Lipstick Traces (2 page)

??? What is DADAyama ???

DADAyama is

to be reached from railroad stations only by a double somersault

Hic salto mortale /

Now or never /

DADAyama makes

the blood boil like it

enrages the crowd

in the melting pot /

(partly bullfight arena—partly Red Front meeting—partly

National Assembly)—

1/2 gold plate—1/2 silver-plated iron

plus surplus value

Echoing each other across half a century, Costello and Mehring raise the question that shapes this book: is it a mistake to confuse the Sex Pistols’ moment with a major event in history—and what is history anyway? Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured—new institutions, new maps, new rulers, new winners and losers—or is it also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language? To fix a precious disruption, why is it that both Mehring and Costello find themselves talking about train platforms and blood pressure? The happenstance of specific words in common is an accident, but it might suggest a real affinity. The two men are talking about the same thing, looking for words to make disruption precious; that may not be an accident at all. If the language they are speaking, the impulse they are voicing, has its own history, might it not tell a very different story from the one we’ve been hearing all our lives?

The question is too big to tackle now—it has to be put aside, left to find its own shape. What it leaves behind is music; listening now to the Sex Pistols’ records, it doesn’t seem like a mistake to confuse their moment with a major event in history. Listening to “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “Bodies,” to Elvis Costello’s
This Year’s Model,
to the Clash’s “Complete Control,” to
the Buzzcocks’ “Boredom,” X-ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” and
Germfree Adolescents,
Essential Logic’s “Wake Up,” the Raincoats’ “Fairytale in the Supermarket,” Wire’s
Chairs Missing,
the Mekons’ “Never Been in a Riot,” Joy Division’s “An Ideal for Living” and
Unknown Pleasures,
the Slits’ “Once upon a time in a living room,” the Gang of Four’s “At Home He’s a Tourist” and “Return the Gift,” the Au Pairs’ “Kerb Crawler,” Kleenex’s “Ü” and (after Kimberly-Clark forced the band to change its name) Liliput’s “Split” and “Eisiger Wind,” to the Adverts’
Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts
(on the sleeve, a smear of color around a photo collage of a public housing complex and a white billboard with the words “Land of Milk and Honey” running in bureaucratic type: the sound was millenarian from the beginning, certain to lead the listener into the promised land, or forty years in the wilderness)—listening now, and listening especially to
The Roxy London WC 2 (Jan–Apr 77),
a shoddy live album where behind table talk and breaking glass one can hear various groups of public speakers which before Johnny Rotten announced himself as an antichrist had not existed even in the minds of those who made them up—listening to this relatively small body of work, now exiled to cut-out bins, bargain racks, collectors’ sales, or flea markets—I feel a sense of awe at how fine the music was: how irreducible it remains.

What remains irreducible about this music is its desire to change the world. The desire is patent and simple, but it inscribes a story that is infinitely complex—as complex as the interplay of the everyday gestures that describe the way the world already works. The desire begins with the demand to live not as an object but as a subject of history—to live as if something actually depended on one’s actions—and that demand opens onto a free street. Damning God and the state, work and leisure, home and family, sex and play, the audience and itself, the music briefly made it possible to experience all those things as if they were not natural facts but ideological constructs: things that had been made and therefore could be altered, or done away with altogether. It became possible to see those things as bad jokes, and for the music to come forth as a better joke. The music came forth as a no that became a yes, then a no again, then again a yes: nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false. If nothing was true, everything was possible. In the pop milieu, an arena maintained
by society at large both to generate symbols and to defuse them, in the only milieu where a nobody like Johnny Rotten had a chance to be heard, all rules fell away. In tones that pop music had never produced, demands were heard that pop music had never made.

Because of Johnny Rotten’s ludicrous proclamation—in one sense, he was from his first recorded moment a shabby old man in the rain trying to get out his crazy words (“I want to destroy pass–ers–by,” croaks the Antichrist, reading from his smudgy broadsheet; you give the bum a wide berth)—teenagers screamed philosophy; thugs made poetry; women demystified the female; a nice Jewish girl called Susan Whitby renamed herself Lora Logic and took the stage of the Roxy in a haze of violence and confusion. Everyone shouted past melody, then rhyme, then harmony, then rhythm, then beat, until the shout became the first principle of speech—sometimes the last. Old oaths, carrying forgotten curses, which themselves contained buried wishes, were pressed into seven-inch pieces of plastic as a bet that someone would listen, that someone would decipher codes the speakers themselves didn’t know they were transmitting.

I began to wonder where this voice came from. At a certain time, beginning in late 1975, in a certain place—London, then across the U.K., then spots and towns all over the world—a negation of all social facts was made, which produced the affirmation that anything was possible. “I saw the Sex Pistols,” said Bernard Sumner of Joy Division (later, after the band’s singer killed himself, of New Order). “They were terrible. I thought they were great. I wanted to get up and be terrible too.” Performers made fools of themselves, denounced their ancestors, and spit on their audiences, which spit back. I began to wonder where these gestures came from. It was, finally, no more than an art statement, but such statements, communicated and received in any form, are rare. I knew a lot about rock ’n’ roll, but I didn’t know about this. Did the voice and the gestures come out of nowhere, or were they sparked? If they were sparked, what sparked them?

A twenty-year-old stands before a microphone and, after declaring himself an all-consuming demon, proceeds to level everything around him—to reduce it to rubble. He denies the claims of his society with a laugh, then pulls
the string on the history of his society with a shift of vowels so violent that it creates pure pleasure. He reduces the fruits of Western civilization to a set of guerrilla acronyms and England’s green and pleasant land to a block of public housing. “We have architecture that is so banal and destructive to the human spirit that walking to work is in itself a depressing experience. The streets are shabby and tawdry and litter-strewn, and the concrete is rain-streaked and graffiti-strewn, and the stairwells of the social-engineering experiments are lined in shit and junkies and graffiti. Nobody goes out of their rooms. There is no sense of community, so old people die in despair and loneliness. We’ve had a lowering of the quality of life”—so said not Johnny Rotten as he recorded “Anarchy in the U.K.” in 1976, but “Saint Bob” Geldof (first runner-up for the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize because of his work organizing pop-music campaigns to fight African famine) as he repeated the social critique of “Anarchy in the U.K.” in 1985. Reduced to a venomous stew, that was what the song had said—except that as the Sex Pistols performed it, you heard not woe but glee.

Is this the em pee el ay

Or is this the yew dee ay

Or is this the eye rrrrrr ay

I thought it was the yew kay

Or just

Another

Country

Another council tenancy!

It was the sound of the city collapsing. In the measured, deliberate noise, words tumbling past each other so fast it was almost impossible to tell them apart, you could hear social facts begin to break up—when Johnny Rotten rolled his r’s, it sounded as if his teeth had been ground down to points. This was a code that didn’t have to be deciphered: who knew what the MPLA was, and who cared? It sounded like fun, wrecking the world. It felt like freedom. It was the freedom, after hearing the news that a San Diego teenager named Brenda Spenser had, because she didn’t like Mondays, opened fire on her high school and killed three people, to write a song celebrating the event—as Bob Geldof had once done.

“I Don’t Like Mondays” was a hit; in the United States it might have
made number one, save for Brenda Spenser’s superseding right to a fair trial. Too bad—wasn’t a song like “I Don’t Like Mondays” what “punk,” which is what the putatively nihilist music generated by the Sex Pistols would be called, was all about? All about what? In the course of an interview, Bob Geldof’s version of “Anarchy in the U.K.,” like the explanations Johnny Rotten offered interviewers in 1976 and 1977, is perfectly rational: on record, both flesheater Johnny and Saint Bob call up the words of surrealist Luis Buñuel—who, Pauline Kael notes, “once referred to some of those who praised
Un Chien Andalou
as ‘that crowd of imbeciles who find the film beautiful or poetic when it is fundamentally a desperate and passionate call to murder.’ ”

It is a question of nihilism—and “Anarchy in the U.K.,” a fan might like to think, was something different: a negationist prank. “‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ is a statement of self-rule, of ultimate independence, of do-it-yourself,” said Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, and whatever that meant (do what yourself?), it wasn’t nihilism. Nihilism is the belief in nothing and the wish to become nothing: oblivion is its ruling passion. Its best depiction is in Larry Clark’s
Tulsa,
his photographic memoir of early 1960s youths spiking themselves to death with speed rather than becoming what they already look like: local Charley Starkweathers and Caril Fugates. Nihilism can find a voice in art, but never satisfaction. “This isn’t a play, Larry,” one of Clark’s needle buddies told him after he’d taken one too many pictures. “This is real fuckin’ life.” “So other people didn’t think it was a play,” Clark recalled years later, “but I did”—even though he’d been in it, using a shutter timer to shoot the blood running down his own arm.

Nihilism means to close the world around its own self-consuming impulse; negation is the act that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems—but only when the act is so implicitly complete it leaves open the possibility that the world may be nothing, that nihilism as well as creation may occupy the suddenly cleared ground. The nihilist, no matter how many people he or she might kill, is always a solipsist: no one exists but the actor, and only the actor’s motives are real. When the nihilist pulls the trigger, turns on the gas, sets the fire, hits the vein, the world ends. Negation is always political: it assumes the existence of other people, calls them into being. Still, the tools the negationist seems forced to use—real
or symbolic violence, blasphemy, dissipation, contempt, ridiculousness—change hands with those of the nihilist. As a negation, “Anarchy in the U.K.” could be rationally translated in interviews: seeking to prove that the world is not as it seems, the negationist recognizes that to others the world is as it seems to be. But by the time of “Holidays in the Sun,” the Sex Pistols’ fourth and last single, issued in October 1977, just a month short of a year after “Anarchy in the U.K.,” no such translations were offered, or possible.

By that time, countless new groups of public speakers were issuing impossible demands, and the Sex Pistols had been banned across the U.K. Waving the bloody shirt of public decency, even public safety, city officials canceled their shows; chain stores refused to stock their records. Cutting “Anarchy in the U.K.” out of the market just as it was reaching its audience, EMI, the Sex Pistols’ first label, dropped them after the televised “fuck” that made Declan McManus’ day, recalled the records, and melted them down. Patriotic workers refused to handle “God Save the Queen,” the follow-up single, a three-minute riot against Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee; A&M, the band’s second label, destroyed what few copies were produced. Finally released on Virgin, the Sex Pistols’ third label, “God Save the Queen” was erased from the BBC charts and topped the hit parade as a blank, thus creating the bizarre situation in which the nation’s most popular record was turned into contraband. The press contrived a moral panic to sell papers, but the panic seemed real soon enough: the Sex Pistols were denounced in Parliament as a threat to the British way of life, by socialists as fascist, by fascists as communist. Johnny Rotten was caught on the street and slashed with a razor; another band member was chased down and beaten with an iron bar.

The group itself had become contraband. In late 1975, when the Sex Pistols first appeared, crashing another band’s concert and impersonating the opening act, the plug was pulled after ten minutes; now to play in public they were forced to turn up in secret, under a false name. The very emptiness of the terrain they had cleared—the multiplication of new voices from below, the intensification of abuse from above, both sides fighting for possession
of that suddenly cleared ground—had pushed them toward self-destruction, into the silence of all nihilist noise.