Compiling a list of books on punk naturally led me here. You can stream a lot of these in our confinement. Play loud.
Documentaries:
Punk (Epix) – 4-part docu-series produced by Iggy Pop. Best if you want to see the originators playing live, and light on hoary pronouncements of significance (thank you Mr. Williamson), letting the explosion (or fart, if you will) of that 2-3 years yawp for itself.
Punk: Attitude (Youtube) (90 minutes) – Don Letts’ history starts with Brando in The Wild One, links to ‘50s rock’n’roll, gives props to hippies, it’s about why punk. Interviews and concert snippets by the originators but follows through to hard core and noise bands (Fugazi, Sonic Youth), even for some reason includes Nirvana. If you only have 90-minutes, watch this one.
Punk Revolution NYC (Amazon Prime) (3-hours). How it began, fascinating about Warhol’s guiding hand, the influence of transgressive downtown theatre, the nascent clubs, the rebellion against disco, SOHO and Loisaida as cauldrons of creativity when poor creatives could still afford to live there. Sob.
The Decline of Western Civilization (Penelope Spheeris) (Youtube) – Okay, it’s not the first wave, it’s the hard core generation that Reagan/Thatcher spawned, but damn, the concerts cum riots! Headache inducing, intentionally, of course.
The Blank Generation (Poe/Kral) (Youtube) (50 minutes) – Grainy black and white footage, audio as if they’re playing down the hall, but it was all shot in 1976 at CBGB, a time capsule, primary documentation.
Hip-Hop Evolution (Shad) (Netflix) (4 seasons). Watching this series now, and wow! Hip hop started exactly at the same time as punk, in bombed out 1970s New York, and way outlasted it. Same impulses, same anger, same release, but black. (Notes that punk fans were the first white people to fall in love with rap.)
Movies:
Sid and Nancy (Alex Cox) (not currently streaming). I so love this sad movie; may have been Gary Oldman’s first (as Sid). One of my favorite unforgettable movie scenes (right up there with “Forget it Jake”) is Nancy running down the street in an angry fit, catching a glimpse of herself in a store window, and then stopping to tear off her clothes, screaming, “Fuckin’ Stevie Nicks!” when she realizes those clothes resemble something Nicks would wear.
Summer of Sam (Spike Lee) (pay to stream on all platforms). If you want to know what it must have felt like to be a nobody in New York when punk and hip hop launched, this is the movie. The blackout, the talking devil dog, CBGB, the graffiti bombed subway trains, the grit and the hopeless energy. Figuring out what to wear!
CBGB (Randall Miller) (Vudu). The late great Alan Rickman’s last movie, as bushy-haired loser Hilly Kristal, the guy who owned CBGB and created a punk Mecca in the process. Actors play the musicians, some even look like the punks, but it’s Rickman’s movie. The scene where he meets the Ramones for the first time is priceless.
Mystery Train (Jim Jarmusch) (pay on Prime). Are you a Jarmusch junky, like me? This movie, set in Memphis, is not about punk rock, but I’ve never seen anything that better nails how our lives fail the rock’n’roll impulse, that cry of spontaneity and freedom, and how that failure hurts and in some cases ruins us.
Control (Anton Corbijn) (pay to stream on all platforms). A biographical film that follows Joy Division’s Ian Curtis to his suicide, and it’s just as bleak and heart-rending as that sounds. If you’ve lost friends and never really understood it, this won’t explain anything, but the movie knows how you feel.
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