by Greil Marcus
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.
Lora Logic, 1979
FOR REASONS
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.
Probably no definition of punk can be stretched far enough to enclose Theodor Adorno. As a music lover he hated jazz, likely retched when he first heard of Elvis Presley, and no doubt would have understood the Sex Pistols as a return to Kristallnacht if he hadn’t been lucky enough to die in 1969. But you can find punk between every other line of Minima Moralia: its miasmic loathing for what Western civilization had made of itself by the end of the Second World War was, by 1977, the stuff of a hundred songs and slogans. If in the Sex Pistols’ records all emotion is reduced to the gap between a blank stare and a sardonic grin, in Adorno’s book all emotion is compressed into the space between curse and regret—and on that field, the slightest reach toward compassion or creation can take on a charge of absolute novelty; along with every sort of fraud and swindler, negation empowers the smallest gesture. The negationist, Raoul Vaneigem wrote, is “like Gulliver lying stranded on the Lilliputian shore with every part of his body tied down; determined to free himself, he looks about keenly: the smallest detail of the landscape, the smallest contour of the ground, the slightest movement, everything becomes a sign on which his escape may depend.” When life is recast in these terms, when domination is posited, when a mere gesture, a new way of walking, can signify liberation, one result is an almost limitless opportunity for popular art.
Minima Moralia was written as a series of epigraphs, of ephemeralities, each severed block of type marching relentlessly toward the destruction of whatever intimations of hope might appear within its boundaries, each paragraph headed by an impotent oath, a flat irony, each (chosen at random) a good title for a punk 45: “Unfair intimidation,” “Blackmail,” “Sacrificial Lamb,” “They, the People.” After 1977 a spoken-rant lp could have been made into an album called Big Ted Says No and it would have made perfect pop sense, and for that matter it did: listen to Metal Box by PiL, Johnny Rotten’s post–Sex Pistols band, read Minima Moralia as you listen, and see if you can tell where one leaves off and the other begins.
What Adorno’s negation lacked was glee—a spirit the punk version of his world never failed to deliver. Walking the streets as pose and fashion, Adorno’s prophecies were suffused with happiness, a thrill that made them simple and clear. “I am the fly,” Wire sang in the Roxy: “I am the fly / I am the fly in the ointment.” The Frankfurt School critique was rusting boilerplate by 1977, less refuted by history or better ideas than turned into an irritating jingle by having topped too many art-student, student-radical charts in the 1960s: All of social life is organized / From the top down / Through impenetrable hierarchies / To make you into a receptacle / For the culture / That will seduce you into functioning / As a robot in the economy. What was new was the impact of the jingle, its new sound. Now you could name it and claim it. Bits of a theory contrived before you were born rose out of the pavement and hit you in the face as if you’d fallen headfirst onto the concrete. Your face was a totality, in the mirror a representation of the only totality you really knew, and the shock of recognition changed your face—now you walked down the street with a frozen mouth that looked like a death sentence to passersby and felt like a smile to you. Because your face was your totality, and the shock had changed it, the shock changed the street. Once out of the nightclub and onto the pavement, every gray public building came alive with secret messages of aggression, domination, malignancy.
“The phone never stopped ringing,” said fire Capt. Donald Pearson, 32. “People were calling from all over the state. We now understand the term ‘media event.’ ”
Pearson said, “The most memorable part of the week was when we cut the tree through and the bees started coming out. There were 30 or 40 reporters and photographers around and some of them started running.”
The fire fighters said [Officer] Racicot had the best description of the killer bees.
“The killer bees are the ones with the leather jackets and the punk hairdos,” he said. “You can’t miss ‘em.”
—San Francisco Examiner, 28 July 1985, on the first discovery of “killer bees “ in California
TO MASTER
To master this vision of ugliness, people acted it out. Today, after more than a decade of punk style, when a purple and green Mohawk on the head of a suburban American teenager only begs the question of how early he or she has to get up to fix his or her hair in time for school, it’s hard to remember just how ugly the first punks were.
They were ugly. There were no mediations. A ten-inch safety pin cutting through a lower lip into a swastika tattooed onto a cheek was not a fashion statement; a fan forcing a finger down his throat, vomiting into his hands, then hurling the spew at the people on stage was spreading disease. An inch-thick nimbus of black mascara suggested death before it suggested anything else. The punks were not just pretty people, like the Slits or bassist Gaye of the Adverts, who made themselves ugly. They were fat, anorexic, pock-marked, acned, stuttering, crippled, scarred, and damaged, and what their new decorations underlined was the failure already engraved in their faces.
The Sex Pistols had somehow permitted them to appear in public as human beings, to parade their afflictions as social facts. “I was waiting for the Communist call,” Johnny Rotten sang on his way to the Berlin Wall in “Holidays in the Sun”; from the same western side of the wall, the narrator in Peter Sch
neider’s 1982 novel The Wall Jumper, his mind turned inside out by repeated viewings of the ideologically reversed versions of the news offered by East and West Berlin TV, asks the same question punk raised: “Doesn’t every career in Western society, whether that of an athlete, investor, artist, or rebel, depend on the assumption that every initiative is one’s own, every idea original, every decision completely personal? What would happen to me if I stopped finding fault with myself, as I’ve been taught to do, and blamed everything on the state?” More than trash bags or torn shirts, punks wore Adorno’s morbid rash; they inked or stenciled it over themselves in regular patterns. As Adorno’s prepared corpses, more consciously prepared than he could have imagined, they exploded with proofs of vitality—that is, they said what they meant.
In so doing, they turned Adorno’s vision of modern life back upon itself: Adorno had not imagined that his corpses might know what they meant to say. Punks were those who now understood themselves as people from whom the news of their not quite successful decease had been withheld for reasons of population policy—as punk defined the no-future, society was going to need a lot of zombie counterpersons, shoppers, bureaucrats, welfare petitioners, a lot of people to stand in lines and man them. The difference was that these people had heard the news.
I WISH
“I wish I could see us,” Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones said. Maybe that’s what Johnny Rotten meant when he said he wanted “more bands like us.” He got them—dozens of groups, then hundreds, then thousands, that cut their own singles weeks after forming (or, if one goes by the sound of some of the sides, before forming), put them out on one-shot labels with names like Raw, Frenzy, and Zero, and sold them at shows, independent record stores, through the mail. Most were never meant for the radio; as if in answer to the repression suffered by the Sex Pistols, groups like the Cortinas, the Lurkers, Eater, and Slaughter and the Dogs made music so brutal, haphazard, or obscene that airplay was out of the question. Given the assumption that the normal channels of pop communication were irrelevant, all restrictions on what could go into a record or a performance, on what a record could sound like or what a performance could look like, were forgotten. Males could abjure macho posing or push it to ridiculous extremes; females could ignore the few roles reserved for women in rock—they could ignore roles altogether.
If in wartime only the clandestine press is free (“The only great nation with a completely uncensored press today,” A. J. Liebling wrote two months before D-Day, “is France”), then it was the fact that the official pop space was closed to most of punk that allowed punk to create its own space of freedom. Though the best-known bands immediately signed with major record companies, that half-dozen meant nothing to the hundreds and thousands in the pop wilderness: there something like a new pop economy, based less on profit than on subsistence, the will to shock, marginal but intense public response—a pop economy meant to support not careers but hit-and-run raids on the public peace of mind—began to take shape. People cut records not so much on the off-chance that they would hit, but to join in: to say “I’m here” or “I hate you” or “I have a big cock” or “I have no cock.” Teenagers discovered the thrill of shouting “FIRE” in a crowded theater—or even in an empty theater.
It was a fad, something to do when you could get your parents’ permission to stay out late and change your hairstyle (you didn’t tell your parents you had changed your name from Elizabeth Mitchell to Sally Thalidomide). A satire of the time caught the fad as well as anything, matching the heedless typography and illiterate syntax of the fanzines that were spreading the news:
x . . . tell me wolf, how did this whole snuff rock scene start?
wolf frenzy . . . well . . . huh . . . like its difficult to be precise, but I think it was the night the bass player in the noise offed himself. he was really pissed off because hed been getting a really good sound out of his equipment, so he jumped off the top of his bass stack breaking his neck and impaling himself on his tuning pegs. then there was a really spontaneous reaction from the crowd.
Reading right to left, another version of the punk story, 1986
x . . . what sort of reaction?
wolf frenzy . . . well . . . you know . . . they all laughed an that.
x . . . what do you think of the so called disease groups like the boils, pus, or superdischarge, who rather than killing themselves outright, infect themselves with deadly diseases and deter deterior det get sicker ever gig until they die.
frenzy . . . well it depends.its and interesting concept and it certainly attracts a hard core of fans.they dont like to miss a gig cos they like to see how the sickness is progressing some of them will travel hundreds of miles just to watch a finger fall off somebody.but it really depends on the disease, i mean someone with rabies is gonna do a really high energy gig, with lots of leaping about whereas a guy with yellow fevers gonna be just too laid back, like j.j. cale.what interests me more is the sounds coming out of jamaica, you know like natty dead, i dub a snuff, or snuffin in a soundcheck, that sort of thing.
x . . . what do you think of the news that andy williams is reported to be doing a simulated snuff act in his new tv series.
frenzy . . . its just pathetic innit.its just what youd expect from him.but this is one scene they cant package and sell back to the kids who created it because theyre all dead.but were not elitist. wed dearly love to see some of the really big stars like rod stewart and elton john getting snuffed.
x . . . i think most people would.
It was a fad, so people banished the love song: the sleeve of Radio Stars’ Songs for Swinging Lovers pictured a young couple hanging from a tree. They sang instead about masturbation, jobs, class, cigarettes, traffic lights, fascist dictators, race, the subway. Banishing the love song, people discovered what else there was to sing about. The love song had draped their lives in cheap poetry; maybe now other matters might poeticize their lives. As faddists, punks played with Adorno’s negative dialectics, where every yes turns into a no; they straddled their unstable equations. The mother of Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook coined the name Johnny Rotten in honor of the singer’s green teeth; singing about advertisements, deodorants, fake identities, supermarkets, an overweight half-caste teenager with braces on her teeth changed herself from Marion Elliot into Poly Styrene and called her band X-ray Spex after the glasses she liked to wear. “Anti-art was the start,” she roared in her one-note voice; an interviewer asked her what she was about. “I like to consume,” she said, “because if you don’t, it consumes you.” No one knew what that meant, or if “Poly Styrene” was good or bad, irony or embrace, an attack on better living through chemistry or a claim that Poly liked to wear it.
That was punk: a load of old ideas sensationalized into new feelings almost instantly turned into new clichés, but set forth with such momentum that the whole blew up its equations day by day. For every fake novelty, there was a real one. For every third-hand pose, there was a fourth-hand pose that turned into a real motive.
THE SHOCK
The shock of punk is no longer in its thuggery, misogyny, racism, homophobia, its yearning for final solutions to questions it barely asked, in negation’s empowerment of every fraud and swindle. “The punk stance,” Lester Bangs wrote in 1979, is “riddled with self-hate, which is always reflexive, and any time you conclude that life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit, you’ve got the perfect breeding ground for fascism.” There was a time in London in 1977 when Jack the Ripper was the ultimate punk, and everything from thuggery to death camps was part of the moment, Eater’s frothing “Get Raped” seemingly as true as the Buzzcocks’ sly equation of shopping and dating in “Breakdown,” all these things briefly legitimized by an irruption affirming itself through the embrace of whatever was officially scorned and stigmatized by society at large.
Today, so many years later, the shock of punk is that every good punk record can still sound like the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. “A Borin
g Life,” “One Chord Wonders,” X-ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage Up Yours!,” the Sex Pistols’ singles, the Clash’s “Complete Control”—the power in these bits of plastic, the tension between the desire that fuels them and the fatalism waiting to block each beat, the laughter and surprise in the voices, the confidence of the music, all these things are shocking now because, in its two or three minutes, each is absolute. You can’t place one record above the other, not while you’re listening; each one is the end of the world, the creation of the world, complete in itself. Every good punk record made in London in 1976 or 1977 can convince you that it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever heard because it can convince you that you never have to hear anything else as long as you live—each record seems to say everything there is to say. For as long as the sound lasts, no other sound, not even a memory of any other music, can penetrate.
As John Peel said, it was like the 1950s, when surprise after surprise came off the radio—but with a difference. If the singers who made fifteen thousand doo-wop records were amateurs, the musicians who backed them were professionals; if they had no idea what social facts the records might dissolve, they knew which chords came next. The punks who made records in 1977 didn’t know what chords came next—and they hurled themselves at social facts. The sense that a social fact could be addressed by a broken chord produced music that changed one’s sense of what music could be, and thus changed one’s sense of the social fact: it could be destroyed. That was what was new: there was no sense of the end of the world in 1950s rock ’n’ roll.