The Scene That Would Not Die

If you fancy yourself a historian of all things punk, then you’re going to need Ian Glasper’s The Scene That Would Not Die on your bookshelf. Published by Earth Island Books, it’s the fourth and final volume in Glasper’s loving, meticulous, and exhaustive chronicle of the UK punk scene(s) beginning with 1980. Following The Day The Country Died: A History Of Anarcho Punk 1980-1984, Trapped In A Scene: UK Hardcore 1985-1989, and Armed With Anger: How UK Punk Survived The Nineties, Glasper’s latest tome covers that last twenty years of punk and ends in the present day. It’s a history that bears witness to the dawn of social media and the early days of music streaming and finds contemporary musicians continuing to play the music they love while anxiously pondering its future in the shadow of Brexit and COVID-19.

First and foremost, The Scene That Would Not Die is a reference book. Explaining his decision to list the bands he profiles in alphabetical order, Glasper notes of his previous books that readers tend to “cherry-pick their chapters” and that “very few read the book from front to back.” Yet even though the book reads like an encyclopedia of bands whom — despite decades of dedication and, in many cases, by design — you’ve never heard of, the entries call out to each other like voices in the night as musicians cite their influences, jump from one band to another, or straddle multiple bands at once. What emerges is the story of a community bound as much by a love of hard-driving guitars and heavy, pounding drums as by a suspicion of mainstream culture and the trappings of a consumerist vision of success.

Not surprising, perhaps, is the fact that many of the bands featured in this volume are as dedicated to political issues as they are to their music; indeed, for most of them, the two go hand-in-glove. Veganism, anti-fascism, anarcho-syndicalism, and socialism are a few of the stances that the musicians profiled herein embrace. Nonetheless, as Justin Wood of two-piece anarcho punk band 51st State insists, the real joy of his brand of punk is that it’s “a little bit like a reset button that shakes you up from the consumerist negativity of our current culture and world.” What’s more, he adds, the punk scene on the whole “is a really broad church, and there is such a wide range of music within it… There is such a variety of bands, holding different views and politics, but all exist within punk, and this does mirror the broad scope of humanity in society; I think that even though this can be a frustration, it is probably human and it should be a nurturing and positive scene.”

The book also goes a long way toward replacing the shopworn Sid-Vicious-inspired stereotype of the punk-as-mindless-ne’er-do-well with an incredibly erudite and socially-conscious model. Take, for instance, the ruminations of Chris Dodd of Bad Breeding, who comes off as a cross between a scholar of Marxism and a character from a Don DeLillo novel when he discusses the future of not just punk but humanity as a whole: “For me, I’ve always seen a return to class analysis as the crucial tenet in pushing for radical deconstructions of the systems and frameworks that purport to govern our lives. This will become ever more apparent as the climate continues to rapidly evaporate and it becomes starkly obvious that our current economic mode runs counter to the existence of life on earth. There’ll be no time for navel gazing or liberal point-scoring when the earth is either ablaze or underwater.”

As the above and many, many other passages of The Scene That Would Not Die suggest, one of Glasper’s strengths as a historian is to let his subjects do the talking. When he does interject, it’s only to provide context so that the bands he’s chronicling can tell their owns stories, or to offer discographies and select-listening lists (including some very helpful URLs at the end of each entry). And while the ease of finding this music certainly signals the end of an era when to be aware of a band like Atterkop meant being neck-deep in a scene of like-minded individuals, the good news is that punk will never die. As unlikely as it may seem that punk can, in Glasper’s words, remain “relevant and meaningful to a risk-averse society in the face of such instant gratification,” the fact that the genre is always moving forward, “never past tense,” means that “as long as someone wants to stand up and ask ‘Why?’ or say ‘No!’ in a loud, angry voice, there will always be a place for this feisty subculture.”

Review by Marc Schuster

Aetherchrist

As he waits for the gunshot that will kill him to sound in the final paragraph of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, protagonist Eric Packer catches a glimpse of his own death in the crystal screen of his smartwatch. It’s a haunting way to end a novel, but also a frustrating one. How, after all, did Eric’s watch both predict and display his untimely demise?

Fortunately for anyone still wondering about that passage fifteen years later, Aetherchrist, the latest novel from Kirk Jones, starts at least nominally and more than likely coincidentally where Cosmopolis left off. This time around, though, the protagonist who catches a glimpse of his own death on a tiny screen is not a billionaire asset manager but a down-on-his luck knife salesman named Rey.

Unlike Eric Packer, however, Rey sees his impending doom on an old analog television set rather than a digital screen. More to the point, he has time to change his fate. Yet every move Rey makes further entangles him in a bizarre plot to rewire the collective consciousness of a nation and thus to usher into being what could either be a golden age of harmony or complete and utter chaos. Spoiler alert: This being a Kirk Jones novel, the smart money is on the latter.

In many ways, Aetherchrist serves as a meditation on the personal isolation inherent in the digital age. Lamenting the cold nature of online relationships in the early goings of the novel, Rey notes that he has to pretend that all he wants is sex when what he really wants is for someone to validate his existence. Curiously, the bulwark against this sense of isolation is the unfolding plot to plunge the world into chaos.

Indeed, as the forces he’s battling gain the upper hand, Rey experiences a curious sense of communion: “It’s actually happening. I can feel it, a faint transmission like the one you get when you watch a late-night movie that you know hardly anyone is up for. You don’t watch the movie for the content. You watch it because you can feel a small population out there like you, riding the airwaves for a sense of connection.” Arguably, the hopeless search for this sense of connection is what Aetherchrist is all about.

Hot on the heels of last year’s bizarre dance with death, Die Empty, Aetherchrist positions Jones as an author who’s clearly and solidly hitting his storytelling stride. Though dark and twisted, his imaginary universes allow for sharp plot twists and solid character development even as the characters in question face certain doom. Indeed, perhaps it’s their proximity to death that makes Jones’s characters so compelling. In their struggle for survival, they cling to hope in the unlikeliest of places and situations.

Murder by Jane Liddle – Review by Lavinia Ludlow

Murder is a collection of succinct and dynamite flash fiction that stylishly focuses on the topic of, well, murder. The fast-paced stories range from 40-500 words, and collectively feel like a meal of amuse-bouches. Jane Liddle breathes life into a story in less than a single page, and often, a single sentence, creating an unparalleled literary density:

The student studied the man with the Bluetooth and decided he would be the one he pushed because he figured no one good would miss him. 

The juvenile delinquent grew from a juvenile delinquent to an adult delinquent. He did not last long as an adult delinquent.

The rioter had adrenaline and anger on his side while the teenager had only fear. The rioter swung his bat as if the teenager’s head were a fastball.

Liddle presents the overarching theme of murder through an eclectic mix of scenarios. Many murderous acts are driven by a combination of insecurity and self-hatred within the minds and hearts of cold-blooded killers. We are exposed to mass shootings, sociopaths swinging baseball bats or burning victims alive, to other incidents ranging from assisted suicide, negligent parenting, or freak accidents such as being trampled by a Black Friday-like herd.

After a while, page after page of killing sprees feel overdone, but perhaps this is Liddle’s intent: to prove just how desensitized society has become with violent video games, films, and real life headlines of humanitarian crises, atrocities, and war. Furthermore, justice for the criminals often flounders, and provides little closure to victims and their families. Many of the guilty respond to their sentencing with apathy, and carry on with their bland lives, whether free or jailed, and reflect little on the consequences of their actions:

He went to prison for life, which turned out to be only four more years, so his gamble paid off, or didn’t pay off, depending how you look at it.

The scoundrel didn’t intend to kill him, but wasn’t sad that he did. Men like that were not to be trusted. The scoundrel got three years in prison for manslaughter, but was out in one.

Liddle christens each criminal subject with derogatory names such as the “weasel,” the “idiot,” the “degenerate,” and the “scoundrel,” which double as the story title. Doing so evokes distance between the reader and criminal, in the way that news stories avoid releasing full names and instead rely on descriptions such as “male in his 30s.”

These violent narratives often feel pulled from the headlines and embellished with literary backstory. Each boasts a, “who’s tragic demise will encounter next?” and although one may assume this collection may only contribute to society’s desensitization to murder, these stories examine just how fragile life is, how easily one can become snarled in a situation where human life is extinguished. Whether the act is conscious and committed with intent (shoving someone in front of a train or taking someone out with a shotgun) or subconscious and committed without (a prank gone wrong), no matter the case, lives are irreparably altered. 

Available for purchase in an array of fun colors through 421 Atlanta

Released March 29th, 2016

68 pages 

Long Promised Road

Books about the Beach Boys tend to focus on Brian Wilson, depicting him as the “mad genius” behind the band’s music. Such accounts trace his evolution from a surf-pop wunderkind to the architect behind the masterful Pet Sounds album, then dwell almost lasciviously on the mental breakdown surrounding the recording of the long-deferred Smile album before turning to his struggles with addiction, mental illness, and the troubling relationship with the Svengali-like therapist who took over Wilson’s life. While such narratives are certainly valid, they tend to ignore other members of the band—in particular Carl Wilson, the youngest of the brothers who formed the heart of the band. In Long Promised Road: Carl Wilson, Soul of the Beach Boys, Kent Crowley aims to correct that.

Less of a counter-narrative than a complementary one, Crowley depicts Carl Wilson as the emotional and musical center of the band, particularly during the years when Brian’s contributions were negligible. In Carl’s early childhood, he was a somewhat reluctant partner in his older brother’s musical machinations, only singing along with Brian under duress and as a result of maternal intercession. Yet as the band started coming together, Carl’s talents as a guitarist and his natural ear for music made him Brian’s closest confidant and later ensured his role as the band’s musical director as the oldest Wilson brother drifted further out of the picture.

As Crowley makes clear throughout the book, a combination of talent and compassion allowed Carl to hold the Beach Boys together through some of the band’s leanest years. Yet even in these lean years, Carl emerges as somewhat of a creative dynamo, crafting some of the finest, albeit most obscure, music the Beach Boys ever created. Indeed, part of the heartbreak of reading Crowley’s account of the band is seeing Carl’s desire to push the band ever forward on the artistic front while personal, financial, and cultural concerns gradually transformed the band into a nostalgia act built almost entirely on the legend of Brian’s genius.

Needless to say, Brian Wilson casts a long shadow in Beach Boys lore. While Crowley’s extensively researched and emotionally sensitive biography can’s fully extricate Carl from that shadow, it succeeds in shining a well-deserved spotlight on the brother whose love for his family and the beautiful music they created together kept the band alive when the rest of the world appeared to have given up on them.