Myers, Ben. Review of Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night, edited by Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix, Mojo, November 2017, p. 119.

Academic reactions to punk four decades on

Punk‘s power lies in its highly fragmented legacy: on the one hand, nostalgic weekends in Blackpool, on the other, key critical thinking as collated here. Editors Richard Cabut (formerly of positive punks Brigandage) and Andrew Gallix, founder of 3:AM Magazine, corral some of punk’s finest theorists to document the “blank zone” in which a scene blossomed; early chroniclers such as Jon Savage and Jonh Ingham remind that it was a series of cultural seeds scattered, trigger points for what followed. Penny Rimbaud of Crass, psychogeographer Tom Vague, Barney Hoskins, Judy Nylon, Simon Reynolds and late theorist Mark Fisher all cast an academic eye over punk, finding it in Parisian art galleries, squat-land, the Angry Brigade, conceptual non-bands (Chrissie Hynde’s The Moors Murderers, Julian Cope’s Nova Mob), jive-talking McLaren wannabes, proto-Dadaist Arthur Cravan, French Situationism and German Romanticism. The subtext here suggests that punk was an outward-looking movement against the end of the British empire.

Ben Myers