In the beginning, punk rock was meant to change the world. The songs were nasty, brutish and short, but the ambitions were extravagant. While the Sex Pistols attempted to foment nihilism in the UK, the Clash hoped that youth culture might become a kind of international socialist club. Even in America, the Ramones sought to take their mock-bubblegum to the masses. "We developed a small following of weirdos," Tommy Ramone boasted to Rolling Stone in 1976. "Then we got the intellectuals. Now the kids are coming."

Of course, it didn't turn out that way. The Sex Pistols ended up bringing more anarchy upon themselves than upon anyone else; a dream of world domination turned into the tawdry spectacle of Sid Vicious's death and a tedious blur of lawsuits. As for the Ramones, their bid for fame never proceeded beyond the intellectuals, if it ever got that far. Punk rock failed to win mass approval; it couldn't even win mass disapproval. By 1980, major record companies disdained the music, preferring the slicker stylings of the new wave.

As a result, American postpunk bands of the 1980s had chastened ambitions. Cut off from commercial radio, they assembled a creaky network of small-time record stores and clubs, mimeographed fanzines and independent record labels. The roundheads among them proposed an alternative community of leather-jacketed, vegetarian rebels, at odds with both corporate culture and adulthood, purified of poseurs and the halfhearted. The cavaliers affected a certain degree of listlessness and indifference to the larger world, retreating to a private arcadia where they could create beautiful washes of noise. Together, they scorned the mass popularity that was now beyond their reach.

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