"Fame" (Jon Savage's Secret History of Post-Punk 1978-81)

In the mid-‘70s, the young London-based writer Jon Savage captured the destructive energy of the emerging punk scene in the pages of his self-published fanzine London’s Outrage. While many fanzine authors moved on to other things after punk’s dissolution, Savage kept writing. Eventually he published England’s Dreaming: an expansive history of the U.K. punk scene that's one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive treatments of it in print. It should come as no surprise that the compilation Fame: Jon Savage’s Secret History of Post-Punk is far more revealing than your average genre primer. Sure, major figures like Wire, Joy Division, Pere Ubu, and others are represented here, but Fame really shines when Savage focuses on some of the more underappreciated artists of the post-punk era. The unsettlingly abstract “A New Kind of Water” by This Heat is one of the more shockingly unorthodox recordings here, while DNA's fractured and dissonant (but rhythmically sophisticated) “Blonde Redhead” practically defined the aesthetic of New York’s emerging No Wave scene.