Who Owns Punk History?
Now that punk history itself has become an umbrella expanding over thirty years, multiple academic disciplines, and the mohawk-rigged mammoth known as pop culture itself, I realize that any history is likely to be partial, riddled with gaps, and rendered almost instantly obsolete, though certain “tomes” have been authored, such as Greil Marcus selected writings found in collections like In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk In Pop Music, 1977-1992, also known stateside as Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music 1977-1992, and the well-known England’s Dreaming Sex Pistols and Punk Rock by English critic Jon Savage. Other accounts, such as Punk in the Present Tense by noted female writer Gina Arnold have lapsed into relative obscurity. Meanwhile, the closest partner to We Got the Neutron Bomb, and likely the catalyst for the undertaking of a West Coast-based oral history of punk, stems from the publication, since revised, of Please Kill Me, by the former PUNK fanzine editor Legs McNeil, wh
