A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982

(Paperback)

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Neither a dry-as-dust reference volume recycling the same dull facts nor a gushy, gossipy puff piece, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk: 1974-1982 is a bold book that examines punk as a movement that is best understood by placing it in its cultural field. It contains myriad critical-listening descriptions of the sounds of the time, but also places those sounds in the context of history. Drawing on hundreds of fanzines, magazines, and newspapers, the book isin the spirit of punkan obsessive, exhaustively researched, and sometimes deeply personal portrait of the many ways in which punk was an artistic, cultural, and political expression of defiance.
A Cultural Dictionary of Punk is organized around scores of distinct entries, on everything from Lester Bangs to The Slits, from Jimmy Carter to Minimalism, from 'Dot Dash' to Bad Brains. Both highly informative and thrillingly idiosyncratic, the book takes a fresh look at how the malaise of the 1970s offered fertile ground for punkas well as the new wave, post-punk, and hardcoreto emerge as a rejection of the easy platitudes of the dying counter-culture. The organization is accessible and entertaining: short bursts of meaning, in tune with the beat of punk itself. Rombes upends notions that the story of punk can be told in a chronological, linear fashion. Meant to be read straight through or opened up and experienced at random, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk covers not only many of the well-known, now-legendary punk bands, but the obscure, forgotten ones as well. Along the way, punk's secret codes are unraveled and a critical time in history is framed and exclaimed.

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Reviews

"Nicholas Rombes answers many of the questions I didn't know I had... It's about time someone wrote a textbook on these things." -The Rumpus
"An expansive, erudite, and hugely entertaining guide through the dark alleys and glittering byways of punk-in music, film, literature, politics, fashion-A Cultural Dictionary of Punk is essential reading for anyone fascinated by one of the most influential artistic movements of our time." -Elizabeth Hand, author of Generation Loss
At a cursory glance, Rombes's compendium has the form of a dictionary, covering punk bands from the Adolescents to the Zeroes, but scratch the surface and you'll discover a profoundly weird document, where the notion of "punk" expands to include discussions of Angela Carter, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Barry Hannahalthough even Rombes admits the last is stretching the point. The tone veers from the academic to the confessional: "How can you hesitate about a song that has saved you more than once from the black depths you are prone to fall into" Rombes asks in an entry concerning the British band Wire. There are several forays into the fictional, including stories about imagined versions of Patti Smith and Joey Ramone, as well as entries written by "Ephraim P. Noble," who is almost certainly a fictional alter ego. If it were touted as a definitive guide to punk culture, the dictionary's omissions would be glaringbut this is something altogether different: a personal investigation into the significance of punk rock, an attempt to inject critical studies with "a big dose of chaos and anarchy" and thereby create a compelling cultural narrative.-Publishers Weekly
Rombes, the author of works on punk musicians and cinema, here examines punk as a cultural movement through A-to-Z entries drawing upon fanzines, magazines, and newspapers to place media and artists in the context of history. In the author's own words, he has "allowed the content of the entries to determine their shape, format and tone." The result is an eclectic examination of the punk movement as well as the cultural and historical issues surrounding it. The book concludes with a postscript analyzing the end of the punk movement in 1982. BOTTOM LINE: The author's love and knowledge of the punk era shines throughout the work. There are several other books on punk, but this one's focus on the general historical and cultural perspective of the movement, as well as its accessible and informal style, makes it a worthy addition to the literature. An excellent overview of the era for any library.-Library Journal
"Rombes has assembled a proudly subjective collection of touchstones through which he attempts to discern, if not a definition of "punk," then at least some semblance of its signifiers' import in his own sense of self....Even while assembling texts and quoting from wide and varied sources, what Rombes does more than anything is provide evidenceevidence and validation that this thing punk is as significant to the world at large as it is to him."-The Agit Reader
"I take a little notebook wherever I go -- I'm sure some of you do this, too -- so that anytime I hear about a cool film or something I should check out, I can jot it down immediately. A Cultural Dictionary of Punk is like a compilation of everything I've scribbled in little notebooks over the last 15 years. ...Much has been written on the subject, but this well-researched and respectful title is one book that should be appreciated, not rejected, by today's punk scene."-Whitney Matheson, USA Today's PopCandy
"After a first read, I now know that A Cultural Dictionary of Punk 1974-1982 will be for me a traveling companion, a friend, for the rest of the way. Author Nicholas Rombes makes the dictionary format yield the urgency, brevity, and speedy darkness of Punk as a musical method, Punk as a cultural necessity. But the book is really a love letter, proud, bitter, flabbergasted, and true. His subjectivity serves him, and the reader, well. Start with his stuff on The Clash, The Ramones, Nirvana (yes: punk), Sixties, punk as a rejection of . . . . Rombes makes you want to write your own dark dictionary.Do it. Do it fast. "-S.X. Rosenstock, a poet and writer for the Huffington Post
I'm obsessed with Nicholas Rombes' amazing book, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk from Continuum Books, and carry it everywhere.' -- The Huffington Post
The cover is perfect; no one person has a hold on punk, so no one person could ever be the face for it (Sid Vicious be damned!). http://new.flavorwire.com/196081/some-of-our-favorite-punk-book-covers/2 -- Flavorpill
"Rombes makes A Cultural Dictionary important by clearly writing about the weird marginal forces that swirled into CREEM-reading, all night donut shop youth haunted Ohio at the end of the Vietnam war era, and editing out a ton of stuff called "punk" in the years since 1982."-KEXP, Seattle
"Part guide, part archive (there are many images from the era never before reprinted), part postmodern study... [A Cultural Dictionary of Punk] is far more punk than its academic title lets on."-The Rumpus
"Rombes launches arguments and counterarguments...that make the selections of his "dictionary" as provocative as Jon Savage in England's Dreaming. ...A challenging lexicography."Record Collector -- Ian Abrahams
"Nearly all the dictionary entries dealing with Cleveland, Ohio and New York City and their denizens (Pere Ubu, The Eels, Peter Laughner, Dead Boys in the former; Ramones, Patti Smith, Richard Hell in the latter) are tremendously evocative..." The Wire, December 2009
"Any dictionary which includes entries on X Ray Spex Germ Free Adolescents alongside Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow just has to be worth a read. And it is. And you should. Read it that is." Total Music, January 2010.
"Excellent" - Jon Savage

Author Bio

Nicholas Rombes is a professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy. His books include Ramones (Continuum 2005), New Punk Cinema (2005), and Cinema in the Digital Age (2017). He has written for Exquisite Corpse, McSweeney's online, and CTheory.