Babylon's Burning: From Punk to Grunge - Hardcover

Heylin, Clinton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841958794 ISBN 13: 9781841958798

Publisher: Canongate U.S., 2007

Synopsis

Destined to become a classic on the subject alongside Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me , Babylon’s Burning is a groundbreaking, definitive account of punk rock, one of the most influential and lasting music movements in history a movement that ironically was built on self-annihilation. Acclaimed critic Clinton Heylin seamlessly weaves together the lives of disparate artists who had in common not the music (there was no distribution) but the pictures, words, and fashions depicted in magazines like Creem and NME . It was a sound that eschewed conventional lyrics, promoted a gutteral musicality but yet contained a keen pop sensibility. Whether exploring the work of early progenitors like Suicide, The New York Dolls, and Patti Smith or charting the progress of the bands who legitimately took up the mantle in the eighties and nineties, Clinton Heylin brings to life the strands of a global artform. From the Sex Pistols’s clarion call of a record, Never Mind the Bollocks,” to Kurt Cobain’s songs of an alienated youth, Babylon’s Burning is the brilliant, exhaustively researched story that once and for all defines what Punk is and is not.

About this title

About the Author

Clinton Heylin's biography of Bob Dylan (Behind the Shades) is now in its second edition and has been in print in Penguin for fifteen years. His history of early American punk, From the Velvets to the Voidoids, was shortlisted for the prestigious Ralph Eleason award in the States, and has just been reissued. Brought up in Manchester where as a teenager he saw many of the bands covered here. He now lives in Somerset.

From Publishers Weekly

When it comes to the heyday of punk rock in the mid to late 1970s, Heylin has put together a solid history, drawing upon interviews with many of the key players from the era. The focus on London bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash is unsurprising, but New York combos like the Ramones and Television also get their due, and even groups whose influence is less generally recognized, like Cleveland's Pere Ubu or Australia's Radio Birdman, receive well-rounded treatment. Heylin (From the Velvets to the Voidoids) is opinionated, but only rarely do his undisguised preferences disrupt the story. (One notable exception comes when he calls the death of Sid Vicious's girlfriend, Nancy, "justifiable homicide.") If he'd simply closed out his account with the suicide of Joy Division's Ian Curtis in 1980, Heylin would have perfectly captured the punk era. Instead, he spends another hundred pages building up to the death of Kurt Cobain, branded as a poser and a sellout. That the story so quickly works its way to Nirvana after such an in-depth exploration of the '70s underscores the tacked-on feeling of these final chapters. It's a shame, because the core material is strong enough that it didn't need to grasp at such ersatz "relevance." (Jan.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate U.S.
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1841958794
• ISBN 13: 9781841958798
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 672