Real Punks Don't Wear Black

by Frank Kogan

With relentless analysis and reckless screaming, Frank Kogan has made a career of asking infuriating questions about popular music. A key figure among music critics for his contentious, perceptive writings, Kogan has been contributing to the Village Voice and underground music publications since the early 1970s. The first book-length collection of his writing on music and culture, Real Punks Don't Wear Black samples the best of thirty-plus years of essays, reviews, and rants, and also includes new bits written specifically for this edition.If you’re after no more than backstage dish or a judgment on whether some song is “good” or “bad,” then look elsewhere. From the Rolling Stones to the New York Dolls, from Mariah Carey to the Ying Yang Twins, through hip-hop, Europop, disco, and metal, Kogan insists on the hard questions: Our popular music is born in flight, chased by fear, and heading toward unattainable glory, he says. Why is this so? What fears, contagions, divisions are we ignoring that our music cannot?

Remember, says Kogan, this is about you, too. Keep your mind alive, your hairstyle in flux, and your tongue sharpened. Whether you’re a gutterpunk or a cultstud geek, you’re a bigger part of the story than you realize. It’s your ideas that you're hearing on the radio, it's your song that gets sung.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2006

Reviews

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can smell Frank Kogan. It’s like the odor of old clothes on a person who washes their body every day and gets all indignant when you tell them that they stink. He probably just forget to do his laundry. He’s got other things on his mind. Thirty-five years of things, much of which is collected in REAL PUNKS DON’T WEAR BLACK (a title, he says, stolen from a girlfriend — he might stink and think too much, but he has a girlfriend, so there to your stereotypes!). Supposedly, these are his writings on rock and music that rocks, which it is, but for the first one-hundred pages or so it’s mostly about high school, which is the perfect landscape for punk rock, so it all makes sense. This book is really an autobiography in song. Kogan loves to pick out lyrics and understand them, even when the lyrics he has picked are all wrong and misheard in his head. It doesn’t matter. It’s the thought that counts. And Kogan’s thoughts are endlessly fascinating. Just when I think I’ve got him, he eludes me. I follow down an intellectual rabbit hole and drink this and feel small, until I eat that and grown gigantic. That’s a guy I’ll follow anywhere. He’s inspiring. I was talking back to the book. The pages made me want to fill pages of my own, which I haven’t done in months (with words, that is — I’ve been prolific with pictures of late). Anyway, that was a cheap shot about the stench. It wasn’t intended as a put down. Kogan is simply a good writer who elicits a visceral response from me. Sometimes, I think he gets a bit too clever, even playful, for his own good. But that pose is played out mostly in the reviews that ran in the mainstream press, which are always edited, sometimes to extinction. In his zines, juvenilia, letters to friends and chat room rants his voice sings at a perfect pitch.

[Amar Pai · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book annoyed the fuck out of me. pointless meandering self-absorbed 'rock criticism' from some dude who's still obsessed with high school social cliques. even contains bad poetry! what was i thinking when i put this on my 'to read' list?

[Greg Fanoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally love Kogan and there's plenty of good ideas here but it's really, really disjointed.