The story of all the -isms, the movements and the wild, wild people of 20th century Western culture from a hip rock 'n' roll perspective. The Culture Club reveals that all those cultural movers and shakers were much closer than your standard six degrees of separation! This addictively readable book is a brilliant free-associating journey through the last 100 years of art, music and ideas.

Description

The Culture Club puts the history of art and philosophy through a shredder, throws the remains in a plastic bag with a torn-up copy of last month's Rolling Stone and some old TV guides, tips everything out on the floor and glues the pieces where they land. Now Vincent Van Gogh finds himself sharing studio space with Prince and Steven Spielberg; John Cage guest stars on The Muppet Show; and futurist composer Luigi Russolo does the orbit with Grandmaster Flash. It's not exactly the way you learned history at school - more like a visit to some weird nightclub where Albert Camus takes the stage to read from The Outsider while the Dust Brothers seamlessly mix The Cure into the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. What is this place? Is that Friedrich Nietzsche talking to Elvis Presley over there? And was that really Marcel Duchamp's Fountain you saw in the toilets? Craig Schuftan is on hand to make the introductions in The Culture Club. Grab a drink, pull up a chair and let him convince you that French dramatist Antonin Artaud really is just as important to the history of rock and roll as Guns 'n' Roses.