by Greil Marcus
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.
“Anything that’s new takes a while before it gets disseminated across the country. You get the J. C. Penney versions of fashions of what the style leaders are wearing. There’s an interesting premise in all of this, in the youth world, you take the lunatic fringe, the avant-garde, the style leaders, the nuts. And if you are careful enough to determine what they come up with that’s a legitimate trend, then you’ll be able to figure out eventually what the people in the middle, I don’t mean necessarily geographically, but in the case of our country it is pretty much the middle, will be doing in the next number of months.”
—Dick Clark, in Lester Bangs, “Screwing the System with Dick Clark,” Creem, November 1973
MUCH HAS
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
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
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
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 i
t 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.
The disturbance in the subway station calls up the dormant Martian presence. The spaceship begins to vibrate, and the energy released by the vibrations creates a vacuum. The vacuum sucks up sleeping genes, which create a repulsive, beckoning image: a glowing, horned devil, overshadowing London, the Martian Antichrist.
Across five million years, genetic drift is not uniform. By the twentieth century, some people are coded for destruction; some carry only a few broken alien messages. Some respond to the Martian image; some do not. For those who do, the ancient codes become language, and memories of the original Martian genocide course to the surface. For those who do not respond, language dissolves. Humanity is split into two species; there is anarchy in London. Men and women surge through the streets smashing all those they recognize as alien: all who carry less of the Martian essence than they do. The Martian image turns red. Hobbes’s state of nature was “the war of all against all”; this is it, and it is lurid beyond belief.
More human than Martian, Quatermass lives to see the demonic image vanquished and the Martian genes put back to sleep—but not before a comrade, more human than Quatermass, who can stand to gaze into the face of the image as Quatermass cannot, has been exploded in the attack. The image is pure phylogenetic energy; guiding a steel crane straight into it, Quatermass’ comrade negates the image with mass—a neat Einsteinian twist.
Quatermass’ assistant, more Martian than he, returns to his side as if awakened from a dream; minutes before, she was squeezing blood out of his neck. In a long, silent shot, the movie ends—and because there is no freeze frame, no automatic irony, the movie doesn’t seem to end at all. Quatermass and his assistant are seen in the wreckage of London; he leans on a ruined wall. Everything he has seen is in his eyes, and he is trying to forget what he has seen, but the shot—it goes on and on—doesn’t last long enough for his assistant’s eyes to focus.
Now it is plain that Five Million Years to Earth is a 1960s version of 1950s atomic-bomb-mutation films; an exculpatory allegory of Nazism and the Blitz; a quick and easy update of the gnostic heresy in which the world is split between equally empowered Good and Evil gods; a bid to make fast money off whatever dislocations might be circulating in modern society at any given time. It doesn’t play like that. It is progressively horrifying—especially at 2 A.M., when it is most readily seen on television; when, as Nietzsche wrote, “man permits himself to be lied to . . . when he dreams, and his moral sense never even tries to prevent this”; when there is no one with whom one might dominate the film. Quatermass’ victory is the victory of rational certainty over irrational doubt; the doubt in his face at the end is not doubt that he has won, but doubt that he wanted to. Perhaps it is no accident that, on occasion, the Late Show has cut the last twenty minutes: cut the anarchy, offering only the mystery, its formal solution, and then the film’s last shot, which no longer carries any meaning.
THAT WAS HOW
That was how I felt when Johnny Rotten sang “Anarchy in the U.K.,” “Bodies,” “No Feelings,” “No Fun.” When he finished that last number, his last performance as a member of the Sex Pistols, when he threw it all back on the crowd—which was, to him, no more than a representation of a representation, five thousand living symbols of Scott McKenzie’s 1967 Love Generation hit, “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” symbols of mindlessly benevolent hippies who knew nothing of negation—when he said, leaving the stage, carefully gathering up any objects of value, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?,” that was how I felt.
At Altamont in 1969, as the Rolling Stones played and a man was stabbed and kicked to death in the midst of the crowd in front of the stage, I had felt only loathing and distance; the peace symbols people flashed were almost as ugly as the violence itself. They affirmed nothing but the primacy of symbolization; the same people who raised those symbols also snarled and pushed for a patch of ground. I wasn’t implicated for a second, and I contemplated the degradation of it all. At Winterland people pushed, but not, it seemed, with anger or fear, but with delight, almost as a greeting—if André Breton’s old “simplest surrealist act,” firing a pistol into a crowd of strangers, or ramming throug
h it in a football helmet, can be called a greeting. Halfway through the show, what had begun in the crowd as an act was turning into a new way of walking.
Over the next years this moment took many forms. In punk clubs in Los Angeles, then throughout the United States and around the world, it would be stylized into slam dancing and pit diving. It would shape a glossary in which the passive neologisms of 1970s human-potential and self-improvement therapies (“Thank you for sharing your anger with me”) were translated back into active English (“Fuck off and die”). In convoluted ways, it would help define the spirit of the riots that swept the U.K. in the summer of 1981. More proximately, in contempt of all authority, it would lead to an immense increase in littering. It would permit thuggishness and scapegoating to be glamorized as self-expression (in the 1983 film Suburbia, a skinhead in an L.A. punk club approaches a woman dressed in a glitzy party dress. “I’d like to fuck your brains out,” he says, “but you don’t look like you got any.” She tries to push him away; he rips her clothes off and leaves her to the crowd), and it would inspire Gudrun Thompson’s “Manners for Muggings,” which appeared in a San Francisco punk tabloid called Damage. Illustrating her demand for a new etiquette with photos of herself beating up the hulking Stannous Fluoride, her boyfriend, Thompson wrote:
The eyes are the most vulnerable points in the body. The best way to attack the eyes are with the fingers or thumbs. Stiffen your fingers, part them slightly, and drive them THROUGH your attacker’s eyes. Drive your finger THROUGH HIS HEAD . . . Never believe a promise that you will not be harmed if you cooperate. Once gaining control over your life for even a few minutes, your attacker may decide to exterminate you. He is not considering you as a human being with a right to exist—don’t consider him one. DESTROY HIM before he destroys you.
