Lipstick Traces (14 page)

Nik Cohn was likely not interested in the possibility
that Little Richard’s glossolalia could be traced back thousands of years to gnostic chants that moved through time until they became the sort of prayers offered by mystics like John of Leyden, after which they found their way into Pentecostal churches, where Little Richard learned the language of “Tutti Frutti.” Nik Cohn may not have been interested in the possibility that a version of this story, as told by his father, produced the money he would use to buy Little Richard records. Cohn was taking Little Richard’s syllables as an assault on meaning as such, as a means to a perfect liberation from it; he was arguing that anyone who believed differently, who believed that rock ’n’ roll could support concepts more complex than yes or no, or tell stories more intricate than “I want” or “Leave me alone,” would be destroyed by the form itself—punished for betraying it. You might get a hit, he said, and then take the response to the sound you made as proof you had something to say, but it isn’t true. Rock ’n’ roll has nothing to say, only a divine noise to make—and anyone who believed otherwise would end up as a shabby old man with a tin whistle, standing in the rain trying to make himself heard, to get someone to listen, to get one more hit.

Of course, Cohn said—claiming rock ’n’ roll as the music that creates the moment and thus supersedes it—so would everybody else. Leaving the supermarket one day, I saw four black men in their fifties harmonizing doo wops from “Earth Angel” as they loaded crates into a van, and the thought struck me: were they, once, the Penguins? What else would the Penguins be doing, thirty years after their one hit? It didn’t matter; when the sound had maintained itself, not as a memory but as a self-renewing moment, for three decades, it didn’t make any difference. These are the shabby old men with their tin whistles, and so is anyone who can hear them.

By the time John Lydon reaffirmed his blasphemies the Sex Pistols’ explosion was a memory—they had long since exploded, but the pieces were still squirming. In a San Francisco nightclub, a Berlin band called Eisenstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings), best known for its lp
Strategies Against Architecture,
turns industrial tools on industrial materials against a backdrop of gothic synthesizer tones; that’s the show. “Whatever
it was,” says the local newspaper critic, usually not sympathetic to such stunts, “it wasn’t boring.” Also on the bill is action sculptor Mark Pauline, who first attracted local attention with his clandestine redesign of commercial billboards, whose Survival Research Laboratories now constructs infernal Rube Goldberg machines out of metal and animal corpses to a soundtrack of old Crystals records and new releases from the female Zurich punk group Liliput, and who is famous, to the degree that he is famous, for blowing off most of one hand while experimenting with one of his devices (later toes were removed from his feet and attached to his ruined hand as surrogate fingers).

The
New York Times
runs an announcement:

Language and noise will be featured during the first two “Poets at the Public” programs this year. Tomorrow, writers who explore the limits of language and who are called “language” writers will read from their recent works . . . The “noise music” movement, a product of the downtown art community, will be represented by the Sonic Youth Band and by David Rosenbloom’s Experimental Chorus and Orchestra, which will present the premiere of a section of Mr. Rosenbloom’s “Departure.” “Departure” takes its text from the second-century Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.

A mainstream “Rock of the ’80s” station plays “Institutionalized,” a blithering punk rant by a Southern California band called Suicidal Tendencies—plays it, within the newly successful format of coldly romantic synthesizer ballads and novelty records, as another novelty record. It is a “novelty record,” an oddity, because by now it is presumed that “punk” is an oddity, a sterile anomaly. The record is arresting, but it has been arrested: contextualized as a novelty in the rock of the 1980s, it has been denied the chance to make its own context, to connect to anything outside of itself.

A teenager lies in his bed, thinking. His mother comes in: What’s the matter with you? Nothing, Mom—could you get me a Pepsi? You’re on drugs, I knew it! No, Mom, I’m not on drugs—could I have a Pepsi? Your father and I have been talking about this, and we’ve decided that you should go to a place where you can get the help that you need . . . . . As the band rumbles behind him, the teenager begins each verse in ordinary, modulated English, talking, not singing, but he ends each verse with each
word impossibly speeded up, not by electronics but by breath control, a wail dense and scrambled beyond language, though not beyond rhythm: somehow the band keeps pace.

A twist of the dial away from “Institutionalized,” an Adult Oriented Radio station plays Billy Joel’s clumsy, lovely “The Longest Time,” an acapella tribute to the doo-wop revival, rooted in the vocal music of the early 1950s, in the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Nite” and the Penguins’ “Earth Angel,” which was staged in New York and New Jersey in 1964 as a protest against the Beatle-era “British Invasion.” Twenty years after that little-noticed event, “The Longest Time” is the first acapella recording to become a national hit. The video of the song shows forty-year-old businessmen—overweight, in three-piece suits, silver in their hair—turning into their slim, blue-jeaned, duck-tailed high-school selves, harmonizing in the boys’ room, patronizing a black janitor, then turning back into businessmen, strutting their high school corridors as if they were still free men. These old men are not shabby; they are not even old. Youth goes on forever, says the video, going back to the beginning of time, which here dates to the beginning of rock ’n’ roll: “They can’t take that away from me.” Nothing has changed, and nothing ever will.

In one of the countless paradoxes of his performance, Johnny Rotten announced what was taken as a youth revolt while denying the status of youth itself: as an antichrist, he claimed all of social life as his terrain. Now, within the pop milieu, the symbol factory, it is as if he had never been born. It is the year of Michael Jackson, a long year—a year, it was possible to believe as it unfolded, that would never end.

It began on 16 May 1983, with the airing of a television special celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Motown Records. As the eleven-year-old lead singer of the Jackson 5, brothers who combined the teenage yearning of Frankie Lymon with the willful dynamics of Sly and the Family Stone, Michael Jackson had made his first, epochal hits for Motown in 1969 and 1970; now he was back, to pay tribute, to join hands. Lithe, beautiful, grown up but still a child, an Afro-American with surgically produced Caucasian features, androgynous, a changeling, communicating menace with the dip of a shoulder, comfort with a smile, singing a song from his new album,
Thriller,
stepping forward but somehow seeming to glide backward at
the same time, walking the television stage not as if he owned it, not as if it was built for him, but as if his very presence had called it into being, he shocked the nation.

A sparkling, brilliantly constructed version of pop music,
Thriller
sold ten, then twenty, then thirty, then forty million copies. As singles, song after song from
Thriller
entered the top ten. A video of the title tune, made at a cost of $500,000 and priced at $30, sold 750,000 copies. Closeted in his parents’ home, keeping company only with family, pets, and mannequins, refusing all interviews, a self-made specter, Michael Jackson became the most intensely famous person in the world.

Michael Jackson stands in the White House Rose Garden with President Ronald Reagan to receive an award for allowing his
Thriller
hit “Beat It” to be made into an anti-drunk-driving TV commercial. On newscasts covering the event, a bit of the commercial is shown: a skeletal hand grasps the hand of one still living. The suggestion of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, where Adam touches the hand of God, is inescapable; so is the feeling that Michael Jackson is becoming a kind of god. The newscasts cut back to the Rose Garden: “Isn’t this a thriller,” says the president. Previously, for $5.5 million dollars, Jackson had allowed his great
Thriller
hit “Billie Jean” to be turned into a Pepsi commercial.

For television there are in fact two commercials, and both are to be weighted with satisfying intimations of hubris, of tragedy. In the first, young black breakdancers are seen slippin’ and slidin’ over city streets; Jackson and his brothers appear, and the dancers halt in awe. Led by a tiny pre-teen virtuoso, they bounce back, and affirm their authenticity as folk dancers against—no, with: the commercial is saying that in America anyone can grow up to be Michael Jackson—the authenticity of the star as star. Soon it
would be announced that the tiny virtuoso had broken his neck breakdancing, and had died.

As with the rumor that Annette Funicello lost an arm while waving to a fan from a bus, the story wasn’t true: radio stations and newspapers that carried obituaries ran corrections. But it was only a warmup. During the filming of a second Pepsi commercial, in which Jackson descended a stage to join his brothers in praise of the drink, explosions of light heralded his presence, and he was burned. The resulting publicity was so productive, for both Pepsi and Jackson, that some were sure the accident had been faked. The day before the official debut of the commercials, on the 1984 Grammy Awards telecast—where the advertisements, which were themselves advertised, were presented to the public like new records, like art statements—TV news shows, still featuring daily medical bulletins on Jackson’s condition, used parts of the commercials as news footage. Jackson appeared to collect eight Grammys; as he stepped forward to accept the last, he removed his dark glasses.

All of this took place in what situationist Guy Debord had called “the heaven of the spectacle.” “I am nothing and I should be everything,” a young Karl Marx had written, defining the revolutionary impulse. “The spectacle,” as Debord developed the concept through the 1950s and 1960s, was at once the kidnapping of that impulse and its prison. It was a wonderful prison, where all of life was staged as a permanent show—a show, Debord wrote, where “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation,” a beautiful work of art. The only problem was absolute: “in the case where the self is merely represented and ideally presented,” ran a quote from Hegel on the first page of
La société du spectacle,
a book of critical theory Debord published in 1967, “there it is not actual: where it is by proxy, it
is not.
”

“The spectacle,” Debord said, was
“capital
accumulated until it becomes an image.” A never-ending accumulation of spectacles—advertisements, entertainments, traffic, skyscrapers, political campaigns, department stores, sports events, newscasts, art tours, foreign wars, space launchings—made a modern world, a world in which all communication flowed in one direction, from the powerful to the powerless. One could not respond, or talk back, or intervene, but one did not want to. In the spectacle, passivity was
simultaneously the means and the end of a great hidden project, a project of social control. On the terms of its particular form of hegemony the spectacle naturally produced not actors but spectators: modern men and women, the citizens of the most advanced societies on earth, who were thrilled to watch whatever it was they were given to watch.

As Debord drew the picture, these people were members of democratic societies: democracies of false desire. One could not intervene, but one did not want to, because as a mechanism of social control the spectacle dramatized an inner spectacle of participation, of choice. In the home, one chose between television programs; in the city, one chose between the countless variations of each product on the market. Like a piece of avant-garde performance art, the spectacle dramatized an ideology of freedom.

I am nothing and you are everything,
the performance artist says to her audience. She leaves the stage, descends into the paying crowd, seals her mouth with tape, takes off her clothes. “Do what you will with me,” she mimes—she is turning herself into an object, empowering the members of the audience, discarding all the authority of the artist, and yet somehow that authority is retained. The naturally active artist imitates the natural passivity of the crowd: she lies on her back with her legs open, inviting the audience to fuck her, to set her on fire, to try to get her to talk, to piss on her, to ignore her, to argue and then to come to blows over what you or I or we should do next. All of these things have actually happened at avant-garde performances. But if where the self “is by proxy, it
is not”
these things have also actually not happened, because it is only the artist’s dispensation that has permitted the anonymous people in the crowd to seem to act. At the artist’s withdrawal of that dispensation (nothing so crude as “
STOP
!”, rather an assistant announcing, “The performance is over”), the counterfeit actors immediately return to their seats. They once again become spectators, and feel comfortable: like themselves.

Like TV fans with a satellite dish, who imagine that they create their own entertainment out of an infinity of channels, the members of the audience feel as if they have intervened in the spectacle of the artist’s performance, but they have not; they have played by the artist’s rules, where such putative intangibles as chance, risk, and violence were fixed from the start. The only true intervention would be for someone to step out of the crowd
and shout, “No, no,
I
am now the artist, you must do what
I
tell you to do, you must play
my
game, which is . . .” Then the rest of the crowd, and the original artist, would be faced with a real choice, a choice containing all the intangibles of epistemology, aesthetics, politics, social life. It would be as if one of the fans who traditionally jumps from the stands during a World Series game then joined the contest, and got everyone playing a new game; as if a mad scientist with a crate of Aladdin’s lamps set up a table in Macy’s and by her very presence destroyed the value of every other available commodity—but, as with the intervention of the audience member claiming to be the artist, such things have never actually happened.