My First Reaction Was To Cringe

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[This text was originally published in the publication Post-Punk Art Now.]



In her book Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys., Viv Albertine – guitarist for seminal female punk group The Slits – tells the story of a young pre-Sex Pistols Sid Vicious, accused of throwing a beer glass at The Damned during a show. The glass shattered against a pillar, sending shards into the face of the lead singer’s girlfriend, who incurred severe eye injuries. Sid went to jail but continued to maintain his innocence. He didn’t do it. It was only much later, after he was released, that he admitted it was actually him. That was punk, spitting rebellion into the face of the world but cowardly if there were real life consequences.

This is Simon Reynolds, writing in the liner notes of the Young Marble Giants Colossal Youth re-issue:

Postpunk and “perfection” rarely went together. This was an era of experimental over-reach, of bands catalyzed by the punk do-it-yourself principle attempting to expand the music by embracing genres (funk, reggae, jazz) that in their original context relied on virtuosity and slickness. Artistic ambition and anyone-can-do-it amateurism make for uneasy bedfellows, and many of the key groups of the period made records that were closer to sketches towards an ideal of a new music than the fully-realised deal. Even some of the accredited classics that defined the era […] have the odd moment or several that are substandard, botched, or simply misconceived. And really, that’s okay, because perfection wasn’t the point of postpunk. What was? Throwing out ideas, setting challenges for band and audience alike, keeping the collective conversation moving.

Punk opened the door and postpunk walked through it. A rebellion against society transformed into a rebellion within music. It resembles a lesson in emancipatory politics. The vanguard, despite its limitations, pries open certain realities previously assumed closed, and then the next wave makes considerably more use of the freedoms that have now been created. If they can do all that, perhaps we can do even more. Only eventual entropy can stop us. Or maybe this is too simple. The energy of music, and the flash-forward social scenes that surround it, often make me feel a sense of political potential that may or may not actually exist.

There is a story about The Ramones I often think about. The first time they toured the U.S. there were no bands to open for them. But the second time suddenly there were. During that first tour, in every city they played, some kids saw them and decided to form a band, a new band that would then end up opening for The Ramones the very next time they came through town. For me, this is almost all that art actually is. Something contagious. You see it and think: I want to do that too. But not only that. You also want to take it further, test the limits, see how much more it will stretch, how far you can go.

My fantasy is that this is all emancipatory politics might actually be as well. You think: the world doesn’t have to be like this. There must be another way. Some activists try to open up a little bit of space, it works for awhile, and you start to wonder how much further it could go, what strategies might take us there, how you might play a role. The difference is the repression and co-option you will be subject to are on a vastly larger scale. The more you succeed the more they kill you.

When David Clersen invited me to write for this publication, he quoted back to me something I had previously written about kindness and taking care of each other:

Here we are in a territory of fragile humanism, about as far away from the ‘no future’ punk rock nihilism that was one of my personal entry points into art and creativity. If I can get past my anxiety that all punks become boring hippies in the end, I can see that conceptual strategies that allow for more generous social relations, to put it rather bluntly, often feel good when you take part in them.

When I read his email, and re-read my earlier words, my first reaction was to cringe. Over the past few years I have written more about the fact that privileging kindness can be radical, that our ability to take care of each other might be the most political thing we can do, that dog-eat-dog Darwinism must be replaced with new visions that pay careful attention to the symbiotic interdependence of all living things. But punk and postpunk still have my heart. In some sense, all my ideas about art and politics still have to do with wanting to rip things up. Which makes me think of the very first line of Sigurd Hoel’s 1927 novel Sinners in the Summertime: “You are a self-deceiver and as such belong to the last generation.”



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