Experience The Story Of \ Published By George Berger Provided As Text

didnt know much about the band apart from their music, so I was happy to learn quite a bit, but I hated the writing, Some quotes were used twice in different chapters, which is annoying, Some stories are not clear, I couldnt suss if the Wedding flexi was actually released or if the magazine discovered the hoax before sending it out, Clarity is important! Berger excessively quoted lengthy passages from Rimbauds Last of the Hippies,
Some nice pix, including one, thankfully, of the exterior of the legendary Dial House,
Also, there are a million acronyms throughout, which are hard to keep track of, I would have appreciated an index of them and their meanings,
Excellent insight into one way to live life as an outsider, This is a really good book about the anarchist punk band crass, with some good detail and interviews from the band members themselves, and some good pictures, If you like this you should read Shibboleth, My Revolting Life by Penny Rimbaud, the drummer from Crass, When I first started reading this book, I was very excited, It begins with thorough details of the individual members of the band and the early art happenings, etc, Unfortunately this level of detail soon fizzled out and the book unraveled into a mess of meanderings and Rolling Stone style rock journalism, The author reads like someone completely new to the band and has trouble describing their music at all, using dismissive generalizations such as "unlistenable" when talking about a live recording which is actually not at all unlistenable.
That shouldn't be good enough for anyone who is seriously interested in reading about any kind of music,

The book focuses far too much on sensationalism and highlights controversies without getting into any sort of balanced description of the music beyond brief, irrelevant opinions.
It contains the term "singafuckinglong" which should give you a clue as to the depth of the author's abilities, He also seems to fail at any sort of intelligent analysis of the bands' philosophies and just decides everything is "shocking" or "funny" as though that is enough.
Maybe he should write about the Sex Pistols instead he can't seem to stop mentioning them in this book,

Then it gets even worse and you start to realize that Berger does not really even like Crass because all he seems to write about is how terrible all their music is and how all their critics were right.
He basically admits this in the epilogue, "I always thought the Poison Girls were a far better band than Crass, and it puzzled me that Crass was so much bigger and more influential.
" Why did this asshole write this book Was it out of some weird need to take them down a peg or just pure ignorance and inability to write Given the way Berger forms sentences, I have to assume it was a combination of the two.


There are a few good moments in the book which detail things I hadn't read before that are very exciting to read about, But those moments are really sporadic and don't hold this thing together, With all the firsthand accounts and stories, it is a bit depressing that this book turned out the way it did, Did the author manage to quote every single word of "Last Of The Hippies" which I do recommend reading over the course of this

I do not recommend this book to anyone.
The music of Crass music largely speaks for itself and this book does not help you to appreciate it, If you want to learn about Crass, listen to their incredible albums and read the lyrics and essays and then make up your own mind about it, I thought it was worth reading, but the author's writing bothered me/seemed lazy at times, For instance, quoting longfull pages excerpts from "The Last of the Hippies" at several parts of the book throwing in quotes by band members and others without always putting them in any context, etc.
In this regard, it seemed more like a collage/zine of artifacts than a wellput together biography or history of Crass, I still enjoyed reading it and learning some new stories, A little poorly written, but an immersive read on a band whose music I've never fully appreciated, but have found their ethos quite fascinating, George Berger doesn't seem to really like Crass at all though, The best bits are quotes from those involved with the band, and not the bits Berger wrote, who spends most of the book sort of slagging Crass off.
Weird. Crass was the anarchopunk face of a revolutionary movement founded by radical leftwingers Penny Rimbaud and Steve Ignorant, Offering an account of the subversive band that took punk to the limit, this title tells their stories of putting out their records, films and magazines and setting up a series of hoaxes that were covered by the press.
I love the band, and this had some very interesting tidbits about them, But, as others have mentioned: could've used a onceover for spelling and grammar, it quotes whole pages from a Penny Rimbaud pamphlet presumably, many Crass fans reading the book have already

read said pamphlet, and the author doesn't seem to personally like Crass all that much, which is odd.
EXCELLENT history of Crass. A must for anyone interested in the era they were playing and UK punk in general, I loved this book. A baptism into the world of enigmatic secondwave anarchopunk band, Crass, Community living, vegetarian friendly, passionately nonviolent, radically feminist, viscerally antichristian, stalwart with integrity, unflinchingly honest, hospitable with conviction, and more than two decades older than most of the other charting punk bands of their day, Crass is certainly one of the most fascinating punk bands of all time.
This book unloads the whole experience of Crass, from the histories of their various counterculture communities alongside the hippies and freaks of the sixties, through their inception and rise fromthrough the early eighties, until their legendary end in, as they said they would when they first began to experience fame five years before.
This is a must read for anyone interested in punk rock, and for anyone interested in the expression of popular anarchism in the late twentieth century,

Upon reading some other reviews, I must add: The edition I read was badly in need of an editor, However, I read the book as though it was a very long, very thorough fanzine, a genre/medium that has much different expectations of its finished product and message than a typical book.
So, this is a very raw book, but consistently so with most other underground and direct publishing from the punk and popular anarchist scene, I didn't find it bothersome, A pretty quick read and a great overview on Crass and its indivdual members, Although I'd rather the book was set up like "We've Got the Neutron Bomb" or "No Beauty Without Danger" where it was more the members giving their accounts without George Berger's interjections, it was still an insightful look at the most misunderstood/active/honest punk band in the history of music.
This book bummed me out, While he dutifully examines their work and times in granular detail, the author doesnt much enjoy the music of Crass and seems almost resentful about their place in punk history.
Also, I preferred Crass in my mind being solely their ideas and music and images, not of the personalities that created them, I never thought Id ever roll my eyes at anything Crass until I started reading Steve Ignorant interview quotes, Ugh. Still, if youre interested in punk history you could do worse than reading this, The author does a stirling job of unravelling the story of punk amp indeed British rock's most enigmatic band, the blackclad anarchohippies Crass, It's fascinating to finally hear the goings on straight from the horses mouth, the only downside being that the enigma that always shrouded the band and made them so utterly fascinating is stripped away with every page until the bubble finally bursts.
Nevertheless, this is a essential purchase for anyone who was remotely interested in the intense, black amp white underbelly of late 's/early 's Punk rock.
An exhaustive exhumation of every bit of history, every idea, and every opinion the band ever uttered, You really get an immersive experience, from the late 's, when Penny and Gee acquired Dial House, through the turblulent early 's, into the punk era, and beyond.
With only a few exceptions, just about everyone involved with the Crass endeavor is mightily forthcoming with their thoughts and opinions, It's a dense read, and you will really step away from it with an increased understanding of everything from squatters to free festival culture to the difficulty of separating the National Socialists who want to stomp your face from the Trotskyists who want to talk your face off about the working man in the abstract.
The material about the Faulklands War was fascinating and a good historical overview of the act itself and reading the transcript of the fake recordings was exciting and slightly dangerous.
However, as we grind toward the end, with the last few chapters increasingly padded out through ever longer quotations from Penny Rimbaud's "The Last Of the Hippies," and as every single band member gives their voluminous thoughts on what it all meant, the act of pushing forward through the book felt like I was walking down a hall whose walls were initially getting narrower, and then were lined with sandpaper.
But for the firstof the book, the reading is great and worthwhile,


Also, if you know me and my musical proclivities, you can imagine that Berger and I diverged paths on the merits of "Yes Sir, I Will.
" I think it's one of their very best and most vital albums, while Berger diverges from this opinion by being wrong, Okay, so this review is mostly positive,

People that know nothing of punk rock will claim that the scene "died" in 'when the Sex Pistols went kaput, For many, the Malcolm McLaren band was the pinnacle of punk rock, the cream of the crop, and when they went under after a truly horrific American tour, the scene croaked with them.
This is both true and false, It's true that the Sex Pistols were the most wellknown punk band at the time and punk's notoriety went down after the group split, Punk purists will only listen to British punk around that era and nothing else, Groups like The Clash went more mainstream, The Buzzcocks created an arguably more suburban and parentfriendly type of punk with poppunk, and other bands like Siouxsie and The Banshees went on to create a darker sound we know as Goth.


So yeah, Big Punk kind of died in,

But the argument of punk "dying" is false because punk is a DIY movement more than anything, As long as there are people who can kind of play music and want to make punk music then there will be punk music, Though "traditional punk" seems to have died, other heads sprouted from that angry Hydra, Postpunk, cold wave, no wave, and other types of experimental music took note of punk's energy and motto of "do it yourself" and made music they wanted to hear they way they wanted to hear it.
Plus this argument centers punk solely in specific area during one specific time when music that is now considered the foundation of punk came from the US almost a decade prior.
Punk isn't linear,so the story of punk shouldn't be linear either,

The irregularities of punk is where George Berger centers his argument, The Story of Crass is, of course, about the history of Crass, a political collectivecumband that existed fromto their eventual disbandment in, I wanted to use the verb "played" in that previous sentence, but Crass did so much more than just play music, They were a political group more than anything, making music as well as visual art, poetry, and using other mediums that expressed their antiestablishment, antiThatcher, antiwar message, Instead of taking the traditional biography route and having Berger tell us about Crass, he blends history and personal anecdotes along with what I can only assume are the longest interviews ever with the former members of Crass and the people that knew them.
This narrative is jarring to the reader when they first start the book but, if we remember that Crass were anticapitalist and cared about a collective goal rather than a series of individual goals, this group story makes sense.
It allows members like Penny Rimbaud, Joy de Vivre, Steve Ignorant, and Phil Free to talk about themselves and their own personal experiences rather than have someone prescribe emotions and narratives to them.


Crass was, to say it lightly, a lot, They were doing a lot, they were saying a lot, and they were being a lot, Starting from hippie roots, they were mobilized by punk's givenofucks attitude to express their emotions and thoughts over butterfly guitar picking and unintelligible lyrics, I'm not joking: you need to read Crass's lyrics because you won't understand a word they're saying otherwise More militant and wordy than other band out there, Crass created anarchopunk at a time where capitalism and democracy were crumbling in England.
This was Crass's greatest feat and their biggest downfall, Crass's political edge pigeonholed them as the "political band" that turned off people wanting easy punk listening an oxymoron if there ever was one and the government, They were expected to be political all the time, something that really came back to bite them in the ass during Margaret Thatcher's early reign over England,

This is not a book for someone that is new to punk, Berger writes with the assumption that the reader already knows something about the history of punk and postpunk, so this book isn't recommended to anyone who wants to use this book to learn more about punk.
Don't come into this book expecting to get a brief history on any of the other bands that existed in the same timeline as Crass like the Sex Pistols, The Damned, or The Clash.
If you want to learn more about them or the history of early punk often called 'punk then I would suggest Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil's Please Kill Me or Simon Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again if you want to learn more about the history of postpunk.
And, while Berger's inclusion of Crass's own words is necessary for telling a holistic narrative, there are times where it becomes overwhelming, Berger adds many of Rimbaud and de Vivre's poetry and writing into this book, which is cool until you remember that sometimes Rimbaud gets a little too academic.


So, overall, this is a great book, Much like the band it is discussing, the reader should be ready to reevaluate traditional narratives when reading this book and open to new ideas being introduced, Crass wasn't right all the time, and Berger makes sure to tel us this, But, when they were right, they were fantastic, .