Real Punks Don't Wear Black (2006)

My favorite part of Frank Kogan's artfully constructed book (I'm still wondering how it comes so relatively late and remains his only one) was the second section, which is more in a memoir vein, and especially the chapter on junior high, which is the truest thing I've ever read—or truest to my own experience anyway—about the terrifying rite of suburban adolescent passage. He treats it by writing about fear. He's also really great on Bob Dylan, notably Dylan's imperial phase 1964-1966, working up a nice lather for example on the typical Dylan zen koan, from Highway 61 Revisited, "The sun's not yellow it's chicken." Kogan's treatment of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago is another high point of the book. I've always had an uneasy relationship with Kogan's writing and a little paradoxical. I have a high level of trust for his taste in music, but I often glaze over on his dives into the rabbit holes that preoccupy him, such as the meaning of "meaning." I like his social-mapping ideas and believe with him that social context is more involved in musical (and all) taste than most people give credit. But then, though he talks about social mapping, he doesn't seem to do much of it. At one point he lists out familiar and semi-familiar terms—jocks, socs, nerds, stoners, etc.—but assumes they're understood. I was stopped, reading this 2006 book about the early 1970s in 2019, by the term "greaser." I have some idea what it might mean, but it covers a wide range of possibilities, some of them overlapping and some exclusionary to others (Latinos? motorheads? Elvis clones?). Speaking of meaning, perhaps the most baffling, frustrating, and illuminating part of the book is his discussion of "Superwords," which Kogan says are words whose definitions people fight about in social terms, often categories of music, e.g., punk, hip-hop, rock 'n' roll, etc. Nearest and dearest to Kogan's evident heart he put in the title of the book, along with an example of the problem, i.e., "Real [Superword] means this / doesn't mean that." This is eminently worth looking at but it leads Kogan down a narrow hole when Wittgenstein rings the doorbell. It's good at suggesting the difficulty of the problem (the meaning of meaning, more or less) but it also reads a little like he's still annoyed with some college instructor who wrote something on one of his papers he didn't like. It's not the only reason his most obvious antecedent as a rock critic is Richard Meltzer.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.