by Greil Marcus
No doubt a year later McLaren would be playing Dolls records for the Sex Pistols, just as two decades before Sam Phillips had played old blues records for his new rockabilly singers. A banner McLaren painted up and hoisted over the Dolls’ last stages captured the dead time they never escaped: “WHAT ARE THE POLITICS OF BOREDOM?”
IT WAS
It was, once removed, a situationist slogan. “Boredom is always counterrevolutionary,” the situationists had liked to say. McLaren’s question mark was his way of asking how much power might be secreted in the slogans he put such stock in; to find the answer, you had to use the slogans. “Boredom is always counterrevolutionary”—the line was typical of the situationist style, of its voice, a blindside paradox of dead rhetoric and ordinary language floated just this side of non sequitur, the declarative statement turning into a question as you heard it: what does this mean?
You already know, the situationists had answered: all you lack is the consciousness of what you know. Our project is nothing more than a seductive, subversive restatement of the obvious: “Our ideas are in everyone’s mind.” Our ideas about how the world works, about why it must be changed, are in everyone’s mind as sensations almost no one is willing to translate into ideas, so we will do the translating. And that is all we have to do to change the world.
Boredom, to the situationists, was a supremely modern phenomenon, a modern form of control. In feudal times and for the first century of the Industrial Revolution, drudgery and privation produced numbing fatigue and horrible misery, no mystery, just a God-given fact: “In Adam’s fall so sinned we all,” and as for those few who knew neither fatigue nor misery, it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. As the situationists saw modernity, limited work and relative abundance, city planning and the welfare state, produced not happiness but depression and boredom. With God missing, people felt their condition not exactly as a fact, but simply as a fatalism devoid of meaning, which separated every man and woman from every other, which threw all people back upon themselves. I’m not happy—what’s wrong with me?
Fatalism is acceptance: “Que sera, sera” is always counterrevolutionary. But as the situationists understood the modern world, boredom was less a question of work than of leisure. As they set out in the 1950s work seemed to be losing its hold on life; “automation” and “cybernetics” were wonderful new words. Leisure time was expanding—and in order to maintain their power, those who ruled, whether capitalist directors in the West or communist bureaucrats in the East, had to ensure that leisure was as boring as the new forms of work. More boring, if leisure was to replace work as the locus of everyday life, a thousand times more. What could be more productive of an atomized, hopeless fatalism than the feeling that one is deadened precisely where one ought to be having fun?
The eight men and women who gathered in the Italian town of Cosio d’Arroscia on 27 July 1957 to found the Situationist International pledged themselves to intervene in a future they believed to be on the verge of banishing both material necessity and individual autonomy. Modern technology had raised the specter of a world in which “work”—employment, wage labor, whatever tasks were performed because someone else said they had to be—might soon be no more than a fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm. In a new world of unlimited leisure each individual might construct a life, just as in the old world a few privileged artists had constructed their representations of what life could be. It was an old dream, the dream of the young Karl Marx—every man his own artist!—but those who owned the present saw the future far more clearly than any of the sodden leftist sects claiming Marx’s legacy. Those who ruled were reorganizing social life not merely to maintain their control, but to intensify it; modern technics was a two-edged sword, a means to the domination of the free field of abundance and leisure that revolutionaries had fantasized for five hundred years. Thus boredom. Misery led to resentment, which sooner or later found its rightful target, those who ruled. Boredom was a haze, a confusion, and finally the ultimate mode of control, self-control, alienation perfected: a bad conscience.
In modern society, leisure (What do I want to do today?) was replaced by entertainment (What is there to see today?). The potential fact of all possible freedoms was replaced by a fiction of false freedom: I have enough time and money to see whatever there is to see, whatever there is to see others do. Because this freedom was false, it was unsatisfying, it was boring. Because it was boring, it left whoever was unsatisfied to contemplate his or her inability to respond to what, after all, was a hit show. It’s a good show, but I feel dead: my God, what’s wrong with me? It was leisure culture that produced boredom—produced it, marketed it, took the profits, reinvested them. So the world was going to be changed, announced the first number of Internationale situationniste in June 1958, “because we don’t want to be bored . . . raging and ill-informed youth, well-off adolescent rebels lacking a point of view but far from lacking a cause—boredom is what they all have in common. The situationists will execute the judgment contemporary leisure is pronouncing against itself.”
The situationists saw boredom as a social pathology; they looked for its negation among sociopaths. In the pages of their journal, lunatic criminals and rioters without manifestos sometimes seem like the only allies the writers are willing to embrace. The situationists meant to define a stance, not an ideology, because they saw all ideologies as alienations, transformations of subjectivity into objectivity, desire into a power that rendered the individual powerless: “There is no such thing as situationism,” they said for years. The world was a structure of alienations and ideologies, of hierarchies and bureaucracies, each of which they saw as a version of the other; thus they celebrated a madman’s slashing of a famous painting as a symbolic revolt against a bureaucratically administered alienation in which the ideology of the masterpiece reduced whoever looked at it to nothing. In the same way, they understood the responsible parade monitor who tried to keep people in check during a march against the Vietnam War as a bureaucratic ideologue enforcing a split between desire and comportment—and as much the enemy as General William Westmoreland, or for that matter Ho Chi Minh. Both the painting and the war were hit shows; whether a visit to the museum or a march in the street, both turned the spending of free time into the consumption of repression. The masterpiece convinced you that truth and beauty were someone else’s gift from God, the protest in favor of the struggle of the Vietnamese that revolution was a fact of someone else’s life. Neither could ever be yours, and so you left each show diminished, with less than you had brought to it. That, the situationists said again and again, was why the show had to be stopped, and could be: just as the tiny humiliations inflicted by the parade monitor were the essence of oppression, a fanatic’s exemplary act could prove that liberty was within everyone’s grasp.
The situationists announced themselves as revolutionaries, interested only in freedom, and freedom can mean the license to do anything, with consequences that are indistinguishable from murder, theft, looting, hooliganism, or littering—phenomena that, lacking anything better, the situationists were almost always ready to embrace as harbingers of revolution. But freedom can also mean the chance to discover what it is you truly want to do: to discover, as Edmund Wilson wrote in Paris in 1922, “for what drama one’s setting is the setting.” That too was what the situationists meant by leisure—and it was a lust not simply to discover but to create that drama that drove a twenty-five-year-old Parisian named Guy-Ernest Debord to gather artists and writers from France, Algeria, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, England, Scotland, Holland, and West Germany into the Situationist International in 1957. In 1975, with the defunct SI no more than a legend to a few one-time 1960s art students and student radicals, that drama was what McLaren was still seeking. What were the politics of boredom?
Anonymous situationist-inspired leaflet, London, early 1980s
DEBORD
Debord wrote “Theses on the Cultural Revol
ution” for the first number of Internationale situationniste: “Victory,” he said, “will be for those who know how to create disorder without loving it.” As empty of disorder as rock ’n’ roll was in 1975, McLaren understood that it remained the only form of culture the young cared about, and at thirty in 1975, he clung to a sixties definition of young—youth was an attitude, not an age. For the young everything flowed from rock ’n’ roll (fashion, slang, sexual styles, drug habits, poses), or was organized by it, or was validated by it. The young, who as legal phantoms had nothing and as people wanted everything, felt the contradiction between what life promised and what it delivered most keenly: youth revolt was a key to social revolt, and thus the first target of social revolt could be rock ’n’ roll. Connections could be made. If one could show that rock ’n’ roll, by the mid-1970s ideologically empowered as the ruling exception to the humdrum conduct of social life, had become simply the shiniest cog in the established order, then a demystification of rock ’n’ roll might lead to a demystification of social life.
To structure the situation in this way took real imagination, even genius —it doesn’t matter whose it was. In the past, rock ’n’ roll as a version of revolt had always been seen by its fans as a weapon or, more deeply, as an end in itself, self-justifying: a momentary version of the life everyone would live in the best of all possible worlds. Pete Townshend, in 1968:
Mother has just fallen down the stairs, dad’s lost all his money at the dog track, the baby’s got TB. In comes the kid with his transistor radio, grooving to Chuck Berry. He doesn’t give a shit about mom falling down the stairs . . . It’s a good thing that you’ve got a machine, a radio that puts out rock and roll songs and it makes you groove through the day. That’s the game, of course: When you are listening to a rock and roll song the way you listen to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” or something similar, that’s the way you should really spend your whole life.
So McLaren heard when a fellow student got up to sing “Great Balls of Fire”—in 1958, the act itself was a negation of social facts. But when rock ’n’ roll had become just another social fact, this was self-defeating, even on the level of the next good song. By 1975, Townshend’s Candideisms removed rock ’n’ roll from the social realities that gave the music its kick. In 1958, even in 1968, a simple rock ’n’ roll performance could open up questions of identity, justice, repression, will, and desire; now it was organized to draw such questions into itself and make them disappear.
Who could say that “Fire and Rain,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and “Maggie May” were not affirmations of freedom as they were made, and oppressions as they were used? Only those who refused to believe that the affirmation where freedom is grasped is rooted in a negation where freedom is glimpsed—and those people did not include McLaren and the Sex Pistols. Thus they damned rock ’n’ roll as a rotting corpse: a monster of moneyed reaction, a mechanism for false consciousness, a system of self-exploitation, a theater of glamorized oppression, a bore. Rock ’n’ roll, Johnny Rotten would say, was only the first of many things the Sex Pistols came to destroy. And yet because the Sex Pistols had no other weapons, because they were fans in spite of themselves, they played rock ’n’ roll, stripping it down to essentials of speed, noise, fury, and manic glee no one had touched before.
They used rock ’n’ roll as a weapon against itself. With all instruments but guitar, bass, drums, and voice written off as effete, as elitist accoutrements of a professionalist cult of technique, it was a music best suited to anger and frustration, focusing chaos, dramatizing the last days as everyday life, ramming all emotions into the narrow gap between a blank stare and a sardonic grin. The guitarist laid down a line of fire to cover the singer, the rhythm section put both in a pressure drop, and as a response to what was suddenly perceived as the totalitarian freeze of the modern world the music could seem like a version of it. It was also something new under the sun: a new sound.
IT’S THE OLDEST
It’s the oldest hype in the book—and the page that can’t be footnoted. After thirty years of rock ’n’ roll there are plenty of footnotes: collectors’ albums that allow a listener to go back in time, enter the studio that no longer exists, and hear the new sound as it was discovered, flubbed, or even denied. It is a displacing experience.
In Chicago in 1957, trying to cut “Little Village,” bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson and his white producer get into an argument over just what, exactly, constitutes a village—an argument resolved only when Williamson shouts, “Little village, motherfucker! You name it after yo’ mammy if you like!” As a footnote, this explains why Williamson proceeds to take up much of the song with a discussion of what distinguishes a village from a hamlet, a town, or a city; it also explains a great deal about the evolution of the master-slave relationship. In Memphis in 1954, guitarist Scotty Moore responds to a slow, sensual early take of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” by calling nineteen-year-old Elvis Presley a nigger; three years later in the same spot, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips engage in an hysterical donnybrook over the question of rock ’n’ roll as music of salvation or damnation. These moments explain most of American culture.
In 1959 in New Orleans, Jimmy Clanton, much loathed over the years as a classic example of the white pretty boy who forced authentic black rockers into oblivion, begins “Go, Jimmy, Go,” his most loathsome hit. He pauses: “Bop bop bop ba da da,” he lilts to the control booth. “Am I singing Mickey Mouse enough yet?” “A little bit more!” comes the answer. “Geez, I’m not Frankie Avalon,” says Clanton, just before turning himself into Frankie Avalon. This explains that Clanton’s heart was in the right place.
Again in Chicago in 1957, Chuck Berry is about to make another run at “Johnny B. Goode.” “Take three!” shouts the producer. “Gotta be good!” Berry and his band lean into the tune, but the opening passage—in the version that made the charts, the most deliciously explosive opening in rock ’n’ roll—isn’t there. The structure is there, the chords, the notes, everything one could write down on a lead sheet, but the music is battened by a queer languor, a hesitation, a hedged bet. Then one changes records and listens to “Johnny B. Goode” as it has been on the radio since 1958: those notes and chords have grown into a fact that throws off all footnotes. They hit.
And one can listen to The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, a two-record documentary of the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols, orchestrated by Malcolm McLaren to prove that the panicky adventures he and the band lived out were part of a plot he had scripted long in advance. The idea this set of footnotes means to get across is that the story of the Sex Pistols—the sudden gulp of social life into the throat of a hunched boy calling himself an antichrist—was from the beginning conceived and delivered as a mere shuck, McLaren’s little joke on the world. If Johnny Rotten really meant it when he railed “We mean it, man!” in “God Save the Queen,” then the joke was on him, or on anyone who believed what he said.
It’s a good try. Released in 1979, a year after the Sex Pistols had ceased to be, The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle includes a lumbering “God Save the Queen Symphony” with fey narration, various depressing post–Sex Pistols rave-ups by the then nearly late Sid Vicious, “Anarchy in the U.K.” done in the manner of Michel Legrand and sung entirely in French by one Jerzimy, and a medley of Pistols hits by a happy-feet disco group. Both the French and disco numbers are actually quite appealing: “Pretty Vacant” recast as elevator music is not an uninspired fantasy. But McLaren’s effort to show up the Sex Pistols as a con (the secret at the heart of the secret society turns out to be a shaggy-dog story) is blown up by the inclusion of several real Sex Pistols recordings: “Belsen Was a Gas” from the final performance in San Francisco, a sore-throat alternate take of “Anarchy,” versions of the Who’s “Substitute” and the Monkees’ “Stepping Stone,” and a combination of “Johnny B. Goode” and Jonathan Richman’s “Road Runner.”
“ ‘Sex Pistols’ meant to me the idea of a pisto
l, a pinup, an young thing. A better-looking assassin.”
—Malcolm McLaren, 1988
The last number sounds like a rehearsal—not a rehearsal for a recording session or a concert, but for the idea of the Sex Pistols itself. You can hear them reaching back for the most primitive rock ’n’ roll voice in order to destroy the smug self-parody rock ’n’ roll had become; at the same time, you can hear them reinventing the music out of whole cloth.
The band heads into “Johnny B. Goode,” but Johnny Rotten doesn’t know, or won’t sing, the words; once past Deep-down-in-Lweezeeanna all he can come up with are squawks, spew, birdcalls. “Ah, fuck, it’s awful” he moans, but the musicians charge on and take hold of the song. “I hate songs like that,” Rotten announces: “Stop it, stop it! It’s torture!” The band won’t stop, so finally he screams them down: “AAAAAAAAAAAAH!” They slow the pace. “Is there anything else we can do,” he asks hopelessly—and then up from his synapses comes “Road Runner.” The association is right: both “Johnny B. Goode” and “Road Runner” are elemental rock statements, the former a founding myth, the story of a little country boy who could play a guitar just like ringing a bell, the latter pretty much an account of listening to him, an account of how good it felt.
The band makes the tiny switch to the second song, and Rotten panics. “I don’t know the words,” he says. “I don’t know how it starts, I’ve forgotten it!” There is such weary embarrassment in his voice you’re afraid he’s going to run out of the studio. “Stop it, stop it,” Rotten cries again. A thuggish cynicism is fighting the desperation in his voice and losing, the band hasn’t stopped for a second, and he gives it one more try: “What’s the first line?” And so drummer Paul Cook, courtesy of Jonathan Richman, as the latter wrote at eighteen, in Boston in 1969, calls back: “One, two, three, four, five, six.” That is the first line of “Road Runner.” With the words in his head, Johnny Rotten, not yet Anarchy or Antichrist, just a kid making new culture out of old chords, takes off.
