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Punk was always something we felt more than we ever really knew; certainly more about attitude than it was really about musical aptitude. There were and are exceptions whereby a good musician or talented artist might still be considered ‘punk’, whether that was Patti Smith, Jello Biafra, or Joe Strummer. Yet back in the 1970s, the ability to make a noise like a herniated Donny Osmond did not automatically mean you could change your surname to ‘Rotten’ and expect to bask in the phlegm of an appreciative crowd. Punk was something special; often mimicked but not always experienced in its raw authentic form.
The question of what constitutes ‘authentic’ punk became relevant once again when this past week the son of the Sex Pistol’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, and punk style originator Vivienne Westwood, took to the Thames to burn punk memorabilia estimated to be worth over £5 million. Putting a match to some tatty shirts and posters of acne-pitted teenagers would not normally amount to a media event but Joe Corré was using his inherited credentials to prove to the world that ‘punk’ as we know it (and currently having its 40th anniversary commemorated at the Museum of London) is not true punk. ‘Punk,’ he said, ‘has become another marketing tool to sell you something you don’t need. The illusion of an alternative choice. Conformity in another uniform.’
Much of that sounded about right, especially post Trump and post Brexit, both of which have been described as the emergence of a new punk scene albeit inside politics. True punk is not the same as the nostalgia for punk in the same way that modern cowboys bear little resemblance to the men who lived on the American frontier. Nor is punk that corporately commandeered style that sees a spiky haired Miley Cyrus sell millions of records off the bare back of a wrecking ball. Punk has always been diverse and more complicated that the perception that now exists among casual observers, which equates punk to anybody or anything with discordant notes, rough style, and even rougher manners. For many, The Sex Pistols remain the very definition of ‘punk’ yet the Pistols were atypical and musically conventional compared to what came before and after them. The Velvet Underground, for example, often considered the progenitors of punk, were musically more atonal than the Pistols; The Black Angel’s Death Song a harder listen than, say, Anarchy in the UK. Afterwards, there were bands that made the Pistols look positively benign.
It is why, perhaps, some argue that there was something manufactured about The Sex Pistols and that they were less ‘punk’ than true punk. Even down to their name, there was something distinctly English and pantomime about the Pistols that made them the perfect fodder for the media. It makes Corré’s protest somewhat ironic given that his own parents shaped punk as it developed in the public’s mind. What made punk so ‘punk’ was that it could be neither managed nor designed in the ways that McLaren and Westood claimed. It is a tension best described by John Lydon, formerly Rotten, whose relation with McLaren was broken on a quite fundamental level. It was typified by the way he objected to McLaren involving the Pistols with Ronnie Biggs, a situation which Lydon found ‘utterly loathsome’.
This is something that Malcolm never ever respected; that working class people do have a sensibility and are repulsed by things like that. It might seem nice to him and his middle class morality… It might seem trendy and chic but it isn’t really.
This is perhaps the crucial point, mirroring what Joe Strummer once said: that ‘punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human being’. Punk does not always set the lowbrow against the high, the polite against the impolite, or even the individual against the establishment. That is to confuse the product with the production. Lydon saw punk as a form of affirmation for people living with few hopes and fewer opportunities. Not all American bands were shaped by the levels of London squalor but it certainly enabled Patti Smith to make art from the broken (and financially broke) city of New York. Punk allowed youth to create something from the rubble.
When there’s no future
How can there be sin
We’re the flowers
In the dustbin
This version of punk hearkens back to the older Romantic tradition which itself responded to industrialisation by finding value in nature. For all the cries of anarchy and claims of nihilism, Lydon is akin to Byron’s Manfred, who climbed the Jungfrau but did not throw himself into the void. Instead, he delighted in the possibility of throwing himself into the void. There is a difference which involves the possibility of changing the terms of what it means to be human. To Lydon, that meant relishing the chance to bring something new into life:
It was rejection of the rules and regulations and the assumptions of what is good or bad music. Which is really personal taste. But I rejected the idea of imitating any of it. There’s more to this than meets the eye, and unfortunately a lot of people jumped on the wrong side of it and thought that punk was a narrowing of your vision when, for me, it was always expanding, to absorb as much information as possible about everything in the world. It’s learning.
In whatever shade, punk was and remains individualism writ large. Rather than being an adjunct to modernity, punk is deeply ingrained on our culture and even our politics. To this day, punk and libertarianism often overlap, with not a few erstwhile punks emerging as believers in the free market. It is also why last week’s pyre felt more like a personal statement than it did a global message. The version of punk burned for the cameras was that version of punk shaped by McLaren and Westwood. It was that manufactured punk that has come to signify rebellion rather than the liberating energy embodied by punk.
It is why, perhaps, back in July, Brendan O’Neil’s byline appealed in The Spectator beneath the headline ‘Brexit is the most punk thing to have happened in years’.
Brexit is actually the most rock’n’roll thing to have happened in a generation. What we have here is ordinary people, including vast swathes of the working class, saying ‘No’ to the status quo, sticking two fingers up at an aloof elite, channelling Rotten and Vicious to say screw you (or something rather tastier) to that illiberal, risk-averse layer of bureaucracy in Brussels. It makes the student radicals of the 60s and even the anarchic punks of the 70s look like rank amateurs in comparison.
This is another attempt to reduce punk to another spasmodic reaction of the counter culture. Punk was never quite that. Lydon’s question ‘When there’s no future / How can there be sin’ makes a more radical point about the absence of values and the moral vacuum which gives anybody willing a chance to establish entirely new meanings. Brexit has the pretence of anarchy but none of the truth. It is no more punk than Donald Trump, though, unsurprisingly, that’s already how he’s being described. In the New York Times, Kyle Smith writes of the first punk president:
Donald Trump may favor stodgy blue suits and boring red ties and wear his hair in a strange double combover, but don’t be fooled. That’s how he looks, not who he is. Who he is is a guy with a safety pin through his nose and a purple mohawk. He just pulled off the most punk act in American history.
Meanwhile, over at The Atlantic, James Parker writes about ‘Donald Trump, Sex Pistol: The punk-rock appeal of the GOP nominee’ who:
“… has co-created a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock. […] It’s as if the Sex Pistols were singing about law and order instead of anarchy, as if their chart-busting (banned) single, “God Save the Queen,” were not a foamingly sarcastic diatribe but a sincere pledge of fealty to the monarch. Electrifying!”
None of this is to misread the politics but they do offer a caricature of punk. ‘The sound of punk and the look of punk is not necessarily part of it anymore,’ said Jello Biafra, founder and former lead singer of The Dead Kennedys. ‘I mean boy bands look like Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious and pop punk bands sound like boy bands’. He might well have added: and sometimes punk politicians are just regular politicians effecting a snarl.
If Donald Trump is punk, then he is that cartoon punk that has the appearance of attitude but offers little that’s truly radical. This is the same punk aesthetic co-opted by business to sell normality covertly back to the crowd. ‘Never Mind the Brexit’ might be the cry but the truth embodied by both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage is that of two men co-opting the voice of social discord for conventional ends. As one establishes a cabinet of corporate cronies, the other follows up his efforts to rid us of unelected officials in Europe by making himself the unelected official mediating Britain’s relationship with our most important international partner.
That’s why Joe Corré’s protest couldn’t have come at a better time. The ritualised burning might itself have been a pastiche of true punk but it was also a reminder that punk and the punk attitude can sometimes be a prop. The true lesson of punk is that we have the power to create something new and positive from a world which, perhaps more than ever, seems to make so little sense.
London calling, yes, I was there, too
An’ you know what they said? Well, some of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
And after all this, won’t you give me a smile?
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.