by Greil Marcus
Never feel sorry for someone who attacks you or feel you asked for it. Anyone who dares to threaten your safety and well being DESERVES TO DIE.
I pushed, too. Walking the aisles of Winterland as the Sex Pistols played, I felt a confidence and a lust that were altogether new. Thirty-two years had not taught me what I learned that night: when you’re pushed, push back; when a shove negates your existence, negate the shove. I felt distant from nothing, superior to nothing. I also felt a crazy malevolence, a wish to smash people to the ground, and my eyes went to the ground, where I saw small children (what sort of parents would bring little kids to a place like this, I wondered, thinking of my own at home), and thought of smashing them.
Reviewing the concert for a magazine, I mentioned none of this. Days later, it seemed unreal. Seeing Johnny Rotten on stage, I was sure I would never see his like again, and so far I have been right.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER
Immediately after the last show of the Sex Pistols’ only American tour, Johnny Rotten reclaimed his given name, John Lydon. In May 1534 John of Leyden, a Dutch heretic also known as Jan Bockelson, was proclaimed king of the German town of Münster, the New Jerusalem—was, thus, proclaimed king of the whole world.
Earlier in the year, a group of radical Anabaptists—one of many new Protestant sects bent on replacing decadent church rituals with a literal practice of the Gospels—had seized control of Münster. At first they simply forced the town council to pass a bill legalizing “liberty of conscience”—that is, legalizing heresy, an unthinkable act even in the heyday of the Reformation. The Anabaptists quickly drove out the Lutheran majority, repopulated the town with like-minded neighbors, and, under the leadership of a baker named Jan Matthys, established a theocracy. By March, Norman Cohn wrote in 1957 in The Pursuit of the Millennium (a book that, published in France as Fanatiques de l’apocalypse, the situationists would carefully plunder), Münster was purified: refounded as a community of the Children of God, bound by love to live without sin.
Afrika Bambaataa: “Who wants to be / A president or king?”
John Lydon: “ME!”
—“World Destruction,” Time Zone, 1984
All property was expropriated. Money was abolished. The doors of all houses were made to be left open day and night. In a great bonfire, all books save the Bible were destroyed. “The poorest amongst us,” read a Münster pamphlet meant to subvert the countryside, “who used to be despised as ‘beggars,’ now go about dressed as finely as the highest and most distinguished.” “All things were to be in common,” John of Leyden said later. “There was to be no private property and nobody was to do any more work, but simply trust in God.” In every instance the new commandments were enforced with the threat of execution.
Outside the walls of the city, Anabaptism—bits of which survive today in certain Pentecostal creeds—was itself made a capital offense; hundreds, perhaps thousands, were tortured and put to death. The local bishop organized an army of mercenaries and laid siege to Münster; in a divinely ordained sortie against the bishop’s forces, Jan Matthys was killed and John of Leyden took his place.
He ran through the town naked, then was silent for three days. During that time God revealed a new order. Matthys’ social revolution was suddenly exposed as abstract; John of Leyden was to take the revolution to the smallest details of everyday life, where death was to be the only sanction against any sin: murder, theft, avarice, quarrelling, the insubordination of children, the naysaying of wives.
Polygamy was mandated. It was made a capital crime for women of childbearing age to remain unmarried, or for new wives gathered under one man’s roof to differ. The streets were given new names, and John of Leyden chose the names of newborns. Spectacles were staged: great dinners, followed by beheadings. Black masses were held in the cathedral, gutted long before.
Still under siege, though carrying out a fierce defense that kept supply lines open, the citizens of Münster lived on rations; John of Leyden feasted, and dressed in gold and silk. The Brethren of the Free Spirit, who since the early thirteenth century had spread the social heresies of “all things in common” and “never work” across Europe, had believed that for those truly free in spirit, no crime was a crime and no sin was a sin—indeed, God’s grace was to be found in the practice of the worst “sins,” for it was only so that one could prove one was incapable of stain. John of Leyden told his city that he was permitted luxury and indulgence because he “was dead to the world and the flesh”—and that, soon, so would be all.
In January 1535 the bishop regrouped his forces and blockaded the town. By April every animal, the last rat and mouse, had been eaten; then grass, then moss, then shoes and whitewash, and finally human bodies. John of Leyden announced that as the Bible promised God would turn the cobblestones to bread; people tried to eat them. Cursed with eternal damnation, doubters were permitted to leave; able-bodied men were immediately killed by the bishop’s troops. Women, children, and old men, as if infected with plague, were left between the battlements and the walls of the city to starve. Begging for death, howling, they crawled on their hands and knees scrabbling for roots; they ate dirt. Resistance to John of Leyden grew within Münster, and he carried out the executions himself. The corpses were cut into pieces, and the pieces were nailed up on posts.
In June 1535 the city was betrayed and taken; except for John of Leyden and two confederates, all of the men were exterminated. “At the Bishop’s command,” Cohn writes, John of Leyden “was for some time led about on a chain and exhibited like a performing bear.” In January 1536 he and his two living followers were returned to Münster, where they “were publicly tortured to death with red-hot irons. Throughout their agony the ex-king uttered no sound and made no movement. After the execution the three bodies were suspended from a church-tower in the middle of the town, in cages which are still to be seen there today.”
So much for one true Christ, for one true Antichrist. And to root motives in a mere coincidence of names is specious—but serendipity is where you find it. John Lydon was raised a Catholic; when in 1980 two born-again Christian rock critics (one of whom later took to the Christian airwaves to denounce rock ’n’ roll as the devil’s music) asked him if he suffered remorse for his blasphemies, Lydon said he did, and disavowed nothing. Nik Cohn, one of the first rock critics, is Norman Cohn’s son; in 1968, in Pop from the Beginning, the first good book on the subject, he disavowed all claims on meaning the form might make, affirming instead a pure, sensual anarchy, summed up in the watchword of Little Richard (who by the Sex Pistols’ time made his living as an evangelist denouncing rock ’n’ roll as the devil’s music): A WOP BOP A LOO BOP, A LOP BAM BOOM.
Münstermash
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 th
e 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
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.
What are they now? Do pop stars change their opinions? We compare some past and present quotes.
Johnny Rotten, 1977: “If I was ‘appy no one would like me.” Today: Paints in isolation. Quote: “It all went horribly wrong. I burned up all my hate.”
—The Assassin, Liverpool fanzine, September 1977
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
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 p
raise 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.