Punk rock scholarship is definitely in its heyday. With a plethora of accounts from epic tomes on 1980s punk to brief forays into the women in punk, it is an exciting time to be a punk researcher. Many of these new titles, however, present recycled histories of white-suburban males with pristine leather jackets and liberty spikes as the standard bearers of this sonic history. Indeed, these books become that which punk rock was rebelling against: dry, cynical, and nostalgic nods to the researchers’ former selves. Therefore, David Pearson’s account of punk rock in the 1990s is a breath of fresh air. Rebel Music in the Triumphant Empire: Punk Rock in the 1990s United States pulls you from such complacency and puts you on your feet with an innovative and in-depth account that is in so many ways deeply “punk rock.”
Pearson provides a path-breaking analysis of punk where he deftly...
University of California Press