On the Triumph of Karaoke Culture and Punk Pantomime

Poster design for Pretty Vacant - The Story of Punk & New Wave 

(Not exactly Jamie Reid, is it?)

 

 

I. 

 

Shortly before he died in April 2010, Malcolm McLaren bemoaned the fact that artistic creativity (which is a chaotic phenomenon that often ends in failure) was increasingly becoming impossible within what he described as a karaoke world - i.e., an ersatz society, that only provides us with an opportunity to safely revel in the past achievements of others; a life lived by proxy [1]. 

 

And, whilst I'm a little uneasy with his use of words like authenticity, McLaren was making an important (though hardly original) point: Britain's got talent; but it's lost its soul. 

 

And so it is, fifteen years on, the Dominion Theatre in London's West End and numerous other venues around the UK and Ireland are planning to stage Ged Graham's Pretty Vacant - The Story of Punk & New Wave ...   

 

II.

 

Ged Graham is a 62-year-old Irish writer, musician, actor, podcaster and producer; what my mother would call a jack of all trades, but, let's be generous, and say he's a multi-talented and versatile individual with a great many passions and ideas. The sort of person who, when you speak with them, always has another project in the pipeline. 

 

The sort of person also who claims to have lived through punk as a teenager and now, à la Danny Boyle, wants to turn this event into a musical stage show; a combination of pantomime, karaoke, and nostalgia for those who want to sit down and enjoy an evening's entertainment. As Graham says in an interview: 

 

"At sixty-two you don't want to be in a nightclub, watching a band on stage. You want to be sat down with a glass of wine or an £8 bottle of beer in a theatre. The old knees just don’t want to do the standing up gigs anymore ..." [2] 

 

That may be true: but not all of us have come to the conclusion that punk is now simply a family-friendly narrative that provides an opportunity to reminisce and have a good singalong; some of us don't wish to be taken on a rollercoaster ride by an incredibly talented cast of musicians, singers and dancers; some of us seriously doubt that the punk attitude can be recreated on stage (even if it can be mimicked, just as punk fashions can be knocked up by costume designers).   

 

Graham may insist in a promotional statement that Pretty Vacant is "not just a show - it's a rebellion against the ordinary!" [3] - but that, as Steve Jones would say, is a load of old bollocks.  

I don't know if Malcolm will be spinning in his grave at this latest development, or looking on with Sid and laughing. But I do know that members of the following bands who - along with many, many more - presumably gave permission for their music to be used should hang their heads in shame:

 

Sex Pistols

The Clash

Blondie

The Damned

Ramones

Buzzcocks

Sham 69

The Undertones

Tom Robinson Band

Ian Dury and the Blockheads

The Police

The Jam

Generation X

Siouxsie and the Banshees

The Pretenders

Joy Division

The Stranglers

The Rezillos [4]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Readers who are interested can click here to watch McLaren deliver his final public talk at the Handheld Learning Conference (2009). Originally entitled 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Txt Pistols', the talk is now better known by the title it appears under on ted.com - 'Authentic creativity vs. karaoke culture'. 

[2] Interview with Ged Graham by Kevin Cooper on UK Music Reviews (5 March 2024): click here. 

[3] Click here to read this statement in full on the Pretty Vacant website. You can also buy tickets, visit a picture gallery, sign up to a mailing list, or watch a trailer for the show on the website. The latter can also be found on YouTube: click here.  

 

[4] Obviously, I am disappointed with some of these bands far more than others.    

On Recuperation and Karaoke Culture: Welcome to Glastonbury 2023

Steve Jones, Billy Idol, Tony James, and Paul Cook demonstrating 

the spectacular nature of punk rock at Glastonbury 2023 [1]

 

 

I. 

 

 

I hate - and have always hated - the Glastonbury Festival. 

 

And so, whilst 'Smash It Up' may not be my favourite track by The Damned, it contains one of my favourite verses of any song and I fully endorse the vitriol aimed at those zen fascists who continue to insist we all wear a happy face and share their vision of unity in diversity: You can keep your Krishna burgers and your Glastonbury hippies [2].  

 

Glastonbury may have started out in 1970 as a counter-cultural event rooted in the free-festival movement, but that's not what it is today, over fifty years on. Now it has become the coldest of all cold monsters, feeding on everything and everyone, and from whose mouth comes the monstrous lie: Art can make you happy and music set you free! 

 

Glastonbury, basically, is a means of establishing the total control and coordination of all aspects of what was once known as pop culture, or youth culture. 

 

The Nazis had a term for such a process: Gleichschaltung. Some translate this as bringing-into-line, but it more accurately means that everything is placed on a single circuit or network, so that it only requires one master switch that can be flicked on or off at the will of a single governing body or individual: Michael Eavis Über alles.   

 

 

II. 

 

For those who think this comparison with Nazi Germany is a bit over the top and who are uncomfortable with the use of the word Gleichschaltung, let's try another term - this time one that is recognisable in English, even though it's French in origin: Récupération ...

 

This term, often associated with the Situationist Guy Debord, refers us to a process by which politically radical ideas and subversive art works are defused, incorporated, and commodified within mainstream culture (usually with the full collaboration of the media) [3].  

 

Glastonbury is a huge recuperative machine making a spectacle out of aged rockers who were once the voice of teen rebellion; gleefully castrating the Sex Pistols, for example, and even managing to strip the songs of the Smiths of all negativity (their dark humour, their melancholy, their pain) by hiring the smiling anti-punk Rick Astley to show that Morrissey really isn't needed any longer. 

 

The audience sing along and wave their arms, or passively stand and watch the reified spectacle. It's an amusing irony that the festival takes place in fields where usually there are a large number of dairy cows grazing, because that is what these audience members essentially constitute - a human herd consuming pop fodder.     

 

Shortly before he died in April 2010, Malcolm McLaren bemoaned the fact that genuine creativity (which is a chaotic phenomenon that often ends in failure) was increasingly becoming impossible within what he described as a karaoke world - i.e., an ersatz society, that only provides us with an opportunity to safely revel in our own stupidity and the achievements of others; a life lived by proxy [4].

 

And, whilst I'm a little uneasy with his use of words like authenticity, he was making an important (though hardly original) point. Britain's got talent: but it's lost its soul.          

 

Notes

 

[1] I am grateful to Roadent for suggesting that Generation Sex are best understood in terms of the Spectacle (i.e. from the theoretical perspective of Situationism).

 

[2] The Damned, 'Smash It Up', single release from the album Machine Gun Etiquette (Chiswick Records, 1979): click here for the official video. 

      Alternatively, you can click here, for a live performance of the song on The Old Grey Whistle Test (6 November 1979), followed by a (curtailed) performance of another track released as a single from the above album, 'I Just Can't Be Happy Today'. 

 

[3] See Debord's seminal text La société du spectacle (1967). It was first published in English in 1970, trans. Fredy Perlman and friends.  

[4] Readers who are interested can click here to watch McLaren deliver his final public talk at the Handheld Learning Conference (2009). Originally entitled 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Txt Pistols', the talk is now better known by the title it appears under on ted.com - 'Authentic creativity vs. karaoke culture'.  

 

Reflections on Another Jubilee (There's Still No Future in England's Dreaming)

Jamie Reid: sleeve artwork for 'God Save the Queen' 

by the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977) 

National Portrait Gallery (NPG D48055)

 

 

I.

 

Celebrations to mark the Queen's Platinum Jubilee are set to take place over a special four-day bank holiday weekend from Thursday 2 to Sunday 5 June 2022. 

 

Seeing the Union Jack bunting and hearing all the Gawd bless 'er majesty bullshit reminds me very much of the Silver Jubilee back in the fateful summer of 1977 - the summer of hate as it is sometimes known; i.e., the summer of punk ...

 

II.

Although not old enough to have partied with the Sex Pistols on their notorious jubilee boat trip along the Thames, I was old enough in 1977 to have woken up and realised what side of the bed I was lying on - and it wasn't the side with the red, white and blue sheets.

 

As far as I recall, I was pretty much the only Essex schoolchild who refused to attend (or have anything to do with) the street parties being held on my estate that June. 

 

And my sense of alienation - combined with a long hatred for all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the royal family - meant that I now aligned myself with the Sex Pistols (what this meant in practice was keeping press cuttings about the band, taping 'Pretty Vacant' off the radio [1], and doing my best to perfect a Rotten persona). 

 

The Sex Pistols were the flowers in the dustbin and they were the poison in the human machine, but it was precisely their uncompromising nihilism that made them so attractive; that, and the way they looked [2]. 

 

III. 

 

Finally, while we're on the subject of the Sex Pistols ...

 

Tonight sees the start of Danny Boyle's six-part TV series Pistol - a Disneyfied punk pantomime loosely based on Steve Jones's memoir, in which a kamikaze gang of foul-mouthed yobs is reimagined by a cast of impossibly middle-class actors [3].

 

Were he still with us, I'm sure Malcolm would regard this as a prime example of what he termed karaoke culture [4] - i.e., one lacking in authentic sex, style or subversion.  

 

So, rather than sit through Danny Boyle's load of old bollocks, why not click here to watch a new version of the video for 'God Save the Queen' - one which combines footage shot by Julien Temple at the Marquee in May 1977, with footage of the Thames river boat party (a fun day out which resulted in eleven arrests, including Malcolm's). 

 

 

Notes

[1] I couldn't record 'God Save the Queen', of course, as it was banned from the airwaves. Famously, it was also prevented from getting to number one in the official UK singles chart, although it was the highest selling single during the jubilee week.  

[2] I loved the songs too, but the music was always secondary to the politics, the clothes, and the artwork - which is why I soon came to appreciate that Malcolm was the fabulous architect of chaos and Rotten just another juvenile Bill Grundy. Indeed, he's now something of an admirer of the Queen it appears.

 

[3] For earlier thoughts on Danny Boyle's Pistol click here and here. 

[4] Readers who are interested in this can watch McLaren's TED Talk of October 2009 on authentic creativity versus karaoke culture: click here. 

Notes on Malcolm McLaren's Paris

I.

We are, of course, far removed in time from the Paris that enchanted so many writers and artists in that period between 1871 and 1914 known as the Belle Époque; the Paris that continued to haunt the cultural imagination as a culmination of luxury and corruption [1] - as well as radical thinking - for many years afterwards.  

Indeed, for Malcolm McLaren, Paris always remained the capital of the 21st century. Or, at any rate, the place in which he felt most at home and often sought refuge: Paris loves anyone the English hate.


II.

In 1994, McLaren released a unique musical tribute to the city. Part easy-listening soundscape, part love letter, the album - entitled, somewhat unimaginatively, Paris - was loosely inspired by the work of Erik Satie, Saint-Saëns, and Serge Gainsbourg. As well as expressing his great passion for the city itself, it revealed his fondness for the grandes dames of French film and music.

McLaren's biographer, Paul Gorman, describes Paris as the most mature work of his career: "Paris presents bewitching melodies, rhythms and lyrics with warmth, reflection and humour ..." [2] Interestingly, Gorman also reminds us of Malcolm's own concept of the album:

"'It was a way of acknowledging a debt that the English try hard not to make. I don't honestly believe that any of the bands that made up the British invasion of rock 'n' roll would ever have happened without the Parisian tinge, that extreme angst, that very dark, vengeful, bored attitude. I don't even believe that Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison would have existed without having some kinship spirit to what was one of the most influential, nihilistic and valid forms of rock 'n' roll philosophy which the French invented.'" [3]

To seek the origins of rock 'n' roll in existentialism, rather than rhythm and blues, is, I think, a daring and original move and almost as amusing as his claim that it was Oscar Wilde who first discovered rock 'n' roll in America in 1882. [4]


III.

Towards the very end of his life, McLaren gave us another work - this time a film installation - in which his Francophilia is again made evident; one that took its title from a famous text by Walter Bejamin which he mistakenly misread as Paris, Capital of the XXIst Century. Although he later realised his error - Benjamin had, of course, written nineteenth not twenty-first - McLaren wisely decided to stick with his more contemporary title.     

Whereas Benjamin sought in all seriousness to uncover (and critique) a dreamlike history of modernity understood in terms of urban architecture and commodity fetishism in 19th century Paris, McLaren was more interested in taking a delirious and playful stroll through the city via a collection of old 35mm films consisting mostly of cinematic commercials.

I'm not quite sure what the German Marxist philosopher would have made of the English punk anarchist and his work; for if McLaren sometimes expresses a desire to rebel against consumerism and what he terms karaoke culture, at other times he seems to delight in bad taste and banality and secretly acknowledge - contrary to his own statements on the subject - that art ultimately draws its inspiration not from authenticity, but insincerity. [5]      
        

Notes

[1] I think the French original reads une apothéose de luxe magnifique et corrompu and is a line found in Maupassant's short story Une aventure pariesienne (1881).

[2] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 664.

[3] Malcolm McLaren, speaking on Australian TV, quoted by Paul Gorman, ibid., pp. 669-70. 

[4] See Paul Gorman, ibid., pp. 572-74.

[5] Paul Gorman is right to point out that while McLaren often appears to oppose karaoke with authentic cultural expression, he recognised that they needn't always be mutually exclusive:

"'Karaoke and authenticity can sit well together, but it takes artisry to make that happen. When it does, the results can be explosive. Like when punk rock reclaimed rock 'n' roll, blowing the doors of the recording industry in the process. Or when hip hop transformed turntables and records into the instruments of a revolution.'" - Malcolm McLaren, '8-Bit Punk', Wired, (November 2003), quoted by Paul Gorman, ibid., p. 693.

Musical bonus: Malcolm McLaren and Catherine Deneuve, 'Paris, Paris', from the album Paris (1994): click here. Video directed by David Bailey. Anyone who can listen to this song and watch this film without tears in their eyes has a heart of stone.