Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Life will never be the same again!, 9 Aug 1999
By A Customer
I bought this book about a year ago and have read it 4 times since. Despite being a huge, scolarly, intellectual work, it still manages to exite at just the same level as the music about which it speaks. Facts and ideas appear and disappear again only to resurface generations later in a different, often more potent and subversive context. Some of the ideas covered are self-evidently unworkable (as Marcus knows as well as his readers) but they still excite and energise the imagination through their sheer radicalism. Like the best Punk Music they prompt the reader to a paradoxical reaction: "I can't condone any of this intellectually, but I feel like fighting in the streets to defend it". Read it, and it will remind you how pitifully dull and conformist your life is. Obviously, you won't be manning barricades on the street, but your first reading of this towering work will blow your assumptions and preconceptions apart and regular helpings thereafter will keep your sense of intellectual radicalism alive, kicking and screaming "Destroy!!"
|
|
|
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
BEST DAMN BOOK YOU WILL EVER READ!, 15 Jul 1998
By A Customer
DO NOT WASTE ANY TIME. READ THIS BOOK. IT WILL CHANGE YOUR WORLD FOREVER. FIND THE EXTRAORDINARY LURKING BEHIND THE ORDINARY THAT YOU ALWAYS SUSPECTED WAS THERE, THE BEACH BENEATH THE COBBLESTONES.(TO PARAPHRASE THE BOOK'PROTAGONIST) IN THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY YEAR OF THE 1968 PARIS UPRISING, THIS BOOK IS MORE THAN TIMELY. I ORIGINALLY READ THIS BOOK BECAUSE IT WAS ABOUT THE SEX PISTOLS, BUT CAME AWAY WITH A THIRST TO KNOW THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL.
|
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Music or Mayhem?, 1 Jun 1998
By A Customer
This is not your father's music history book.If you are expecting a book about punk rock, read it. It is about punk rock in a manner of speaking. But even if you aren't a punk rocker, still read it. I know they always say this and then you think to yourself, why would I want to read a book about something I could care less about? But this book only uses punk as a kind of centerpiece or metaphor. But this book is about everything--Dadaism, revolution, Situationism, even a medieval religious fanatic who walled himself into a city with a group of followers resorting to canabalism and self-annihilation. See, it seems interesting. It is scholarly, but quite readable (and God knows, most aren't). Sometimes a little unfocused, but if it had too much structure, it wouldn't be punk.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
(6 customer reviews)
(
