A study of Anglo-American cultural and countercultural exchange from the mid Fifties to the mid-Seventies, Special Relations explores aspects of London modernism, the anti-war movement, student rebellion, black power, the second-wave feminist and gay liberation movements, and transatlantic nostalgia.

Through a long and chequered career, Mick Farren has functioned as a writer, poet, rock star, recording artist, rabble-rouser, critic and commentator, and even won a protracted obscenity trial at the Old Bailey. After resisting the idea for a long time, he has finally written his own highly personal and insightful account of the British counterculture in the 1960s and '70s, from the perspective of one who was right there in the thick of it. With a continuing and unashamed commitment to the tradition of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, he recounts a rollercoaster odyssey - sometimes violent and often hilarious - from early beatnik adventures in Ladbroke Grove, through the flowering hippies to the snarl of punk. He gives a firsthand, insider's account of the chaos, disorder and raging excess of those two highly excessive decades. At the centre of the book is Farren's career in the underground, as the man on the door at the UFO club, driving spirit at IT and, of course, lead singer with the Social Deviants. He describes his encounters with the celebrated and the notorious, who range from Jimi Hendrix and Germaine Greer to Julie Burchill and Sid Vicious, and concludes that the pop history of bohemian culture does not neatly divide itself into easy decades, but continues to this day, perhaps in different guises, but frequently with the same goals and motivations.

A truthful and learned treasury of musings on the miracle drug.Beryl...

For more than three decades, a punk underground has repeatedly insisted that 'anyone can do it'. This underground punk movement has evolved via several micro-traditions, each offering distinct and novel presentations of what punk is, isn't, or should be. Underlying all these punk micro-traditions is a politics of empowerment that claims to be anarchistic in character, in the sense that it is contingent upon a spontaneous will to liberty (anyone can do it - in theory). How valid, though, is punk's faith in anarchistic empowerment? Exploring theories from Derrida and Marx, Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground examines the cultural history and politics of punk. In its political resistance, punk bears an ideological relationship to the folk movement, but punk's faith in novelty and spontaneous liberty distinguish it from folk: where punk's traditions, from the 1970s onwards, have tended to search for an anarchistic 'new-sense', folk singers have more often been socialist/Marxist traditionalists, especially during the 1950s and 60s. Detailed case studies show the continuities and differences between four micro-traditions of punk: anarcho-punk, cutie/'C86', riot grrrl and math rock, thus surveying UK and US punk-related scenes of the 1980s, 1990s and beyond.

"Waksman brings a new understanding to familiar material by treating it in an original and stimulating manner. This book tells 'the other side of the story.'"—Philip Auslander, author of Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music "While there are a number of histories of punk and metal and numerous biographies of important bands within each genre, there is no comparable book to This Ain't the Summer of Love. The ultimate contribution the book makes is to provoke the reader into rethinking the ongoing fluid relationship between punk, a music that enjoyed considerable critical support, and metal, a music that has been systematically denigrated by critics. This book is the product of superior scholarship; it truly breaks fresh ground and as such it is an important book that will be regularly cited in future work."—Rob Bowman, Professor of Music at York University and author of Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records "Debunking simplistic assumptions that punk rebelled and heavy metal conformed, Steve Waksman demonstrates with precisely chosen examples that for decades the two shared strategies and concerns. As a result, this important volume is among the first to extend to rock history the same much-needed revisionism that elsewhere has transformed our understanding of minstrelsy, blues, country music, and pop."—Eric Weisbard, author of Use Your Illusion I & II

Booklist Top of the List Reference Source The heir and successor to Eric Partridge's brilliant magnum opus, The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, this two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is the definitive record of post WWII slang. Containing over 60,000 entries, this new edition of the authoritative work on slang details the slang and unconventional English of the English-speaking world since 1945, and through the first decade of the new millennium, with the same thorough, intense, and lively scholarship that characterized Partridge's own work. Unique, exciting and, at times, hilariously shocking, key features include: unprecedented coverage of World English, with equal prominence given to American and British English slang, and entries included from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Ireland, and the Caribbean emphasis on post-World War II slang and unconventional English published sources given for each entry, often including an early or significant example of the term’s use in print. hundreds of thousands of citations from popular literature, newspapers, magazines, movies, and songs illustrating usage of the headwords dating information for each headword in the tradition of Partridge, commentary on the term’s origins and meaning New to this edition: A new preface noting slang trends of the last five years Over 1,000 new entries from the US, UK and Australia New terms from the language of social networking Many entries now revised to include new dating, new citations from written sources and new glosses The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is a spectacular resource infused with humour and learning – it’s rude, it’s delightful, and it’s a prize for anyone with a love of language.

Bob Dylan’s abrupt abandonment of overtly political songwriting in the mid-1960s caused an uproar among critics and fans. In Wicked Messenger, acclaimed cultural-political commentator Mike Marqusee advances the new thesis that Dylan did not drop politics from his songs but changed the manner of his critique to address the changing political and cultural climate and, more importantly, his own evolving aesthetic. Wicked Messenger is also a riveting political history of the United States in the 1960s. Tracing the development of the decade’s political and cultural dissent movements, Marqusee shows how their twists and turns were anticipated in the poetic aesthetic—anarchic, unaccountable, contradictory, punk— of Dylan's mid-sixties albums, as well as in his recent artistic ventures in Chronicles, Vol. I and Masked and Anonymous. Dylan’s anguished, self-obsessed, prickly artistic evolution, Marqusee asserts, was a deeply creative response to a deeply disturbing situation. "He can no longer tell the story straight," Marqusee concludes, "because any story told straight is a false one."

Entry includes attestations of the head word's or phrase's usage, usually in the form of a quotation. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Now in paperback and with a new foreword, a kaleidoscopic look at the many faces of Bob Dylan, legendary folk singer-songwriter and winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. For almost half a century, Bob Dylan has been a primary catalyst in rock's shifting sensibilities. Few American artists are as important, beloved, and endlessly examined, yet he remains something of an enigma. Who, we ask, is the "real" Bob Dylan? Is he Bobby Zimmerman, yearning to escape Hibbing, Minnesota, or the Woody Guthrie wannabe playing Greenwich Village haunts? Folk Messiah, Born-Again Bob, Late-Elvis Dylan, Jack Fate, or Living National Treasure? In Who Is That Man? David Dalton--cultural historian, journalist, screenwriter, and novelist--paints a revealing portrait of the rock icon, ingeniously exposing the three-card monte games he plays with his persona. Guided by Dalton's cutting-edge insights and myth-debunking point of view, Who Is That Man? follows Dylan's imaginative life, integrating actual events with Dylan's words and those of the people who know him most intimately. Drawing upon Dylan's friends and fellow eyewitnesses--including Marianne Faithfull, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Stampfel , Larry "Ratso" Sloman, Eric Andersen, Nat Hentoff, Andrew Oldham, Nat Finkelstein, and others--this book will provide a new perspective on the man, the myth, and the musical era that forged them both.

Available in paperback for the first time, his book demonstrates how the personal became political in post-war Britain, and argues that attention to gay activism can help us to fundamentally rethink the nature of post-war politics. While the Left were fighting among themselves and the reformists were struggling with the limits of law reform, gay men started organising for themselves, first individually within existing organisations and later rejecting formal political structures altogether. Culture, performance and identity took over from economics and class struggle, as gay men worked to change the world through the politics of sexuality. Throughout the post-war years, the new cult of the teenager in the 1950s, CND and the counter-culture of the 1960s, gay liberation, feminism, the Punk movement and the miners' strike of 1984 all helped to build a politics of identity. There is an assumption among many of today's politicians that young people are apathetic and disengaged. This book argues that these politicians are looking in the wrong place. People now feel that they can impact the world through the way in which they live, shop, have sex and organise their private lives. Robinson shows that gay men and their politics have been central to this change in the post-war world.