Lipstick Traces (10 page)

A lot of people—fans of Chuck Berry, the Beatles, James Taylor, the Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Rod Stewart, or the Rolling Stones—didn’t think this was music at all, or even rock ’n’ roll; a smaller number of people thought it was the most exciting thing they’d ever heard. “It was the first taste of rock & roll excitement I ever got,” Paul Westerberg of the Replacements said in 1986—ten years after, it was still a story worth telling. “The Sex Pistols made you feel like you knew them, that they weren’t above you. It was obvious that they didn’t know what they were doing and they didn’t care. I was a much better guitar player years ago. I’d sit there and learn the scales, the whole bit. I learned all the slide solos from the Allman Brothers’
At Fillmore East.
I’d put the record on and turn it down to 16 rpm so I could transpose the solos. But then the Sex Pistols came along and said, ‘You don’t need nothin’. Just play it.’ ” And what Westerberg said, so said countless other people—describing what they were now allowed to play and what they were now allowed to hear.

The music business was not destroyed. Society did not fall, and a new world did not come into being. If, as Dave Marsh wrote, punk was “an attempt to eliminate the hierarchy that ran rock—ultimately, to eliminate hierarchy, period,” it did neither. You could still turn on the radio with the assurance that, on most stations, you would hear “Behind Blue Eyes,” “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Maggie May”—with the radio terrorized backward by punk, you could hear these songs more often than ever before.
But over the next few years, far more than fifteen thousand groups of people made records. They made a blind bet that someone might be interested in what they sounded like or what they had to say, that they themselves might be interested. Some were bent on fame and money, and some were not; some wanted most of all a chance to announce themselves, or anyway to change the world.

Tiny independent labels, most no more than a post-office box and a typed letterhead, sprouted like mushrooms. “Suddenly,” read the liner notes to
Streets,
the first collection of U.K. punk singles, “we could do anything.” It was a surge of new voices unprecedented in the geopolitics of popular culture—a surge of voices that, for a time, made a weird phrase like “the geopolitics of popular culture” seem like a natural fact.

The Adverts’ “One Chord Wonders” takes place right on the verge of the punk moment. The Sex Pistols have cleared the ground—burned it up. There’s nothing left but the city standing as if nothing has happened, a patch of smoking dirt in the middle of the city, in the middle of that a lettered piece of wood that in the haze looks as much like a for-rent sign as a condemnation notice: you can’t tell if it reads “
FREE STREET
” or “
FIRE SALE
.”

The people circling the empty space don’t know what to do next. They don’t know what to say; everything they’re used to talking about has been parodied into stupidity as the old words rise in their mouths. Their mouths are full of bile: they’re drawn to the void, but they hold back. “Rozanov’s definition of nihilism is the best,” situationist Raoul Vaneigem had said in 1967 in
Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations
(Treatise on Living for the Young Generations, known in English as
The Revolution of Everyday Life):
“The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn round . . . No more coats and no more home.’ ” That’s where they are.

A girl and three boys take the first steps. They enter the black terrain like two-year-olds set down on familiar concrete at the edge of a field of grass—will it hurt? Feeling the lightness of the grass beneath their feet, they run,
and as they run a double fantasy possesses them: the crowd smiles, tenses, joins them; it flinches, and stones them to death.

It’s the chance of a lifetime. The four grab hold of the wooden sign, break it into pieces, and begin to beat on them: they make a narrow, channeled noise. It’s a noise that acknowledges no listeners, connects only to itself: it’s random, then focused, helpless, then cruel. That the four can’t keep time with each other makes time move so fast it seems to stop: freeze. No one can get out of this moment, and so the four hammer out the common fantasy that possessed them when they first moved toward each other, ages before. The music pulls against itself, the first two or three lines of each verse violent, cynical, present, the next two almost drifting away into a split-second reverie of doubt, regret, a sense of chances already taken and blown, a tense of future past. Only the momentum of the music holds it together.

I wonder what we’ll play for you tonight

Something heavy, something light

Something

To set your soul alight

I wonder how we’ll answer when you say

WE DON’T LIKE YOU! GO AWAY!

Come back

When you’ve learned to play

I wonder what we’ll do when things go wrong

When we’re halfway

Through our favorite song

We look up

And the audience is gone

“
THE WONDERS DON
’
T CARE!”
shout three of the group, “We don’t give a damn!” answers the last one, and they press on like that, ten, twenty times, back and forth, but as with the verses the double chorus is opposed to itself: the three singers hard and certain, their chant never varying in tone or speed, the isolated voice hard too at first, then mournful, then despairing, then leaving the cadence as the other side of the chorus marches on in lock-step—that
single voice rises, twists almost out of the music, discovers hints of a melody in the banging rhythm, abandons the melody and turns into a scream that comes from deep in the body, then buries itself in a greater noise.

The space wasn’t altogether empty. There was that sign, and attached to the sign was a string that, once pulled, turned the world inside out. As people in the Roxy heard the Adverts, or the two girls and three boys who made up X-ray Spex, or the balding teenage Beckett fan who sang for the Buzz-cocks—all people who had climbed out of the Sex Pistols’ first audiences—there was a reversal of perspective, of values: a sense that anything was possible, a truth that could be proven only in the negative. What had been good—love, money, and health—was now bad; what had been bad—hate, mendicity, and disease—was now good. The equations ran on, replacing work with sloth, status with reprobation, fame with infamy, celebrity with obscurity, professionalism with ignorance, civility with insult, nimble fingers with club feet, and the equations were unstable. In this new world, where suicide was suddenly a code word for meaning what you said, nothing could be more hip than a corpse, but the affluent survivors you saw on the street every day, the ones you had paid to see in concert halls the day before, were walking corpses. Punk factored the equation with the instinctive apprehension of an old argument: “The only objective way of diagnosing the sickness of the healthy,” Theodor Adorno wrote three decades earlier in
Minima Moralia,
“is by the incongruity between their rational existence and the possible course their lives might be given by reason. All the same, the traces of illness give them away: their skin seems covered by a rash printed in regular patterns, like a camouflage of the inorganic. The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy.” In other words, the only good survivor was a dead survivor.

Since heroes were frauds and poverty riches, both murderers and deformity were privileged: had Myra Hindley or the Hunchback of Notre-Dame
entered the Roxy the crowd would have boosted them onto the stage. Entertainment was posited as boredom and boredom as the categorical imperative, the destroyer of values, precisely what the new entertainer, shaking her falsity as a sign of authenticity, had to turn into something else: for an hour, for the length of a single song, just a moment within it, the source of values.

There were no more coats, so people began to dress in rips and holes, safety pins and staples through flesh as well as cloth, to wrap their legs in plastic bin liners and trash bags, to drape their shoulders in remnants of curtains and couch coverings left on the street. Following the lead of McLaren’s designs for the Sex Pistols and the Clash, people painted slogans up and down their sleeves and pants legs, across jackets, ties, and shoes: the names of favorite bands and songs, passwords like “
ANARCHY
” or “
RIOT
,” phrases more cryptic (“
WHERE IS DURUTTI?
”, “
YOUR ON THE NEVER NEVER
”), or a noisy, cut-up zeitgeist: “
WE AN’T PROUD PUNKS ONE
big
MESS
, like something else
SCHOOL
’
S A RIP
off straights out of it all, everywhere if you dont we will include 1/4!,” the whole scored with a giant X.

“There couldn’t have been more than a hundred real punks in all of England then,” Lora Logic, in early 1977 the saxophonist for X-ray Spex, said in 1980 of the group’s first performance; her working word was “real.” There was no more home, so she left hers—left behind the pink uniform she’d worn to her good private school, which, she realized too late, was a mistake, because it would have looked just right on stage. Along with her, the rest of the “real punks,” more than a hundred, the two or three or ten in every town in Britain by early 1977, changed the picture of social life.

Punk began as fake culture, a product of McLaren’s fashion sense, his dreams of glory, his hunch that the marketing of sado-masochistic fantasies might lead the way to the next big thing. “The art of the critic in a nutshell,” Walter Benjamin wrote in 1925–26 in
One-Way Street:
“to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.” This was Benjamin’s careful absolutism—the pre-pop, anti-pop conviction that you can’t have it both ways. It was an absolutism an anarchist gold digger like McLaren could have never shared, and didn’t have to. In a milieu shaped by the enervation of the pop scene, crushing
youth unemployment, IRA terrorism spreading from Belfast to London, growing street violence between British neo-Nazis, colored English, socialists, and the police, punk became real culture.

The way in which punk sound did not make musical sense made social sense: in a few short months, punk came together as a new set of visual and verbal signs, signs that were both opaque and revelatory, depending on who was looking. By its very unnaturalness, its insistence that a situation could be constructed and then, as an artifice, escaped—the graffiti now creeping up from wrecked clothes onto faces, into slashed, dyed hair and across holes in the hair that went to the skull—punk made ordinary social life seem like a trick, the result of sadomasochistic economics. Punk drew lines: it divided the young from the old, the rich from the poor, then the young from the young, the old from the old, the rich from the rich, the poor from the poor, rock ’n’ roll from rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll once again became a new story: something to argue about, to search for, to prize and reject, something to hate, something to love. Once again, rock ’n’ roll became fun.

For reasons the two or three or ten could not articulate beyond songs and screeds (each one, at first, lifted from a Sex Pistols single or interview), everything was now a matter of ugliness, evil, and error, of repulsion, repression, and bondage—sex, love, family, education, pop music, the star system, government, guitar solos, labor, welfare, shopping, traffic, advertising—and everything was all of a piece. The inane radio jingle you heard too many times a day fed into a totality: to get that jingle off the air, you somehow understood, the radio had to be changed, which meant that society had to be changed. The totality came back on the fragment: enough Myra Hindleys, you could imagine in some right-side lobe that knew nothing of language but everything of what language couldn’t say, and there would be no more jingles.

Shopping, traffic, and advertising as world-historical insults integrated into everyday life as seductions—in a way, punk was most easily recognizable as a new version of the old Frankfurt School critique of mass culture, the refined horror of refugees from Hitler striking back at the easy vulgarity of their wartime American asylum; a new version of Adorno’s conviction, as set out in
Minima Moralia,
that as a German Jewish intellectual in flight from the Nazis to the land of the free he had traded the certainty of extermination for the promise of spiritual death. But now the premises of the old critique were exploding out of a spot no one in the Frankfurt School, not Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, or Walter Benjamin, had ever recognized: mass culture’s pop cult heart. Stranger still: the old critique of mass culture now paraded as mass culture, at the least as protean, would-be mass culture. If punk was a secret society, the goal of every secret society is to take over the world, just as the goal of every rock ’n’ roll band is to make everyone listen.