Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge
Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge
Author Clinton Heylin
The author of over two dozen books has delved deep into a favorite subject of his, the punk scene. However he doesn’t just go mainstream in the accounting and he doesn’t just stop and that era, he continues onto punk’s reinvention in the backwoods of Seattle.
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 guttural 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 art form. 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.
One sentence review: A great read, pick up a copy.
Info and art provided by: Canongate U.S.
Music, Kurt Cobain, Sex Pistols, Kurt Cobain, Grunge, Punk, Seattle
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