In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92 [Paperback]

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.

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.