From Duck Soup to Duck Rock: On Malcolm McLaren and the Marx Brothers

From Duck Soup to Duck Rock 

(SA/2024)

 

 

I.

 

Although Malcolm McLaren's album Duck Rock [1] was dedicated to his hero Haywire Mac [2], the title is actually a reference to the Marx Brothers' film Duck Soup (1933) and it's no coincidence that McLaren is pictured on the record sleeve wearing a high-cut, double-breasted corduroy jacket based on the one famously worn by Chico [3].

 

 

II. 

 

Duck Soup is a musical black comedy with a satirical edge, directed by Leo McCarey and written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (with additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin). Released by Paramount Pictures in November 1933, it stars the four Marx Brothers; Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo (the latter making his final film appearance). 

 

At the time, the film was not particularly well received; neither by audiences nor critics [4]. However, it's now regarded - along with A Night at the Opera (1935) - as the Marx Brothers' finest achievement, although, personally, I must confess I still don't find it funny even if I have come to appreciate the film's cultural and political significance [5].   

 

Apparently, it was McCarey who suggested the film be called Duck Soup, after earlier working titles - including Firecrackers, Grasshoppers, and Oo La La - had all been abandoned. Amusingly, McCarey had previously used Duck Soup for a silent film starring Laurel and Hardy [6]. 

 

A popular slang expression in the US at that time, duck soup referred to something easy to do (just as, conversely, to duck out of something meant to avoid doing it altogether). 

 

 

III.

 

Paul Gorman mentions that McLaren enjoyed watching Marx Brothers' films at a flea-pit cinema in northwest London during his student days [7], so there's a good chance he saw Duck Soup at this time. 

 

And, interestingly, due to the fact that the film ridicules war and nationalism and also pokes fun at censorship, it was popular with many others on the radical left (or associated with the so-called counterculture) in the 1960s [8].

 

But who knows what Malcolm found so appealing about this movie? 

 

If it wasn't the anarchic, anti-authoritarian, and irreverent elements, then perhaps it was simply the ducks swimming in a kettle and quacking away quite happily that most struck a chord with him; one thinks, for example, of the refrain used in 'Buffalo Gals': Duck! Duck! Duck!   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Duck Rock was released in 1983 on Charisma Records. I have previously published posts inspired by several of the tracks on the album, including 'Buffalo Gals' and 'Double Dutch' - click here and here.

[2] Harry K. McClintock (1884 - 1957), aka Haywire Mac, was (among other things) an American singer-songwriter in the hobo-punk tradition. He is arguably best known for his song "The Big Rock Candy Mountains", about which I have written here. 

[3] The Chico Jacket was part of the McLaren/Westwood collection 'Nostalgia of Mud' (A/W 1983): click here, for a post on this if interested. Unlike Chico Marx, McLaren chose to match the jacket with an Appalachian mountain hat, rather than Tyrolean style headgear.  

 

[4] Duck Soup was not a box office failure - in fact, it was the sixth-highest-grossing film of 1933 - but it didn't go down as well as the producers hoped, possibly because audiences found the anarchic buffoonery and cynicism of the Marx Brothers inappropriate at a time of economic and political crisis.

 

[5] Wishing to play down the political nature of the film, Groucho Marx insisted it had no real significance and was simply four Jewish comics trying to get a laugh. Nevertheless, the Brothers were delighted to hear that Mussolini banned the film in Fascist Italy, having found it personally insulting.

 

[6] The Laurel and Hardy silent short comedy Duck Soup (1927), was directed by Fred Guiol, with Leo McCarey acting as a supervising director. The film was considered lost until a print was discovered in 1974. It was remade as Another Fine Mess in 1930 (dir. James Parrott). 

 

[7] See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), pp. 499-500. 

      The cinema attended by McLaren was the Tolmer, situated just a short walk from Euston Station. It was known as the cheapest cinema in London and attracted what might be described as a mixed audience, including cinephiles, prostitutes, and pensioners. It closed in 1972.

 

[8] Whether that includes Woody Allen and The Beatles is debatable, but both the director of Bananas (1971) and the stars of Help! (dir. Richard Lester, 1965) have admitted they drew insparation from Duck Soup.  

 

 

Bonus: to watch the official Duck Soup (1933) trailer on YouTube, please click here.

The Best Things in Life Are Dirty: Reflections on Malcolm McLaren's Nostalgie de la boue

Malcolm McLaren and friends in a photo taken outside 

Nostalgia of Mud by Neil MacKenzie Matthews (1982)

 

 

 

I. 

 

The phrase nostalgie de la boue was coined in 1855 by the French playwright Émile Augier [1]. 

 

It refers to a decadent attraction to primitive culture or a yearning for some form of debased experience outside of what is regarded as socially and morally acceptable according to the bourgeois norms and conventions of European civilisation [2].     

 

One might even think of it in terms of Freud's death drive; i.e., as a desire on the part of complex life to revert to an earlier stage of evolution that allows one to contentedly wallow in a primordial mud pool (though when Augier used the phase he was thinking of the desire to return to humble social origins, rather than the origins of life [3]). 

 

For me, the phrase nostalgie de la boue has a further resonance, however; one that is rooted in the music and fashion of the early-mid 1980s - a time of buffalo gals, b-boys, hobo-punks, and Zulus on a time bomb ...

 

 

II.

 

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood opened their new (short-lived) West End shop in March 1982. Located at 5, St. Christopher's Place, it was spitting distance from Selfridges (but a long way from King's Road). 

 

Ben Westwood recalls:

 

"The shop front was covered by a 3-D relief of the map of the world made out of plaster and coloured mud brown. The interior featured the cave-like look of an archaeological dig. Scaffolding surrounded the walls, brown tarpaulin was stretched across the ceiling and a central pillar (or stalagmite) rose out of a bubbling pool of oily liquid." [4]

 

What Ben doesn't offer is an explanation for the name of the shop - Nostalgia of Mud - except to say that this was also the name of Vivienne and Malcolm's inspired Worlds End collection for A/W 1983 [5]. 

 

Keen-eyed readers will immediately notice the unusual translation of the original French phrase discussed above; nostalgia of mud, rather than the more standard nostalgia for mud. 

 

I don't know why this was so: I doubt that Malcolm wished to assign agency to the mud, as if it were the earth itself yearning for something. Probably he just mistranslated or misremembered the phrase. It doesn't really matter, I suppose - and, to be honest, I rather like the idiosyncratic reworking of nostalgie de la boue. 

 

As to when McLaren first heard the phrase, or from where he took it, again, I don't know ... 

 

Paul Gorman reminds us in his biography of McLaren, that it can be found in Tom Wolfe's famous essay 'Radical Chic' (1970), where it is used to mock those rich white liberals who host fundraising parties for revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers and thus seemingly endorse a brand of militant radicalism that would violently drag them from their own elevated social position [6].  

 

But I'm not convinced that McLaren took the phrase from Wolfe. And even if he did, he means something very different from what the American author means by it, giving the term mud a wholly positive new interpretation [7]. 

 

Anyway, let's close by giving the last word to Malcolm himself: 

 

"I wanted the shop to look permanently closed down, making it appear as if we were digging up the place to find the London that lay under the pavements and eventually I found that all that lay under there was mud." [8]

 

        

viviennewestwood.com

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Émile Augier, Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855), Act I, Scene I. 

      Interestingly, however, as Rosalind Krauss points out, the expression nostalgie de la boue "is not in fact idiomatic French; indeed, it is not part of spoken French usage at all, being instead a purely Anglophonic invocation of the English notion of slumming transposed into the magically resonant frame of a supposedly French turn of phrase". See her essay 'Nostalgie de la Boue', in October, Vol. 56, (The MIT Press, Spring, 1991), pp. 111-120. The line quoted is on p. 112.

 

[2] Sir Clifford Chatterley famously accuses his wife of being "'one of those half-insane, perverted women who must run after depravity, the nostalgie de la boue'" after she confesses her affair with the gamekeeper. Suddenly seeing himself as the embodiment of moral goodness, Clifford regards Connie and Mellors as "the incarnation of mud, of evil". 

      See Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 296.

 

[3] In Act I, Scene I of Le Mariage d'Olympe, Augier wrote: "Mettez un canard sur un lac au milieu des cygnes, vous verrez qu’il regrettera sa mare et finira par y retourner." We might trans-paraphrase this as: Put a duck rocker amongst clean-cut new romantics, and you'll see that he soon longs for a muddy hole that he can retreat to. 

 

[4] Ben Westwood writing in a post entitled 'Nostalgia of Mud' on the World's End blog (20 Feb 2014): click here. Note I have very slightly modified the text. 

      

[5] Rather than try to describe this collection, I encourage readers to watch a ten minute video posted by Ben Westwood on YouTube, which affords a glimpse of the magical scenes that unfolded on the catwalk in the Pillar Hall (Olympia), on 24 March, 1982: click here. 

 

[6] Tom Wolfe's essay, 'Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's', originally appeared in New York magazine (June 8, 1970): click here to read online. Paul Gorman mentions it in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, (Constable, 2020), p. 496. 

      For my take on the question of radical chic - with reference to the case of AOC - click here.  

 

[7] As I wrote in an earlier post, for McLaren, the term mud implied more than merely low-life experience or primitive culture. It was a glorious synonym for authenticity, something that he has always striven for in his work; the true look of music and the real sound of fashion (even though he surely knew, as a reader of Wilde, that realism is just a pose and authenticity merely another form of fabricated reality or myth).  

      Critics of McLaren will doubtless argue at this point that he is another prime example of the sort of person Wolfe is satirising; someone who exploits the experiences and appropriates the cultural cachet of those he liked to call the dispossessed; someone claiming to be nostalgic for mud, whilst rarely getting their own hands dirty in the process of making cash from chaos. For me, however, there's a big difference between Malcolm and someone like Leonard Bernstein.     

 

[8] Malcolm McLaren, quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 497.

 

        

And They Dance by the Light of the Moon ...

A Buffalo Gal as imagined by Mclaren and Westwood

 in their Nostalgia of Mud collection (1982/83) 

I.

Buffalo Gals is a popular 19th-century American folk song, written and published by the blackface minstrel John Hodges (aka Cool White) in 1844, although earlier versions are likely to have existed.

Contrary to what many people believe, the song doesn't refer to a particularly tough breed of cowgirl who hunted bison on the Great Plains. Rather, it refers to the dancing girls who performed in the many bars, concert halls, and brothels in the notorious Canal district of Buffalo, New York. 

However, the song continues to incite many imaginative interpretations. For example, some insist that it takes its inspiration from an old legend that tells of how the spirits of wild animals sometimes take the form of attractive young women, in order to seduce innocent cowboys sleeping beneath the stars.


II.

Unsurprisingly, when I hear the words Buffalo Gals, I also think of the 1982 single by Malcolm McLaren and the World's Famous Supreme Team, produced by Trevor Horn, that combines scratching with square dancing in a fabulously eccentric hip-hop manner - much to the horror of the record company bosses who were initially reluctant to release the track.        

In many ways, this song was more groundbreaking than Anarchy in the UK, helping as it did introduce hip-hop culture to a wider (whiter) audience; the video for the song not only featured breakdancing - courtesy of the Rock Steady Crew - but also showed rappers and graffiti artists in action.

Oh, and of course, it also featured models wearing McLaren and Westwood's latest fashions from their brilliant Nostalgia of Mud collection; a collection which attempted to show how haute couture and other aspects of Western culture retained primitive roots; or how even modernity essentially lives off the traditions it insists it has left behind.

Further, as Yvonne Gold, the make-up artist who worked on the McLaren-Westwood fashion shows, points out, the soft, unstructured tailoring with exposed seams that characterised the above collection was the antithesis of the yuppie power suit:   

"Buffalo girls wore hip-slung dirndl skirts over padded petticoats, with baby-sling-bags across their backs and hoodies topped with Buffalo hats, or T-shirt Grecian toga dresses with conical vintage satin bras worn over the top."

She continues: 

"The legacy of raw-edged, reversed-seamed sheepskin coats lives on as a classic, and wearing a hoodie under a tailored jacket or a bra as outerwear has become standard. The conceptual black painted strip mask is still seen on catwalks in infinite variations. Three and a half decades later, the iconic Buffalo hat has been revitalized by [musician] Pharrell, and you can find entire ensembles in the collections of international museums and individual collectors [...] keeping the Buffalo legacy alive."

It's such a pity, therefore, that the McLaren-Westwood design collaboration ended soon afterwards. We can only dream of what might have been, for whilst, obviously, we know how Westwood's career in fashion developed post-Malcolm, we don't know what sartorial innovations the latter would have produced had he continued working in the rag trade.*

* Having said that, see the astonishing post by Paul Gorman on McLaren's 'lost collection' intended to accompany his album Fans (1984): click here.

See: Yvonne Gold, 'Vivienne Westwood's Radically Chic Nostalgia of Mud', Another Magazine (15 March, 2016): click here to read online.

Play: Malcolm McLaren and the World's Famous Supreme Team, 'Buffalo Gals' (1982), single from the album Duck Rock (Charisma Records, 1983): click here.