killing Joke, and the Damned - dodging police, skinheads, Perry Boys, football hooligans, and er, the Bath Warriors as he hitchhikes from town to town. Packed with history and hilarity, Punk Snot Dead is a coming-of-age story like no other, and a nostalgic glance at an England that is no more.

This original collection of insight, analysis and conversation charts the course of punk from its underground origins, when it was an un-formed and utterly alluring near-secret, through its rapid development. Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night takes in sex, style, politics and philosophy, filtered through punk experience, while believing in the ruins of memory, to explore a past whose essence is always elusive.

This book explores the ways in which Western-derived music connects with globalization, hybridity, consumerism and the flow of cultures. Both as local terrain and as global crossroads, cities remain fascinating spaces of cultural contestation and meaning-making via the composing, playing, recording and consumption of popular music.

Discusses how young women use the punk subculture for empowerment and self-identification, constructing their own version of femininity from the ingredients of the style. The book is based in part on the author's own reminiscence of a punk girlhood, as well as interviews with 40 punk girls and women between the ages of 14 and 37 in a handful of cities throughout North America. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A history and social psychology of punk music.

Much to his chagrin, John Dunning was born into the movie business. But once he came to accept his career fate, he developed a great passion for making movies, and ultimately became Canada's pre-eminent B-movie producer, with a knack for developing young talent. In You’re Not Dead until You’re Forgotten, Dunning, in forthright and charming fashion, recounts his rough-and-tumble upbringing in the Montreal suburb of Verdun in the 1930s, his modest start in the film industry behind the candy counter of his family's movie theatre, and later, his ventures into film distribution and production. In the 1960s Dunning, along with financial wizard André Link, founded Cinepix, which eventually merged into the Lionsgate Entertainment film colossus. Specializing in such exploitation genres as raucous comedy, groundbreaking Québécois "maple syrup porn" and horror films, Cinepix churned out cult classics like Valérie, Shivers, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, and Meatballs. Dunning's detailed recollections of making these movies provide a rare, candid, and witty take on how the film industry really works. Driven to succeed in the face of arbitrary censors, parochial Canadian critics, and controlling government funding agencies, Dunning and Link developed a formula for producing controversial, moneymaking movies, and helped launch the careers of such luminaries-to-be as David Cronenberg, Ivan Reitman, and Don Carmody. Cronenberg has called John Dunning "the unacknowledged godfather of an entire generation of Canadian filmmakers." Illustrated with personal photos and film stills, You’re Not Dead Until You’re Forgotten finally gives this pioneer Canadian filmmaker his long-overdue spotlight.

This book explores for the first time the punk phenomenon in contemporary China. As China has urbanised within the context of explosive economic growth and a closed political system, urban subcultures and phenomena of alienation and anomie have emerged, and yet, the political and economic differences between China and western societies has ensured that these subcultures operate and are motivated by profoundly different structures. This book will be of interest to cultural historians, media studies and urban studies researchers, and (ex-) punk rockers.