by Greil Marcus
LISTENING
Listening to “Anarchy in the U.K.” years ago, all I wanted to know was why the record was so powerful. I have an idea now.
In my account of what McLaren and Reid made of the SI’s old art project—by 1975, dead letters sent from a mythical time—Johnny Rotten appears as a mouthpiece; I prefer to think of him as a medium. As he stood on the stage, opened his mouth, and fixed his eyes on the crowd, various people who had never met, some who had met but who had never been properly introduced, some who had never heard of some of the others, as Johnny Rotten had heard of almost none of them, began to talk to each other, and the noise they made was what one heard. An unknown tradition of old pronouncements, poems, and events, a secret history of ancient wishes and defeats, came to bear on Johnny Rotten’s voice—and because this tradition lacked both cultural sanction and political legitimacy, because this history was comprised of only unfinished, unsatisfied stories, it carried tremendous force.
All the demands that dada made on art, that Michel Mourre made on God, that the LI and the SI made on their time, came to life as demands on the symbolic milieu of pop music—demands that produced a voice it had never used. Because these demands were so disproportionate to the strictures the pop milieu had come to accept—strictures that produced entertainment as alienation and art as hierarchical dispossession—the milieu exploded. Because the milieu enclosed pop culture, obscure and hermetic incidents and ideas were taken up by countless ordinary people, and those incidents and ideas made a code those people did not know they were deciphering, a code which deciphered them.
With Debord, Huelsenbeck, Ball, Wolman, Chtcheglov, Mourre, Coppe, and more fighting for Johnny Rotten’s microphone, the pop market was flooded with desires it was not built to satisfy. Traditional rock ’n’ roll desires to make noise, to step forward, to “announce yourself,” were transformed into the conscious desire to make your own history, or to abolish the history already made for you. The situationists bet that such a pass would lead people to go off the market, but that is not what happened—rather, people drove deeper into the market, and the result was topsy turvy. Remade as punk, pop music returned a gift it never knew it had received—returned it on a higher plane of value, producing richer works of art than dada, the LI, or the SI ever did. But the gift also fell short of the gift to which it found itself returned, because in the tradition in question, art had never been the goal, but “only an occasion, a method, for locating the specific rhythm and the buried face of this age . . . for the possibility of its being stirred.” Remaining always within the pop milieu, the symbol factory, punk was only art—and so as language, thought, or action it was swallowed by the chiefs who began the game. Measured against the demands its precursors made, punk was a paltry reflection; measured against the records the Sex Pistols and their followers made, the leavings of dada, the LI, and the SI are sketches of punk songs; all in all it is the tale of a wish that went beyond art and found itself returned to it, a nightclub act that asked for the world, for a moment got it, then got another nightclub. In this sense punk realized the projects that lay behind it, and realized their limits.
The story continued; it also changed. Because the story punk was telling was so old and so foreign—a story about art and revolution now playing itself out in a realm of amusements and commodities—every sound and movement seemed completely new. But the very intensity of this illusion, its vertigo, drove the story into the past, in search of an anchor.
“Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” So said Nietzsche, and Mourre, and numerous punks, and Debord, quoting Rashid al-Din Sinan, Islamic gnostic, leader of the Levantine Assassins, Sinan as he lay on his deathbed in 1192, unless it was 1193, or 1194—and apochryphal or not, the words make up the first line in the canon of the secret tradition, a nihilist catchphrase, an entry into negation, a utopianism, a shibboleth. If this was all Johnny Rotten’s songs finally said, the story would turn back on itself and die, choking on its own clichés. But in his most convulsive moments, Johnny Rotten said something more—what Hasan i-Sabbah II, chief of the Assassins in Iran, and Sinan’s spiritual master, said in 1164.
In that year, Hasan i-Sabbah II, legatee of the first Hasan i-Sabbah, founder of the Assassins, announced the millennium. In Alamut, the mountain fiefdom he ruled, he threw down the Koran and proclaimed the end of the law. With his subjects, in the Holy Hour, he turned his back on Mecca. In the midst of Ramadan, the Holy Fast, they feasted and rejoiced. “They spoke of the world as being uncreated and Time as unlimited,” wrote a chronicler; because “in the world to come there is no action and all is reckoning,” they declared that on earth “all is action and there is no reckoning.”
This is absolute freedom, the prize seized by the Cathars, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Lollards, John of Leyden, the Ranters, and Adolf Hitler: the end of the world. This is the fire around which the dadaists and Debord’s strangely fecund groups held their dances, and which consumed them—a fire, though, that can be heard in the words they left behind because of the noise the Sex Pistols made. In the dadaists’ manifestos and poems, in the LI’s détournement of the best news of the week, in the SI’s détournement of the news of the world, the fire is a reference point, properly footnoted but carefully marginalized; in the Sex Pistols’ music, no footnotes at all, the fire is central. The ancestors danced around it; their inheritors dove in.
In the act, the story doubles back and rewrites itself. All of the freedom of that twelfth-century blasphemy, and all of its terror, is in the Sex Pistols’ music, far more than it is in their precursors’ writing. This is what is happening in the last minute of “Holidays in the Sun,” and it is why no sane person would want to listen, or sing, for a minute more.
This is the secret the Sex Pistols told, and it is half of the story. The other half is a secret the Sex Pistols didn’t tell. Their ancestors did tell it, because they lived it out—or, because they were not punks but primitive philosophers, they glimpsed the secret before the fact, as Debord did. “This is our entire program,” he went on in 1957, “which is essentially transitory. Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future: passageways.”
I was drawn to this message, coded but not stated in punk, because in a small and anonymous way I lived it out myself. In the fall of 1964, in Berkeley, at the University of California, I was, day after day, for months, part of the crowd that made up the Free Speech Movement. In that event, which began as a small protest over rules and regulations, and which I now understand as a conversation, everything was at stake and, in one way or another, everyone took part. “I came here to go to business school,” a friend said—he couldn’t have been less interested in politics, in questions of how and why people make judgments on the ordering of their shared space and time, on what counts and what doesn’t according to those judgments—“and all we ever do is talk about this goddamn FSM!”
It was a period of doubt, chaos, anger, hesitation, confusion, and finally joy—that’s the word. Your own history was lying in pieces on the ground, and you had the choice of picking up the pieces or passing them by. Nothing was trivial, nothing incidental. Everything connected to a totality, and the totality was how you wanted to live: as a subject or as an object of history. In enormous gatherings, people spoke out as they never had before; they did the same in gatherings of two or three.
As the conversation expanded, institutional, historical power dissolved. People did and said things that made their lives of a few weeks before seem unreal—they did and said things that, not long after, would seem even more so. A school became a terrain on which all emotions, all ideas and theories, were tested and fought over; it was scary and it was fun. Dramas were enacted; people gathered around poisonous speeches; one found oneself in Homeric times, and the metaphor was physical, the body politic. In the university’s Greek Theater, the entire community came together; before sixteen thousand people the president of the university gave a long, calming speech, so full of reasonableness
it defused every mental bomb anyone had brought to the event. Then Mario Savio, the stuttering Demosthenes of the Free Speech Movement, walked toward the podium to deliver a response, police seized him and dragged him away, and what was left was nothing: it was as if the president of the university had never opened his mouth. There was only chaos. People who moments before had been lulled into a lovely sleep screamed their lungs out. It was the loudest noise I’ve ever heard, or made.
Soon enough, the battle was resolved—won—in a great, formal debate by professors over rules and regulations. The rules were changed, and everyone went back to real life. But though the Free Speech Movement would occasionally be cited in years to come as a harbinger of the storm of protest that swept the campuses of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as a prefiguration of the protest against the Vietnam War, in fact the event, its spirit, in which people acted not for others but for themselves, with no sense of distance or separation, completely disappeared, as if it had never been.
For better or worse—it wasn’t my choice—this event formed a standard against which I’ve judged the present and the past ever since. Even though the event left nothing behind one could touch—no monuments, not even a plaque—I never got over it. Time passed and I tried to hold on to it, as an incomplete but indelible image of good public life. As an image it reappeared in different shapes, in different times. I recognized it from afar in May ’68, when, in my own town, the open discourse and experimental action of the Free Speech Movement had long since been transformed into ideology and manipulation: during a Berkeley demonstration held in solidarity with the rioters in Paris, activists mistakenly distributed the leaflets denouncing the atrocities committed that night by the local police an hour or so before the police showed up. So I looked back, wanting more of what I’d briefly seen, seeking an anchor, and recognized the public life of a few years before in accounts of what revolutionary councils had been like in Petrograd in 1917, Berlin in 1918, Hungary in 1956—but reading the books, the event I’d been part of seemed almost as old.
I recognized this public life in punk—right away, with no idea why. As a fan I felt the way John Peel felt as a disc jockey: shocked. After so much had happened, after so much had stopped so fast, after so little had happened for so long, it felt as if the sound were coming from another planet, it seemed so remarkable that it was happening at all. But as I looked into this new event, the shock doubled. The event was a strand in a real tradition, partly grasped by its many authors, mostly not; the tradition had its own imperatives, which operated in a manner independent of what anyone might choose to make of them.
I found a tale composed of incomplete sentences, voices cut off or falling silent, tired repetitions pressing on in search of novelties, a tale of recapitulations staged again and again in different theaters—a map made altogether of dead ends, where the only movement possible was not progress, not construction, but ricochet and surprise. And so, pursuing this story, when I finally came across Debord’s homily on the ephemeral, his theory of “situations without a future,” I was drawn to it as I had been drawn to the noise in punk: to his frank and determined embrace of moments in which the world seems to change, moments that leave nothing behind but dissatisfaction, disappointment, rage, sorrow, isolation, and vanity.
This is the secret the Sex Pistols didn’t tell, which they only acted out: the moment in which the world seems to change is an absolute, the absolute of passing time, which is made of limits. For those who want everything, there is finally no action, only an endless, finally solipsistic reckoning. Thus Debord, over and over, quoting that sentimental line of Bossuet’s, “Bernard, Bernard, this bloom of youth will not last forever”—words that, combined with those that follow them (which, once, out of all the times he used the phrase, Debord also quoted), are not sentimental at all. “Bernard, Bernard, this bloom of youth will not last forever,” Bossuet said to the dead saint. “The fatal hour will come—the fatal hour, which, with an inexorable sentence, will cut short all false hopes. On our own ground, life will fail us like a false friend. The wealthy of this earth, who lead a life of pleasure, who imagine themselves to possess great things, will be astonished to find their hands empty.”
THERE IS
There is a hint of transformation here, of resentment, leading—who knows where? There is the certainty of failure: all those who glimpse possibility in a spectral moment become rich, and though they remain so, they are ever after ever more impoverished. That is why, as I write, Johnny Rotten is a pop star who cannot make his fans forget the Sex Pistols, why Guy Debord writes books about his past, why the Hacienda is a nightclub in Manchester, England, and why, a few years before he died, Dr. Charles R. Hulbeck again became Huelsenbeck, left the U.S.A., and went back to Switzerland, hoping to rediscover what he’d found there more than fifty years before (not believing for a minute that he would), trying, he said, “to go back to some kind of chaos,” half-convinced that “liberty really never existed anywhere.”
If all of this seems like a lot for a pop song to contain, that is why this story is a story, if it is. And it is why any good punk song can sound like the greatest thing you ever heard, which it does. When it doesn’t, that will mean the story has taken its next turn.
WORKS CITED AND SIGHTED
This book does not pretend to be a history of any of the movements it addresses; the sometimes annotated list that follows does not provide anything like a comprehensive or even schematic bibliography, discography, or filmography of those movements. It is meant simply to keep the record straight—though, given the vast retrieval of Lettrist International and Situationist International writing and filmmaking over the last twenty years, and interesting commentary on it, and new and continuing work by and about dadaists and punk performers, that list is richer now than I could have ever imagined it might be, and in this section I have tried to keep up.
Films are listed by title, with the name of the director following, except when the director is a principal in the story I’ve attempted to tell, when films are listed by that person’s name. Recordings are listed by artist, with label and date of original release in parentheses; singles are noted in quotation marks, with albums and eps italicized; punk performers are noted by home town; in many cases only original releases are cited. Interviews from which short quotes from punk performers have been taken are generally not listed here, nor are daily newspaper reports.
Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951), trans. G. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1978.
Adverts (London). “One Chord Wonders”/“Quickstep” (Stiff, 1977, U.K.). “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes”/“Bored Teenagers” (Bright/Anchor, 1977, U.K.). Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts (Bright/Anchor, 1978, U.K.; augmented reissue, with “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes,” Essential/Castle, 1997, U.K.). Thirty years after the release of the first Adverts album, leader TV Smith put out In the Arms of My Enemy (Boss Tuneage). In the video for the single “Clone Town” he looked like someone you’d cross the street to avoid, old, beaten down, muttering to himself, a cannibal of his own rage. “Clone Town” wasn’t Smith’s best new song, but it presented the character he’d made fully: a crank, unwilling to keep his mouth shut, the man with the bad news: “You don’t really want to know how they get those prices so low!” he sang in a battering refrain, the phrase taking on another exclamation point with every repetition—but you do, you do. See The Roxy.
Ambler, Eric. Cause for Alarm (1938). Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1961.
An endless adventure . . . an endless passion . . . an endless banquet: A situationist scrapbook, ed. Iwona Blazwick. London: ICA/Verso, 1989. Catalogue of the London installation of the exhibition “On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972.” Includes translations from Internationale situationniste and Potlatch, Michèle Bernstein’s 1964 Times Literary Supplement essay “The Situationist International,” Alexander Trocchi’s “Invisib
le insurrection of a million minds,” excerpts from Heatwave and King Mob Echo, Sex Pistols documents (Malcolm McLaren’s 1978 “manifesto,” signed Oliver Twist: “They are Dickinsenian-like urchins with ragged clothes and pock-marked faces roaming the streets of foggy gas-lit London pillaging . . . This true and dirty tale has been continuing throughout 200 years of teenage anarchy and so in 1978 there still remains the Sex Pistols. Their active extremism is all they care about because that’s what counts to jump right out of the 20th century as fast as you possibly can in order to create an environment that you can truthfully run wild in”). See Bernstein, Heatwave, King Mob Echo, Trocchi.
Anscombe, Isabelle. Punk. New York: Urizen, 1978. Unique for its gallery of photos of London punks posing on the street—or hiding in plain sight.
Apostolidès, Jean-Marie. Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord, précédé de Portrait de Guy-Ernest en jeune libertin. Paris: Exils Editeur, 1999. According to one who would know, capturing its subject more acutely than any other book.
______and Boris Donné. Ivan Chtcheglov: Portrait Perdu. A strikingly designed and illustrated biography. See Chtcheglov.
Arendt, Hannah. “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility” (1945), in The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron Feldman. New York: Grove, 1978.
Arp, Jean (Hans). “Dadaland” (1938–1962), in Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories, ed. Marcel Jean, trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Viking, 1972.
______and Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada in Zürich, ed. Peter Schifferli. Zurich: Sansouci, 1966. See also Dada•Anti•Merz.