Warren Kinsella
Random House
2005
296 pages
Counterculture has its pantheon of heroes, individuals whose rebellious actions have made them iconic in countercultural history. Because of the nature of counterculture and the adherents of all its forms, there's iconoclasts working to smash those idols of rebellion. Sometimes this means you read a screed that leaves you convinced that Nirvana selling out damaged the underground culture of the northwest, as members of Bikini Kill (who are iconic themselves) argued one time, but mostly its dumbs who think they're going to make Noam Chomsky look stupid or youtubers calling Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson a coward. Ludicrous statements. Warren Kinsella begins his punk book, Fury's Hour, by being one of the guys who rants about Johnny Rotten not being enough of a punk.
Kinsella is relevant to this blog for two things. Thing one, he wrote THE book about the Canadian racist right, Web of Hate. Thing two, he was in one of the first Canadian punk bands, the Hot Nasties, whose story of can be found in the book Perfect Youth by Sam Sutherland, which tells the story of early Canadian punk. Most of Kinsella's career has been in politics, he worked as a strategist for the Liberal Party of Canada, which is irrelevant to a blog about counterculture and to punk culture because the Liberal Part of Canada is not only not punk but is also very uncool. Still, he was there near the beginning, being a punk out in Calgary in the late 70s where I bet being even a little weird took guts, so that's not nothing.
Anyways, I don't actually have a lot to say about this book. Fury's Hour is a book about whether or not punk is politically relevant. Turns out punk is indeed relevant but there's so many other books like this and all the bands referenced are like, the most famous bands of punk history. I figure that the book was written to be read by unpunk people who follow Kinsella's political commentary, since punks don't need the Ramones explained to them. I didn't get much out of reading this book but it is interesting that a well known Canadian political figure has written a book about punk for mainstream readers that doesn't just treat punk imagery as coffee table reading, and really, he mentions Craig O'Hara's book The Philosophy of Punk which doesn't seem to come up much in the punk literature, so it was cool to read a Canadian mainstream politician discussing an anarchist publication put out by AK Press.
