History is inevitably best dissected with a sense of distance, so it's only relatively recently that any serious attempt has been made to document - let alone come to terms with - the late seventies punk explosion. There's been Jon Savage's marvellous, massive sociological tract-cum-history lesson England's Dreaming; Rotten, the all-too credibly titled autobiography of erstwhile Sex Pistol John Lydon; and the much-discussed, much less-read theoretical treatise on contemporary music, Lipstick Traces.

Lipstick author Greil Marcus is an American Political Thought BA and MA as well as one of that country's most literate and astute musical commentators with books like Mystery Train and Dead Elvis. In the Fascist Bathroom, rather than another of the professor's elaborate academic texts, is a compilation of articles for Rolling Stone, Interview, Artforum, and others. Subtitled "Writings on Punk 1977-1992", this is essentially high-grade fanzine writing. From the pen of a genuine fan: Marcus is a true disciple - a groupie - ready to be transported with delight, but certainly not about to be blinkered by reverence. This is spade-calling stuff, a world where no artist (almost no artist, as we shall see) is justified by something so base as a back-catalogue.

Example, this is Marcus on the agit-prop syncopations of Leeds' Gang of Four:

"The songs are gnomic, situational renderings of the paradoxes of leisure as oppression, identity as product, sex as politics; the theme here is not Armageddon...but false consciousness within consumer culture."

This Marcus is in love with the notion of British punk. Often in love with the British punk even the home side weren't falling for: The Gang of Four, Essential Logic, a love/hate affair with both Elvis Costello and The Clash.

These are fin de siecle documents, grand apocalyptic opinions, unbendable and intractable, often fermented in a social and political cocktail. Thus Laurie Anderson's exemplary 'O Superman', performance piece-cum-novelty pop classic, is discussed - with regret - within the context of Reagan's elevation to the Presidency, a similar distorting-lens held up later to Bruce Springsteen.

Marcus likes Bruce Springsteen.

But in a book of writings on punk? Definitions are loose, they mean whatever the professor finds to fascinate him at the time, but it's undeniable that for all his best efforts he finds it next to impossible to fire his language on Mr. USA with the same dynamism he endows to, say, that damn Gang of Four. Here it's ugly, lumpen, blue-collar music rendered in (almost) ugly, lumpen, blue-collar prose. We just don't buy it. Marcus is lying. He only lies once more - when the played-out John Lennon releases his tepid final LP. Marcus is in awe of the legend and, much as obviously doesn't like this stuff, he is at once afraid to criticise too loudly. Similarly, the ex-Beatle's epitaph is mawkish and flaccid. It's a rare lapse of honesty in the man. The real Greil Marcus would have danced on the grave.

But before you run away with the idea that this is somehow dour classroom stuff - and it can be frighteningly erudite - at best the author is breathlessly funny. Example: an essay on the gruesome celebrity of the rock "survivor" ("the cant word of the seventies"), that's resolved in a lurid and hysterical index of rock-deaths (few points for succumbing to drugs; plenty for plane crashes or - stand up one Arlester Christian - being shot on stage).

The key to Greil Marcus is his ability to render on the page what we hear in the music, a capacity to distil that essence rare (sic), as in his description of the early Sonic Youth as a band with a "negating impulse, its will to function as a sort of sonic corrosive." If you don't always get it, you do always get the instinct behind it. Of the 400 or so pages in this volume (one superfluous short story notwithstanding) 350 are damn near essential. Highly recommended.