There has been a wealth of scholarly work on punk in recent years, much of it excellent and adding a lot to the already existing mass of memoirs, biographies and general journalism on the topic. Unfortunately, Raymond A. Patton's Punk Crisis adds little of value to that body and, indeed, is lacking in scholarly rigour in significant ways as well as re-treading too many topics (the Parents Music Resource Center, for example, and many of the big players in UK and US punk) which have already been scrutinised in greater critical detail elsewhere.

That said, the book is not entirely without merit. The effort to redress a perceived ‘schizophrenic tendency to isolate scholarship on punk (and popular culture in general) in the West from scholarship on [punk and pop culture in] the east’ (p. 7) is reasonable enough, even if the word ‘schizophrenic’ reads a little harshly. ‘Was punk anticommunist’, or not? (p. 6) is a fairly interesting question which Patton does address quite well, giving the overall impression that punk in the West unwittingly supported the rise of the right whilst punk in the East helped to hasten the demise of the Soviet experiment to an extent that we might not necessarily want to applaud with hindsight. This conclusion is counter-intuitive (most assume punk is leftist) and interesting, but is overstated. Some less known research from the recent wave of ‘punk scholars’ is employed quite well, including that of Monica Sklar (p. 35), Matt Grimes (pp. 49–50) and (at many points) the outstanding work of Matthew Worley. The detail about the Polish group Lady Pank (pp. 121–5) was interesting and could be of value to researchers of punk in the East. Some archival quotes were fascinating, such as the Polish Division of Culture's complaint about punk's ‘hopeless artistic quality… eccentricity… and stupidity’ (p. 57; just the kind of music I like, I thought to myself on reading of this appraisal).

However, these strengths are greatly outnumbered by problems with the book. Patton is right, for example, to note problems around a shift towards ‘identity politics’ within which punk represents an important signpost. However, to say ‘This transformation [towards an identity politics] wasn't caused exclusively by punk’ (p. 157) is to enormously understate the fact of the matter; indeed, the process began long before the words ‘punk rock’ started to make headlines in 1976 and punk is almost certainly best seen as an effect of the transformation rather than any kind of causative source. For a scholar with a generally sociopolitical interest in punk, Patton seems surprisingly sketchy as to the detail of post-war political history at several points. For example, he suggests that ‘class- and ideology-based political and social demarcations were gradually losing their dominance’ from ‘the late 1960s, with the rise of a “new left”’ (p. 78): actually, the development of the New Left, and the associated transition away from class-based and strict Marxist analyses, certainly begins much earlier than the late 1960s. Elsewhere he makes the frankly risible claim that Thatcher ‘operated in the realm of identity more than ideology’ (p. 102). ‘Since the middle of the Second World War … the Left accepted the basic inequalities of capitalism’ (p. 79), he argues. However, it can hardly be said that such an acceptance was made during the war and, indeed, the left could not be the left if such an acceptance was made, surely. Patton writes as if the left dies from the World War II onwards, which is certainly an overstatement.

Even where his criticisms of punk have validity, Patton tends towards excessive dismissal. I understand why he argues that ‘punk bolstered the formation of new constellations on the Right’ such as the Thatcher–Reagan axis (p. 180): even if enacted unwittingly, such almost certainly has occurred at times (punks and their ilk as scapegoats for right-wing policy-making, in short). To say this, however, without also noting the immense hostility of punks to, in particular, Thatcher during the 1980s and beyond is an injustice by Patton towards his subject of enquiry. Put bluntly, he treats punk as if it is [or ‘was’, as he often writes, e.g. p. 7 (‘punk… the global phenomenon it was’, although punk is today far more global in reach than it has even been before)] far less politically minded and politically active than it in fact has often been. ‘Self-identified punks and bands … focus was not on politics but on striking the delicate balance to maintain their subcultural capital and avoiding unwelcome [governmental/grass-roots] attacks’ (p. 171), Patton argues, but that depends on what we mean by ‘politics’ (not to mention ‘grass-roots’ and ‘subcultural capital’ – more on the latter shortly). ‘A central feature of punk scenes everywhere was … their indifference to ideology’ (p. 179, emphasis added), Patton insists, but that depends what we mean by ‘ideology’. Sure, Crass sang ‘left wing, right wing, you can stuff the lot’ and other similar sentiments. To describe them as ‘apolitical’ (p. 129) is ludicrous, however: the aforementioned sentiments are not a sign of ‘political ambiguity’ (p. 136), they are a sign of a concrete demand for a different kind of political thinking (pacifist anarchism, essentially) beyond the standard left/right categories. In any case, there have been vehement socialists within the broad punk/post-punk umbrella (The Jam, The Redskins, Billy Bragg, The Mekons, The 3 Johns and so forth), rendering the claim that punk everywhere (and thus always, presumably) lacks ideology clearly false. (Let us skirt over the fact that many definitions of ideology would insist that ‘indifference to ideology’ is itself ideological, a nuance which does not seem to trouble Patton.)

For those of us who have done painstaking research on punk over many years, the vulgar sweep of innumerable claims by Patton is most irksome. ‘For every politically informed and engaged punk, there were others for whom being an anarchist, communist or Nazi meant roughly the same thing’ (p. 178) – precisely who, we are entitled to ask, are these ‘others’? Patton offers no evidence, and I think he would struggle to do so, although it would not be hard to find those who identify as punks but are not interested in politics (but, again, Patton goes much further than just saying that). He claims his work is ‘far more complex’ than studies which have been ‘scouring songs or interviews for clues’ (p. 180); it seems to me, however, that he thus abandons precisely the kind of concrete detail which songs, interviews and other hard data could have provided. Patton often writes as if he is not bound to offer any evidence to support his sweeping statements. ‘Punk did not bring “the people” together against “the system”’ (pp. 180–1). The possibilities to rebut this statement with factual data are too numerous to adumbrate in this short review: in short, let us note that many, many punks will not recognise themselves in the account of punk this book offers.

One of the most shocking things about the book (particularly given its publication by Oxford University Press) is the complete absence of page numbers for references. This reviewer found the complete lack of page references extremely frustrating: I have never before come across an academic book without page references for all quotations, and I hope never to again.

As mentioned above, Patton places the Bourdieusian concept of ‘subcultural capital’ at the heart of his critique of punk, frequently placing it in contradistinction to ‘actual capital’ (pp. 71, 122, 176 and more). That contradistinction is highly problematic, given that Bourdieu actually stipulates that we ‘must endeavour to grasp capital and profit in all their forms’ and not only their ‘mercantile’ forms; in any case, ‘different types of capital… change into one another’ (Bourdieu, quoted in Szeman and Kaposy Reference Szeman and Kaposy2011, p. 82). Subcultural capital, in other words, is actual capital for Bourdieu. Even if this weren't an issue, the subcultural capital concept is drawn with a strangulating tightness. To give just one example, Patton only offers the possibility that ‘uncompromising hardcore identities’ were taken by punks to ‘restore’ a subcultural capital which had been threatened by ‘popular new wave bands in the media’ (p. 126). He offers no room whatsoever for the idea that some punks (‘hardcore’ or otherwise) actually wanted a different society, a different culture, a different world – for Patton, all the punks could ever have really wanted was a distinct subculture (a different haircut, for example).

It is absolutely fair to criticise the classic subcultural theory of the Birmingham CCCS (pp. 4–5) which has of course already been rightly critiqued by the ‘post-subcultural’ school of the last decades. However, to insist that ‘Resistance is not something that exists in a cultural form’ (p. 181), is to go far too far in the opposite direction. If Patton were right about that, we would have no further use for Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, even Gramsci perhaps – the whole of cultural studies might as well be binned. As so often happens in Punk Crisis, a potentially valuable point is ruined by the most all-encompassing statement.

I will not list all the factual errors which I found in the text, it would take too long. I do want to clarify, however, that Crass were not ‘avant-garde artists … engaging with mass culture to reach a wider audience’ (p. 46); this is a gross misrepresentation. When Patton states that ‘To avoid the taint of capital, Crass directed the proceeds’ of their massive record sales to CND and various anarchist causes (p. 72, emphasis added), he does not only Crass themselves an immense disservice but also the anarcho-punk movement and much of the whole punk movement. Crass took anarchy and peace very seriously: to imply they were simply posing to avoid a ‘taint’ is inexcusable. Small Wonder, who had issued the first Crass disc, certainly did not ‘refuse to produce’ the bands’ next release (ibid.): Crass offered to go elsewhere so that Small Wonder would not suffer further police pressure arising from the group's establishment-baiting activities; mutual respect between Crass and Small Wonder prevailed. These and other misrepresentations in relation to Crass are frankly offensive; there is a wealth of scholarly and non-scholarly literature on Crass in the public domain and no excuse can be made for these gross inaccuracies. Many of Patton's other blunders – stating that there was something called a ‘Suspicious Persons Act’ in the 19th century (p. 99), misspelling Ivan Gololobov's name (p. 189), confusing the Ruts’ ‘Babylon's Burning’ with Max Romeo's ‘War Ina Babylon’ (p. 125), to name only three – are more understandable, although disappointing in an academic text.

Overall, this book represents a highly problematic account of punk. Matthew Worley's No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Reference Worley2017) was a first-class, detailed and thoroughly reliable text on punk. The same cannot be said of Punk Crisis. In punk, ‘style … was an end in itself’ (p. 40), Patton claims. Not always, I think, and to make such a blanket assertion is to risk taking scholarship on punk back to the bad old days when academics got their facts wrong but still assumed their mastery was greater than those bricoleurs ‘the punks’.