New York Times, Spin, and Vanity Fair contributor Marc Spitz explores the first great cultural movement since Hip Hop: an old-fashioned and yet highly modern aesthetic that's embraced internationally by teens, twenty and thirty-somethings and even some Baby Boomers; creating hybrid generation known as Twee. Via exclusive interviews and years of research, Spitz traces Generation Twee's roots from the Post War 50s to its dominance in popular culture today.Vampire We...

An expansive biography of David Bowie, one of the twentieth century’s greatest music and cultural icons.From noted author and rock ’n’ roll journalist Marc Spitz comes a major David Bowie biography to rival any other. Following Bowie’s life from his start as David Jones, an R & B—loving kid from Bromley, England, to his rise to rock ’n’ roll aristocracy as David Bowie, Bowie recounts his career but also reveals how much his music has influenced other musicians and forever changed t...

A biography and cultural examination of the Rolling Stones' frontman Mick Jagger's spectacular life and the cultural revolution he led.As the Rolling Stones' legendary front man Mick Jagger remains an enigma. He hasn't given an in-depth interview for a decade and a half and never commented on his friend and partner, Keith Richard's often critical biography. Drawing on firsthand recollections from rockers, filmmakers, writers, radicals, and other artists who have be...

Taking us back to late ’70s and early ’80s Hollywood—pre-crack, pre-AIDS, pre-Reagan—We Got the Neutron Bomb re-creates word for word the rage, intensity, and anarchic glory of the Los Angeles punk scene, straight from the mouths of the scenesters, zinesters, groupies, filmmakers, and musicians who were there.“California was wide-open sex—no condoms, no birth control, no morality, no guilt.” —Kim Fowley“The Runaways were rebels, all of us were. And a lot of...

Reunited more than a decade after their brief flirtation with fame in the early 1990s, the middle-aged members of the Ohio-based Jane Ashers suddenly find themselves hitting the big time, with a new record deal, a hit single, fame, fans, and a tour, that transforms their dream into a nightmare of colliding egos, family pressures, and too much success too late.

The full story of the rise and spectacular comeback of the band hailed as the saviors of punk rock.It's hard to believe that in early 2004 Green Day was considered over—the band was still together, but they were dismissed as a strictly '90s phenomenon, incapable of re-creating the success of their groundbreaking album Dookie. Then American Idiot debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, stayed on the charts for nearly 18 months, and went on to sell more than four mill...

It was supposed to be a routine promotional appearance: an aspiring writer appears on a cable news or entertainment network to film a talking heads expert spot in order to promote one of his recently published articles. When face to face with the routine manipulations and blunt agendas that elicit the soundbytes we routinely see as part of our daily info-tainment, he is horrified and decides to rebel, only to realize that he is essentially violating the order of the entertainment universe...

Moses Malone is a drug dealer who wakes up in the middle of the night with a crisis of conscience. Determined to go straight, live a virtuous life, adopt a dog and give back to the society he’d prided himself on being outside of, Moses must deal with the resistance, frustration and often sheer panic of his loyal clients. It’s a series of breakups that lead to violence, bargaining, and improbably, a real love affair with a doomed soap opera actress. It’s a play about growing up, and lookin...

There is a light and it never goes out . . . or is there?Welcome to the big Reagan ’80s, where ketchup is a vegetable and the Cold War looms large and chilly. If like Joe Green you were coming of age during this boom era, your main concerns include one or more of the following: a rainbow assortment of Polo shirts worn with the collar flipped up, K-Swiss tennis shoes, a new cable channel called MTV, and Top 40 radio. Stuck in the suburban haze of Long Island, New York, Joe Green kno...

Winston Frame is the self described, urban "poet of death and despair." Young, dour, pale and handsome, he is, much like Ian Curtis of Joy Division, also haunted and suicidal. When the pressure of impending success, fatherhood and an affair get too much, he hangs himself. Only his journey is not quite over. Winston finds himself in Purgatory, which is a Weimar style cabaret full of animal acts, exhausted chanteuses and the borscht belt comic Bobby Lemondrops. His guide is "...

Fitzgerald was once a twee wallflower. He’s remade his image as a tough, junkie hipster and wants to take his Smiths obsessed, cardigan-wearing friends with him. Fearing resistance, he approaches a surly, Australian pimp, Blixa and hires her "finest bitch" Kylie, to "de-virginize them." He pays for Kylie’s services with bad dope. When a furious Blixa shows up for revenge, what is supposed to be the most special night of Rodney and Stew’s life could very well be their l...

Bug Blowmonkey does so much cocaine that he has developed a friendship with one of his chemically induced hallucinations: the confused but still righteous ghost of Marvin Gaye. Estranged from the one woman he had feelings for, Bug begins to question his compulsion to get so numb and frigid. When he meets a new woman, he tries to strip away the icy, hipster facade and accept her for who she is: and not the idealized Vertigo-style duplicate of the pristine ghost he needs to break away from. ...