Volume 28, Number 18 · November 19, 1981
Brave New World
By James Wolcott
Easy Travel to Other Planets
by Ted Mooney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 278 pp., $11.95
Not long after the Sex Pistols told the Queen of England to sod off in their 1977 single 'God Save the Queen,' a spate of punk novels began to appear—novels featuring sneer-lipped punks in slashed clothing who pogoed in sweaty, packed clubs, engaged in knife play, and collapsed on all fours in rubbish-strewn alleys, retching like dogs. (The titles of these novels were as tersely to the point as the books themselves—The Punk, Death of a Punk, Punk Novel, etc.) In their lurid swelter, the punk novels resembled the pulp paperbacks about bohemian life which appeared in the late 1950s: 'Her combat uniform was blue jeans, her vicious weapon a beer-can opener…' (blurb for The Young Punks, 1957). Once the Pistols broke up and their bassist Sid Vicious became a drug casualty, the defiant glamour of punk was overtaken by the cool ironic braininess of 'new wave' artists like Ultravox, Devo, Talking Heads, and Gary Numan.
Review, 1366 words
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