Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

Marcus asks a question nobody had thought to ask: what if the Sex Pistols were not new? What if Johnny Rotten's sneer connected backward through the Situationists to the Dadaists to the medieval Free Spirits — a recurring underground current of absolute refusal that keeps erupting through Western history whenever the official world becomes intolerable? The book that results is associative, digressive, and formally as radical as its subject — tracing lipstick traces across centuries of negation to argue that punk was not a moment but a gesture, and that this gesture is permanent. The most important cultural history of punk ever written and the one that places it in the largest possible frame. Read after Please Kill Me and England's Dreaming and the argument becomes complete: punk happened before, it will happen again, and P&P is part of the same line.