Tito's Punks

Recueil de nouvelles dans lesquelles un musée est assailli par des hordes de punks et défendu à la mitraillette, un écrivain se change en calamar, un chasseur de plumes de paon vit une romance avec une étrangère triste. Certaines de ces nouvelles sont parues dans des anthologies chez le même éditeur. La nouvelle Heureux comme un samoyède est parue dans la revue Brèves en 2004. …

Since the historiography of punk is a male-dominated one, a "Revenge of the She-Punks" was long overdue. This feminist reckoning was written by none other than post-punk pioneer Vivien Goldman, who has an insider's perspective due to her work as a musician and one of Britian's first female music writers. Along four themes - Identity, Money, Love and Protest - the "punk professor" traces empowering moments that punk holds especially for women. This Compilation is inspired by the book, which was originally released by University of Texas Press in 2019.

Intrepid Hells Angels-style Mexican bearded punks with inverse Mohawks, led by a silicone-implanted blonde superstripper and a masked pro wrestler in gold costume, go around robbing, blackmailing, and raping people, sometimes lighting them on fire while playing rock tunes in neighboring rooms or enjoying a casual game of Russian roulette, until they manage to upset both the mob and the authorities, who call upon a duet of uncharismatic supercops to put a stop to their reign of over-the-top terror as well as end corruption in general in rural Mexico.

This combination of the Tubes' first couple of albums really does feel like two distinct releases slapped together -- and it's the Grand Canyon-sized gap in quality that makes the demarcation about as subtle as a farting elephant hanging from a chandelier. The innovative San Francisco band's 1975 eponymous debut was, and is, a masterpiece. Creative, intelligent, sardonic, theatrical. By contrast, 1976's Young & Rich was, for the most part, uninspired, insipid, short on ideas, and lacking in color. However, it does contain the more-cheese-please, boy-girl-melodrama hit "Don't Touch Me There" -- a great track in any critic's language. And that's the good, the bad, and the ugly of it. You get one superb (remastered) re-release featuring such camp/spoof classics as "Mondo Bondage," "What Do You Want From Life," and the deliciously over-the-top title track, plus one "bonus" hit and little else. Unless you're an obsessive-completist collector, there are better ways to approach the Tubes catalog than getting weighed down with all this filler. But one way or another, you have to have the first album.