A Brief Note on the Punk Is Dead / Punks Not Dead Debate

I. 

 

There is a big secret about The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle: most punks don't like it [1]. 

 

And the reason is simple: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle is an attempt by Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid to dig a grave and bury both the reputation of the Sex Pistols as well as the expectations of their fans. 

 

Of course, Wattie Buchan didn't get it: and still doesn't get it, even in 2024. 

 

Suggest that punk is anything less than alive and kicking and he'll give you the same mouthful of abuse as spewed out in 1981, grounded in his unshakeable conviction that punk's not dead.

 

 

II.

 

For those who aren't familiar with the name, Wattie Buchan is a former squaddie turned punk rocker, born in Scotland in 1957. He is best known as lead singer and frontman for the Exploited, who, in 1981, released an album by the title of Punks Not Dead [2] - one that, even lacking an apostrophe, would quickly become a slogan graffitied on walls (and leather jackets) the world over. 

 

In part a reaction to snobby music critics writing for the NME who now privileged bands categorised as post-punk, the album title also challenged the anarcho-hippie band Crass who famously included a track on their album The Feeding of the 5000 (1978) entitled 'Punk Is Dead' [3]. 

 

If this track is lyrically more sophisticated than that given us by Mr Buchan and friends - sung by Steve Ignorant, I'm guessing it was written by Penny Rimbaud - it is equally naive in its militant idealism and, ultimately, the discussion around punk - what it is and whether it is alive or dead (as well as who is and is not authentically a punk) - becomes extremely tedious and futile; especially when it's almost 50 years after the event.

 

One thinks of the phrase two bald men fighting over a comb ...

 

    

Messrs. Buchan and Ignorant in 2024 

(aged 67)

 

Notes 

 

[1] Obviously, I'm paraphrasing the opening line to Leo Bersani's famous 1987 essay 'Is the Rectum a Grave?', which can be found in Is the Rectum a Grave and Other Essays (Chicago University Press, 2009), pp. 3-30. 

      The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle was released as a soundtrack album in 1979 (Virgin Records) accompanying the film of the same title that finally arrived in UK cinemas in 1980, dir. Julien Temple. Click here to play the title track. 

 

[2] The Exploited, Punks Not Dead (Secret Records, 1981). To listen to the title track: click here. For those who may have trouble understanding the lyrics: click here.

 

[3] Crass, 'Punk Is Dead', from the album Feeding of the 5000 (Crass Records, 1978): click here to listen to a remastered version of the track on YouTube (with a video by Jay Vee which conveniently includes the lyrics to the song). 

      Punk Is Dead is also the title of a collection of essays edited by Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix (Zero Books, 2017), about which I have written in a post dated 27 June 2021: click here.

 

 

On Dorian Gray and Models of Illicit Masculinity

 River Hawkins as Dorian Gray

Deleuze writes that one of the pleasures of doing philosophy is buggering the thinkers that one admires in order to produce monstrous offspring. This is an openly perverse and promiscuous love of wisdom in which texts are ravished and authors fucked from behind and below; a non-consensual methodology that suggests violence and Vaseline, rather than fidelity and faithfulness. 

This model of intertextual rape and illicit insemination is one that works particularly well with Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray - a work wherein elements of camp and gothic queerness helped not only to set the terms for a specifically gay identity founded upon secrecy, narcissism, and fabulousness, but also shaped models of outlaw masculinity open to all men which contested the bourgeois norm of conventional manhood forever oscillating between the poles of an ideal husband and doting father.

Throughout Dorian Gray Lord Henry openly ridicules married life, suggesting that men only enter into it due to fatigue and women from curiosity: both are disappointed. As for the idea of outlaw masculinity, it is worth noting at the outset that Dorian is a violent criminal; not only does he commit murder and blackmail, but he’s complicit in at least three suicides. This notion of the rebellious deviant or ‘anti-hero’ who provides a non-domesticated model of manhood, was popular throughout the twentieth century – not least within the gay community – and continues to this day (thus our eroticised fascination with pirates, gangsters, and psychopaths). 

But arguably, however, there is nothing very queer about what might be regarded as a romantic quest for macho or phallic authenticity. Often it simply endorses the Classical ideal of masculinity as powerful and active and serves to divide men into those who like to love young boys (pederasts), those who like to fuck other men (sodomites), and those who like to play a feminized, passive role and be fucked by men (inverts). It is the latter who, predictably, call forth the greatest level of scorn and vitriol, even from others who share a same-sex attraction. Nothing seems to disturb more than those that William Burroughs denigrates as limp-wristed cock-suckers. For, as Leo Bersani memorably puts it: to be penetrated is to abdicate power. In this way, the invert offers a double refusal – either to dominate or be dominated – and there’s nothing as queer as that!

Anyway, the point is that during the final years of the nineteenth century masculinity was increasingly problematized and strange new models of manhood were springing up as traditional forms of male identity became increasingly unattractive: their power and authority severely eroded and compromised by modernity itself. And when a man to whom phallocratic authority really matters no longer feels king of his own castle, then he looks for something beyond the domestic space and, indeed, beyond Woman. This can result in all kinds of curious thing: from the formation of all-male clubs and secret societies, to criminal gangs and even fascism. All of these homosocial phenomena are, in part at least, a reaction to female emancipation and the increased visibility of women in the public sphere. With the rise of Selfridges and the Suffragettes, London, for example, becomes an increasingly female-friendly urban space in which to shop and do lunch, rather than a masculine metropolis in which to drink, gamble, and whore.         

What I am suggesting, then, is that elements of gothic queerness not only circulate freely within The Picture of Dorian Gray, but are ever-present within modern society. Wilde’s thinking on questions to do with art, ethics, and the nature of the soul exposed not only the radical instability of masculine identity during the period in which he wrote, but also exemplified how that gendered self was increasingly being pathologized.    

Further, Wilde’s use of ‘paradox in the sphere of thought’ and ‘perversity in the sphere of passion’ has significantly served to unsettle any lazy categorization of ideas or people and exposed many of the so-called ‘facts of life’ for the limited and limiting abstractions they are. By encouraging us to think beyond metaphysical dualism, Wilde taught us to resist the urge to identify ourselves as either this or that and accept that deep down there is no deep down. In other words, he has eviscerated and evaginated ideas of sex, substance and soul; not by direct repudiation, but with mockery and masquerade, making depth, as it were, retreat to the surface.

In this way Wilde, like Nietzsche, becomes Greek: superficial out of profundity, transforming questions of being into questions of style and inciting us to abandon our obsession with desiring subjects in favour of the seductiveness of objects.