POST-PUNK.(The Talk of the Town)

It is customary for politicians to be called rock stars and for rock stars to be active in politics, but there haven't really been any rock stars who are politicians, in the Mr. Smith sense of the word. "Sonny Bono doesn't count," Danny Goldberg, the record executive and liberal activist, said one night last week. "He was television, not rock and roll." Goldberg was standing in the garden behind his town house, in the West Village, in the midst of a party he and his wife, Rosemary Carroll, were throwing for Krist Novoselic, the former bassist for Nirvana, one of the bands Goldberg used to manage. Goldberg was making the case that Novoselic was a serious man, with serious prospects. "He'll be governor of the state of Washington one day," Goldberg said. "He's our Arnold."

The occasion for the party, if not for the comparison, was Novoselic's new book, "Of Grunge and Government: Let's Fix This Broken Democracy!," which Goldberg had published, in partnership with Akashic Books (its motto is "Reverse-gentrification of the literary world"). Novoselic was using a book tour to canvass on behalf of some of his pet electoral reforms (instant runoff voting, proportional representation), his promotion of which would be familiar to legislators and alternative-weekly editors in his home state of Washington. He's a local-politics veteran; in 1995, he helped form jampac--the Joint Artists and Music Promotions Political Action Committee--in order to help get Seattle teen-agers access to live music. From there, it was a short leap to ranked ballots.

Novoselic, thirty-nine, is tall and baldish, with a kindly, half-bewildered expression and posture that call to mind the Andy Kaufman character Latka. At the party, he was wearing a wide-striped oxford shirt and new black Carhartt pants, with a big belt buckle. When it came time for him to speak, the guests--for the most part, rock-and-roll chroniclers and practitioners in a political mood ("We were thinking that a good name for a band would be Swing State")--gathered at one end of the garden. Novoselic's opening remark, "Hey, thanks ...