CULT RECORD: THE SLITS: " CUT " (1979)

In the punk movie Jubilee, Derek Jarman cast the Slits as a wild girl gang marauding the streets of London. That was how the Slits liked to project themselves: as urban primitives who'd just picked up their instruments for the first time-- which most of them had. Viv Albertine, Ari Up, Tessa Pollite and Palmolive launched the Slits in 1977 (Albertine having already played in Flowers of Romance, a short-lived band with Sid Vicious and Keith Levene), thrashing out a gleeful punk-reggae pandemonium of loose rhythms, warbly unison vocals and proto-feministic lyrics.
Cut is the Slits' true masterpiece. Dubmeister Dennis Bovell's crisp and spacious production enables us to hear, for the first time, just how mutinous and eccentric the Slits' version of rock'n'roll is. Their music pulsates with the fitful biorhythms of adolescence. Continually shifting tempos lunge between bravado and hesitancy; girl-harmonies clash and overlap; guitars scrape and stutter. Every verse is an adventure full of unrepeatable collisions and unexpected noises ( a spoon dropping, coins clinking, vaporous voices from some distant radio).
"Typical Girls," the closest they get to an anthem, pokes wicked fun at conventional zombified females who "Don't create/ Don't rebel" but instead "worry about... unnatural smells." The songs' targets-- consumer capitalism, normative notions of romance and gender-- were standard issue in the post-punk era. But unlike their agit-pop contemporaries Gang of Four and the Au Pairs, the Slits inject their cultural critique with so much joyous abandon that they sound riotous, not righteous. "Shoplifting" transforms that most female form of delinquency into glorious liberation: "We pay FUCK ALL!" Ari's earth-shattering howl dissolves into bladder-busting hilarity as she giggles, "Ooh, I pissed in my knickers!"

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CULT RECORD: PUBLIC IMAGE LTD.: METAL BOX (1979)

If Johnny Rotten had gotten his way, the Sex Pistols would never have made the thuggish but populist hard rock that make them such a world-historical force. Instead of mod, glam and proto-punk ( the Stooges, New York Dolls), the Pistols would have been informed by his favored listening: Captain Beefheart's fractured avant-boogie, Peter Hammill's art-rock exorcism, the space and stealth of Can and dub reggae. Of course, if Johnny had prevailed, the Pistols wouldn't have revolutionized rock, merely exempted themselves from it. Which is precisely what Rotten did with Public Image Ltd., the studio-based experimental unit he formed after turning his back on punk rock godhood in 1978.
Initially released as three 12-inches in a tin canister (an attempt to deconstruct the "album" that actually succeeded in making you approach records in a new way), subsequently repackaged as the double-LP, single CD,  Second Edition, Metal Box is where PiL's anti-rock-ism ceases to be a pipe dream and starts looking like the future, your future. From the soul-flaying savagery of "Chant" to the appalling grace of "Poptones," Levene's guitar work makes him post-punk's very own Hendrix; he's equally stunning with synths on the apocalyptic "Careering" and Satiesque "Radio 4." Lydon's scalpel-sharp words -- dissecting suburbia's "layered mass of subtle props" on "No Birds," anatomizing the abject horror of his mum's death on "Swan Lake"-- are matched by his most untethered singing. But it's Wobble who is PiL's heart and soul: his deep-strata bass is what drags you through the terror-ride, but it's also the handrail that keeps you hanging in there.

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CULT RECORD: SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES: " THE SCREAM " (1978)

1976: Siouxsie Sioux is the queen of punk; a style-terrorist whose swastikas and fetishistic peek-a-boo bustiers are a kick in the eye of straight society; an ice bitch whose skull-piercing howl obliterates the legacy of all the traditional, wispy songstresses who came before. 1991: Siouxsie is a simpering sophisticate, dolled up like some Hollywood starlet with toenails polished and hair curled. Where once she shocked, now she aims to seduce. From the macabre malevolence of "Carcass" to the feminine wiles of "Kiss Them for Me," what a long, strange trip it's been...
Siouxsie and the Banshees always represented the more fantastical strand of punk, Sioux and Steve Severin were suburban London kids raised on the glam theatrics of Bowie and T. Rex, swayed by decadence and romanticism. So while all their contemporaries were busy negating and demystifying, the Banshees cultivated an aura of magic and mystery, making punk something altogether less dour and more otherworldly. In the process, they inspired the early-'80s "positive punk" movement( Southern Death Cult, Gene Loves Jezebel), which later evolved into Goth.
The Banshees' first gig, in September of 1976, was a shambolic mess. Sioux, Severin, and pals Sid Vicious and Marco Pirroni (later of Adam & the Ants) borrowed the Sex Pistols' equipment and massacred unlikely songs such as "The Lord's Prayer" and the Bay City Rollers' "Young Love." When the Banshees' brilliant debut The Scream materialized two years later , Vicious and Pirroni had been replaced by Kenny Morris and John McKay, and the band had found a sonic identity: twisted art-punk that is at once jagged and melodic, McKay's thick gashes of guitar chafing against Siouxsie's caustic wail. Sioux's and Severin's lyrics are riddled with imagery of psychic and bodily fragmentation, but the morbid vibe is leavened with black humor. In "Suburban Relapse," for instance, Siouxsie plays a housewife driven berserk by domesticity: '"Whilst finishing a chore/I asked myself 'what for?'"

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CULT RECORD: THE ONLY ONES: "THE ONLY ONES" (1978)

At the height of the British punk explosion in 1978, the Only Ones opened their debut album with " The Whole of the Law," a defiantly sentimental love ballad tugged along by a cheesy lounge saxophone and singer/songwriter Peter Perret's tragic-romantic lyrics. Live, the band's leopard skin vests, furs, pink top hats, sharkskin smoking jackets, and shades had more in common with glam than punk. Also, the musicians were accomplished players: powerhouse drummer Mike Kellie did time in the late '60s hard rock/blues outfit Spooky Tooth; Alan Mair was a lissome, inventive bassist; and guitarist/keyboardist John Perry, as fluid a lead  guitarist as has ever strapped on a Stratocaster, coolly ripped off otherworldly solos that shadowboxed with Perrett's suggestive, flowery, mystical, debauched verses.
Perrett's heroin addiction gave the band its cryptic languor, the same junkie blues Nikki Sudden's Jacobites would later tap; vocally, his gloomy croak doesn't land far from Tom Verlaine, either. And as a songwriter he was the shit. The Only Ones classic, "Another Girl, Another Planet," later covered by the Replacements among others, is formally perfect power-pop from the edges where jadedness almost replaces desire; "The Beast," an equally accomplished slow creeper, turns Perrett's habit into a monster on the prowl. The stance isn't novel, but that only helps explain why this exquisite debut album has a timeless/trendless quality that fans in the postpostpunk '90s and '00s still turn to for dark solace.

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CULT RECORD: PERE UBU: "THE DUB DANCE" (1978)

Before punk hardly even existed Pere Ubu had gone a step further. The basslines are filaments of dub, coated and werded-out by synthesizer artist Allen Ravenstine; the guitars lurch in sluggish psychedelia as if under the influense of Can; big David Thomas's birdy voice is a freaky sideshow of arresting seriousness. But put together, you don't hear influences: even twenty years later, Ubu echoes out of the future. Occasionally-- at the end of " Heat of Darkness," in the anthemic  chorus to "Final Solution," punk's un-"Free Bird"-- the band walks it home as well as anyone from the Velvets before to Mission of Burma after. But it's just one weapon in an asrenal; as intellectualized teen Goths with a visceral appreciation for the links between Godzilla and Alferd Jarry, as urban Cleveland poets of the saltmined Cuyahoga Flats, as grotesque-surreal art absurdists who could really play, Pere Ubu was nearly boundless.
Dub Housing opens "I have these arms and legs, they flip-flop flip-flop"; Thomas has never been in finer theatrical form, the unggainly, traffic-dodging humanist. Sound here is murkier in places, but there's a delighted groove present too; fewer real songs, but more musical adventure. Pruning indulgences from all three albums leaves the most luminous C-90 tape in alt-rock history. Drummer Scott Krauss and bassist Tony Maimone dance in cement, Ravenstine is spastic and uneathly without pretense, and guitarist Tom Heman's crescendos aren't announced: they bubble over. Ayleresque free jazz trades off with punk-jizzed boogie woogie on "Laughing"; the shanty "Drunken Sailor" meets a similar joyous explosion on "Caligari's Mirror."

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CULT RECORD: HUSKER DU: "ZEN ARCADE"(1984)

In the midle of the 1980s,Husker Du toured relentlessly, shows that never let up for a second's rest and usually featured songs the audience had never heard,because guitarist Bob Mould,drummer Grant Hart, and bassist Greg Norton were releasing albums so fast they'd usually recorded another one by the time their latest was available in stores. It didn't really  matter ,since it was always clear the band was getting better, closer to some place where melody and chops helped rage combust. Linking the noise and tunefulness was a deeper symbiosis. Husker Du shared a great delusion with the college fans who'd supplanted hardcore's Ayatollahs-that the finest postpunk should and could be everything in the rock at once,without need of validation from any mainstream. At least that's what was conveyed in the Husker's epic moment ruling indieland alongside Minneapolis rivals the Replacements. The sweat pouring off of fat Bob Mould's body, as he played enough guitar for two people on his Flying V, was one of indie's most romantic sights; every time a drop hit earth, some band like Superchunk or Soul Asylum sprang into existence.
Zen Arcade (an inevitable concept album from this most Who-ish of indie bands) devided into four sides on vinyl,the first a declaration of revolt, the second sheer vengeance, the beloved third sublimely catchy, the fourth a single with a weird long B-side. Between the coldly acoustic "Never Talking to You Again," merciless "I'll Never Forget You," flat-tire boogie "What's Going On," piano-moistened "Pink Turns to Blue," therapeutic "Whatever", and Clash-like "Turn on the News," Zen Arcade bulges with unleashed possibility, its weaker songs and tossed-off experiments almost deliberate, momentary breaths designed to elevate the classics still higher.

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CULT RECORD: BIRTHDAY PARTY: " PRAYERS ON FIRE " (1981)

Emerging, like some hideous butterfly, from the Bowie-damaged new wave chrysalis of the Boys Next Door, the Birthday Party were the most abandoned, sensorily-deranged Dionysian rock'n'rollers since the Stooges. But although Nick Cave's self-confesed urtex was Funhouse, his grandiose delivery and baroque lyrics were actually closer to Iggy's own model, Jim Morrison.  Like Jimbo, Cave had literary ambitions that eventually blossomed in his Southern-Gothic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. Abjection-- the base materiality of fleshy existence-- figures vividly in Cave's lyrics for Prayers on Fire and  Junkyard, as a source of both voluptuous allure and skin-crawling revulsion. On Prayers, Tracy Pew's scabrous bass is the obscenely throbbing heart of the band's itchy, twitchy music of disequilibrium and malaise; he provides both motor and melody in the lust-stricken baccahanal "Zoo-Music Girl", the Artaud-meets-Screamin'-Jay-Hawkins paroxysms of "A Dead Song," and the spasming swamp-funk of "King Ink"

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CULT RECORD: THE JAM:" SOUND AFFECTS" (1980)

The Jam swiped its musical and sartorial cues from the mod subculture of the '60s: Italian loafers, parkas, the Who, suedhead haircuts, Vespa scooters. Paul Weller wrote simple, catchy punk anthems, but he filled them with more underground iconography than any American could decipher. Of course, he would have been easier to take if he'd been able to refrain from interrupting his own anthems with goofball cries of " youth explosion!" or "reality's so hot!" But Weller's passion was unmistakable, even for American kids who couldn't figure out what he was blathering about through the accent. The Mod fantasy was a leap of faith, a subculture you could join simply by believing it existed, and it made for great rock'n'roll even if the Jam's "youth explosion" never amounted to anything but a handy way to conflate fashion, socialist revolution, and making out. Sound Affects, however, is the Jam's crescendo, lovingly detailing the secret hopes and fears of the "Boy About Town". In "Start!", "Monday," and "That's Entertainment," the boy about town dresses up in his Mod gear to wander the streets, hoping someone will notice him and pluck him out of the crowd. Sound Affects made the Jam the most popular thing since crumpets in the U.K., but Weller seemed confused; he publicized the fact that he almost wept for shame the day "Going Underground" hit number one. It wasn't that Weller didn't like having impact-- he'd always been a ham. But his music was rooted in a fantasy of the past, and he had no clue about how to update it in public

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CULT RECORD: WIRE: "PINK FLAG"(1977)

The Velvet Underground of the seventies,Wire has sometimes been called: for those "What Goes On" fans who finally worship punk most for the dynamic capacities of its outwardly ugly, secretly beautiful sound, English punk produced no finer document than the band's debut, Pink Flag. Art schoolers to the bone, the quartet turned punk rage into one of the fine arts--even garage purists would have a hard time denying these melodies and AC/DC-caliber power chords, played at a Ramones tempo with an Eno/Roxy Music coating over the guitars. Singer Colin Newman is able to be achingly tuneful and still convey Johnny Rotten contempt. Crazed but clean, DIY with nothing out of place, Wire was an aesthete's dream of the incendiary. Much of the charm of Pink Flag comes from the enormous scope it manages to achieve within punk's procrustean bed of guitar rushes and half-tunes. Newman, bassist Graham Lewis, guitarist Bruce Gilbert, and drummer Robert Gotobed effortessly shift between one-chord ravers ("12XU" the legend; "Field Day for the Sundays" a precedent-setting 28 seconds, including a false end!), dandy dalliances ("Lowdown", "Feeling Called Love"), set pieces about war and violence ("Reuters", "Pink Flag"), and overwlming power pop like "Ex Lion Tamer" and "Mannequin". Only about five of the twenty-one cuts are less than essential to an album that races by into immortality.

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CULT RECORD:TELEVISION:"MARQUEE MOON"(1977)

Television made self-consciously mythic rock that conjures up steely skyscrapers the way Led Zeppelin conjures up moss-covered stone castles. Despite its garage-band sound, Television never played many anthemic punk riffs. Instead, it specialized in soaring drones over which Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd played staccato radar blips on guitar. Television evidently loved the Velvet Underground's "European Son" for the same reason Kraftwerk did: the robotic, jagged overdrive of the stark rhythms. Although many punks accused the group of being hippies, today Television songs sound more like synth-pop songs that happen to be played on guitars. Whether Verlaine was impersonating a gum-chewing detective in "Prove It" or a decadent artist in "See No Evil", he always sounded like a dewy-eyed kid who'd just read his first Baudelaire poem twenty minutes ago, staring up at the city lights with a sense of wonder that was too too-too to put a finger on. And as Patti Smith pointed out, he had the most beautiful neck in rock'n'roll. Marquee Moon is the CBGB era's most grandiose guitar album, with chiming Byrdsy folk-rock building into screeches nicked from Ayler and Reed. Verlain may have adopted his strangled voice to sound jaded and urbane, but it communicates boyish delight in mockingly superficial symboliste tropes such as "the flat curving of the room" and "I want a nice little boat made out of ocean". The saga of "Little Johnny Jewel" continues in amazing songs such as "Elevation", "See No Evil", and "Venus", where Little Boy Blue falls asleep in the haystack and wakes up in the urban grime, rubbing his eyes and declaring, "Broadway looks so medieval!". "Marquee Moon" allows serpentine guitar riffs to entwine like tendrils around the desolate groove for ten of punk's most intensely emotional minutes.

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CULT RECORD:UNDERTONES:"THE UNDERTONES"(1979)

While U.K. bands raged about guns in the streets, Northern Ireland was nurturing a bunch of acts who wanted nothing more than to play pop songs about girls. Belfast, a city whose youth grew up under the gun, produced a whole string of pop-punk bands in the late '70s, most of them under the auspices of Terri Hooley's Good Vibrations label. Among their number were Protex, Rudi, the Xydreamysts, and the Moondogs, who even had their own after-school series on British TV. Head and shoulders above the pack was the Undertones. Guitarist John O'Neill's written-in-stone hooks and Feargal Sharkey's quavering choirboy delivery made a masterpiece of their debut single "Teenage Kicks". Veteran British DJ John Peel proclaimed it his favorite song of all time, elevating it onto the pop charts. The exuberant material the band pumped out for its Peel radio sessions (later gathered on record) proved "Teenage Kicks" was no one-off. Bursting with brief songs, buzzsaw guitars and big choruses ( think Ramones plus Irish conviction), The Undertones enshrined teenage cliches with the same fervor that U.K. hardcore combos used to foam about anarchy. Perfectly capturing a worldview that extends from hanging out in the schoolyard to hanging out in the city streets, the album is pretty much dud-free. And no collision between pop and punk ever produced more ecstatic results than "Get Over You".

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CULT RECORD:RAMONES:"RAMONES"(1976)

The Ramones built their music around a crass glue-sniffing fantasy: What if you took only the giddiest peaks of your favorite songs--the second verse, which is the same as the first, in Herman's Hermits' "I'm Henry VIII, I Am," or the roller coaster screams in the '60s AM nugget "Palisades Park"--and played them over and over? And what if you left everything else for Traffic fans to bother with? The result would be Ramones, the founding punk rock record. The Ramones' dessert-only approach resembled that of the hip-hop DJs who started making noise in New York around the same time, especially in that their first priority was rhythm. Joey's stuttered vocals, Dee Dee's bass and Johnny's guitar fuzz were all submerged into the fastest beats ever manufactured, and before you appreciated their songs for their wit, arrogance, or melodies, you had to absorb Tommy Ramone's drumming into your own bodily rhythms. Ramones burns with the rage of fuckups who find comfort in recognizing and renaming each other, refusing to play the victim, insisting on a "Palisades Park" of their own. It kicks off with "Blitzkrieg Bop", beats on the Beatles with a baseball bat, rants against the world, sniffs some glue, demands your spare change, asks you to dance, and finally swandives into the garbage can with "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World". The sinus-clearing album of all time.

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CULT RECORD:JOY DIVISION:"CLOSER"(1980)

Of all the bands inspired by punk, Joy Division seemed most desperatly to need the music's pure, incediary force as a form of therapy-by-purge. The Manchester band channeled the Sex Pistols' flip alienation into a dark, extreme vision of collapsing civilization and individual dreams of escape. With apocalyptic imagery that draws on the bible, science fiction, and fascist spectacles, Joy Division's dire, stark music can be traced forward to death metal, grunge, and industrial noise. But this is no macabre pose: Ian Curtis's deep vocals and gothic lyrics and the band's intense, atmospheric sounds-crystallized by producer Martin Hannet- paint a chillingly accurate, albeit superdramatic, portrait of a tortured, sensitive soul. Nor was the band simply creating a soundtrack for Curtis's eventual suicide: the music's effect can actually be exhilarating, since its expression of feelings is a victory over obliteration as well as confirmation of shared humanity--Joy Division aspired to heaven even when trapped in hell. On May 18, 1980, on the eve of Joy Division's first American tour, the 23-year-old Curtis hanged himself. Closer, the band's second album, released several months later, was, sure enough, an achingly beautiful testament of an artist in a state of profound despair. Unlike his many imitators, Curtis never wallowed in doom and gloom or threw back at the world the ugliness it fed him. His despondency at the realization of both society and the individual's fall from grace wasn't soured with bitterness or hate, and therefore he put into words and music the pure experience of depressive pain. The dominant themes on Closer are betrayal, isolation, horror, and death. The ominous foreshadowing of the title becomes clear on "Twenty-four Hours", when Curtis sings, "Deep in the heart of where sympathy held sway/ Got to find my destiny before it gets too late." The band sounds accomlished throughout, its rough edges smoothed over, and Curtis sings without the strained quaver of Unknown Pleasures.

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CULT RECORD:THE CLASH:"THE CLASH"(1977)

For better or for worse, the Clash's gift was for venting pointless hostility, not for making sense of the world. The group posed as rebel rockers because it knew it looked cool, but Joe Strummer's Red Brigades T-shirt was no more revolutionary than his sideburns or his leather jacket. The Clash's paradox was that its desire to say the right thing was tangled up in its desire to punish the human race for making it a bunch of punk losers in the first place. So its songs are rarely memorable for what they set out to say, for the worthy intentions that inspired such desire as the TV Personalities' "Part Time Punks," which concluded, "The Clash are nice." The Clash's records still startle and disturb because despite its efforts to be the most socially responsible punk band, the Clash was made up of sick f*cks who could never justify their destructive urges. The Clash captures the sound of lonely teenagers hiding in the garage, trying to channel their paranoid aggression into a roar loud enough to scare everybody else away. While Strummer spits and snarls, Mick Jones adds tuneful harmonies and guitar flash. The music makes utopian gestures of community, from the reggae cover "Police and Thieves" to the Slade-like football cheers in the choruses, but each utopian gesture suffocates in the carbon monoxide of "Garagegeland." Even "Police and Thieves" simmers with the same intensely private rage as "Remote Control," "What's My Name," or "Hate and War." A truly frightening album, fast and trebly, with each song a distinct physical pleasure. To paraphrase William Blake, the Clash sang fiercely about problems and weakly about solutions because the members were true punks, and of the devil's party without knowing it.

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CULT RECORD:STOOGES:"THE STOOGES"

In the latter part of the '60s,as Detroit's racial tensions boiled toward riot temperatures,a bunch of underskilled colege-town burnouts plugged in their amps and created a crass and messy mixture of Motown's rhythmic heartbeat and John Coltrane's holy wail, adding deafening distortion via pre-pinball Who to arrive at an unprecedently brutal riff-rock.The Stooges--four dum-dum boys from the not-so-mean streets of Ann Arbor,Michigan,and nearby Ypsilanti--combined the transgressive antics of singer/perfomance artist James Osterberg(better known by his nom de rock Iggy Stooge) with fast power chords,ample feedback,and enough wah-wah to damage the chromosomes of listeners.Unlike the similarly straightforward, no-frills punk thud that they would inspire,however,the Stooges grooved and swang.Their dissonant attack wasn't merely heavy metal but something much funkier-noise,maybe,but noise raised to the level of art.Produced by John Cale,the Stooges' first album is a masterpiece (aside from the yawn-inducing proto-goth indulgence of the ten-minute-long "We Will Fall"), a perfect summation of teenage angst back when it didn't pay one thin dime.Armed with three chords and just one thing on its mind,the band rips through primal mating calls like "Real Cool Time," "Little Doll,"  and "I Wanna Be Your Dog," the ultimate anthem of sexual debasement and animal lust.Iggy reduces the most turbulent year in modern American history to a cant of utter boredom and alienation on "1969"("another year with nothing to do"),while "No Fun" 's numbskull haikus ("Maybe go out/Maybe stay home/Maybe call mom on the telephone") articullated the slacker ethos decades before such ennui was de rigueur.

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CULT RECORD:"NEW YORK DOLLS"

The argument can be made-indeed,New York rockers made it-that the Dolls not only sired New York's heady '70s underground (the Ramones,for instance,who also invaded from the outer boroughs), they also taught English punks (the Damned, the Sex Pistols) how to spit,swagger,and roar.As David Johansen put it in "Frankenstein," on the Dolls' debut, "Something musta happened over Manhattan," a cloud that blew around the world,altering the music genes in descendants as farflung as Axl Rose and Morrissey.Efficiently produced by Todd Rundgren,the first album holds up as an essential compendium of urban rock,drenched in whatcha-lookin'-at street-corner defiance, full of alley-cat sex howls.For all the draggy, grimy undertones,however,the Dolls were romantics at heart, unabashed lovers looking for a kiss, citing the threat of nuclear apocalypse (in the hysterical "Bad Girl") as the excuse to get it on right now.They knew the city was doomed and loved it nonetheless,making songs out of daily life ("Trash","Subway Train","Personality Crisis").Always swinging,teetering on its platform shoes,the band, particularly guitarist Johnny Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan, threatened to implode at any moment, and sometimes did.

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CULT RECORD OF THE DAY(25-12-2009).X-RAY SPEX:"GERMFREE ADOLESCENTS"

X-Ray Spex were punk's ultimate coffee achievers;their tunes were wound tight enough to make the Buzzcocks sound like the Doobie Brothers.The hero of the story was Poly Styrene,a racially mixed London teen with braces who proclaimed, "I am a poseur and i don't care/I like to make people stare!"Styrene began X-Ray Spex's debut single by mumbling, "Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard,but i think . . .Oh bondage up yours!"Styrene's screech and Lora Logic's saxophone baited each other through the careering quitars,both women sounding bored and ready to explode.On "Germfree Adolescent","Styrene toys with her shrill voice the same way she toys with her bubblegum melodies,flashing them as emblems of an exuberant worldliness.Her songs are about,well,stuff-latex,acrylic,plastic popper beads,deadorant,fast food,fast drummers."Art-I-Ficial", "Plastic Bag",and "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo"  detour the waste products of industrial culture into props for one loud  Typperware party.And although Styrene cheerfully includes herself as one of these waste products ("I wanna be instamatic/I wanna be a frozen pea"),anybody who tries to tell her she's nobody gets slapped with her pet rat."Germfree Adolescents" is so exhilarating,so inspiring,so . . .fun.

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CULT RECORD OF THE DAY(20-12-2009).GANG OF FOUR:ENTERTAINMENT(1979)

The Clash and Sex Pistols wrote songs complaining about how record labels screwed them over,but no punk group before Leed's Gang of four had ever assaulted the entire popular culture industry so radically.Filled with bitter references to television and disco as elements of state control,the band's debut,"Entertainment",comes perilously close to priggish hypocricy in its suggestion that this particullar commodity could escape the taint it describes."Down at the disco floor/They make their profits/From the things they sell."So,"Saturday Night Fever" fans are suckers.Dave Allen(bass)and Hugo Burnham(drums)create an uneasy rhythm.Andy Gill's quitar is precise and startling,choking on its own fumes and coughing up bursts of sharp notes,feedback,and melodic phrases.An impossible ambition to infiltrate mass culture and tear it apart from within.

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