Author Description

'Punk was a new kind of music, a new social critique, but most of all it was a new kind of free speech. It inaugurated a moment - a long moment, that still persists - when suddenly countless odd voices, voices no reasonable person could have expected to hear in public, were being heard all over the place: sometimes as monstrous shouts in the marketplace, sometimes as whispers from an alleyway.' In the Fascist Bathroom collects Greil Marcus's responses to that new free speech in a series of essays that vividly recapture the diversity and impact of punk. Sometimes working from seemingly random songs and shows, sometimes following careers - the Clash, the Mekons, Elvis Costello, Margaret Thatcher - in essence Marcus write about whatever moves him, scares him, disgusts him, and about those things he feels privileged to have witnessed. Marcus's chronicle goes far beyond the disintegration of the Sex Pistols, focusing especially on the reaction of the pop work, which reformed itself against the punk challenge and exiled new voices to cult stations scattered along its borders. Yet punk has shown an extraordinary resilience, resurfacing and reasserting its message again and again, in forms as varied as the voices the carried it: things do not have to be as they seem.