A Posi Review of "NoMeansNo: Going Nowhere"

Hello and welcome. I am going to be reviewing a book today and herein hope to review many more books for my brand new column because, as a writer with a staunch complex that believes everyone else is doing more than me, I read a lot. I’m also going to be reviewing a Canadian book because generally there is little to no interest in the publishing industry in this country, especially the independent publishing industry which, hold onto your butts, is flourishing. It too has the staunch complex that everyone else is doing more than it is. Lastly book reviews, except for a very kind of neurotic few, don’t exactly have it popping off in terms of audience, a fact underlined most recently by The Globe and Mail axing its own Book Review. But you know what? Forget all that malarkey. Books rule! So let’s get started.

Mark Black sent me a questionably late-night DM over Twitter (i.e. drunk) asking me not to review his new book for Invisible Publishing, NoMeansNo: Going Nowhere. This is Mark’s first book and he was nervous, I’ve been there too, so I wrote back some kind and reassuring words, “I’m gonna too bad”.

Mark, what were you nervous about?

NoMeansNo is a short, very concise, up-to-now history of the Victoria, British Columbia punk band of the same name, spliced intermittently with Black’s own memories of growing up as a young punk on the opposite coast in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It’s part of an ongoing new series called Bibliophonic that the Halifax founded, Toronto based, Invisible Publishing is behind and Black’s book is the 2nd of 3 (so far).

Music writing can be the worst thing in the entire world, especially when you become aware of the writer trying to edge themselves into everything they are trying to tell you about the band. Like an annoying person at a party who repeats the last few words in your jokes or a nerd predator on the bus reading your tweets (sorry, I picture all music writers to be intense mouth-breathers with beady shark eyes who only get harmonically atonal synth scales stuck in their heads instead of soft rock bangers like the rest of us). When music writing, any writing, is at it’s best it has the capacity to not only peak but hold your interest in a subject you might not know anything about. And when the writer’s own sincere excitement is coming through around the edges of everything that tone propels you forward more than heavy-handed facts that give you the sense of feeling guilty about not already knowing. That sincere excitement is what happens in this little book.

From the formation of the band out of boredom and isolation in a beautiful but otherwise secluded place to growing into the pretty seminal figures they are today. Black parallels the rise of NoMeansNo with Daylgo Abortions and D.O.A., a sonic universe they obviously share, but more interesting are his own memories in which the band seeped into. Everyone can relate to this, periods of crisis or dumb teen strife, approaching the same songs over and over and realizing songs shift and mature just as much as you do, but can manage to retain original meaning along with the overlapping growth. Have you ever been to Cape Breton? It’s pretty depressing. I had to go there once and dress up in the Esso Tiger costume and drop the puck at an international hockey juniors final, but Mark’s description of Cape Breton made me forget all that and instead made the place kind of sound fun.

This book jumps around between solemn reflection, interviews with the band, personal interpretation and the annals of punk, but none of it is so heavy handed that you feel your concentration drifting. Black is also a pretty self-aware writer in his fandom, with a self-depreciating sense of humor that helps insert breathers in an otherwise tightly packed chronology.

One of the funnier parts serves as a nod to the omnipresent but rarely acknowledged rulebook of “how should a punk band be,” in which Black makes a pretty concise list of bands with names containing “Youth,”  Acronyms, “Dis” and “No,” while still managing to make fun of Rockabilly bands… thank god. He also manages to avoid the pitfall of a lot of band biographies which become one tour story after another.

80% of people I know are still, or have been, in bands and toured, and have wacky stories. The other 20% have had their fill of those stories. I don’t care if you got so drunk (and it’s always “we got so drunk”) you took a slow boat to China and then in China you rode a city bus filled with hot dogs that took you to the mall. Zzzzzz. Black’s avoidance of these typical tales is due, he says, to the fact that NoMeansNo simply do not subject their fans to tour stories. The only tour story in this book is about how the band van got stolen in Poland and they had to buy it back from some goons. Everything was still intact and undamaged, except for their real dinner plates that had been curiously replaced with paper ones. And that’s a pretty good story.

You can buy No Means No: Going Nowhere here. Do you know of an awesome Canadian book that Katie should review? Ok, well email her then, geez.

Follow Katie on Twitter: @wtevs

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