Punk Primer
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There aren’t a lot of duds among the 100 selections–though I could’ve done without the entries by chameleonic British poseurs 999 and kitschy proto-new wavers the Rezillos. And it’s hard to believe somebody thought the Boomtown Rats, even in their early punk mode, really warranted two slots. There’s a decent, if predictable, history lesson by Billboard columnist Chris Morris; Ira Robbins and Dave Schulps, cofounders of the influential punk and new-wave mag Trouser Press, pithily annotate the songs. There are a few treats for the folks who think they’ve heard it all, including relatively obscure single versions of songs by Devo (“Mongoloid”), the Pretenders (“The Wait”), and X (“Adult Books”) and left-field entries from the likes of the tribal all-girl band the Slits, militant postpunks the Pop Group (often overshadowed by contemporaries like the Gang of Four), and San Francisco punks the Avengers, who never managed to put out an album in their brief lifetime.
Sometimes sets like No Thanks! are most useful as argument starters, opening up discussion of what the victors’ history leaves out. I might ask, for instance, why the chugging, indelibly catchy rocker “Action Time Vision” is the lone inclusion here from Alternative TV, the arty punk band started by Mark Perry, publisher of the early English punk zine Sniffin’ Glue. As it happens, Alternative TV is one of three 70s punk acts performing in Chicago in the next couple weeks. The other two–the French band Metal Urbain and New York no-wave icon James Chance–aren’t included on the Rhino box, but they’ve been at least as influential as almost any of the bands that are.
