by beeline » Thu Jun 17, 2010 3:27 pm
In the mid-1970s, Great Britain experienced a certain cultural upheaval among the nation’s youth which, when examined later, stands apart from the other various youth counterculture movements in close proximity to that era. Aggressive music, torn and disheveled clothing, wildly colored hairstyles, and the appropriation and reinterpretation of symbolic imagery (such as the Nazi swastika) characterized the outward ‘look’ of this movement; all were integral to the anti-establishment tone of the movement. The movement, which became known as “punk,” was seen as ‘offensive’ to most Britons; resultantly, the press, police, politicians and even ordinary members of society widely vilified and sought to persecute members of this movement. In and of itself, the persecution of a youth counterculture movement may not seem unremarkable to the casual observer. But in the context of post-World War II British society, it can be seen as extraordinary, given the foundations of freedom for which Briton themselves had fought only thirty years earlier: as late as the 1960s, Britons considered themselves to be members of a ‘Permissive Society,’ and allowed the various youth counterculture movements the freedom to run their inevitable courses. The causes of the highly conservative reaction to punk by the mainstream society of England in the mid-1970s are varied and complex; however, it may be that many Britons, including the upper echelons of government, the press, and even ordinary members of the middle class, viewed punks as a genuine threat to their own existence: as such, punks became an enemy to the state and mainstream society—and needed to be silenced, if not destroyed.
To understand the backlash that punk generated, some of the generalities of life in England during this era must first be examined, and a working definition of what exactly ‘punk’ was must be established.
After World War II, England experienced economic contraction on a scale never before experienced by an industrialized western nation. Yet the Labour government in power between the end of the war and 1950 had successfully managed this recession: unemployment remained very low, as significant portions of the British economy were ‘nationalized,’ or turned over to the state for management; they successfully presided over the dissolution of the British Asian empire; it had made the welfare state a reality. During the 1950’s a conservative government continued this course, and conditions continued to improve: new houses were built at a rate of fifty percent higher each year. By the end of the decade, the wounds of World War II had nearly disappeared, and a generation of Britons had grown accustomed to a world in which large-scale unemployment was rare, and a national network of social services could be counted upon.
The 1960s, for the most part, saw continued economic growth, if not continued successful decolonialization. One family in four lived in a house built after the war, which in turn meant a gradual decline in the housing slums. More people achieved a higher level of education than in any other point in British history. Consumer goods like cars and refrigerators were now being purchased on an installment plan—a sign of the growing influence of the United States or “Americanization” of Britain.
In this context, the youth counterculture movements that developed in the 1960s—the Mods, the Rockers and the Hippies—were generally accepted by Britain’s ‘permissive society.’ Although some members of British society objected to aspects of these movements, most of their objection lied upon moral, and not political grounds. Rock groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were vilified because they advocated premarital sex and the use of marijuana and LSD. Blame for the use of drugs among the young was laid squarely on the shoulders of rock groups: the members of several groups were arrested and charged with possession. Although they disliked the supposed drug message within the lyrics and often the album art that the bands used, mainstream society and the British government were generally tolerant of any political message the music may have contained.
This occurred for two reasons: the bands were commercially successful both at home and overseas, and therefore contributed to the economy. Furthermore, any political message the music contained or the artists espoused independent of the music was largely anti-American in nature: America, whose involvement in Vietnam ran contradictory to Britain’s own decolonialization; America whose commercial hegemony was seen as threatening to Britain’s self-identity; America, who, along with the Soviet Union, had come replace England as the architect of world affairs.
By the close of the 1960s, however, the economic boom that had characterized life in Britain for decades had begun to end: the annual growth rate had shrunk from an already small three percent to less than two percent. In 1970, the mood of the electorate had changed enough that conservatives won Prime Minister and a slight majority in Parliament. This victory, however, caused the ideological distinctions between the Labourites and the Conservatives to reappear after nearly three decades. Conservatives generally viewed the greatness of Britain as the product of “freedom, not in reliance on the state…the acceptance of personal responsibility, not dependence upon the state, [was what] made this island so dominant in the world.” It was the private, and not public, sector of the economy that had precipitated the economic rebounds of Japan and Germany, which the conservatives hoped to imitate. Labour, however, was more concerned with the distribution and not the production goods. In 1973, Labour promised to bring about “a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favor of working people and their families.”
Trade union militancy accentuated the sense of ideological tension between the Labour and Conservative parties. Strikes occurred with ever-increasing frequency. In 1971, a strike of Post Office workers led to forty-seven days without mail. In 1972, the first coal strike since 1926 led to extensive electricity cuts and caused the layoff of 1.5 million people. The number of working days lost to strikes was four times higher than in any year during the 1960s. Such strikes often entailed little economic risk for union members, as welfare was available easily.
Such strikes did not merely injure the reputation of reliability for British manufacturers, but they also led to increasingly inflationary wage settlements, which in turn led to higher costs to the consumer, and pressure from other unions to catch up. As inflation made exports more expensive, the international balance of debt payments left over from World War II was in deficit for the first time in three years. By 1974, the British pound had been devalued twenty percent in comparison to other major western European currencies. Coupled with the cost of imported raw materials, the economic decline that had begun in the late 1960s was now barreling headlong toward an overt economic recession. The general index of retail prices shows that, in the years between 1974 and 1976, prices increased by nearly twenty-five percent annually. Unemployment increased from 615,000 in 1974 to 1.3 million in 1979.
It was within this political and economic environment that punk developed.
The term ‘punk’ is a nebulous concept—the definition of ‘punk’ can change from person to person, and often changes to an individual over time. However, it is necessary to begin with some kind of working definition in order to proceed. At a basic level, ‘punk’ was a subculture best characterized as being part youth rebellion, part artistic statement. It peaked as a movement during the period of 1976 to1979, most visibly in England and the United States.
It had its primary manifestation in music, not only among the disaffected rock and roll bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash that made the music, but also their fans. Secondary manifestations of punk were fashion and the visual arts. Philosophically, punk stood for identifiable attitudes: an emphasis on nihilism, a consciousness of class-based politics, a belief in spontaneity, and an ethic of ‘do it yourself.’ Finally, because ‘punk’ also entails political and class consciousness, it can only have begun in one place: England in the mid-1970s. This perhaps one of the most important distinctions between the punk bands and prior rock and roll groups that had come before them: their music was directly political.
Bands that had come before punk did have political leanings; however their politics were largely discussed in the press, and, rarely, if ever, appeared in the music. The Beatles, arguably the most successful British rock band of all time, were notoriously anti-war. But the closest they ever came to a genuinely political song was “Revolution,” in which John Lennon sings
"You say you want a revolution / Well you know we’d all love to change the world / You tell me that it’s evolution / Well you know / We all want to change the world / But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out / Don’t you know its gonna be alright "
Lennon’s message is clear: although he objects to many of the policies carried out by the United States, tacitly supported by Great Britain, as many other Americans and Europeans did, he sees revolution — genuine, bloody, violent revolution — as an untenable solution. This may have been due to Lennon’s philosophy — the man would also sing “All You Need Is Love,” — but it may have also had to due with Lennon’s position in society.
Lennon, like the other members of the Beatles and the members of other groups like the Rolling Stones and The Who, had mostly been members of middle or upper class society in England. All had been university-educated, and if not already members of the upper class, their status as rock stars made them at least equal to, if not above, the upper class—even if they did pretend otherwise. “The Rolling Stones did live in a hovel, but wasn’t Mick Jagger from a nice wealthy family? Most of these dropout people had their hovels self-inflicted. Being an economics graduate is not the same thing [as being genuinely poor].”
Rock and roll had ceased to be counter-cultural: it had become the mainstream, a giant that celebrated material wealth and hedonism. This giant was generating a bogus reality: ostensibly, it was rebellious music; actually, it had become yet another strata within the class divisions existing in English society. To the teenagers of the early 1970s, rock and roll was simply boring.
American bands, such as the Ramones, the New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges had formed before the punk bands, and had a sound very similar to the punk bands of England. Without a doubt, punk could not have been born without their influence. However, these bands used generally used outrage for art’s sake, and had little or no political agenda.
Punk therefore contained not only a musical sound, but also an injection of often-radical political philosophy. In addition to these distinctions, punk also entailed a visual aspect, which manifested itself in fashion and artwork, and also exhibited a more blurred line between listener and musician.
The ‘fashion’ of punk was anti-fashion; in fact, it was less fashion than it was bricolage: When John Lydon first auditioned for the Sex Pistols, he was emaciated—very thin with spiky hair. [He] was wearing what would later become full punk garb—ripped shirts and safety pins. It was [him] rehashing all those awful pop star images, taking bits and putting it together. Bits like taking a Pink Floyd T-shirt. Once you add the words I hate, you have something completely different...But when you buy these old tatty things, they tend to fall apart. So the safety pins were not a decoration but a necessity.
Likewise, members of the Clash painted slogans and lyrics from their songs on their clothes: often the messages, such as “Hate and War” or “White Riot,” would seek to shock or offend passerby. Unlike other rock stars, punks wore the same clothes on the street as they did onstage, blurring the line between their performance and the surrounding reality.
Finally, punk bands, especially in the early days, were their own audience. That is, many of the supporters of punk bands were in other punk bands themselves. This initially can be attributed to the relative size of the scene itself. However, as the punk movement grew, the fans soon outnumbered the bands. Unlike their predecessors, punks encouraged a familiarity with their fans to a degree that Lester Bangs, the premier rock critic of his day, touring with the Clash, noted that
"The Clash came down [from their hotel rooms] and joined us, and I realized that unlike most of the bands I’d ever met, they weren’t stuck up, they weren’t on a star trip, were in fact genuinely interested in meeting and getting acquainted with their fans in a one-to-one, noncondescending level…most rock stars are goddamn pigs who have the usual burly corps of hired thugs to keep the fans away from them at all costs, excepting the usual select contingent of lucky (?) nubiles who they’ll maybe deign to allow up to their rooms for the privilege of sucking on their coveted wangers, after which often as not they get pitched out into the streets to find their way home without even cabfare. The whole thing is sick to the marrow, and I simply could not believe that any band, especially one as musically brutal as the Clash could depart so far from this fetid norm."
The members of the the Clash and the Sex Pistols, those that managed them, or those that were affiliated with them would introduce political philosophy into the movement. Bernie Rhodes, manager of the Clash, Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, and Jamie Reid, the Sex Pistols album artist, were all at least admirers or members of the Situationist International movement during the nineteen sixties. The Situationists were the modern intellectual descendants of the nineteenth century anarchists. The Situationists ideological basis was that the original working class movement had been trampled, by the bourgeoisie in the West and by the Bolsheviks in the East. Working class organizations, such as Trade Unions and Leftist political parties had sold out to world capitalism; furthermore, capitalism could now appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely, in the form of harmless ideologies to be used against the working class, which they were supposed to represent. The Situationists did not want to work with the existing system: instead, the sought to destroy it, after which they would create a world composed of small, independent states: “an alternative society, neither capitalist nor bureaucratic-socialistic: a society based on voluntary co-operation among men and women, working and living in small self-governing communities."
The members of the Sex Pistols were not necessarily politically aware when McLaren formed the group in 1975. They were, however, aware of their own economic plight and lack of opportunity. With the exception of original bassist Glen Matlock, the members of the group were lower class, and had been raised in abject poverty. Singer John Lydon had been born into an Irish immigrant family living in the slums of Finsbury Park, London. “The whole family [father, mother and three brothers] shared the same bedroom and a kitchen. That’s all it was. No bathroom. Outside toilet. A tramp lived in the front room, which used to be a store front.”
The members of the Clash, on the other hand, had some political consciousness prior to their formation. Before manager Bernie Rhodes formed the group, guitarist Joe Strummer “knew from an early age that authority was supposed to be grounded in wisdom, [but] instead was based in control, and didn’t have any inherent wisdom.” Also lower class, the members of the Clash had been raised in similar conditions as Lydon, and had witnessed firsthand the violence used by and against London police during a riot that broke out at the Nottingham Carnival in August of 1976.
Rhodes, bassist Paul Simonon and Strummer had been in attendance at the annual carnival, which had been started in the late 1950s by Jamaican immigrants to Britain. As “a conga line” of police formed, “paper cups then cans” were thrown in their direction. “The next minute, there were police everywhere, and they literally just charged. All Hell broke loose.”
As the riot ensued, Siminon and Strummer joined the melee, attempting to set a car on fire. Unsuccessful with their attempted arson, the experience would become material for the song “White Riot,” in which Strummer sings
"White riot/I wanna riot / White riot / a riot of my own / Black people gotta lot a problems / But they don't mind throwing a brick / White people go to school / Where they teach you how to be thick/ All the power's in the hands / Of people rich enough to buy it / While we walk the street / Too chicken to even try it."
From his experience in the Nottingham Riot, Strummer inherently understood the power that lay within of a mob of oppressed people, reacting to the continued encroachment of authority; realizing that, if harnessed, the same power could be applied to the governmental forces that oppressed the much larger white underclass.
Lydon, dissatisfied with his own socio-economic-political situation, reflected a similar philosophy with the lyrics to “Anarchy in the U.K.” In it, he sings:
"I am an antichrist / I am an anarchist / Don't know what I want /But I know how to get it / I wanna destroy the passerby /'Cause I wanna be Anarchy / Anarchy for the U.K. / It's coming sometime and maybe / I give a wrong time stop a traffic line / Your future dream is a shopping scheme"
Lydon, who claims to have been “apolitical” at the time, provided the conceptual direction of the group, calculated to be as confrontational, caustic and threatening as possible. Lydon was not interested in British politics because they had nothing to offer—thus the need to express a nihilistic rage against the the existing social structure. His message is devoid of productive or positive comment, which in turn fed into the antipathy directed toward the band.
McLaren, realizing that the promotion of the song and the philosophy was key to the success of both, booked the band on London Weekend Television's Today program with Bill Grundy, which ended in a stream of four-letter abuse of the host that brought the group banner headlines in the following morning's tabloid press:
Grundy: They are punk rockers. The new craze, they tell me. Their heroes? Not the nice, clean Rolling Stones... You see they are as drunk as I am... They are clean by comparison. They're a group called The Sex Pistols, and I am surrounded by all of them...
Jones: In action!
Grundy: Just let us see The Sex Pistols in action. Come on kids...
I am told that that group have received forty thousand pounds from a record company. Doesn't that seem, er, to be slightly opposed to their anti-materialistic view of life?
Matlock: No, the more the merrier.
Grundy: Really?
Matlock: Oh yeah.
Grundy: Well tell me more then.
Jones: We've fuckin' spent it, ain't we?
Grundy: I don't know, have you?
Matlock: Yeah, it's all gone.
Grundy: Really?
Jones: Down the boozer.”
The reaction to the interview was so strong that one man even kicked in his own television set. Under pressure from local authorities, promoters in the cities of northern England canceled most of the group’s scheduled tour. Furthermore, the “Anarchy in the U.K.” single was banned from many shops due to the lyrical content—although the words were not the obscene in any aesthetic sense. The values of the British middle-class were far different than those of the underclasses – and the middle class did not like what they saw.
In spite of this censorship, the group had gained enough attention from the interview that the single eventually reached #36 on the New Musical Express charts. Yet the negative publicity was too much for the group’s label, EMI, to handle: the group was dropped shortly after the interview.
Besides the tabloid press and bans from record stores, the bands were also reviled by the more legitimate press, and members of political institutions. Ronald Butt, writing for the Times of London, dismissed the group as “the grubby face of mass promotion;” Member of Parliament Marcus Lipton stated that “if punk rock is going to be used to destroy Britain’s institutions, then it ought to be destroyed first.” Bernard Brooke Partridge, a member of the Greater London Council, delivered this diatribe:
"My personal view on punk is that it’s nauseating, disgusting, degrading, ghastly, sleazy, prurient, voyeuristic and generally nauseating. I think that just covers it as far as I’m concerned. I think most of these groups would be vastly improved by death. The worst of these punk rock groups I suppose currently are the Sex Pistols; they are unbelievably nauseating. They are the antithesis of humankind. I would like to see somebody dig a very, very large exceedingly deep hole and drop the whole bloody lot down it. You know, I think the whole world would be improved by their utter non-existence. "
Lipton and Partridge nearly got their wishes. In the next few months, the Sex Pistols released their next single, “God Save the Queen.” In it, Lydon sang
God save the Queen / The fascist regime, / They made you a moron / A potential H-bomb. / God save the Queen / She ain't no human being. / There is no future / in England's dreaming / Don't be told what you want / Don't be told what you need. / There's no future / There's no future / There's no future for you.”
The release of the single coincided with the jubilee anniversary of Queen Elizabeth—outraging ordinary British citizens, most of whom adored the monarch, in spite of the lack of prosperity in their own lives and the millions of pounds paid annually to the royal family. In spite of the public outrage, “the record…took off. It was bound to because so many people felt the same way. Nobody had openly declared any anti-opinions of the royal family in ever such a long time. [Lydon] thought it was about time somebody stood up and said something, and [he] was more than pleased that it be [him].”
The repercussions were swift. The BBC banned the record from the airwaves; when the record debuted at number one on the popular music charts, a black line inhabited the space next to the digit. At Virgin Records, the bands new label, press officer Al Clarke said, “There is a unanimity of bans. Every conceivable outlet for the disk is now closed for us and our only chance is to push it via press advertising and a poster campaign, but quite a few posters have been ripped down by supporters of the royalty.” Finally, Lydon and drummer Paul Cook, as well as members of four other bands, were attacked and beaten in the street by bands of hooligans: suddenly, the political had become very personal.
During this time, a split occurred within the Sex Pistols, as Glen Matlock was replaced by John Ritchie (also known as Sid Vicious). McLaren claimed that Matlock had been fired for liking the Beatles. In reality, Matlock left the band because his own middle-class upbringing did not concur with the ideology of Lydon. Matlock would go on to form his own group, the ironically titled Rich Kids.
Later that year the group released an album called “Never Mind the Bollocks-- Here’s the Sex Pistols.” As with all of their other material it found itself banned from airplay. Nevertheless, it was a commercial success and was number one in the charts within four weeks of its release. The media refused to carry ads for the album. These ads were designed specifically to give no offense, but were barred from commercial radio and television. According to Virgin, the ban was imposed by the Independent Broadcasting authority (IBA) after initially being approved. A spokesman for the IBA confirmed that no technical objection had been found to the ads, but felt that advertising the album itself might give offense. The IBA advised both the Independent Radio Contractors and the Independent Television Companies Association to consider carefully whether they wanted to advertise the album. Not surprisingly, both decided they did not want to carry any ads for the record. Like the record-store owners that had refused to carry the “Anarchy in the U.K.” single, the middle-class executives running both radio and television in the United Kingdom also perceived the band as a threat to their own value system; the fact that the underclasses may have developed an entirely different value system had never occurred to them.
Some of the record stores that did carry the album came under attack. Several stores were charged with indecent display. The offending word was “bollocks.” However, in the first case to come to trial, an English professor defined the word as nonsense, and the case was dismissed.
Yet, the fact that there was a legal case at all shows how acute the reaction to punk by governmental authorities had become. Primarily, this reaction was rooted in the threat which punk, like all revolutionary movements prior to it posed: an attack on those in power by those without it, with the presupposition that those without power intend to supplant those with it. Punk, therefore, had become the intellectual offspring of Marx, Lenin, and the Situationists.
Nonetheless, it remains that prior to the evolution of punk, British society had not reacted to a subculture so strongly as they did to punk. Certainly, members of other bands had been arrested in the past. But these musicians had been allowed the freedom to create their art without interference from political authority. Furthermore, although these musicians had widely known and publicized political opinions, the politics rarely, if ever, entered directly into their music. Punk was a direct attack on English political authority and control, set in a time when the powers-that-be had, at best, a tenuous grip on that authority. Therefore, the perpetuation of those people and systems that depended directly on that power used it, for their own self-preservation.
Ultimately, those fears proved to be unfounded. The Sex Pistols and the Clash both fell apart from their own accord: the Clash, partly because of their success, estranged themselves from one another through drugs and infighting. Although they never compromised their sound or message, Lester Bangs was correct when he predicted of the Clash that “without one-on-one contact with their audience [they] would seem into falling into elitist alienation as most bands preceeding them, but if it gets to the point that several thousand people want into your hotel room, you have to find some way of dealing with it.“
During the Sex Pistols first and only tour of the United States, Ritchie became growingly addicted to heroin. Controversy continued to follow the band wherever they played. At the Longhorn Ballroom in Texas, Ritchie and members of the audience traded insults, them blows. In the ensuing fracas, Ritchie hit an innocent bystander with his bass while attempting to ward off an attacker. As the tour progressed, the members of the group became estranged, to the degree that Lydon and Ritchie refused to ride the same bus as drummer Paul Cook and guitarist Steve Jones.
Yet they played their last show, at promoter Bill Grahm’s Winterland Auditorium in San Francisco in January of 1978, with the same vitality and energy that they had exhibited from the beginning. Without a laser-light show, a proper sound engineer, or even working monitors onstage, the Sex Pistols did what they did best: shock their audience into the understanding that they were witnessing the beginning of the end of the western cultural tradition. There is a point during the show, which can be heard on “The Great Rock N’ Roll Swindle” LP: the band is performing “Belsen Was A Gas,” with Lydon singing the lyrics: “Kill a man/ Be someone / Kill someone / Kill yourself.” The song ends abruptly; there is a moment of stunned silence, then spontaneous cheers. The audience has succumbed and accepted as fact Lydon’s vision of the past as equaling the present: vis-à-vis those forces which seek to maintain and control society, to coerce and control the individual, there lay only two choices: compliance or self-destruction. As Joe Strummer had noted, authority is not rooted in wisdom, but in power.
In the end, the Sex Pistols chose self-destruction: the group disbanded after the San Francisco show. Ritchie would die of a heroin overdose less than a year later. Lydon went on to front his own group, Public Image Ltd., while Steve Jones and Paul Cook toiled in relative obscurity, until the band reformed for its self-parodying, appropriately titled 1996 Filthy Lucre Tour: as the Situationists had predicted, the band itself had eventually transitioned themselves from countercultural iconoclasts to marketable icons, even as the subjects of the movies “The Great Rock N’ Roll Swindle” and “Sid and Nancy”; as Lydon once said onstage, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
Perhaps, but perhaps not: the ultimate legacy of the Sex Pistols and the Clash lay not in their political under-achievement. Instead, it can be heard and seen in the art that followed them. Whether it is the anti-establishment tone of the punks bands that followed them, or the more recent bands Rage Against The Machine and Public Enemy; the non-linear insistence in the filmmaking of Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch, or the cyberpunk storytelling of William Gibson, the Sex Pistols taught countless artists in the nearly three decades that have passed since their formation one simple rule: Express yourself, and fear none.
