Lipstick Traces

by Greil Marcus

  What is not hard to read is the account of what everyday life was like during the brief suspension of what almost everyone had taken everyday life to be. In 1954 the Lettrist International had committed itself to the perfecting of a complete divertissement; in 1968 Debord, the only member of the Situationist International left from those days, was able to recognize it.

  The movement was a rediscovery of collective and individual history, a recognition of the possibility of intervening in history, an awareness of participating in an irreversible event (“Nothing will ever be the same again”); people looked back in amusement at the strange existence they had led a week before . . . people found themselves at home everywhere. The recognized desire for dialogue, for completely free expression, and the taste for true community found their terrain in the buildings transformed into open meeting places . . . the wandering of so many emissaries and travelers through Paris, through the entire country, between the occupied buildings, the factories, and the assemblies carried this true practice of communication. The occupations movement was plainly a rejection of alienated labor; it was a festival, a game, a real presence of real people and real time.

  IN MANY

  In many of the more than three hundred books, many people tried to say the same thing: after all, they had seen it, done it, lived it out. They were trying to hold onto it as it vanished—of all the graffiti, Debord wrote, “perhaps the most beautiful simply said, ‘QUICK.’ ” As a momentary illusion, it was easy to dismiss—easy, even, to forget. As the realization of fantasies of a new city, fantasies that had been contrived and acted out fifteen years before, it was impossible to forget—and impossible to match. “Nothing will ever be the same again”—the slogan cut back against those who embraced it, cut them in half. “Years, like a single instant prolonged to this moment, come to an end,” Debord said in 1959, on the soundtrack to On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: he was speaking of 1953. “What was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, inscribed in the fashions and illusions of an era carried away with it,” said a man in the voice of a radio newscaster. Debord spoke again, then a young woman: “What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it . . . the years pass and we have not changed anything.”

  “Once again morning in the same streets,” Debord said as he put daybreak footage on the screen. “Once again the fatigue of so many nights passed in the same way. It is a walk that has lasted a long time.” “Really hard to drink more,” said the newscaster; the screen went white. Then, in historical time, came the event: “the ‘sunrise,’ ” Debord said in “The Beginning of an Epoch,” in I.S. no. 12, September 1969, “ ‘that, in a flash, all at once, traces the shape of the new world.’ ” It was a turning point in history where history refused to turn; as a beacon of the future it revealed nothing so vividly as the past.

  EPILOGUE

  Punk song: a man stands in a room, bare save for a mattress, a few bottles, a few books. From his window he can see a crowd gathered before a huge, new public building. The setting is uncertain; you can’t tell if this is taking place in the present, in some tired near-future, or if the sodden familiarity of the scene locates the action well back in the past. A dignitary steps down from a reviewing stand to snip a ribbon. As the crowd presses up for a better look, the man in the room begins a keening sound: the strangled no of someone who’s spent too much time talking to himself, a voice that gives off not the slightest hope of winning a response. Stamping one foot, the man edges toward hysteria, then escapes it as his cursing takes on a hint of form.

  The sectors of a city are, at a certain level, legible. But the meaning they have had for us, personally, is incommunicable, like the clandestinity of private life, of which we possess nothing but pitiful documents . . . And only a few encounters were like signals emanating from a more intense life, a life that has not really been found.

  —Guy Debord,

  Critique of Separation, 1961

  He’s screaming quietly at his walls, at the people he has to look at, hating them and hating himself, wishing that the crowd were a loving community and that he could join it, though with his every jagged intonation—“and we bow to re–pub–lic . . . we bow to em–ploy–er . . . we bow to God” (a horrible, helpless loathing for the last word)—he drives himself out even of any fantasized community, past any possible communication. He loses his breath for a moment, loses his train of thought, then regains it; the listener, who feels almost ashamed to be listening, begins to realize that, at least to the man in the room, this cry-and-thump is some kind of music.

  The singer has made his way down to the street; he stands on the fringes of the crowd, peering from behind a corner of the new building, still making his noise. Don’t look at him, says a woman to her child. Fucking drunks, says her husband. The man leans out from the corner, as if expecting someone to actually acknowledge his presence. The way he carries his tune, all hesitations and broken cadences, tells how he holds his body: ready for abuse, maybe wishing for it. Abuse is a kind of communication: a perversion of community that in an inverted way might suggest community when nothing else does. So the man bears down harder; this is now a public assault, no matter that the public ignores it. It’s a riot, a rising, even if there is only one rioter—so far, he thinks. “Little girls, lit—tle girls, we’re innocent until pro–ven guilty,” he chants over and over. For a moment, he gives the words so much weight they sound as if they’re about to mean something; then the moment passes, and he sounds like a child molester. By then everyone else has gone home.

  It is—it might as well be—1985. In Washington, following his overwhelming reelection as president of the United States, Ronald Reagan addresses members of his administration. “We made beautiful music together in the last four years,” he says, “but from here on in, it’s shake, rattle, and roll.” In Guatemala, mercenaries working with government troops to root out resistance to the state in place since Big Joe Turner first took “Shake, Rattle and Roll” to the top of the charts wear t-shirts printed with a version of an old slogan: “KILL ’EM ALL, LET GOD SORT ’EM OUT.” In Berkeley, near a crowded coffee bar, I finish the morning paper in which I’ve read these stories, and watch former mental patients force themselves on the busy bohemian bourgeoisie, begging quarters, tearing at their clothes, calling down the wrath of God. One man, who on any day can be seen carefully retracing his steps across the whole north side of town (never the south side—there is a border in the city only he can see), carries his trademark unstrung bow and quiver full of sticks; another has a series of messages neatly painted on his ruined pants and shoes. As I look, the wasted derelicts, none of them old, all of their clocks stopped, change into Ranters shouting obscenities in seventeenth-century English churches, Free Spirit adepts crouching in doorways in fourteenth-century Swabia: weird cultural survivals, time walkers, loop tracers. I’m carrying too many books in my head, product of living too long with my own—but how many, really, is too many, when the Cathars are still making news? The heresies and blasphemies that flowed from Abiezer Coppe’s mouth like lava in London in 1649 (“and lo a hand was sent to me, and a roll of a book was therein . . . it was snatcht out of my hand & the Roll thrust into my mouth; and I eat it up, and filled my bowels with it, where it was bitter as worm wood; and it lay broiling, and burning in my stomack, till I brought it forth in this forme. And now I send it flying to you, with my heart”) today signify the extremes of a great social revolution, but they had their source, for Coppe, in Tourette’s Syndrome and coprolalia; there is a textbook case right here. A man rises to his feet, spinning, and the word “shit” comes down like rain, ten times, a hundred times; then in under a minute the man announces himself as every well-known rock ’n’ roll performer the name of whose group, or whose own first or last name, begins with the letter “J.” “I’m Jimi Hendrix, I’m Joe Walsh, I’m Junior Walker, I’m Jimmy Jones, I’m Michael Jackson, I’m Johnny Rotten, I’m Elton John, I’m St
eve Perry, I’m Ian Anderson, I’m Jeff Beck . . .” I go home and listen to “The Building.”

  The song comes from it falleth like the gentle rain from heaven—The Mekons Story, a collection of fragments and detritus that traces the first six years of an English punk band, founded in Leeds in 1977, temporarily defunct as of 1982. The record presents itself as a chronicle of possibility and failure. Vision collapses into bile, shared rage into private shame, wit into self-mockery, melody and beat into the drunken, electronically slurred narration that stitches the pieces together. Merely one of thousands of groups to come together on the terrain cleared by the Sex Pistols, the Mekons were best known as the band that took punk ideology most seriously: “Those who couldn’t play tried to learn, and those who could tried to forget.” They quickly blew their only chance to submit to the strictures and rewards of a major label, and disappeared into a pop wilderness mapped by none so well as themselves; on The Mekons Story, you can hear it all happen.

  Released in 1978, the Mekons’ first, small-label recordings—“Never Been in a Riot,” “Where Were You?,” and “32 Weeks”—were preposterously rough, left-handed screeches about, respectively, a wish for trouble, a wish for affection, and the number of weeks of low-wage labor required to pay for various household objects, like refrigerators. They were self-conscious affirmations of punk crudity, stabs in a dark brought forth by turning out the lights, and they attracted attention in the small but growing punk community. Made in 1982, when “punk” was just another chapter in the history of rock ’n’ roll and no one was paying attention to the Mekons, “The Building”—no instruments, no band, just Mekon Mark White’s throat and foot—is beyond crudity. As a smear of oblivion and public life, silence and public speech, it is the antithesis of self-consciousness, of ideology or even style: it is an event, even if as such it’s the tree falling in the forest, the building collapsing only in the singer’s mind. Naked, demanding that the world be changed, “The Building” is the first punk song, a rant going back far beyond the Sex Pistols; naked, damning the fact that the world is more like it is now than it ever was before, it’s also the last.

  THE WHOLE

  The whole of the story I have tried to follow is in this song. The primitivism of the music dissolves the temporal claims of the story and simultaneously subsumes its detail, assumes all of its debts: that is why the performance is so strong. It turns Jean-Michel Mension’s “general strike” into the punk song it almost was and punk songs back into the graffiti Mension almost wrote. All at once, certain that to speak a language everyone can understand is to say nothing, the man in the room calls up Hugo Ball flapping his wings in the Cabaret Voltaire, Wolman hissing and barking in the Tabou, the glossolalia of Debord’s Mémoires, Johnny Rotten’s unspeakable confusion in the last minute of “Holidays in the Sun.” All at once, now certain that to denounce the old world is to kill it and that to prophesy a new world is to call it into being, the man reenacts Huelsenbeck’s hateful Berlin speeches, Michel Mourre’s sermon in Notre-Dame, the LI’s decrees in “Rational Embellishments to the City of Paris,” the SI’s carnivalization of May ’68, the plea for destruction in “Anarchy in the U.K.” He reenacts none of them in the event, but just before they happened, and just after they made what history they made—after they happened out of it. Leaving these pseudo-events suspended in time, the man reenacts the judgment of history on all such attempts to make it, on all attempts to get out of the century, whether backward or forward: the judgment that save for madness or suicide there is no way out of one’s time. But of course this is not all that is happening in the song. So quiet, “The Building” is an echo of an explosion that actually took place.

  “We wanted to create a situation where kids would be less interested in buying records than in speaking for themselves,” Malcolm McLaren said of the Sex Pistols, and one result of “Anarchy in the U.K.” was a sort of giant answer record, an assemblage made of thousands of pieces, in dozens of languages, all over the world. It was a potlatch of yesses and noes that sounded like a conversation in which everything was at stake—a potlatch that, for a time, sounded like a conversation in which everyone was taking part.

  This is what you can still hear in some of the artifacts the punk conversation left behind—in the Adverts’ “One Chord Wonders,” X-ray Spex’s “I Am a Cliché,” the Gang of Four’s “Return the Gift.” Destroying all limits on everyday speech, turning it into public speech, the conversation discovered a new subject: everyday life, which was revealed as public life. In this answer record, the most obvious facts of love or money, of habit or news, were neither obvious nor facts, but interested constructions, mysteries of credulity and power. In misery or delight, one could dramatize submission or resistance, false consciousness or negation. As in “Anarchy in the U.K.,” streets became potential fields of action, and ordinary buildings world-historical. As in “Holidays in the Sun,” the world-historical became a joke, then a horror movie. As in “Bodies,” the private self became the body politic, and that transformation produced an urgency, a spirit of collective vehemence—the thrill of speaking out loud driven by its own danger—that no record had quite contained before.

  It was, in a haphazard way, an art project. It had its proximate roots: in 1968 McLaren and his partner-to-be Jamie Reid were on the fringes of King Mob, a group Christopher Gray formed in London after his exclusion from the SI. Taking its name from the murderous crowds that rampaged through London during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, opening prisons and putting criminals on the streets, the band attacked the spectacle-commodity society by smashing up Wimpy bars. In surging letters three feet high it painted the city walls with cryptic slogans: sometimes lines from Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” (“A GRIEF WITHOUT A PANG, VOID, DARK, AND DREAR, A STIFLED, DROWSY, UNIMPASSIONED GRIEF”), sometimes just “I CANT BREATHE.” The group threw a potlatch in Selfridges’, with a man dressed up as Santa Claus giving away the department store’s toys to throngs of happy children; it accomplished Strasbourg-style détournement when the children were forced to witness the shocking sight of one of Santa’s helpers placed under arrest. In the pages of the short-lived sheet King Mob Echo, all the old talismans appeared once more: a reprint of Vaneigem’s celebration of dada, a photo of Rosa Luxemburg in her canal coffin, the colloquy between Suso and the Free Spirit, a letter to the London Central News Agency from Jack the Ripper (“I love my work”), cartoons of naked Ranters preaching, even a bitter rejection of “alternative culture” (“the Cabaret Voltaire on ice”) signed with the pen-name “Richard Huelsenbeck.” Then the times changed, the context in which all these things could communicate not pedantry but novelty vanished, and what once were metaphors became fugitive footnotes to a text no longer in print.

  As with the already-old slogans the LI put on Paris walls in 1953, those who tried to carry this conversation into the next decade soon found that the phrases they were condemned to use were barely language at all. Damning his “revolting celebrity” as the black hand behind May ’68, Debord wrote an end to the SI, hoping to destroy the revolutionary commodity it had become. The SI’s multitude of new fans, he said, would never learn the answer to their most important question: what metallic color had been chosen for the cover of I.S. no. 13? “The more our theses become famous, we ourselves will become even more inaccessible, even more clandestine,” he said, and though he kept his word, it was only his; the year was 1972, and there was no more “we.” McLaren opened his King’s Road boutique and sold his May ’68 t-shirts. Reid started Suburban Press, a mimeographed journal devoted to an SI-style critique of the planned London suburb of Croydon. Gray put together Leaving the 20th Century; Reid designed it. And Reid printed up little red stickers, which he posted in supermarkets——but nobody was frightened. The last days, anyone could have figured, referred only to those of the story he was telling.

  By 1975 the old talismans had come loose from their events; they were toys. Together, McLaren and Reid began to fool with
them. Playing with legends of freedom picked up in art school, in news reports about May ’68, in The Return of the Durutti Column, in tales recounted in Gray’s book—playing with situationist notions of boredom as social control, leisure as work, work as a swindle, architecture as repression, revolution as festival—playing with the dadaist aggression and arrogance in the SI’s writing, with its millenarian strain, the sense that the world could be changed in an instant—and playing with the inversions of the new social facts, with mass unemployment in a welfare state as a new kind of leisure, and that kind of leisure as the bad conscience of a new kind of boredom—they invented a pop group. With “I am an antichrist,” the first line of the group’s first song, they restaged the invasion of Notre-Dame. Just as that forgotten event led to the foundation of a small band that went on to imagine and spark a wildcat general strike, a wildcat general strike is what McLaren, Reid, and Johnny Rotten restaged in the words and sounds that followed.

  It was the restaging of another art project—for that, before and after all the elegant and absolutist theory, before and after the long and inspired argument with history, was what the situationist project had been. If the spectacle was bad art, the creation of situations was the good. “We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects,” Debord wrote in 1957, as the LI dissolved itself into the SI, “and we have to organize games of these poetic objects among these poetic subjects. This is our entire program”—and the entire program it was. In Internationale situationniste the facts of life were removed into a poetic dimension, where they could be reseen, and remade, by anyone, by everyone; during May ’68, it had seemed as if the game had begun. If you looked you could see it happen: every gesture was extended, every street redrawn, every building demolished and rebuilt, every word part of a new language. But this is also what happened with punk.