England's Dreaming: Anarchy, the Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond.

• Author: Heilemann, John

Jon Savage. St. Martin's, 27.95. Since punk rock's demise--arguably on January 14, 1978, when the Sex Pistols' lead singer, Johnny Rotten, walked off stage for the last time in San Francisco muttering, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"--punk has been analyzed by countless sociologically inclined pop critics. Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces took an ambitious, if occasionally preposterous, stab at linking punk to every disruptive impulse since the sacking of Carthage; Simon Frith and Howard Horne's Art Into Pop picked apart the naive myth that punk was an "eruption from the gutters of inner-city recession" and showed instead that it was instigated mainly by middle-class art school students. A colleague of mine at The Economist, Michael Elliott, went so far as to suggest that by unleashing a teeming generation of artists and street-bred entrepreneurs, punk did more to resurrect the British economy in the eighties than did Margaret Thatcher. Not only that: It had a better beat.

Like the movement itself, the best writing about punk has been intellectually audacious. Sadly, Savage's book isn't. I say sadly because in its best moments, England's Dreaming hints briefly, frustratingly, at answers to the hard questions about punk and the social/political circumstances that gave the movement its force--circumstances that, in some ways, called punk into being. Sadly because it is clear Savage has at least some sense that these issues are the ones his colleagues have yet to sort out. And sadly because England's Dreaming is so obviously a labor of love, a devoted fan's failed attempt to make sense of the passion that has fueled his life's work.

Savage says, for instance, that "the Sex Pistols can be seen as a last gasp of youth culture as a single, unifying force--that sixties ideal which all those concerned with the group both hated and loved." An intriguing claim. But he leaves it at that, never identifying which forces, whether corporate (global media conglomerates) or consumer (fragmented teenage audiences), came into play after punk to destroy this unity. To back the idea, Savage would also need to explain Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Bruce Springsteen--three superstars who arrived in the post-punk epoch and meant more to the world's youth than Johnny Rotten ever did.

Often, what bits of analysis there are in England's Dreaminng consist of little more than a few declarative sentences lined up in a row. "All pop movements have started with...