It's his own fault, perhaps, but Jon Savage is forever associated with the Sex Pistols. It's what comes of writing the definitive book on your subject, of course, but towards the end of this mammoth collection he tellingly lets slip that, "without the Velvet Underground I would never have visited New York; read Delmore Schwartz; heard LaMonte Young and Terry Riley; perhaps even become a writer." This book covers many and most of everything - music, fashion, the media, sexual politics - but Savage is still The Sex Pistols Man.

Pop (Pop is everything) as it now exists might have begun in the 50s but it had its first shag a decade later. The Beatles are important, regardless of how good (or not - FACT) they ever were. The Sex Pistols were better (FACT) and more significant (FACT) - look no further than Savage's own masterwork England's Dreaming for the scientific proof. But Pop has rewritten its own history. The Compact Disc has brought the disposable-everything back into the present, effectively allowing Pop to, literally, eat itself. And, as if anyone asked, The Beatles and (the HORROR) the Pistols have risen from the grave - with one dead member apiece. This book starts with the latter and ends with the former. It was no doubt a deliberate irony, but even Savage couldn't have known the Pistols would promenade their ugly bodies - like so many old prize-fighters on the piss - round on the festival circuit quite so soon. Still, it can't do him any harm, and better Neo-Punks and their forbears shell out twenty notes on both of Savage's epic tomes than a ticket to these particular witch trials.

Time Travel brings together a selection (about a quarter, apparently) of Jon Savage's output from 1977 to 1996. It's been designed with a modicum of logic: (roughly) three decades; three politics; three musical transitions; three recorded formats (7", 12", CD).

Punk is inevitably first, Savage being, for better or worse, its most astute archivist. For all the nihilistic joie de vivre of the period, the thing that comes through is this tyro's prescience. This was a time, don't forget, when the Pistols' televisual profanity was a national - filth and fury - foot-through-the-TV scandal. Now few eyebrows even stir when Dennis Potter has Albert Finney swearing like a fucking trooper. Even on a Sunday. And what of Savage? On the Jubilee boat-trip, at the back of the Screen On The Green, in the stalls at the Rainbow? And what was he writing at Sounds? Remarkable things - his 1977 review of Never Mind The Bollocks reads more like 1987, with a solid decade of 20/20 hindsight. The Jam were marked men, The Clash's contradictions and conflicts pegged-out in the sun even as the fanzines were still giggling over how rude was 'Bodies' (EXCEEDINGLY), and which three Punk Rock Electric Guitar chords your band needed.

Savage's own thoughts on fanzines as a future for the new journalism now read a little naive, but that - and a ghastly hagiography of Gary Numan - are rare flaws. Punk writes a virtual manifesto for the brave new world. Music had changed beyond all imagining, a revolution was possible. It points up the pusillanimity (fuck ****) of too much contemporary music journalism; these read more like The Guardian than Sounds, for christsake.

Then what happened? The Labour Government fucked-up (thanks, Mr. Callaghan) and the putrid spectre of Thatcherism was unleashed upon the land. Music blanded out or went underground, somebody mistook Smash Hits for the future (it's a great magazine, but the deleterious effects of the 80s on rock journalism are almost incalculable), and the greedy, vapid Style generation was born. Time Travel gets lost, irritating, even annoying. Savage falls victim to the climate of the time; all i-D and The Face, and Boy George (pathetic willing victim) and Annie Lennox (tiresome BPI androgene) and Billy Idol (INSERT LIBEL HERE). It's not pretty to see someone take the 80s quite so seriously. And if you chose to skip bits, no one is going to point the finger.

Speed saves us. Speed and Beats for the drab Major Generation. The aforementioned Velvet Underground piece, a couple of Nirvanas, Suede, Bjork (why all the horoscope nonsense?), Tricky (and his Emperor's New Clothes), R.E.M.: all those sorts of tunes. The pieces on Section 28 and, especially, Operation Spanner are a minor miracle of dedicated, proselytising journalism. Add one on US censorship, and several of his rather fine Sight & Sound essays (a goodie on Todd Haynes and Poison, another on Performance). It's half and half, but one of those halves is really very good indeed.

Savage is our very own Greil Marcus - an erudite, cogent, astonishingly on the ball Pop commentator. But to compare this (over-long) collection with, say, In The Fascist Bathroom finds him a little wanting. He makes less mistakes than his American counterpart (no simpering over Springsteen, at least) but is something of a humourless bastard. We don't expect jokes, but the occasional wry smile wouldn't go amiss.

When it's on the money, his particular brand of socio-textual analysis (HA!) is a thing of beauty. It's just that now and again Savage's critical faculties push him so far from the point it borders on the surreal. Example, Jon Savage on dance-popsters Orbital: "Now that Britain has lost most of its heavy industry, its children are simulating an industrial experience for their entertainment and transcendence." That is bollocks, Mr. Savage.

Sometimes he is so busy trying to assign social significance that he misses the target as surely as if his eyes were closed. Not everything - and dance music (oh! oh! baby!) more than most - has a point. And that really is the point.

Time Travel would be a great book were it a third less of a book. Some journalism is of its time. It belongs between magazine covers or plumping up a Sunday broadsheet, not bound in a volume of this enormous size. As such, Time Travel comes only grudgingly recommended.