Babylon's Burning

From Punk to Grunge

By Heylin, Clinton

Publishers Summary:
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.

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ISBN
978-1-84195-879-8
Publisher
Canongate U.S.


REVIEWS

Library Journal

Reviewed on January 15, 2007

Heylin goes for the gusto in this expansion of his seminal New York punk roundup,From the Velvets to the Voidoids . Beginning with the death throes of the Stooges (and the myriad young rogues rising from their ashes), his narrative ranges over the birth of punk club CBGBs, the rise and fall (and back again) of British punk, that music's jumping the pond to infect the West Coast, and finally its corruption of a young lad named Kurt Cobain. The book's heart lies in the mother lo...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

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