[kj] The great POST-PUNK debate

Fri Oct 29 10:41:21 EDT 2004

So when was post-punk born? What do you think to this statement?

---"Punk turned into post-punk when the group Wire played their now mythic 
"Document and Eye Witness" set at the Electric Ballroom, Camden, in 1978. 
Comprising nearly two hours of repetition-based performance art, to an 
audience largely of drunk skinheads, the event featured masked performers in 
paper headdresses, and a hammer attack on a gas cooker."

It was taken from the following article about punk (doesn't talk about 
American punk though) to promote a new fashion show, or something.

>>>>>The Times

September 25, 2004, Saturday
HEADLINE: Live fast, die old

Punk was meant to be a short, sharp cultural shock with no future, so how 
come its legacy is still all around us, asks Michael Bracewell

Malcolm McLaren once declared: "History is for pissing on." Which is ironic 
given the enduring legacy of punk, the cultural movement he is credited with 
having helped to create. Today, the origins of British punk comprise a 
culturally enshrined configuration of people, events and places, the 
accounts of which breed lengthening bibliographies, provoking questions of 
ownership, authorship, status and authenticity. In a world gorged on 
product, punk played tricks on production itself -dismantling technique, 
reclaiming materials and reversing rhetoric.

This month there is a new exhibition of punk clothes and artefacts from the 
collection of Andrew Wilson and Paul Stolper, yet another biography of Sid 
Vicious, and a new compilation CD, England's Dreaming, compiled by the Sex 
Pistols biographer Jon Savage, of key punk and post-punk tracks. The 
aggressive modernity of punk just never seems to date.

Entitled Punk: A True and Dirty Tale, the exhibition of Stolper and Wilson's 
meticulously assembled collection of artefacts seems set to give the most 
accurate assessment to date of punk's creative importance. Including 
garments made by Vivienne Westwood and McLaren for their infamous Chelsea 
boutiques, SEX and Seditionaries, the exhibition contains such rarities as 
handmade, handprinted shirts and T-shirts which can undoubtedly be regarded 
as art objects in their own right. (The nearest comparison would be, 
perhaps, with Elsa Schiaparelli's design collaborations with Salvador Dali.) 
With crude printing on muslin, elongated sleeves, dropped necklines and 
restraining dog clips and D-rings, many of these pieces feature quotations 
from Futurist and Situationist writings, as well as from lumpen popular 
culture.

Alongside posters, flyers and handwritten Sex Pistols' lyrics, there are 
also such morbid items as a Never Mind the Bollocks poster, retrieved from 
Sid Vicious's hotel room in New York, and stained with blood along its 
bottom edge from where he cleaned his syringes.

The first wave of punk in Britain, between 1976 and 1977, was arguably the 
single most important cultural revolution to occur in Britain since the 
height of Modernism in the 1920s. Although the movement became a cartoon 
version of itself within a year of the first notoriety of the Sex Pistols, 
the fallout of punk dismantled the existing cultural language, and proposed 
a whole new perspective with which to view the modern world. Its audacity, 
in terms of both its creativity and its attitudes, has yet to be equalled.

But ought a movement of such targeted nihilism -beginning with a slogan such 
as "No Future" -allow itself to own a history? By the rules of its own 
rhetoric, punk ought now to occupy a discursive void -booby-trapped by its 
pioneers to repel the historians of the future.

Punk's artefacts -more than almost any other form or period of pop cultural 
relic -have become narrative, each telling their different story of 
trickery. As yesterday's punks are today's Friends Reunited and eBay 
junkies, they can all recall the day they bought their bondage trousers -the 
experience, in most cases, was one of making a very intense statement about 
how you saw yourself and saw the world.

Punk's trickery was comprised in part by speed, and in part by aggressive 
rhetoric.

The first phase of punk styling was most probably the last time in social 
history that clothing would provoke such hatred. As the garments sold at SEX 
and Seditionaries went to prove, punk style declared society derelict, and 
its wearers the occupants of a post-history position, in which science 
fiction strangeness was fused with fetish-wear doubling as sloganeering.

The rubber fetish-wear sold by Westwood and McLaren appeared more scientific 
than erotic -more attuned to anti-radiation than sensual constriction. 
Similarly, the exquisite tailoring, fragility and detailing of much of 
Westwood's work added a dandified, aristocratic elegance to the often 
outrageous basis of its principal imagery. The potency of their effect lay 
in their reversal of accepted values - even to the point of debunking 
anarchy itself, and turning it into a camp joke.

The film-maker John Maybury, for instance, recalled: "One of my favourites 
was the Anarchy hanky. It came with a black Seditionaries tag."

The clothing sold at SEX and Seditionaries was considered way beyond the 
limits of public tolerance. To imagine their impact now, one would have to 
think of a Chelsea boutique selling an exquisite shirt, hand-printed with 
the face of Ian Huntley, over a caption taken from the sentencing of Gary 
Glitter or some academic treatise on civil disobedience. In 1977 to sell a 
T-shirt printed with the legend "Cambridge Rapist" -referencing a recent 
crime -was off the scale of acceptability.

Mohair jumpers and ties made of feathers added an element of surrealism - 
completing the idea (and sold at World's End, of all the aptly named 
places!) that history had ended, society was senile and culture out of 
balance. In short, the shock factor of punk styling was in fact covert 
intelligence -intellectualism, mysticism even, and conveyed through 
fashion's equivalent of a story by Bulgakov or Burroughs.

All sides now claim punk for their own, from the most committed class 
warriors to the most inflexible of aesthetes. Academics grow fierce and 
red-faced as regards rival interpretations of the movement, their 
contortions becoming ever more complex as they struggle to balance their 
theories against their memories. For punk is still regarded as representing 
and authorising cultural authenticity; and each of punk's participants, 
survivors and champions, in the manner of a fairytale, seems to find their 
own reflection in the mirror of punk itself. The social realists see class 
struggle; the aesthetes a late 20thcentury reprise of the Ballets Russes.

Punk first came to the broader public attention through the music of the Sex 
Pistols: at its best, on their first two singles, Anarchy in the UK and God 
Save the Queen, a form of jaw-dropping, ragged edged, high-speed glam rock, 
with Johnny Rotten's vocal sounding like a cross between Albert Steptoe and 
Bill Sykes.

Many of the first, seminal punk releases were shot through with a wit and 
game-playing cultural intelligence which has kept their edge razor sharp. 
The first release by Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley's group Buzzcocks, for 
example, Spiral Scratch, has been acclaimed as perhaps the definitive punk 
statement. This was a record that compressed an entire philosophical outlook 
into its four tracks -the shortest of which, Breakdown, was 1 minute 54 
seconds.

The record's very title, Spiral Scratch, was a literal yet poetic-sounding 
description of recording on to vinyl; while its catalogue number ORG 1, was 
a reference to the psychologist Wilhelm Reich's definition of "orgone" as a 
vital life force. "Spiral Scratch was a very serious joke," says Richard 
Boon, of the New Hormones label, "from a group who could play Judy is a Punk 
two seconds faster than the Ramones could play the original." Every aspect 
of Spiral Scratch, from the music to the packaging, can be seen as an 
exercise in questioning, dismantling and reassembling the equation between 
pop music and time. It was this kind of artistic shadow-play -reversing the 
roles of "dumb" and "clever", for instance, which gave punk its initial 
leverage to destabilise the corporate culture surrounding pop music and 
fashion.

In terms of contemporary culture, punk seems like the card that cannot be 
trumped -its credibility always wins. Much of the music and the fashion 
created in the initial epoch of punk retain their oddly futuristic, 
inscrutable air. From the lyrics, for instance of Wire's 12XU, or Boredom by 
the Buzzcocks. Or in the shroud-like, unwieldly, yet intensely romantic 
muslin shirts made by Westwood and McLaren. There is a quality of enigma to 
these recordings and artefacts, rendering them like exhumed creations, 
buried some 26 years ago by visitors from a future which is still long 
distant. For all the lumpen comedy of punk's initial language, its 
tabloid-taunting naughtiness, there remains a founding strangeness to its 
ultimate effect -the intensity of which has armoured its initial otherness 
against assimilation.

In terms of its sheer velocity, punk could mint newness, and thus has become 
a kind of magnetic north by which whole swaths of contemporary cultural 
practice, from music to fashion to communication design, take their 
bearings. With regard to pop and rock music, a recurring demand is why and 
how there could never be another pop moment with the intensity of the Sex 
Pistols' best single, God Save the Queen.

The prehistory of punk had seen an unofficial yet retrospectively coherent 
sequence of events which celebrated new ideas of artifice, and new icons. At 
the Roundhouse, for example, the Lindsay Kemp troupe performed their mimed 
celebration of the life of Jean Genet, Flowers. The performance was all 
mirrored coffin lids, glitter, blood, white bodies. In fact it was the 
church of David Bowie to most of the audience, a congregation of street 
aesthetes absorbed in a style which came across as nostalgia for archaic 
visions of the future -the ambiguous conformity of Kraftwerk, for instance: 
young men from London dressed like an idea of Berlin bank clerks from the 
1930s -"die Mensch Maschine". The writer Peter York would identify these 
aesthetes as "Them".

Across the suburbs, cities and provincial art schools of punk Britain, you 
would find the local outposts of "Them" -Warhol's punk children, each with 
their own Candy Darling, their own Nico, their own Andy. To be strange was 
to be cool. The importance of Jordan (assistant at Seditionaries and SEX) as 
an icon above all, was her utter reversal and dismantling of all known forms 
of fashion "model" - rejecting all conventions of body size or beauty. The 
Warholian trait within British punk was continued in the way that punk was 
documented, and pioneered cheap, DIY forms of image making and printing 
-from passport booth photographs to photocopying machines.

As the social realists would claim punk for political ends, so the principal 
originators of punk were swift to acknowledge the importance of punk as 
process, rather than as an end in itself. Howard Devoto, founder of the 
Buzzcocks and then Magazine, regarded the first impact of punk as delivering 
a near mystical experience of fundamental shift. "I think that punk rock was 
a new version of trouble-shooting modern forms of unhappiness," he says 
today, "and I think that a lot of our cultural activity is concerned with 
that process, particularly in our more privileged world, with time on our 
hands -in a world, most probably, after religion."

As early as 1976 punk had been picked up on the radar of trend analysis; by 
1977 it would have been noticed by Woman's Own. The destination of Westwood 
and McLaren's astonishing artefacts would be as agents of social mobility. 
What is left is the imprint of a rare moment of intense energy, the power of 
which can still be felt in some of the creations left behind.

Punk: A True and Dirty Tale is at the Hospital, 24 Endell Street, London 
WC2, from October 7 to January 23. No Future, a book to accompany the 
exhibition (ed Mark Fletcher) is available from the Hospital (£18.99)

ANARCHY AND ECSTASY: FIVE GREAT PUNK MOMENTS

* The release and immediate BBC banning of God Save the Queen, by the Sex 
Pistols, coinciding with the Queen's silver jubilee in the summer of 1977. 
For punk purists, this occurred pretty near the end of punk proper -the 
British movement having first declared itself in the sparsely attended 
concerts by Malcolm McLaren's Sex Pistols, in 1976.

* The "Anarchy Karl Marx shirt". Striped cotton shirt with Marx patch sewn 
on the back and hand-stencilled with the slogans "dangerously close to love" 
and "try subversion". Made by either Vivienne Westwood or Malcolm McLaren 
some time during 1976.

* "Anarchy in the UK" newspaper. A fanzine in the style of a tabloid 
newspaper, intended for the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy" tour, and first available 
at the Pistols' concert in Cleethorpes on December 20, 1976. On the cover 
was the punk pin-up Sue Catwoman, whose winged crop and black lipstick still 
look ahead of their time.

* Jon Savage, biographer of the Sex Pistols and pretty much punk's official 
historian, cites Linder's photomontage for the cover of the Orgasm Addict 
single by the Buzzcocks as the definitive piece of punk graphic art. It 
features a nude female model, her breasts replaced with bared teeth and an 
iron in place of her head.

* Punk turned into post-punk when the group Wire played their now mythic 
"Document and Eye Witness" set at the Electric Ballroom, Camden, in 1978. 
Comprising nearly two hours of repetition-based performance art, to an 
audience largely of drunk skinheads, the event featured masked performers in 
paper headdresses, and a hammer attack on a gas cooker.

LOAD-DATE: September 25, 2004

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