Rat Race is a semi-autobiographical novel set in the 1980s in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. It focuses on Paul, who has just graduated and wants to be a writer. He faces overwhelming pressure from everyone around him, however, to ‘get on’ and join the Rat Race, against his will and in sharp contrast to the alternative lifestyle he wants to live. Pretty soon he finds himself on the scrapheap and having to compromise his beliefs in order to make something of himself. Rat Race is one year in his life, charting his fluctuating fortunes, set against a background of the music and fashion of the alternative scene at the time. It is also a love story, as he meets and falls in love with the girl of his dreams, and all the trials and tribulations that brings with it. Rat Race is an alternative view of growing up in the 1980s, the flipside, a savage indictment of the Thatcher regime, punctuated with some of the writer’s own poems written at the time, which provide a juxtaposition to the sometimes hard- hitting and brutal prose. Rat Race is a novel about many things, but most of all the pressures on the young to achieve at any cost in the get- rich-quick society in which they find themselves.

This history of the punk movement in the United States shows how punk music, fashion, art, and attitude clashed with and ultimately influenced mainstream culture. Unlike other volumes on the punk era that focus on just the music—and primarily on British punk bands—Punks: A Guide to an American Subculture spans the full expanse of punk as it happened in the United States, from the late-1960s blast from Iggy Pop and the Stooges to the full explosion of punk in the mid 1970s to its next-generation resurgences and continuing aftershocks. Punks covers it all—not just music, but the punk influence on film, fashion, media, and language. Readers will see how punk spread virally, through fan-created magazines, record labels, clubs, and radio stations, as well as how mainstream America reacted, then absorbed aspects of punk culture. The book includes interviews with key members of the punk subculture, including new conversations with people who participated in the punk scene in the 1970s and 1980s.

Presents a comprehensive cultural, social and historical overview of post-war popular music genres, from rock 'n' roll and psychedelic pop, through punk and heavy metal, to rap, rave and techno.

A Johnny Liddell Mystery! The Boys who couldn't go home ruled the air-conditioned oasis called Las Palmas. They'd built a beautiful new city there on the Nevada desert. But there was trouble in paradise--a killer was on the loose. So the Boys called in Johnny Liddell to teach a murderer manners--for ten thousand dollars a lesson. Money isn't everything: cold cash won't keep you warm in the morgue. Johnny Liddell was learning that as he realized he was being set up for the next kill...

Explosive! Amazing! Terrifying! You won’t believe your eyes! Such movie taglines were common in the 1950s, as Hollywood churned out a variety of low-budget pictures that were sold on the basis of their sensational content and topicality. While a few of these movies have since become canonized by film fans and critics, a number of the era’s biggest fads have now faded into obscurity. The Cool and the Crazy examines seven of these film cycles, including short-lived trends like boxing movies, war pictures, and social problem films detailing the sordid and violent life of teenagers, as well as uniquely 1950s takes on established genres like the gangster picture. Peter Stanfield reveals how Hollywood sought to capitalize upon current events, moral panics, and popular fads, making movies that were “ripped from the headlines” on everything from the Korean War to rock and roll. As he offers careful readings of several key films, he also considers the broader historical and commercial contexts in which these films were produced, marketed, and exhibited. In the process, Stanfield uncovers surprising synergies between Hollywood and other arenas of popular culture, like the ways that the fashion trend for blue jeans influenced the 1950s Western. Delivering sharp critical insights in jazzy, accessible prose, The Cool and the Crazy offers an appreciation of cinema as a “pop” medium, unabashedly derivative, faddish, and ephemeral. By studying these long-burst bubbles of 1950s “pop,” Stanfield reveals something new about what films do and the pleasures they provide.

No-holds-barred political strategist Warren Kinsella’s colourful, no-holds-barred look at punk rock, and how it influenced him and millions of other kids to strive for nothing less than changing the world. Playing bass for Calgary punk-rock quartet the Hot Nasties might seem a strange way for one of Canada’s top political strategists to have spent his formative years, but in Fury’s Hour — Warren Kinsella’s exploration of punk’s history and heroes, its factions, failures and triumphs — he shares his unique view into a subculture that has long encouraged people to think big about the world. From early meetings with icons Joey Ramone and Joe Strummer, Kinsella has gone on to interview a who’s who of punk: Sex Pistols Johnny Rotten and Glen Matlock, Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye, Billy Idol, DOA’s Joey “Shithead” Keithly, Bad Religion’s Brett Gurewitz, Blink 182, Good Charlotte and many more. Since he was a teenager, Kinsella has challenged his heroes to put into words the true value of the music. How, after decades of co-optation by the record industry, neo-Nazis and misdirected radicals, are new generations continuing what he calls punk’s “search for the real”? In Fury’s Hour, with the iconoclasm and passion that have marked his career in politics, Warren Kinsella searches for the soul of a sound that invigorated the way he and millions of others have grown up — finding a way to turn anger into energy.

This book examines regional and rural popular music scenes in Europe, Asia, North America and Australia. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 will focus on the spatial aspects of regional popular music scenes and how place and locality inform the perceptions and discourses of those involved in such scenes. Part 2 focuses on the technologies and forms of distribution whereby regional and rural popular music scenes exist and, in many cases co-exist in forms of trans-local connection with other scenes. Part 3 considers the importance of collective memory in the way that regional and rural popular music scenes are constructed in both the past and the present. Part 4 examines themes of industry and policy, in relation to culture and music, as these impact on the nature and identity of rural and regional popular music scenes.