My new rose, lets go

Hey ho, let’s go
Hey ho, let’s go
[…]
They’re pil­ing in the back seat
They’re gen­er­at­ing steam heat
Pulsat­ing to the back beat
The Blitzkrieg Bop.
(Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop”)

Even if the lyr­ics of punk did not always address polit­ical issues or had expli­citly sub­vers­ive and anti-​establishment lyr­ics they were usu­ally pro­voc­at­ive, con­tro­ver­sial and against moral and social pro­pri­ety as comes clear in Ramones’ extremely short and ener­getic songs: “Now I wanna sniff some glue /​Now I wanna have somethin’ to do”. The drum­mer Tommy Ramone defines punk: “Soon you had end­less solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bull­shit rock ‘n’ roll.” Their music was so fast that when Sally Flesh saw them play­ing their blitzkrieg sounds in Ber­lin he had for­got­ten every song when he exited the venue.

Okay, okay, not all songs were rebel­li­ous. One finds also tra­di­tional rock ‘n’ roll lyr­ics à la boy-​meets-​girl-​girl-​dumps-​boy. Actu­ally in the first punk single by a Brit­ish group, The Damned’s “New Rose”, released on Octo­ber 22, 1976, Dave Vanian sings: “I got a new rose /​I got her good /​… /​I never thought this could hap­pen to me”. How­ever, singing about love was con­sidered to belong to pop, which belonged to the private sphere, whereas, punk “was pub­lic, determ­inedly in the world”, writes Sav­age. Even if lyr­ics some­times were about this private thing called love emo­tions were vocal­ized with raging style. It was not merely lyr­ics that mattered, since the “brand new beat” in itself was sub­vers­ive and under­min­ing the Law. This “revolu­tion rock” expressed the free­dom and speedy intens­ity of the times.

“This is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band”, the Eng­lish fan­zine Side­burns instruc­ted in Decem­ber 1976. And in May 1977, Melody Maker described punk as the sound of less music­ally com­pet­ent but more rebel­li­ous bands than the emer­ging New Wave bands. There was rad­ical equal­ity in the punk’s DIY atti­tude: who­ever – “even me”, Sally Flesh says, who admits, proudly, that he never learned to play the gui­tar how­ever hard The Pin Ups gui­tar­ist Floyd Super­star tried to teach him – could play punk as long as he remembered the basic “rules” of punk: short, fast, hard-​edged songs with stripped-​down instru­ment­a­tion, shouted and harsh vocals, over-​amplified and nerve-​shattering dis­tor­ted gui­tars, the repet­it­ive rhythm of stiff bass, relent­less and dry drums. As long as you remembered a crude, aggress­ive and raw intens­ity, you could not go wrong.

The aggress­ive sound and aes­thet­ics of punk was a musical revolu­tion that fought against both the music industry and the revolt­ing and pathetic super groups that had noth­ing to offer any­more. It was a fin­ger to the old farts as it turned away from the pom­pous and grandi­loquent pro­gress­ive rock, the tech­nical vir­tu­os­ity of com­plic­ated gui­tar solos, the mediocrity of pop songs and the tri­vi­al­ity of disco: “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977″ (The Clash, “1977”). Johnny Rot­ten revealed in an inter­view why they are in a band: “It’s because we’re bored with all that old crap. Like every decent human being should be.”

How­ever, many punk bands retained the law of rock ’n’ roll: 4/​4 time and verse-​chorus form. Moreover, one should not for­get that punk was not cre­ated from scratch. Sally Flesh high­lights as its pre­de­cessors The Vel­vet Under­ground, The Son­ics, The Kings­men, MC5, The Stooges, Sui­cide, The Dic­tat­ors, The Saints, The Who, and, last but not least, David Bowie. Then again, Pete Shel­ley claims that punk evolved from sub-​heavy metal bands played badly. “That’s what it was, fast riffs and singing over the top”, says he.

And do not for­get that you can and must do everything – records, fan­zines, gigs, clubs, fly­ers, etc. – yourself – punk was inter­net before any­body had heard about it. And it was a visual revolt. There are thou­sands and thou­sands of images that present the energy, rage, fury and burn­ing cool­ness of punk. Jamie Reid’s situ­ation­ist cut-​and-​past designs had a huge influ­ence on the ripped up punk style and its visual aes­thetic. His graphic designs – which were done with what was at hand, as he recalls, “Xerox and cheap print­ing, rips and black­mail lettering” – for the Sex Pis­tols have become iconic images: a poster of a ripped and safety-​pinned Union Flag, his sleeves for “God Save the Queen” single or Never Mind the Bol­locks.

Filth & Fury

I am an anti­christ
I am an anarch­ist
Don’t know what I want
But I know how to get it
I wanna des­troy passerby.
(Sex Pis­tols, “Anarchy in the UK”)

The Sex Pis­tols, the first gig of which took place in Novem­ber 6, 1975 at St. Martin’s School of Art, was there to out­rage and to pro­duce shock effects. It denied any polit­ical con­text for their songs, or as the singer, Johnny Rot­ten spewed the vocals “as if his teeth had been ground down two points”, as Greil Mar­cus describes, through Steve Jones’ sear­ing wall of gui­tar sound: “I get pissed, des­troy!” (Sex Pis­tols, “Anarchy in the UK”). Once Johnny Rot­ten chal­lenged the audi­ence: “Bet you don’t hate us as much as we hate you!” They were, Steve Jones said, not so much into music as they were chaos. Then again, “Our songs are ideas. Just spend one night in Lon­don and you’ll become fucked off with the old ways. You’re bound to get ideas from that”, Johnny Rot­ten admit­ted in an inter­view in Decem­ber 11, 1976. Jon Sav­age sailed with the Sex Pis­tols on their Jubilee boat gig up and down the Thames on the Queen Elisa­beth where the Sex Pis­tols played “for their lives” and Johnny Rot­ten poured all his resent­ments and frus­tra­tions into “a cauldron of rage”. “Rot­ten gives up on los­ing the feed­back, and the band slams into ‘Anarchy’, right on the cue with the Houses of Par­lia­ment. A great moment. It’s like they have been uncaged – the frus­tra­tion in not being able to play bursts into total energy and attack.” The police inter­rup­ted the gig: “ ‘No Fun’ SCREAMED out as the police boats move in for the kill is one of the rock ’n’ roll moments EVER.”

The infam­ous Anarchy in the UK tour of 1976, fea­tur­ing the Sex Pis­tols, The Clash, The Damned, the Heart­break­ers and the Buzz­cocks, was made up of noise, chaos, con­flict, con­front­a­tion – and can­cel­la­tions. “That was when the bal­loon went up”, Joe Strum­mer tells. In 1979, Dick Heb­dige, who saw punk as a visual response to the socio-​economic crises of the 1970s, wrote: “Clothed in chaos, they pro­duced Noise in the calmly orches­trated Crisis of every­day life”.

The three fun­da­mental prin­ciples of the punk atti­tude decreed by the Sex Pis­tols were “no future”, “no fun” and “no feel­ings”. Punk res­isted the main­stream bour­geois val­ues and the punk “stars” – all punks were “superstars” – achieved their pos­i­tion in the punk scene, as Barry Sug­ar­man wrote in 1967, “without long years of study, work or sac­ri­fice”. Barry, that’s right: “I don’t work /​… /​I’m a lazy sod” (Sex Pis­tols, “Sev­en­teen”). Mar­cus claims that the Sex Pistol’s “Pretty Vacant” declared the right to not work and to ignore all the val­ues that went with it: “per­sever­ance, ambi­tion, piety, frugal­ity, hon­esty, and hope, the past that God inven­ted work to pay for, the future that work was meant to build”.

There’s no point in ask­ing, you’ll get no reply
Oh just remem­ber I don’t decide
I got no reason it’s all too much
You’ll always find us out to lunch
Oh we’re so pretty
Oh so pretty
we’re vacant.
(Sex Pis­tols, “Pretty Vacant”)

This was rep­re­hens­ible from the stand­point of the Law that aimed to reduce every­one to the state of (legal and moral) object. Its rep­res­ent­at­ives could not under­stand what was tak­ing place. They had been accus­tomed to their abso­lute power and author­ity to include and exclude, to estab­lish the bor­ders between the aud­ible and inaud­ible, the say­able and the unsay­able, the vis­ible and the invis­ible and to determ­ine the dis­tri­bu­tion of parts, roles and pos­i­tions in the soci­ety. When punk chal­lenged, using Jacques Rancière’s term, the estab­lished dis­tri­bu­tion of the sens­ible, the estab­lish­ment was lost. From the col­lect­ive night­mares of the Law emerged this anarch­ical pro­cess of angry res­ist­ance and dis­agree­ment that was a sens­ible, per­cep­tual, aud­ible and visual shock. Because of this, the estab­lish­ment became scared of this social men­ace that viol­ently was sub­vert­ing the law and order. The startled Law reacted by attempt­ing to exclude punk as an insig­ni­fic­ant viol­ent rowdi­ness. The Labour MP Mar­cus Lipton ran­ted that if the pop music is used to des­troy the estab­lished insti­tu­tions, “then it ought to be des­troyed first”. The media called the Sex Pis­tols ringlead­ers of a sick and sin­is­ter con­spir­acy against the Eng­lish way of life. The head­line of the Sunday Times ran: “PUNISH THE PUNKS”. Punk was called “the filth and the fury”, as the head­line of Daily Mir­ror ran on Decem­ber 2, 1976.

The respect­able nor­mal people heard this call of the Law and regarded punk as a per­sonal assault against them and their val­ues. An Eng­lish lorry driver tells that as he was watch­ing with his eight year old kid Bill Grundy’s TV show where swear­ing Sex Pis­tols were inter­viewed he became so out­raged that he kicked in the screen of his TV: “It blew up and I was knocked back­wards. But I was so angry and dis­gus­ted with this filth that I took a swing with my boot.” It is funny how all these decent fath­ers revealed their intol­er­ance and their fear of oth­er­ness in their reac­tions. On the streets and pubs, if they were served, punks invited aggress­ive atten­tion, which once a while turned into phys­ical violence.

When the Sex Pis­tols was sup­posed to visit Fin­land at the end of Janu­ary 1978, the major Finnish news­pa­per Helsingin San­o­mat pub­lished a story about the Sex Pis­tols that described it as dan­ger­ous and strange phe­nom­ena and referred to the crim­inal records of Pis­tols. Not only the Cent­ral Union for Child Wel­fare and con­ser­vat­ive and right-​wing polit­ical children’s and youth organ­isa­tions but also left-​wing ones and the biggest trade union, SAK, fiercely opposed the visit and peti­tioned the gov­ern­ment not to grant work per­mits. The Com­mun­ist and Social Demo­cratic youth organ­isa­tions con­sidered them fas­cists and no argu­ments could turn their nar­row minded, unin­tel­li­gent and dog­matic views. As Antti Einiö, who was organ­iz­ing the gig, said: “the Sex Pis­tols is an Eng­lish working-​class band. In Fin­land, the working-​class circles have stopped them. It is the extreme right that should have opposed this group.” Of course, the Home Sec­ret­ary agreed that Finnish chil­dren and youth must be pro­tec­ted from this kind of filth and the Office for Alien Affairs refused the work permits.

If this was how the Law, its intol­er­ant rep­res­ent­at­ives and lobotom­ized nor­mal people, regarded and treated punk, it is no won­der that many punks shared the mes­sage of “God Save the Queen”:

No future, no future,
No future for you
No future, no future,
No future for me.

No future was not, how­ever, merely a nihil­ist with­drawal from the world. As Johnny Rot­ten said, “We are totally against apathy of any kind”. Accord­ing to the ethos of punk, one should never stag­nate and remain still, never take for gran­ted the given situ­ation and the pos­sib­il­it­ies and lim­its that it is claimed by the Law to have. Thus, punks painted on their shirts the Situ­ation­ist slo­gan “Demand the Impossible”. Punk made, Jon Sav­age says in his England’s Dream­ing, the sem­inal his­tory of punk, impossible demands. This was the only way to free one­self from the apathy of the Law, which declared everything that it did not sanc­tion as abso­lute impossib­il­ity. For punks, anger was energy that could make the impossible pos­sible. This anger touches your ears and your whole body in the storm of over­power­ing noise, shrieks and shouts of the all-​female band The Slits. Its singer, Ari Up later claimed that now girls lack the aggres­sion, which they had in their per­form­ances of over­flow­ing speed, res­ist­ance and revenge: “You gotta be really aggress­ive – you gotta really have the pas­sion of anger with you […] you gotta carry that with you into the music and then let your anger out, you know, it’s just another emo­tion that needs to be expressed”.

Part 3 »>