When it started in the late '70s, punk rock wasn't an option on the entertainment menu. Punk involved a degree of difficulty, even danger. By becoming a punk, you were breaking with the mainstream. You'd certainly be at odds with most of your peers. Walk down the wrong street and you could be in for a fight. And if you didn't mind your step, you might lose.
London's Burning: True Adventures on the Front Lines of Punk, 1976-1977(Chicago Review Press) is one man's memoir of those days. Admittedly, the author, Dave Thomas, never formed a band and wasn't first on his block to produce a fanzine. But he did become a rock critic when he grew up and the punk subculture was formative. In London's Burning he recalls what it was like to forge a perspective and an identity from the scraps mainstream society had rejected.
Like many punks, Thomas began with Patti Smith, the androgynous New Yorker who became a thumb in the eye of what rock had become in the '70s-a bombastic, self-important business rationalizing itself with selectively chosen, shopworn ideals from the '60s. And while London's Burning is valuable as (yet another) eyewitness account of the tectonic cultural shift that occurred on the fringes of culture in the late '70s, his main point is this: in the '00s, rock has become a bombastic, self-important business (albeit with an increasingly uncertain business model) rationalizing itself with selectively chosen, shopworn ideals from the '70s.
