Word: punks
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Penelope Spheeris' The Decline of Western Civilization is a documentary about the punk-rock scene in Los Angeles: music from seven bands (Black Flag, the Germs, Catholic Discipline, X, the Circle Jerks, Alice Bag and Fear), plus interviews with band members, their managers, the club owners, rock writers and fans. It is also an acid test of hipness. You're hip if you see the punks' musical and social anarchy as liberating, bringing rock back to its proletarian roots and also forging ahead. You're out of it if you see this new wave...
...punk revolution, like many others, is one of style. Or of antistyle: the incendiary insults, the compulsive tattooing, the head shaved as if recuperating from a Nazi lobotomy. Punk admits to no past; it anticipates no future. And the present is only impulse-the 300 heartbeats a minute of the raucous new rock. This music is rigorously monotonous, a mantra of bully nihilism; the lyrics are surrealist graffiti, spat out indistinctly. Director Spheeris occasionally supplies English subtitles for these messages from a lost world. In interviews she plays the sympathetic den mother to these kids barely out of their teens...
Caliban (Barry Miller) is depicted as if he were a punk-rock psycho, which scarcely suggests the "power of darkness...
...started eight films, compared with a total of 15 for Columbia, Disney, Paramount and Fox combined. Begelman has also announced that he will be developing 51 films. These include Tarzan, the Ape Man starring Bo Derek, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row with Nick Nolle, and American Rhapsody with Punk Rocker Deborah Harry...
...Strummer of the Clash recognized a kindred spirit and invited Ely and his band to share billing on a European tour in 1979. The punk audience, Ely remembers, "threw shirts, hot dogs, bottles and panties at us. We threw back a crate of ice, and they loved it." The recorded result of the London leg of this tour, Live Shots, was never released in the U.S., although the album's reckless drive and scalding lyricism could have put a few badly needed cracks into the country Establishment...