by Greil Marcus
Slits flyer, 1978
Looking back, it remains possible to take this version of the rock ’n’ roll story for the truth, as the whole story—not because the music punk discredited was worthless, but because what little remains of the Slits’ music allows you to imagine that the sound they made communicated more completely and more mysteriously than the most carefully crafted work of anyone who came before or after. “A Boring Life,” heard as it was made in 1977 or heard a decade later, rewrites the history of rock ’n’ roll.
IT’S SAID
It’s said that in the 1950s fifteen thousand black vocal groups made records. I don’t know if this is true; when I first came across the figure, my eyes bugged out. Punk made it credible.
Only the smallest fraction of those groups would have been heard by the public, though all would have been bent on the public—on fame and money, and on the sensation that if only in the fantasy utopia of a three-minute record, this was the momentary empowerment of people who never before had reason to think anyone might be interested in what they sounded like, or what they had to say. It was a surge of new voices unprecedented in the history of popular culture, and along with other forms of early rock ’n’ roll—the sophisticated rhythm and blues of Ray Charles and Clyde McPhatter’s Drifters, the rockabilly of Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis, the mad irruptions of Little Richard, the savvy teen anthems of Chuck Berry, the surprises of noisemakers like the Monotones—this event marked the transformation of popular music all over the world. “I must speak to a boy named Elvis Presley,” said the headmistress of a London comprehensive academy in 1956, “because he has carved his name on every desk in the school.”
“It was so wonderful to have rediscovered at what was already an advanced age the sort of feelings I first had when I heard Little Richard and Elvis Presley as a kid. It was exciting, but there was an element of fear as well—you thought, ‘Can this be real?’ You went to the gigs and there was a feeling that you were participating in something that had come from another planet, it seemed so remarkable that it was happening at all.”
—BBC disc jockey John Peel, 1986, on London punk, 1976
The next major event in rock ’n’ roll—the emergence of the Beatles in Liverpool and London between 1962 and 1963, powered by the black rock of James Brown, Motown in Detroit, and Stax in Memphis—produced no such cacophony. Countless new bands recorded, but once revitalized the music was soon dominant and entrenched across the West; linked to the social revolt of American blacks, then to the international rebellion of white youth, rock ’n’ roll grew self-important. Hailed as art, it grew self-conscious. The spirit that brought the sound to the attention of the world in the first place—the eagerness to do absolutely anything to get heard that still leaps out of so many 1950s 45s, or for that matter out of so many third-rate 1964 Beatle imitations—was replaced by a cult of wisdom, responsibility, and virtuosity.
Bypassed the first time around by hundreds of tiny independent labels, from the mid-1960s the major record companies covered the major artists and built a center; idiosyncratic music, a concept that would have made no sense at all in 1956, soon sounded merely cranky. By 1967, a pop year organized around the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, rock ’n’ roll was governed by an ideology of affirmation, creativity, and novelty. Almost everything sounded hopeful, significant, and new, but in fact the music was imploding. Almost everything was aimed at the center, and the spinning center threw off whatever was not. End-of-the-decade warnings—the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed, Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat, John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a riot goin’ on, the post-Riot wave of disillusioned, politicized black pop—were ignored even by those who made them. The music business moved toward rationalization; the process was almost complete by 1975, when leisure-service conglomerates had concentrated record sales in the hands of corporations hardly more numerous than American auto manufacturers. “Entertainment isn’t a suspension of belief,” Michael Ventura wrote in 1985, “but a suspension of values. It may even be said that this is the meaning of ‘entertainment’ as it is practiced among us: the relief of suspending values with which we are tired of living and frightened of living without . . . To go from a job you don’t like to watching a screen on which others live more intensely than you . . . this is American life, by and large”; Ventura could as easily have said modern life. In 1977, in its annual report, Warner Communications, then the leading leisure-service corporation, had already faced the problem:
Entertainment has become a necessity. The statement seems unsupportable: can entertainment be necessary in the sense that food, clothing and shelter are necessary? . . . the problem in the above statement is not with the word “necessary,” but with the word “entertainment.” As recently as twenty years ago, “entertainment”—diversion, amusement—would have served adequately to describe the vast majority of movies, television, radio, popular print and recorded sound. But today the word seems inadequate, outdistanced by events. The role of these media is now far more various and crucial than the pleasurable passing of time. In their mechanical operations . . . the media [have remained] essentially the same. Yet in their personal and social usefulness, they are utterly changed . . . The pace of world industrialization that has steadily accelerated since the 19th century is widely believed to have effected a severe challenge to individual identity: an increasingly efficient and standardized world jeopardizes personal freedom, importance and opportunity, with a consequent sensation of disenfranchisement of self.
This is what, in 1956, Harold Rosenberg meant when he spoke of “proletarianization”: the “process of depersonalization and passivity” brought on by modern social organization, the extension of “the psychic condition of the nineteenth-century factory worker” into the totality of twentieth-century society. “Demoralized by their strangeness to themselves and by their lack of control over their relations with others,” Rosenberg said, “members of every class surrender themselves to artificially constructed mass egos that promise to restore their links with the past and future.” In 1977 Warner Communications did not see things so bleakly:
Having allowed technology to create the problem, man has begun using technology to redress it. With the exponentially increased availability of all forms of communication, the media of “entertainment” have been pressed into service to provide the individual with models of experience, opportunities for self-recognition, and the ingredients of identity . . . The movement of information—at many rates of speed, to many kinds of people—is the business of Warner Communications. And the phenomenal growth of our company, along with other leaders in the field, reflects a marriage of culture and technology unprecedented in history, and a commensurate revolution in the human sense of self.
THE WORLD
The world had prospered despite the disappearance of the Jordan Motor Car Company, makers of the Jordan Playboy, the most glamorous American automobile of the 1920s; presumably the world could get along without the equivalent of fifteen thousand doo-wop groups making records. With the market hugely expanded and organized from the top down, record sales boomed, even though the flush economy of the 1960s was giving way to an irrational, shrinking economy that mocked traditional values, be they the pre-rock values of work-hard-and-save-your-money or the already traditional 1960s values of don’t-work-and-get-it-while-you-can. The plague hit the U.K. before the U.S.A., which would take a couple of years to catch up. It is no accident that The Ice Age, Margaret Drabble’s novel about the economic and social collapse of Britain, peopled with characters who actively welcomed depression as a relief from anxiety, appeared at the same time as the Sex Pistols. Both sought a purchase on a world in which society’s promises were no longer kept, and in which those who believed they would be kept were swiftly exposed as fools.
Bills for war or social planning came due, Arab
s with oil began dealing with the West like Westerners with guns once dealt with Arabs, unemployment rose, inflation soared, capital dried up. The world promised in the 1950s (“What do you want?” read a British ad in 1957. “Better and cheaper food? Lots of new clothes? A dream home with the latest comforts and labour-saving devices? A new car . . . a motor-launch . . . a light aircraft of your own? Whatever you want, it’s coming your way—plus greater leisure for enjoying it all. With electronics, automation and nuclear energy, we are entering on the new Industrial Revolution which will supply our every need . . . quickly . . . cheaply . . . abundantly”), a world apparently on the verge of realization in the 1960s, seemed like a cruel joke by 1975. Based less on concrete suffering than on blocked expectations, panic set in; so did the urge to seek revenge. Drabble wrote:
All over the nation, families who had listened to the news looked at one another and said, “Goodness me,” or “Whatever next,” or “I give up,” or “Well, fuck that,” before embarking on an evening’s viewing of colour television, or a large hot meal, or a trip to the pub, or a choral society evening. All over the country, people blamed other people for the things that were going wrong—the trades unions, the present government, the miners, the car workers, the seamen, the Arabs, the Irish, their own husbands, their own wives, their own idle good-for-nothing offspring, comprehensive education. Nobody knew whose fault it really was, but most people managed to complain fairly forcefully about somebody; only a few were stunned into honourable silence. Those who had been complaining for twenty years about the negligible rise in the cost of living did not, of course, have the grace to wish they had saved their breath to cool their porridge, because once a complainer always a complainer, so those who had complained most when there was nothing to complain about were having a really wonderful time now.
The Penguins, one of 15,000 black vocal groups to make records in the 1950s
MAIN STREAM
Mainstream rock ’n’ roll, by 1975 nearly all-white and middle-class, continued to play out its string to rhythms that were nothing if not passively congruent. “Adventure” and “risk” had been watchwords, finally cant words, of the 1960s, an era which had itself become cant, “the sixties.” Now the deaths, breakdowns, and burnouts attendant upon the struggles and experiments of those times were converted into the cant watchword of the 1970s: “survival.”
Queer as the word might seem as a definition of choices open to people who were white, middle-class, and relatively young—for it was almost exclusively to such people that the word was applied—it proved impossible to resist. Through the magic of ordinary language, “survival” and its twin, “survivor,” wrote the 1960s out of history as a mistake and translated the 1970s performance of any act of personal or professional stability (holding a job, remaining married, staying out of a mental hospital, or simply not dying) into heroism. First corrupted as a reference to those “survivors” of “the sixties” who were now engaged in “real life,” the word contained an implacable equation: survival was real life.
Soon enough, anyone whose material or physical existence was patently not in jeopardy could claim the title of survivor, and to be named a survivor was to receive the highest praise. The idea grew arms and legs. Intimations of aggression crept in: ads for a new line of suitcases, “The Survivor,” made it plain that what was at stake was the survival of the fittest—in the jungle of the new economy, nothing else mattered. The idea conquered ontology as it overran ethics. “Garp is a survivor,” wrote a fan of John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp, knowing full well that Irving’s hero is shot to death at the age of thirty-three. Here was the ultimate victory of the idea over its word: the dead survivor.
The notion of what in 1976 Bruno Bettelheim called “a completely empty survivorship,” where “survival is all, it does not matter how, why, what for,” invaded every form of discourse. Bettelheim was writing about the new philosophical sanctification of “survival,” as opposed to even a fantasy of resistance, in Nazi extermination camps: according to such arguments as Lina Wertmuller’s film Seven Beauties and Terrence Des Pres’s camp-study, The Survivor, he said, “the only thing that is really important, is life in its crudest, merely biological form . . . we must ‘live beyond compulsions of culture’ and “by the body’s crude claims.’ ” One had to live, in other words, according to a dictatorship of necessity, not beyond culture but before it, and as Hannah Arendt once wrote, the dictates of the body were inimical to freedom: when survival took precedence, “freedom had to be surrendered to the urgency of the life process itself.” In 1951 in The Rebel, Albert Camus retold a different story—
Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary mentions a German lieutenant—for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost unbearable—who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery, perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music audible to him alone
—a story, Camus said, of an “harmonious insurrection.” But Camus was no longer fashionable; neither were cold and hunger or the “state of constant want and acute misery” Arendt meant by “necessity.” Language turned inside out, so that culture was a compulsion, necessity a luxury, survival an affluent sensibility, and thus the creed of survivalism was embraced most eagerly not by those suffering privation, but by rock stars. You could read the new ideology off the record titles: Survivor, Rock and Roll Survivor, “You’re a Survivor,” I Survive, “Soul Survivor,” Street Survivors, Survival, Surviving, “I Will Survive,” on and on into endless redundancy—in almost every case signifying the offerings of performers who should have been stunned into an honorable silence years before, but who now found themselves granted the dispensation to purvey their wares forever and, what is more, to celebrate the act as a moral triumph, a triumph that devalued any effort to pursue adventure and risk. The exchange of a guarantee of dying of boredom for a guarantee of not dying of hunger was a good deal—the only game in town.
NOW
Now identified with those who had the money and the corporate affiliations to secure the most sophisticated and arcane tools, rock ’n’ roll became an old story: a parody of the time had a rock star demanding that his label fund the recording of his next album in outer space, but it didn’t come off as a parody. Rock ’n’ roll became an ordinary social fact, like a commute or a highway construction project. It became a habit, a structure, an invisible oppression.
A mythical era even as it unfolded, the sixties were based in the belief that since everything was true, everything was possible. Among rock stars, that Utopian ideology was by the 1970s reduced to a well-heeled solipsism. On the terms of the barefoot solipsism of extermination camp survival, even a fantasy of resistance—which by its nature almost had to be a fantasy of collectivity, of solidarity—was Utopian; insisting on the sensitivity of the individual as the source of all value, rock stars made a utopia out of solipsism. Like movie stars, they had made so much money that they remained untouched by and uninterested in what was happening in the world, and their renderings of a life of ease or of small problems proved attractive to a very large audience. There was no need for change; “change” began to seem like an old-fashioned, sixties word. The chaos in society at large called for a music of permanence and reassurance; in the pop world, time stood still. For years that seemed like decades, you could turn on the radio with the assurance that you would hear James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.” It was all right; they were good songs.
SOME PEOPLE
Some people began to lose their taste for surprise; others had never known it. “People pay to see others believe in themselves,” Kim Gordon of the New York punk band Sonic Youth wrote in 1983. “On stage, in the midst of rock ’n’ roll, many things happen and anything can happen, whether people come as voyeurs or come to submit to the moment.” Such words would not have been written in the mid-1970s
, when people paid to see others believe that others believed in them. As the concerts of the time ended, fans stood up, lit matches, held them high: they were praying.
It was 1974. Malcolm McLaren was briefly in the United States, managing the New York Dolls, then on their last legs. They had wandered into his shop, played him their records; he’d laughed. “I couldn’t believe how anybody could be so bad,” he said long after, citing the moment as the inspiration for the Sex Pistols. “The fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force that I began to realize, ‘I’m laughing, I’m talking to these guys, I’m looking at them, and I’m laughing with them’; and I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well. Whether you were able to even know about rock ’n’ roll to the extent that you were able to write songs properly wasn’t important any longer . . . The Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.”
