POP MUSIC : Back Before Punk Wore Flannel : Sixteen years ago Johnny Rotten howled ‘no future,’ but punk rock refuses to die. Embraced by grunge and mainstream rockers alike, it’s at the center of a nihilistic nostalgia kick

Welcome to the great three-ring punk-rock revival, as bright an efflorescence of nostalgia as we’ve seen since the original ‘50s revival, or at least since last year’s attempted disco thing.

Read the books, which seem to consider Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren the most brilliant conceptual artist at least since Duchamp. See the movies: “D.O.A.,” “Sid & Nancy,” “The Great Rock & Roll Swindle,” “Rude Boy,” “The Year That Punk Broke.” Buy all nine volumes of the new Rhino punk/power-pop compilation “D.I.Y.”

More than 16 years after Johnny Rotten first howled “no future,” 16 years after the first Ramones album, 16 years since Richard Hell first sang about the Blank Generation, the term punk rock is suddenly used to describe about one new band in three, and the first flush of punk rock has finally become part of the American pop-culture mainstream--complete with newly issued documentation and a neatly packaged nostalgia movement. Compare: 16 years is less time than it took for rock ‘n’ roll itself to “progress” from Chuck Berry to Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Punk rock codified the underground anti-Establishment groove that is now mandatory for any artist harder-edged than Whitney Houston. Rock groups as unrelievedly mainstream as Skid Row and Motley Crue consider it more or less obligatory to include Sex Pistols songs in their sets.

Punk rock tapped the blind, destructive teen-age “No!” more successfully than perhaps any pop movement this side of death-metal. Nirvana, the most-copied band in the world these days, calls itself a punk-rock revival act, and grunge, the wildly popular style spawned by Seattle’s Sub Pop Records, the self-described “punk-rock Motown,” is basically punk rock in flannel shirts.

Punk-rock bands ranging from Fear to the Buzzcocks have reformed--the nostalgia circuit seems almost as genteel as the one that sustains the Righteous Brothers and Paul Revere & the Raiders. The Sex Pistols album itself recently went platinum--and aging ex-punks pull their hair out when radio stations stick “Pretty Vacant” into the rotation on oldies weekends.

Punk rock, at least in fond memory, was the moment when kids took the music back, spat on the stale old rock ‘n’ roll oligarchy, rejected the old-fashioned virtues of musicianship, pop craft and decent drum sounds. (Actually, the early punk bands did spend an awful lot of time complaining about how major labels ignored them.)

Each import punk single that made it from England to the racks at Zed or Pooh-Bah was treated as some kind of message from the front, and in some circles, the first thing you did when entering friends’ apartments was to head straight to the stack of 7-inches to see what new records they’d been able to score.

And because everything was new again, the early punk-rock era was a golden age of innocence: When X’s Exene Cervenka described a character’s mounting resentment of racial minorities and gays in the group’s signature song “Los Angeles,” the record it appeared on was acclaimed by The Times as album of the year, and X became the quintessential critics’ band.

When Axl Rose expressed a similar statement in the Guns N’ Roses song “One in a Million,” with identical nihilist irony, he was vilified as a racist in newspapers across America.

To a lot of people, punk rock was the last fine time--memories of the incandescence of those early singles by X-Ray Spex, Stiff Little Fingers, the Germs, the Dils, the Avengers, the Weirdos, the Damned seemed to increase each year, mostly fueled by the music’s utter unavailability.

And each year, grumbling could be heard about the need for a punk-rock equivalent of “Nuggets,” the awesome double-album compilation of late-’60s garage rock that almost single-handedly fueled the power-pop resurgence in the ‘70s.

Despite its mass, Rhino’s “D.I.Y.” is no “Nuggets.” And as a matter of fact, if you slog your way through its nine or so hours of New Wave madness, one of the thoughts that may occur to you is how fine, how consistent Sub Pop’s first few dozen singles were in comparison, how far such a large set falls from even token comprehensiveness. Punk rock is a never-ending thing.

The first--and only indispensable--volume, “Anarchy in the U.K.: U.K. Punk I,” collects many of the obvious first-wave British punk singles inspired one way or another by the Sex Pistols: trebly, underproduced clots of nihilism that sound as vital today as they did when they were recorded. And the excellent liner notes are by Jon Savage, whose Sex Pistols biography “England’s Dreaming” is the best book written about punk rock so far.

“U.K. Punk I” has its faults. Rhino couldn’t get the rights to any Clash songs, so the essential “White Riot” is not included. A persuasive case might be made for the inclusion of Subway Sect or Slaughter & the Dogs rather than the awful Lovers of Today. “Boredom,” from the “Spiral Scratch” EP, and not the lightweight “Orgasm Addict,” is the essential early Buzzcocks cut.

But here are the Damned tooting through “Neat Neat Neat” in an awesome parody of ‘60s pop craft; the Jam cranking through its early Who fixation; X-Ray Spex, the first in a line of abrasive, political, women’s punk rock that seemed to have leaped over the ‘80s and reasserted itself in today’s Riot Grrrl bands; the existential detachment of Wire; the Sex Pistols themselves in slightly rawer (and ironically poppier) demo versions of “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen.”

These are, for the most part, the songs that convince you that there is no other rock ‘n’ roll, at least for the duration of the two-and-a-half minutes that each of them seem to last, that they are small, bright universes unto themselves. Anarchy . . . it’s the only way to be.

The other eight volumes of “D.I.Y.” though, the three initials of which stand for Do It Yourself , form less a catalogue of early punk rock than a survey of the late-’70s power-pop revival, which was nowhere near as influential nor as interesting. (This doesn’t mean that the series isn’t good--just that it isn’t anywhere close to definitive.)

As historians and demagogues know all too well, the truth lies in how you arrange the facts. If one traces the trajectories implied by “D.I.Y.,” one might never come up with the logical outcomes of hard-core, metal, industrial music or the democratization of disco that were also presaged by that first big bang of punk.

In a potential survey of Los Angeles punk rock, for example, you could begin with Zolar X, Rodney Bingenheimer and the Runaways and draw a line directly to Jane’s Addiction, thus showing the Los Angeles underground to be little more than a descendant of Hollywood-decadent early-’70s glam.

You could start with the Germs, the Skulls and the Controllers, aggressive bands that were among the first to play regularly at the Masque, L.A.’s first punk club, and make a case for the imminent rise of Black Flag and hard-core punk--and the birth of the first real pan-American D.I.Y. underground. You could include the vital San Francisco bands and follow the West Coast art-school anarchy punk thing.

Or, like Gary Stewart, the producer of the series, you could start with the Pop, the Motels and the Dogs--the three power-pop bands who played at the Radio Free Hollywood concert that may well have been the impetus to L.A. D.I.Y.--and document the path that made it safe for Missing Persons and the Knack. Here are the Furys, the Nerves, the Zippers, the Quick, the Last--fine, tight bands all, but more appropriate in the context of the series’ two volumes of power pop.

Here also is a handful of stuff originally recorded on the What? and Dangerhouse labes that is all available on wonderful What? and Dangerhouse compilations released in just the last couple of years. The interested may already own these vital if crudely recorded circa-’77 happy-punk from the Weirdos and the Bags and the Alley Cats, but there is no Angsty synth-punk from the Screamers, no twisted artiness from the Extremes or the Deadbeats or Monitor, none of the pre-hard-core punk craft of U.X.A., none of the immensely popular punk-rockabilly bands from the period.

The pre-Black Flag L.A. punk scene was always dismissed as derivative of the British one, and it seems almost like “We’re Desperate: the L.A. Scene” goes out of its way to prove that the music--except for the pop--was indeed monochromatic.

A punk-rock aficionado will carp like this about each of the other discs in the series--the dearth of noise bands (and Talking Heads--licensing trouble again) in the generally dull New York volume; the popward slant of the second U.K. punk disc; the utter uselessness of a CD documenting a Boston New Wave scene that nobody but a Harvard-educated rock critic ever loved. (Rhino might profitably have made San Francisco or Cleveland compilations instead.)

A power-pop nut might actually be ecstatic about the series, a little like an Alabamian who reads a revisionist history text that shows how the South actually won the war, though even he or she might be confused about the sheer mass of cuts from the likes of Bram Tchaikovsky, the Pezband and the Rezillos. The corpses from the power-pop side of this war have lain for many years in the 23-cent cut-out bins of independent record stores.

But the biggest revelation from this giant mass of stuff is how little of it really was D.I.Y., how much of the music was recorded by entrepreneurs, guided by Svengalis, released by giant multinational corporations.

When the smoke clears, the empire Black Flag built, a nationwide underground of hundreds of tiny labels, a cross-country network of clubs and squats and ‘zines, the hard-core bands in tiny towns across America singing essentially the same songs about their parents and their principals and the doughnut-eating local cops--punk rock almost as folk music--may prove to be the greater legacy by far. Anarchy is easy; what’s hard is to build up a world.