One of the best music documentaries I have ever seen about some of the world's greatest music, Don Letts's "Punk:Attitude" gives us a succinct and pungent history of punk from Andy Warhol's Factory to 9/11 and beyond.
Featuring rare performance clips and interviews from The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Richard Hell, Television, The Clash, X-Ray Spex, Minor Threat, Fugazi, The Velvet Underground (if you're not in love with Nico, you will be), The Buzzcocks who may have played the single most influential show in punk rock history, a concert where future members of Joy Division, The Smiths, and The Clash first met and...if you're already salivating like Pavlovian Mohawk dogs at the mere mention of those names you're already out the door and on the way to the video store (I checked my copy out from the local library).
The rare performance clips by both well known and more obscure artists alone make this worth a maxi-price rental. Don't smash the DVD player but pogo ceaselessly and air guitar to Sonic Youth ("for years, no one came to their shows but they just kept on...") Black Flag (Henry Rollins on narrow-minded punk "fans" : "When songs grew beyond 2 minutes long, some fans were like "what are you doing? Freebird?",
When it comes to the commentary, it's all fresh and stimulating and good, being mainly by the most literate of the performers and the scribes. Henry Rollins btw is extraordinarily well read and educated as is Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. Chrissie Hynde and Rollins center the documentary's key transition. Imagine being a punk fan in 1976 when the Ramones are cranking out their famous 2-minute crunching ditties and 1986 when Sonic Youth first hit with their implosive 11-minute D-tuned literate noise epics? Punk:attitude reveals in detail how the music evolved and at what cost, even covering the much maligned and nearly forgotten No Wave genre where fans of "pure" punk complained that No Wave "wasn't musical" (can someone define "irony"?). No Wave features pure sonic cacophony, sans melody in favor of rhythm and distortion. The very best of them were trying to get on to what John Coltrane and Archie Shepp explored in jazz in the mid and late '60s.
For even stimulating the debate again over the inherent ironies of trying to define what punk was and is, and why certain bands are here and not there, the doc gets 4 stars., and is a riotous, glorious continuing education for us aging vets). Punk die hards will note the conspicuous absence of Minneapolis and Athens Ga.(*sigh* yet another punk documentary that doesn't even mention Husker Du or Pylon).
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.