Lipstick Traces (12 page)

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 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 Boring 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.

There is a feeling in the best punk 45s that what must be said must be said very fast, because the energy required to say what must be said, and the will to say it, can’t be sustained. That energy is going to disappear, that will is going to shatter—the idea will go back in the ground, the audience will get up, put on their coats, and go home. Like its rhythm, the punk voice was always unnatural: speeded up past personality into anonymity, pinched, reduced, artificial. It called attention to its own artificiality for more than one reason: as a rejection of mainstream pop humanism in favor of resentment and dread; as a reflection of the fear of not being understood. But the voice was unnatural most of all out of its fear of losing the chance to speak—a chance, every good punk singer understood, that was not only certain to vanish, but might not even be deserved.

The sense of risk one can hear in punk is a distrust of the punk moment itself. It is the will to say everything cut with the suspicion that to say everything may be worth nothing. No one knew where the chance came from, and no one knew what would come of it—save that it couldn’t last. Rock
’n’ roll had barely said its name in the 1950s when Danny and the Juniors announced that “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay”; there was no such song in punk. Punk wasn’t here to stay. Punk was not an opportunity to exploit, no matter how many commercial plots Malcolm McLaren hatched, no matter how many one-time Sex Pistols fans went on to international New Wave fame and success. “New Wave” was a code word not for punk without shock, but for punk without meaning. Punk was not a musical genre; it was a moment in time that took shape as a language anticipating its own destruction, and thus sometimes seeking it, seeking the statement of what could be said with neither words nor chords. It was not history. It was a chance to create ephemeral events that would serve as judgments on whatever came next, events that would judge all that followed wanting—that, too, was the meaning of no-future.

Much has been made of punk’s antecedents in Chuck Berry; in the Kinks and the Who; in the American garage bands; in the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the New York Dolls; in such British precursors as David Bowie, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople; in the arty, ironic New York scene that emerged in 1974—especially as exemplified by the Ramones. “Beat on the brat / With a baseball bat”—what could be more punk than that? Not stopping there—and that is where the Ramones stopped for years. Yes, the Sex Pistols encored with the Stooges’ “No Fun,” as sons they killed their father-Dolls with “New York,” Velvets covers were a punk touchstone, but this is just arithmetic. If what is interesting about punk is something other than its function as a musical genre, there is no point in treating it as one.

As algebra, one could as easily say that punk came from two lines in “Tale in Hard Time,” a song Richard Thompson wrote in 1968 for Fairport Convention, a mostly quiet, reflective British folk-rock group: “Take the sun from my heart / Let me learn to despise.” Whether or not a single punk ever heard those words is irrelevant, as irrelevant as whether or not a single punk ever read a word by the writers whose adventures make up most of the story of this book. The best of them played those words out. Drawing whatever truth Thompson’s plea held out of their own history, their own blind inheritance, the first punks used his plea as a bet. The likely result was that one would pass through the future not as a survivor, but as a ruin: a shabby old man in the rain. The odds were implicit in the event—and in 1985, in Los Angeles, with “punk” still the only new story rock ’n’ roll had to tell, a band called God and the State, formed two years before, defunct about the same time, would sum up the story with its sole, posthumous record, a collection of demos called
Ruins: The Complete Works of God and the State.

Here it was: the punk pottery shard. The notes to the disc told the reader that the band members had come together in a certain place and time, and then separated—scattered all over the globe. Whoever was left in L.A. to put out the album wrote on the sleeve: “The record was produced in ten hours, for $200. There are a lot of jokes in the songs; but some listeners don’t think they’re funny, and others don’t even think they’re jokes, rather symptoms of spiritual decay. There is an intended message of hope, of finding power in yourself against domination and power’s corruption; but some find the songs as cynical and as glib as the clever people they occasionally denounce.” And that may be the best possible description of punk’s would-be secret society, save for these words from Jean-Pierre Gorin’s film
Routine Pleasures,
which is about a model railroad club: “We are all like bit players in a Preston Sturges movie, ready to testify in front of a small-town jury in terms whose relevance would escape anyone but ourselves.”

In Winterland on 14 January 1978, punk was no secret society. When the crowd was faced with a band that was already legend, with the thing itself,
“punk” became a representation several times removed. One had heard that, in the U.K., audiences “gobbed”—spit—at punk performers; in San Francisco the Sex Pistols were greeted with a curtain of gob. One had heard that, in the U.K., there was violence at punk shows (the storied event told of a woman losing an eye to a shattered beer glass; Sid Vicious was said to be responsible, though he denied it, but not that he had beaten a journalist with a chain); in San Francisco a man in a football helmet butted his way through the crowd, smashed a paraplegic out of his wheelchair, and was himself beaten to the floor. Hadn’t Johnny Rotten said he wanted to destroy passersby? It was, at this point, an act: a collective attempt to prove that the physical representation of an aesthetic representation could produce reality, or at least real blood.

Not for long; with the Sex Pistols on stage, everything changed. Slumping like Quasimodo under heavy air, Johnny Rotten cut through the curiosity of the crowd with a twist of his neck. He hung onto the microphone stand like a man caught in a wind tunnel; ice, paper cups, coins, books, hats, and shoes flew by him as if sucked up by a vacuum. He complained about the quality of the “presents”; a perfectly rolled umbrella landed at his feet. “That’ll do,” he said.

Sid Vicious was there to bait the crowd; two fans climbed onto the stage and bloodied his nose. A representation of a representation, even streaked with his own gore, his arm bandaged from a self-inflicted gouging, he was, in a strange way, hardly there at all: this was actually not happening. For decades, pulp rock novels had ended with a scene out of
The Golden Bough,
with the ritual devouring of the star by his followers, and Sid Vicious was begging for it, for the absolute confirmation that he was a star. A few feet away, Johnny Rotten was eating the expectations the crowd had brought with it.

Paul Cook was hidden behind his drums. Steve Jones sounded like he was playing a guitar factory, not a guitar; it was inconceivable there were only three instruments on stage. The stage was full of ghosts; song by song, Johnny Rotten ground his teeth down to points.

I can compare the sensation this performance produced only to
Five Million Years to Earth,
a film made in England in 1967 under the title
Quatermass and the Pit.

The time and place is Swinging London, where the reconstruction of a subway station has revealed a large, oblong, metal object: a spaceship, as any moviegoer could tell the cops and bureaucrats who can’t. Near the object are the fossilized remains of apemen; within it are the perfectly preserved corpses of human-sized insects. The scientist Quatermass is called in.

Putting the pieces together, he determines that, five million years before, Martians—the insects—faced with the extinction of life on their own planet, sent a small band of scientists to earth. Their goal is to implant the Martian essence in an alien life form (the gimmick is a nice anticipation of the theory of the selfish gene): to find a home for the soul of the Martian race.

The Martians, Quatermass slowly learns, were by nature genocidal: the death of their planet is their own work. Indeed it is their masterpiece, and so to maintain themselves on earth they must destroy it. The Martian scientists select the most promising earth creatures—australopithecines, which emerged perhaps eight million years ago, and which most paleoanthropologists consider directly ancestral to our own genus—and, through genetic surgery, set a small group on the road to planetary dominance. Endowed with the Martian traits of cognition and bloodlust (the latter notion, in 1967, a nod to the fashionable human-origin theories of Robert Ardrey), the chosen australopithecines follow their coded path to Homo sapiens and inherit the earth. Once the new species has achieved the technology necessary to dominate nature, destiny will be manifested in its destruction.

But the graft is not perfect; the contradiction between earth and Martian genes is never fully absorbed. Though there is no consciousness of the intervention, there is a phylogenetic memory. Freud believed that modern people in some fashion remember, as actual events, the parricides he thought established human society, and unconsciously preserve that memory in otherwise inexplicably persistent myths and rituals; in
Moses and Monotheism
he argued
that, hundreds of years after the fact, the Israelites carried a memory of their forebears’ murder of a first Moses, even though in oral and written traditions the event was completely suppressed. In
Five Million Years to Earth
the argument is that modern people remember step-parents who, with infinite patience, set out to kill their progeny—and the idea explains why, with their all-powerful science, the Martians did not simply wipe out life on earth as they found it. They meant to perpetuate themselves on earth by making its history—by coding its end in its beginning. A passion for prophecy, it seems, is also a Martian trait: they loved drama as much as death.

For Quatermass, all sorts of phenomena that as a scientist he has dismissed as relics of an irrational past take on a new meaning. Poring through books on ritual and myth, he begins to understand that along with its domination of nature, its march toward mastery and abundance, the new species has produced irreducible images of a primordial displacement. They are attempts to cast the alien out; to abstract the implanted traits from the body, to reify them into demonism. But there is a contradiction here too: it is only the alien intelligence that permits the species to engage in a process as complex as reification—a sort of fetishization of alienation, where human properties are transferred to things that human beings have themselves produced, things that then operate autonomously, finally turning human beings into things—and reification cuts a two-way street. Once expelled, once removed into a representation of the demonic, the alien presence casts a spell. Quatermass discovers that not only did the Martians put their name on the site of the subway station where their remains were found (frantic research reveals that its address, “Hobb’s Lane,” once meant “Devil’s Haunt”), thus making it, in medieval times, a cursed place, they have, in the shape of the part-human, part-horned-animal figure of “The Sorcerer,” inscribed their image on the wall of the Cro-Magnon sanctuary of Trois Frères, thus making it, in paleolithic times, a place of worship. “The Sorcerer” echoes across fifteen thousand years into an otherwise inexplicable Christian prayer: “The Lord is in this place, how dreadful is this place.” Human history begins to make sense, but it is no longer human.