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In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992 | 
 enlarge | Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $26.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 314231
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0674445775
Dewey Decimal Number: 781.66
EAN: 9780674445772
ASIN: 0674445775
Publication Date: March 15, 1999
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Amazon.com Review
By now, first-generation rock critic Greil Marcus is better known as the author of highbrow pop-culture tomes (Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes) than as a workaday, keep-it-pithy critic. This collection of columns and short pieces (most rewritten to varying degrees for the book) churned out for New West, Artforum, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone presents the erudite Marcus as a periodical commentator subject to deadline and word-count pressures. As such, it gives a history-as-it-happens perspective on the music scene rather than a sweeping overview, meaning it's perhaps less provocative than Marcus's more recent efforts, but it's also more readable. Invigorated by the emergence of the Sex Pistols, Marcus delighted in chronicling the music and behavior of the first wave of punk provocateurs. Here are pieces on the import of the Pistols, the Clash, Elvis Costello, the Gang of Four, and (closest to the author's heart?), the Mekons, presented largely as they were originally written, with the din still ringing in the scribe's ears. --Steven Stolder
Product Description
Was punk just another moment in music history, a flash in time when a group of young rebels exploded in a fury of raw sound, outrageous styles, and in-your-face attitude? Greil Marcus, author of the renowned Lipstick Traces, delves into the after-life of punk as a much richer phenomenon-a form of artistic and social rebellion that continually erupts into popular culture. In more than seventy short pieces written over fifteen years, he traces the uncompromising strands of punk from Johnny Rotten to Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth, even Bruce Springsteen. Marcus's unparalleled insight into present-day culture and brilliant ear for music bring punk's searing half-life into deep focus. Originally published in the U.S. as Ranters and Crowd Pleasers.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 England, shmengland...a punk history full of holes April 21, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The facts we hate / you'll never hear us / I hear the radio is finally gonna play New Music / ya know, the "British Invasion" / But what about the Minutemen, Flesh Eaters, DOA, Big Boys and the Black Flag?..." -- X, "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts"
Greil Marcus is engaged in an endless quest for the musical epiphany, and he's at his best when he's unravelling the mystery of why and how a particular song heard at a particular moment can crystallize into something with the power to forever change the life of the listener. And he is one of the few scholarly American music writers of his generation who (sometimes) looks to punk rock for those moments.
Superficially, American punk has been about physical energy, naive rage, and alienation, while its UK counterpart has often engaged more explicitly with political ideology. In these essays (originally published as "Ranters & Crowd Pleasers") Marcus gravitates toward the latter, especially bands that were on the Rough Trade label and their close relatives: Gang of 4, Mekons, Delta 5, Au Pairs, Essential Logic. Many of these were mixed gender groups, and they weren't afraid to seriously address issues of class struggle and sexual politics in their music or in their interviews. But while these bands may have given Marcus something to sink his intellectual teeth into, they also distracted him from important developments in his own backyard.
There are some conspicuous gaps here. Marcus admits as much, but that doesn't excuse him. A self-proclaimed champion of the rant, it's odd that he has nothing to say about The Fall, who practically define the genre. But I'd especially like to know what he might have to say about American groups from the same time period, especially the many worthy smaller bands from the various regional scenes around the country: Avengers, Noh Mercy, Minutemen, Pylon, Neo Boys, Wipers, and plenty of other great bands are MIA. Sadly, he seems to use the distasteful violence that stigmatized some SoCal punk as an excuse to write off most everything that happened in the US scene. Instead there are awkward, unconvincing efforts to pull non-punk items into the discussion. Fleetwood Mac? Van Morrison? Springsteen? Granted, this is a collection of magazine articles, and one can only hear and respond to so much music, but I wish he'd cast his nets wider.
Another issue is that Marcus writes about punk but never to it. In spite of his enthusiasm, he remains here a spectator, a pop anthropologist who maintains a careful, scientific distance from those he is studying. He pays attention, asks questions, takes notes, and then goes back and reports his findings to the civilized world - the readers of Rolling Stone, New West/California, Harper's, Artforum, the Village Voice -- none of them likely to reach a punk audience. Which is too bad, because Marcus has things to say that the punk community should hear; he has the right amount of critical distance and belief in the possibilities of the form to offer some useful observations. Of course, writing in punk zines won't pay the bills...
Ultimately, this is flawed as a history of punk because like all histories it shares the blind spots of the writer. No matter how much empathy Marcus feels, he's still a 60s kinda guy looking for 60s-style rock heroes and gestures, clinging too much to the similarities he sees between the youth culture of his own generation and the one he's writing about, and not really dealing with the differences which are so important and interesting. Which perhaps explains his tendency to write about the same people over and over (Costello, Mekons, Springsteen, the Clash, Gang of 4, Dylan). This need to keep an eye on his heroes long after they've ceased to be worth watching occasionally turns up something poignant, as in his heartbreaking portrait of the meltdown of The Clash. But mostly it gives one the feeling that Marcus is caught up in his own obsessive hero worship -- exactly the sort of sentimentality which punk has always resisted (at least in theory). Still, Marcus does his best to take punk seriously on its own terms, and he's worth reading in spite of the flaws. Now it's up to the younger generation to produce some critics who can fill in the gaps and set the record straight. But I'd also be curious to see what would happen if Marcus were to write about the era in hindsight himself, and return to some of the stuff he skipped over the first time around.
 Barthes-In-Punk September 17, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Marcus' writing on punk and its' effects may or may not be the smartest rock journalism out there. But this book is no mere compendium of record and show reviews.
Marcus is obsessed with art history, and the social/historical contexts surrounding them, and in varied other works he draws links between dada, surrealism and punk, or invesitgates the social aspects of the conflicted American South that also spawned the primoridal forms of just about all forms of American music.
In smaller doses, Marcus does the same here - these short essays were published initially in more mass-audience publications, but Marcus is fairly uninterested in simple reviewing. Instead he - in a fashion that occasionally seizes upon Zen-like epiphanies - scrounges through the depths of the most easily overlooked moments of anything from the Gang Of Four, The Mekons, X or The Buzzcocks to Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk." And then he elaborates what he's found in such moments, crafting Barthes-like meditations upon the more obtuse meanings of culture, art and commerce in the process.
Marcus doesn't nail his varied theses 100% of the time - his write-off of New York (and Cleveland/Detroit) punk is the great, vast hole in this book. But I do agree with his take on the thuggishness of LA punk - a controversial contention open to much debate, though one could endlessly debate the ironic value vs. the ugly realities within the race and class tensions that floated through the work of X, Gun Club, Fear, et. al., especially in light of the early multi-ethnic and queer aspects of punk that have largely been written out of most official histories.
-David Alston
 Ranters & Punters! August 9, 2003
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I found this Book under it's original Title. I think it is a great collection of Greil Marcus's Writings of Music outside the mainstream. Not Pretentious, but not Dumbed down for some average Music Joe. Post Punk Groups are treated with the respect & relevance that they deserved, at the time of their exhistance! Less convuluted than Lipstick Traces, and more enjoyable. I sought out these different group's music with new insight. Made even more enjoyable by Greil's added depth of his words. I like my Rock writers to actually Love their Subjects, without Jealousy or rancor.
TASTY & SUCCULENT June 27, 2000
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
A collection on punk and related matters from 1977 through 1992, including what was left out of Marcus' earlier book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. In the author's own words, it's about "records, performances, twists of the radio dial." It moves from the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy" to Nirvana's "Nevermind" in this illumined golden thread. Marcus writes about what moved, scared and disgusted him and what made him feel so privileged to be part of the punk audience. His views of punk encompassed a wide horizon, to include the likes of Bruce Springsteen, early Prince, Laurie Anderson and David Lynch's film Blue Velvet. His point is that punk made wonderful things like Anderson's "Superman" possible even though Superman itself isn't punk. In other words, punk's liberating effect caused sea changes in the perception of pop. A major weakness of the book is that it ignores the entire New York scene, because, as he puts it, "most [New York] punks seemed to be auditioning for careers as something else." So no Patti Smith, no Richard Hell, a cursory mention of Talking Heads, but you WILL find Blondie here. Fascist Bathroom follows many avenues (The Clash, Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello) but maybe its most precious contribution is rescuing from obscurity some lower-profile such as Laura Logic, The Mekons, Marianne Faithfull. It's a joy to read, chronologically arranged and ending with Nirvana and grunge in the 90s. The text swarms with relevant quotes from rock lyrics and references to other rock journalists like Lester Bangs. For anyone with a passionate interest in rock/pop music and youth culture, it's required reading.
Valedictorian of the Space Academy April 1, 2000
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
These are brilliant essays, many of them indeed discussing punk's effect on mainstream culture, but some of them bother me. Marcus is original and insightful, but can be overly academic. That is, sometimes his theses take precedence to the truth, or even common sense.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.
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