It's all working well for him and it's all going smoothly for McQueen
NB: this post is a continuation from part one: click here.
V.
The MA-1 - or bomber jacket, as it is better known - was a popular fashion staple in the 1980s; particularly with skinheads, who loved both its utility and hypermasculinity (as did certain gay clones).
However, as Ian Trowell reminds us, what imbued this garment with such great "subcultural crossover potential" [1] was the fact it evaded fixed meaning. This also helps explain its strange longevity.
That and the fact that what's good enough for Steve McQueen, is, as a rule, good enough for anyone (although, for the record, I never owned a bomber jacket and wouldn't have dreamed of wearing such).
VI.
Mike Wyeld and Antony Price are both concerned with subcultural politics.
The former asks whether punk or acid house, for example, has resulted in any long lasting political change. I think we all know the answer to this, even Wyeld, although he wants to keep the dream alive so can't quite bring himself to openly admit it hasn't.
Price, on the other hand, is adamant that rave continues to offer a form of "collective resistance to the oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism" [2].
Unfortunately, Jean Baudrillard has indicated how and why the very idea of resistance in a transpolitical era characterised by the techno-social immersion of the individual rather than their alienation, has become problematic and even a little passé. Speaking in an interview with François L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard says:
"I'm a bit resistant to the idea of resistance, since it belongs to the
world of critical, rebellious, subversive thought, and that is all
rather outdated. If you have a conception of integral reality, of a
reality that's absorbed all negativity, the idea of resisting it, of
disputing its validity, of setting one value against another and
countering one system with another, seems pious and illusory." [3]
Of course, that isn't to say that there cannot exist singular spaces which, at a particular moment, constitute themselves as alternative worlds with their own set of rules. And that's pretty much how Price describes nightclubs:
"At their best, nightclubs are places for experimentation, for inclusiveness and exclusiveness, a place to try out different personas, to challenge sexual identity and orientation through both individual and collective freedoms, a space to move outside of the confines of society." [4]
The problem is, anyone who has actually been to a nightclub recognises that this is mostly bullshit. And even if nightclubs were (at their best) heterotopic wonderlands of transgression and otherness, they still wouldn't offer the kind of head-on socio-political resistance that Price imagines and advocates.
VII.
According to Madeline Lucarelli, the practice of witchcraft has been transformed via the establishment of online communities. No longer concerned with the casting of spells and the harnessing of supernatural forces, witchcraft is now all about personal growth and spiritual freedom [5].
Alas, if Lucarelli is to be believed, witchcraft has therefore become a depressingly tame affair; no sex, no scourging, no satanic ritual ... The Dionysian frenzy of the orgy and the blasphemous humour of the black mass appears to have given way to a New Age theology that upholds many of the same woke values that any good liberal might recognise.
Wicca, I'm sorry to say, is now a humanism. And the witch, far from being a figure who inspires terror or offers resistance to hegemonic society, is now merely a Twilight-reading Barbie Goth hardly deserving of the name.
VIII.
Finally [6], we come to Russ Bestley's article on the joy of punxploitation and his deep fascination with Plastic Bertrand's international hit single 'Ça plane pour moi' (1977).
Whilst Bestley struggles to say what, exactly, first attracted him to this song, I think I understand (and to an extent share) his love of those songs which have all the energy of punk but which are not weighed down by the spirit of gravity; songs which privilege the joy and laughter of pop over the austere monarchy of rock [7].
Bestley recognises that fun is a vital element of popular culture, even if it is often valued negatively by those commentators whose language succumbs all too easily to moralising imperatives; i.e., the kind of people who are embarrassed by the crude and shallow entertainments enjoyed by the working-class and who will never accept the fact that 'Friggin' in the Riggin'' was a bigger selling-single than 'Holidays in the Sun'.
I agree with Bestley that 'Ça plane pour moi' amusingly manages to "embody so much of what 'punk' set out to achieve" [8]. So click the link above, roll around with your cat on the bed, and enjoy!
Notes
[1] Ian Trowell, 'Bomber Crew: Storying the Eighties Through the MA-1', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 12.
[2] Antony Price, 'Rave On', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 30.
[3]
Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, trans. Chris Turner (Routledge, 2004), p. 71.
[4] Antony Price, 'Rave On', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 30.
[5] See Madeline Lucarelli, 'The Body, Broom and Sins of the Witch', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 22.
[6] It should be noted that there are numerous other articles in SIG News 3 that I have not discussed. These include Rachel Brett's piece on fashion's relationship with the colour black (a dark history I have myself written on here); Isabella Chiara Vicco's piece on Jerry Rubin and his metamorphosis from yippie to yuppie; and Shijiao Kou's musicological analysis of 'Hong Kong Garden' (the debut single by Siouxsie and the Banshees). Oh, and there's also my piece on the revolt into red-trousered style.
[7] The phrase 'spirit of gravity' is borrowed from Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and the phrase 'austere monarchy' is borrowed from Foucault (The History of Sexuality 1). I have written on rockism contra poptimism and in defence of fun elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: click here and here.
[8] Russ Bestley, 'Ça Plane Pour Moi': The Joy of Punxploitation', SIG News 3 (1 September, 2024), p. 27.
