I'm Pretty Vacant - But I'm Not Sure I Belong to the Blank Generation

Virgin Records (1977)

I.

I remember listening to a run down of the charts in the summer of 1977; anxiously waiting to press record on my cassette player when Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols finally blasted out and hoping against hope that Tony Blackburn wouldn't ruin things by inanely talking over the greatest ever intro to a pop song; an intro that, if you like, consummated my love affair with punk.

Released on July 1st, Pretty Vacant was the band's third single and, unlike God Save the Queen, you could actually listen to it on the radio, despite Rotten's aggressive phrasing of the term vacant, sung repeatedly in the chorus with a strong emphasis on the second syllable. Indeed, you could even watch the official promo video, directed by Mike Mansfield, on Top of the Pops.


II.

According to Malcolm, Pretty Vacant was written at his instigation and directly inspired by Richard Hell's Blank Generation (which was itself a punk re-imagining of Bob McFadden's and Rod McKuen's 1959 single The Beat Generation).

Just as Rotten - by Hell's own admission - pushed the nihilistic persona that he'd originally developed in a more extreme direction, so is Pretty Vacant a far more provocative kettle of fish than its American counterpart. The latter is clever and vaguely amusing, but it lacks something in comparison. One can imagine Steve Jones hearing Blank Generation and crying out for it to be given some bollocks.

Perhaps the difference (and, for me, the problem) is that Hell allows himself the option of opting out of his own lifestyle - he can take it or leave it - but the Sex Pistols have no choice but to affirm the beauty of their own emptiness without caring what anyone thinks of this.

Is it a class thing, a cultural thing, or something else? Interestingly, Hell has spoken about the chauvinism of British punks who would sneer at the American bands and insist on the UK origins of the movement.

Whatever it is, there's something crucially different between the two songs. When one listens to Blank Generation one feels that one is listening to Hell's private vision or personal experience; it's basically a poem set to music. Pretty Vacant, by comparison, is a call to arms that genuinely articulates the feelings of a generation. And, whilst there's humour in both songs, it's more crudely sarcastic than cleverly ironic in the latter.

Ultimately, you don't need to have read Blake, Rimbaud and Burroughs to understand the Sex Pistols; you just need a mistrust of hippies, an eye for fashion, and an instinct for chaos. 

Play:

Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols: click here. 

Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids: 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.