Even though the very title telegraphs the synthesis of Punk and Politics, I was taken aback at this collection of writings by Greil Marcus.

I didn't learn all that much about the music: like Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus' essays evoke moods which endear me to the albums he's discussing, makes me want to listen to them not because I know anything about how I'd enjoy them but because I want to feel anything close to the same sort of profundity Marcus writes about.

The bigger sledgehammer, though, is the political conscience that fills these pages. Even though Punk is a political music, it's currently an empty one, all surface, no feeling. By writing about Bruce Springsteen I can feel the terror of a world governed by Reagan and Thatcher, and I and draw the parallels to the Bush/Blair/Harper world I haven't yet fully escaped as a Canadian.

Reading this book as a punk, politically aware, and a computer scientist, I have to ask myself: Could I ever embed this much concern about the world into works on subjects as seemingly distant as my aesthetic love and my tech love? ( )

If Quaaludes are the drug that can turn English into a second language, Flipper is the band.

Equally conversant in American folklore, continental cultural critique, and pop music history, Greil Marcus here provides an indirect chronicle of a pop culture moment that came and went. As he did with the ‘Old Weird America’ conjured up by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music in the 1950s, Marcus situates punk in a particular context while continuing to insist that the best records—whether by Dock Boggs or the Raincoats—carry “a faraway sense of the absolute.” He can write an ontological analysis of the Gang of Four’s first album, contrast the cultural power of the Mekons with that of Chuck Norris, and lament the juvenile idealism of late-model Joe Strummer—all without sounding haughty, because his exuberance is both wary and genuine.

As Marcus points out, the dichotomies during the punk era were hard to miss: the invigorating energy of the music sprang from the Anglo-American malaise of the late 70s; the ‘anything goes’ ethos of the post-punk milieu coexisted with "entrenched economic and social forces that demanded quietude and conformity." Still, “extremism by means of rock ‘n’ roll” has (had?) the power “to intervene in the symbol system of a listener’s everyday life” (Roland Barthes meets Johnny Rotten)—and Marcus can send you off in search of the old records or the lost outsider masterpieces. I don’t know what it means that much of the more obscure stuff that he cites is now available as bit-streams on the interwebs, but I guess I’m glad for it. Now my kids can hear Liliput in the kitchen, and I know they’re better off for that.

Composed of 15 years of assorted reviews and brief essays loosely organized around the idea of "punk" (for Marcus, this term is capacious enough to include the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and Cyndi Lauper alongside the Sex Pistols and the Clash), the book turns into something much more: a sustained critique of an increasingly moribund music industry and the deadened popular tastes that the industry shapes and serves. In the process, Ranters also becomes one of the more lucid treatises on aesthetics I have read. (Read more at http://www.donutage.org/posts/2005/10/punkrockandtheabsolute.html) ( )