BORN TO ROCK: HEAVY DRINKERS AND THINKERS BY TODD TAYLOR GORSKY PRESS, ...

OCK: HEAVY DRINKERS AND THINKERS BY TODD TAYLOR GORSKY PRESS, 318 PAGES, $13.95

PUNK ROCK WAS built to fail. Its rise and fall can be charted in Hegelian terms. It's a dialectic with shattered, snotty logic pyramids, a series of antitheses that spiraled into smaller and smaller objections until the chains just canceled themselves out. Each strain of punk began because it said "no" to the one that came before it—a series of battles pitched to find the most powerful cynicism, the most succinct statement of nihilism.

The constant churning of negation led punk into some seemingly illogical territory. The punk umbrella covers G.G. Allin self-destructos, straight-edge ascetics, political activists and money-grabbing hucksters. It was all saying no at the time. Yesterday's young and vital became today's old and in-the-way, ad nauseum.

Punk's slow burning self-destruct mechanism was very effective, but other factors helped kill it, too. Punk was badly bruised by metal, which projected a brutal negativity that made punk seem like an art project. Hiphop effortlessly attracted the disdain and attention that punk had to media blitz its way into. At the same time, music and youth cultures emerged that were influenced by punk and yet were distinctly not punk. Where did college rock end and punk begin? Punk defined its boundaries, got boring and atrophied.

In the early to mid-90s, punk (or something like it) saw a resurgence. Kids with Day-Glo-colored hair rocked Green Day and Blink-182 out of their moms' SUVs. Pinpointing the exact moment punk rock died is impossible—and a great game to play at a bar—but the birth of the word "mallpunk" is a strong contender, as is the popularity of the phrase "punk's not dead." Mallpunk proved punk was dead by parading its corpse in a Weekend at Bernie's-esque attempt at proving that it was alive and in charge.

Today's disaffected 13-year-old shopper has a canon of punk rock culture to construct a pose from. Movies offer mythmaking narratives (Sid and Nancy, Suburbia), documentaries (The Decline of Western Civilization, Another State of Mind) and at least one hybrid of the two (The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle). Nascent punk rockers can learn the word of punk in first person accounts (Johnny Rotten's No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs), ill-conceived high-minded analysis (Greil Marcus' In the Fascist Bathroom) and clunky experiments (Punk Rock Aerobics: 75 Killer Moves, 50 Punk Classics, and 25 Reasons to Get Off Your Ass and Exercise). Pick an era, a bullet point or two and find the outfit to match. Punk offers a mac-and-cheese recipe for rebellion: spiked hair, piercings and fast power chords. Mix, stir and piss off your parents.

Today punk is easy to buy. But can it still be lived? In his book of interviews and essays Born to Rock: Heavy Drinkers and Thinkers, former Flipside writer Todd Taylor argues that it can. Taylor stays out of the shopping mall and focuses on a microgenre he terms DIY punk: bands that aren't on major labels, tour constantly and respect punk's history. They aren't nostalgia acts and they're not looking for MTV fame. They don't look like "Welcome to London" postcard mohawk punks. They value self-preservation over self-destruction. They're not in high school. It's punk rock for and by grown-ups.

Taylor's punk rock is a self-supportive, self-contained community. They work in each other's coffee shops. The bass player from Dillinger Four works at the restaurant owned by his guitar player. The members of Smogtown manage their own tours and surf together. The bands come off as collections of friends, happy to pack into U-Hauls and crisscross the country.

With exceptions like Pennywise and NOFX, the musicians interviewed have day jobs and modest goals. They seem like okay folks who view playing music as an intense hobby. They're not the problem. Taylor is. He is a punk-rock nerd, the kind of sickly specimen that should be toiling at some IT department, listening to Gorilla Biscuits on his Walkman. Instead, he gets to speak as the voice of punk rock—which should by all rights be a beer-drinking, crank-addled, violent good time—and present it as a nerd refuge.

Introducing his interview with Kid Dynamite, Taylor laments the death of "posicore" (positive hardcore) by saying, "Minor Threat made perfect sense. Angry metal that looked like it was taking place in a weight gym didn't." That's right: Punk rock scribe Taylor objects to the presence of anger in his music. Taylor's punk is not a place for aggression (or muscles, apparently). As the man says, "When I think about punk rock and what it truly means at its core, it quickly gets pared down to this: this music keeps me alive and living a life I want." A paragraph later, punk is "real and vital," possessed of an "earnest intensity." It is supportive. Positive. Life-affirming. Epiphany-inducing. Tony Robbins with safety pins.

You can almost feel the spittle-spray reading the geeky excitement of Taylor's prose. He's an ultra-fan, the sort of obsessed enthusiast that Stan Lee used to call "true believers." For Taylor, the bands' devotion to the scene is epic and heroic, their music rapturous and awesome. He sounds like a 15-year-old describing his first favorite band. Which wouldn't be a big deal except that he's in his early thirties. That's not ancient, but it makes the book's pro-punk argument suspect. The old guy at the all-ages show is not the ideal person to argue for the vitality of a presumed-dead subculture.

But even if Taylor's age had about a decade and a half shaved off, he would still be the wrong man for the job. Born to Rock's intro gives a thumbnail sketch of Taylor's life. The man's as punk rock as an Eagle Scout, and he says it himself in his lame-iography: He survives a childhood car crash, becomes disaffected as an adult while pursuing his English Lit PhD (!) before getting a low-paying, glorified cubicle-slave job at punk magazine Flipside. Throughout, he searched for the punk life by "look[ing] beyond the television, the radio with endless commercials, and magazines with ads for cars." Taylor might do well to look at tv, commercials and glossy magazines. He might enjoy the Stooges and Buzzcocks songs in commercials, the So-Cal punks on K-Rock or the positive reviews of Pennywise in Blender.

He comes closest to acknowledging the mainstream acceptance and co-option of punk rock introducing his interview with Strike Anywhere:

Our own clever weapons—even our very own words—have been used repeatedly against us to sell punk's skin and appearance over and over again. Two things usually happen. We either get smarter with each turn and learn from our mistakes or we give up, give in, and tie our own hands behind our backs because we're already so very fucked.

Get it? Neither do I. It's as coherent as a meth-head on Cops explaining where his pants went. What seems clear is that he pursued the distant dream of punk rock, found out that it was no longer dangerous, was relieved and maneuvered himself into its warm, dead heart. It's his job to pretend that it's not pointless and he's not up to it. For lack of a convincing argument, he adopts the impressionistic hepcat speech that punk boosters of yore employed. Lester Bangs would be rolling in his grave if his belly didn't keep hitting the top of the coffin.

Addressing how punk has lost its usefulness as a means of rebellion wouldn't just destroy Taylor's argument, it would destroy his life. He has staked his self-image on the viability of punk rock and his place in it. The book's title and cover is taken from Taylor's tattoo. "Born to Rock" is stenciled over his inch-wide belly button and Cheetos- and Budweiser-addled torso. That tattoo will come back to haunt him someday. Most likely, when he's furtively masturbating to that one blue-haired chick on Suicidegirls.com he thinks could possibly understand him.

Punk rock is cute and quirky for Taylor. His interviews are punctuated with the sort of clubby, forced "wacky" questions that litter photocopied teen fanzines and websites. He poses dead-on-arrival joke questions like, "[Is it true that] you came in your shoe?" and, "Would you say that you're your own favorite band," only to receive replies like, "It's all quasi-social, semi-political, semi-melodic beer punk." None of the transcribed conversations are terribly funny, and I get the impression that Taylor did his research by reading other fanzine interviews. The few interviews that are (nearly) compelling get sidetracked by Taylor's impatience to ask his next "funny" question. There's no narrative or logical sequencing. That's especially irritating when he interviews people who have actual stories, like Duane Peters of U.S. Bombs. Peters has lived an epic life and is willing to tell it in graphic, gutwrenching detail. Peters tells weird, savage stories about shooting heroin into his neck, repeat jail visits, knocking out his teeth with microphones and sneaking cigarettes to a friend dying of AIDS. Taylor? He breaks Peters' flow to ask him how he got his nickname, "Master of Disaster."

Before reading this book, I thought punk rock was as dead as a coffin nail. Now I realize it's just in a coma. Time to cancel life support.