Simon Reynolds and Stephen Alexander
I.
Thank you for your remarks on a recent post entitled 'Destroy Success' (7 Nov 2025), in which you were either highlighting (without judgement) the paradoxical aspect of Malcolm McLaren's life and multifaceted career as an artist - the successful failure; the professional amateur; the bourgeois anarchist, the inside outsider, etc. - or you were making some kind of moral appraisal [1] and suggesting (without actually using the terms) that he was a fraud and a hypocrite.
I'd like to think you were doing the former and that any antipathy towards McLaren that you feel is nonethless born of love and an ongoing obsession with this fascinating figure: "Even now, despite all the reprehensible things he did and the
suspicion that he helped misdirect a generation [...] I can't quite amputate McLaren from my consciousness." [2]
I couldn't help wondering if perhaps you also begrudge the fact that, in his final years, Malcolm was paid large sums of money to give talks all over the world to people in business as well as the arts, travelling first class and staying in the best hotels, etc. But then, why would that be the case when you also give lectures and interviews on an international stage in your capacity as a hard-working pop-historian and pedagogue ...?
II.
Your main gripe seems to be that enjoying the rewards of such a lifestyle is further evidence of Mclaren's hypocrisy: "I mean, it's not exactly 'living like a hobo' ..." [3]
But, here again, I would disagre: for living like a hobo doesn't mean begging in the streets like a bum [4], anymore than being a punk means adopting a certain look or thinking one has to be angry and miserable all the time in order to be militant, like the po-faced political ascetics who would preserve the purity of the punk revolution.
Whilst the etymology of the term hobo is uncertain, I like to imagine it could be an abbreviation of homeless bohemian, a description that could well be applied to McLaren who "cultivated the mannerisms and appearance of a bohemian outsider" [5] and whose life involved constant travel and a deliberate rejection of conventional work and societal norms; partly out of a desire for freedom and sometimes just for the fun of it.
Malcolm may not have illegally hopped freight trains, but he rarely paid for his own travel - or even his own cigarettes! - and, just like a hobo, he was an extremely resourceful individual, flitting between London, Paris, and New York just as he had once flitted from art college to art college, living on his wits and other people's generosity.
Above all, McLaren stayed true to the number one rule of the Hobo Code [6]: Decide your own life; don't let another person run or rule you.
And one recalls, of course, that Duck Rock (1983) may have thanked many people for their collaboration on the project, but it was solely dedicated to Harry K. McClintock; better known by his hobo name, Haywire Mac, whose Hallelujah! I'm a Bum (1981) Malcolm insisted was crucial to an understanding of duck rock or hobo-punk as he conceived it and an album he made me buy in Collet's bookshop [7].
III.
In sum: living like a hobo is primarily about adopting a certain attitude and recognising the creative potential within failure - if I may return to this word. In a piece for The Guardian written two years before he died, McLaren wrote:
"I've always embraced failure as a noble pursuit. It allows you to be anti whatever anyone wants you to be, and to break all the rules. It was one of my tutors [...] when I was an art student, that really brought it home to me. He said that only by being willing to fail can you become fearless. He compared the role of an artist to that of being an alchemist or magician. And he thought the real magic was found in flamboyant, provocative failure rather than benign success. So that's what I've been striving for ever since." [8]
McLaren's, therefore, is a very special understanding of failure; an artistic and philosophical understanding of the term.
One is almost tempted to bring Samuel Beckett in at this point; for Beckett (as I'm sure you know) uses the symbolic figure of the
tramp to explore various existential themes and informs us that what we learn from failure is not how to succeed in the future, but, at most, how to fail better [9]. Success, says Beckett, is not even an option; we are destined to fail - such is the tragic character of Dasein.
The fact that Beckett - like McLaren - affirms this and finds in it a source of darkly comic
satisfaction, is something admirable I think. Nietzsche would call it a pessimism of strenth [10] and he made it a central teaching of his Dionysian philosophy; a philosophy that, like McLaren's vision of punk, finds creative potential in destruction and flamboyant failure.
McLaren had his successes - but he didn't chase or desire success. Indeed, if anything - and again to quote your own words Simon, if I may - he was thwarted by success [11]. His dream was always to go down in flames or sink beneath the waves [12].
Notes
[1] I'm referring here to the claim made by Reynolds that Paul Gorman's excellent biography of McLaren failed to give a "moral appraisal of its subject". It was an allegation swiftly refuted by Gorman, who rightly pointed out that the primarly task of a biographer is to write a critically objective study, not pass judgement.
See: Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', a review of Paul Gorman's The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2021), in The London Review of Books, Vol. 44, No. 5 (10 March 2022), and see Paul Gorman's letter in response in the following issue (44. 6), dated 24 March 2022. Both can be read by clicking here.
[2] Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', as cited and linked to above.
[3] Simon Reynolds, comment on the TTA post 'Destroy Success' posted on 10 Nov 2025 at 16:56. Click here.
[4] In the revised and expanded fourth edition of his The American Language (Alfred A. Knopf, 1937), H. L. Mencken argued that although commonly lumped together, tramps, hobos, and bums are actually distinct fron another. Both tramps and hobos like to travel around and lead an itinerant lifestyle, but the former try to avoid work preferring just to dream (and drink), whereas the latter, whilst enjoying some prolonged periods of unemployment, essentially want to work, albeit in a series of jobs with no desire to establish a long term career. As for the bum, according to Mencken, he neither wanders nor works. Obviously, such a fixed and rigid classification is highly questionable.
[5] Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', as cited and linked to in note 1 above.
[6] A set of ethical guidelines known as the Hobo Code was created by a hobo union during its 1889 National Hobo Convention, in St. Louis, Missouri. It consists of more than a dozen rules intended to govern the conduct of hobos nationwide and help dispel negative stereotypes associated with their lifestyle. These rules essentially boil down to: 1. Respect the law. 2. Help fellow hobos. 3. Protect Children. 3. Preserve the natural environment.
The National Hobo Convention continues to be an annual event - held in Iowa since 1900 - where the Hobo Code is still recognised. Readers wishing to know more are encouraged to visit the Open Culture web page on the subject: click here.
[7] Collet's was a bookshop (that also stocked selected records and tapes) founded by Eva Collet Reckitt in 1934. It was famous for selling radical and revolutionary publications, particularly those from Russia and Eastern Europe, and acted as a hub for left-leaning intellectuals.
[8] Malcolm McLaren, 'This much I know', The Guardian (16 Nov 2008): click here.
[9] See my post on Beckett's short prose work 'Worstward Ho!' (1983) and the idea of failure (11 Jun 2013): click here.
[10] This phrase - Pessimismus der Stärke - can be found, for example, in Nietzsche's 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy (1871), where he describes it as a "predilection for what is hard, terrible, evil, problematic in existence", arising from strength and well-being rather than decadence or enfeebled instincts.
See 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism', in The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (Penguin Books, 1993), p. 3.
[11] Simon Reynolds, 'Serious Mayhem', as cited and linked to in note 1 above.
[12] It is interesting to note that, etymologically, the term flamboyant that Malcolm used in relation to the kind of failure he aspired to, comes from the French and means 'flaming' or 'wavy'.
