Five Brief Notes on Rockism, Poptimism, and Authenticity (With Reference to Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols)

Cover by Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols' single 'Silly Thing' 

released from the album The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle 

 (Virgin Records, 1979) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Those elderly punks who maintain that Never Mind the Bollocks is the only true Sex Pistols album are clinging desperately to an ideal of authenticity that is central to what has become known as rockism.

 

 

II.

 

This neologism, coined in 1981 by the musician Pete Wyley, soon became a pejorative used enthusiastically by music journalists such as Paul Morley [2], who were sick and tired of the idealistic fantasy that rock music matters - and matters more than other genres of popular music - because the performers really mean it man and just 'one great rock show can change the world.' [3]

 

Perhaps my favourite definition of rockism was provided by the critic Kelefa Sanneh, in 2004: 

 

"Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher." [4]

 

 

III.

 

In contrast to the above, there are those think pop music - even at its most commercial and ephemeral - is just as worthy of serious consideration as hard and heavy rock. 

 

Now, whilst I wouldn't describe myself as a poptimist - and don't particularly worry about progressive values of inclusivity, etc. - my sympathies increasingly lie with those who prefer music that makes happy - makes you want to dance and singalong - to music that is overly earnest and makes miserable.

 

 

IV.

 

Funny enough, one of the reasons that Malcolm McLaren disliked Julien Temple's The Filth and the Fury (2000) was because in its downbeat revisionism it made the Sex Pistols' story seem a very sombre affair: 

 

"'I don't remember punk rock being like that. [...] I always remember it as a ticket to the carnival for a better life.'" [5]             

 

No wonder that The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle takes us to Rio de Janeiro and explores many different musical styles; from disco and punk pop to bawdy drinking songs. Whatever people like to think about McLaren, he was never one to take things too seriously.

 

 

V.

 

And yet, paradoxically perhaps, McLaren always retained a notion of authenticity; as something to be found beneath the ruins of culture in a similar manner that the beach is to be found beneath the paving stones. 

 

It's a non-ideal model of authenticity, however, invested with chaos and which, in his words, is dirty, horrible, and disgusting [6]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The single version, released on 30 March 1979, features Steve Jones on vocals; the album version, however, recorded in the spring of 1978, has Paul Cook on vocals. Click here to play the former, which reached number 6 in the UK Singles Chart. Or click here to see the unique interpretation given to the song by Legs & Co. on Top of the Pops (BBC1 12 April 1979).  

 

[2] See Paul Morley's article 'Rockism - it's the new rockism', in The Guardian (25 May 2006): click here. Interestingly, Morley warns here that when poptimism simply becomes another form of proscriptive ideology, it's little different from rockism. 

      See also Michael Hann's article 'Is Poptimism Now As Blinkered As the Rockism It Replaced?' for The Quietus (11 May 2017): click here.

 

[3] I'm quoting a line by the character Dewey Finn, played by Jack Black, in School of Rock (dir. Ricard Linklater, 2003).   

 

[4] Kelefa Sanneh, 'The Rap Against Rockism', in The New York Times (31 Oct 2004): click here. Unfortunately, it's difficult to argue with Sanneh's claim that rockism is ultimately "related to older, more familiar prejudices" of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

[5] Malcolm McLaren speaking with Geoffrey McNab, 'Malcolm McLaren: Master and Servant', Independent (31 May 2002): click here. Cited by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable 2020), p. 718.  

 

[6] See the 1999 interview with Malcolm McLaren by Jefferson Hack; 'Another Malcolm McLaren Moment', in Another Magazine (7 May 2013): click here. 

On Negative Capability

John Keats (1817) paraphrased by Stephen Alexander (2024)

 

 

I. 

 

In a letter written to his brothers George and Thomas, in December 1817 [1], the English Romantic poet Keats briefly mentions a concept of Negative Capability - an idea by which he privileges uncertainty, indecision, and the refusal to rush to judgement. 

 

The great writer, he says, is one who is happy to have his doubts and to consider the complexity of a question from multiple perspectives, rather than quickly make up his mind. One retains one's freedom and affirms one's liberalism - and one avoids the mark of Cain - by refusing to know for sure.

 

For to know decisively and with precision is to kill; it is not simply to exercise choice between ideas, but to cut all other possibilities dead in order to arrive at a single fixed position.

 

 

II. 

 

Obviously, Keats being Keats, for him negative capability was esentially tied to the pursuit of beauty, even if that resulted from - or resulted in - ambiguity and irrationalism. But the idea has since been appropriated and developed by other writers, including the Zen philosopher Byung-Chul Han, for example, who has written:  

"Negative potentiality is the ability to do nothing. The latter is, however, not identical with the inability to do something. It is not a negation of positive potential but a potential of its own. It enables spirit to engage in still, contemplative lingering, that is, deep attentiveness." [2]

 

As sympathetic to all this as I am, I would still like to stop procrastinating and finish writing that fucking Sex Pistols essay ...! [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This letter - with explanatory notes - can be found on the George Mason University website: click here.

 

[2] Byung Chul-Han, Non-things, trans. Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2022), p. 82. 

 

[3] See the post entitled 'Procrastination' (14 June 2024): click here. This post is written in response to the comment left by Simon Solomon.  

Reflections on a Plastic Penis

Plastic Penis Silhouette 

(SA 2024)

 

 

I. 

 

It's an amusing irony of the world we live in today that just as silicone sex dolls become ever-more life-like with their synthetic skins and other technosexual advances, actual flesh-and-blood human beings are becoming-plastic [1].

 

So, it was no great surprise to read this morning [2] that microplastics have been discovered in the male member for the first time - having already been found in the testes and semen - effectively turning the penis into an organic dildo. 

 

Now, you might have thought that would have certain advantages; perhaps enabling harder and longer-lasting erections, for example. But, as a matter of fact, the opposite is true and questions are now being raised (no pun intended) about the role of these tiny pollutants in erectile dysfunction and falling fertility rates.

The penis, as a vascular, spongy organ with high blood flow, is particularly vulnerable to contamination with microplastics, which we are continually breathing in and swallowing in our food and drink. First they get into the blood; then they lodge themselves in the smooth muscle tissue of the penis. 

 

Maybe they do or maybe they don't cause damage and lead to problems in the bedroom. But the fact is they shouldn't be there; although how we might remove them from the environment - and from our bodies - is a question no one knows the answer to.

 

II. 

 

Of course, D. H. Lawrence foresaw all this a hundred years ago: we should've listened, but we didn't.

 

One is reminded, for example, of a passage in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) in which Oliver Mellors protests against the becoming-machine of the human being - 'with India rubber tubing for guts' - and the manner in which technocapitalism is emasculating men and destroying both their virility and fertility; 'making mincemeat of the old Adam' and sucking the spunk out of each and every individual [3].

 

Notes

[1] I have written on this in earlier posts: see, for example, the post on RealDolls (17 July 2017); or this one on Living Dolls (10 Jan 2013).

[2] See Damian Carrington's report in The Guardian entitled 'Microplastic discovery in penises raises erectile dysfunction questions' (19 June 2024): click here. 

      The multi-authored scientific report that Carrington based his article on was published in the International Journal of Impotence Research (June 2024): click here for online access provided by Springer Nature.   

[3] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217. 

In Praise of Interspecies Friendships

My new horse friend coming over to say hello 

(17 June 2024)

 

 

Whilst I'm alert to the danger of anthropomorphism and the denial of an animal's otherness, one of the things I very much encourage is the forming of interspecies friendships. 

 

Such friendships are mutually beneficial and I would suggest that human beings who have never bonded with an animal of some description have not only missed out on something, but lack something, that leaves them poorer in world than they would otherwise be. 

 

Those who maintain that we are entirely distinct from all other animals - closer to angels than we are to apes - are profoundly mistaken; standing in the presence of my new horse friend and communicating through the silent language of shared affection, reminds me that humans and animals cannot be essentially separated and form a continuous chain of being. 

 

It's not only because they can suffer as we suffer, but because they know joy and experience a wide range of other emotions, that they should be accorded the same kindness and respect that we like to be shown.   

 

 

Procrastination

Statue of Pál Pató in Svodín, Slovakia [1]

 

 

You know when your procrastination is becoming serious when you choose to write a post on procrastination rather than work on the 8000-word essay you should be writing ... 

 

Procrastination is an ugly word for an ugly thing; the act of unnecessarily delaying or postponing something that needs to be done, despite knowing that there could be negative consequences for doing so. 

 

Apparently, it's quite a common thing, although until now I've never experienced it. Someone suggested that it's sign of an underlying mental health issue, such as depression, or possibly related to old age - which didn't really help. 

 

I tend to suspect that in my case, however, it's more due to the fact that after 13 years of writing nothing but fragments and short posts in a cheerful manner, the thought of composing a long and serious piece of scholarly research in a formal academic style no longer comes naturally and no longer appeals. 

  

Also, because the essay is on the Sex Pistols I can't help hearing the mocking words of Johnny Rotten at the beginning of 'No Fun' - A sociology lecture, with a bit of psychology ... etc. [2]

 

Having said that, I do want to write the essay - and I will write the essay! 

 

Just not today ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Pál Pató is a popular pipe-smoking character who appears in a poem by the 19th-century Hungarian poet (and liberal revolutionary) Sándor Petőfi and personifies procrastination. His catchphrase is: We've got time for that ...

 

[2] 'No Fun' is the B-side of 'Pretty Vacant', the third single released by the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here to play the remastered version as it appears on the 35th anniversary edition of Never Mind the Bollocks (Universal Music, 2012). Although not strictly relevant to the subject of this post, being left in a void of indecision and unable to act by procrastination is certainly no fun.    

 

In Memory of Cat

Cat (June 2024)

 

 

I.

 

Mon chat est mort aujourd'hui. 

 

Unlike Nellie McKay, however, I didn't pour myself some gin; nor ponder whether she died from natural causes or, like Jesus, for my sins [1]. 

 

For whilst I loved her oh so much - and will miss her little kitty touch - such a question seems irrelevant (and a little inappropriate) in this case; her death was very much due to a combination of old age and illness and had nothing to do with substitutionary atonement. 

 

II.

 

Cat had been displaying many of the common signs of feline senescence - loss of appetite, restricted mobility, behavioural changes, etc. - for some time. I'm sure she knew she was getting older, although whether she had a concept of death and could instinctively sense that her own days were numbered, I don't know (and the science isn't certain on this point either).

 

But I think so: and believe she even made an effort to say goodbye. 

 

Her final hours were spent - contentedly I hope - in her favourite corner of the garden, in the sunshine, surrounded by the flowers ...

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring here to the Nellie McKay track 'Ding Dong' found on her brilliant debut album Get Away From Me (Columbia Records, 2004): click here to play.  

A Thousand Kisses Say Goodbye (In Memory of Françoise Hardy)

Françoise Hardy (1944 - 2024)

Photo: Vittoriano Rastelli (1966)

 

 

The French singer-songwriter Françoise Hardy has died and all over the world fans like me are feeling a pain in their heart. 

 

Loved by everyone, she was a muse to many - including Serge Gainsbourg [1] and Malcolm McLaren [2] - and yet remained an intensely private person (by which I mean shy and unaffected by fame, rather than aloof and withdrawn). 

 

She will be remembered as an iconic and influential figure in the worlds of music and fashion; as someone who embodied the look of the former and the sound of the latter. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In 1968, Hardy recorded a track entitled 'Comment te dire adieu', an adaptation of the song 'It Hurts to Say Goodbye' written by Arnold Globe and Jack Gold, with new lyrics by Serge Gainsbourg. It was released as a single from an album of the same name (Disques Vogue, 1968). To play, click here.   

 

[2] In 1994, Hardy was (eventually) persuaded to participate by Malcolm McLaren on his album Paris. The track she performed on - 'Revenge of the Flowers' - was released as a single the following year (Vogue, 1995). To play, click here. 

 

 

Bonus: perhaps my favourite track by Hardy - and one that was written by her - 'Voilà', is taken from her seventh studio album Ma jeunesse fout le camp... (Disques Vogue, 1967): click here for a 2016 remastered version.   

And I Wanna Live Yesterday Tomorrow

Malcolm McLaren Paris (1994)

 

'The only artist capable of rekindling the spark of hope in the past is the one who is 

firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe if the enemy is victorious.'

 

 

I.

 

Retrofuturism - born of the fact that capitalist realism makes tomorrow inconceivable - doesn't imagine future worlds that are projections from the present; it imagines future worlds that are reclaimed from the past. 

 

At first, this seems like fun. But there's a certain melancholic pessimism in concluding that since one can no longer look forward and dream of what might be, one is obliged to look back and (wistfully) recall what might have been. 

 

No wonder that the cultural theorist most often associated with this idea, Mark Fisher, topped himself.

 

However, for those who can bear it, retrofuturism's exploration of the tension between past and future - and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology - is a philosophically fascinating topic; one that, surprisingly, has quite a long history - certainly pre-dating Fisher's analysis - although its import as a concept has grown in recent years, perhaps as the present becomes ever-more unbearably dystopian. 

 

 

II.

 

Funny enough, although the word retrofuturism wasn't then part of my philosophical vocabulary, I first came across the idea in a song recorded by Malcolm McLaren in 1994, the last line of which is: And I wanna live yesterday tomorrow [1].

 

I remember thinking at the time that it was a nice, rather clever line - probably borrowed, I assumed, from one of those writers, like Walter Benjamin [2], who meant a great deal to McLaren, but I didn't reflect any further on it. 

 

However, thirty years later, and here we are ... The line has come back to haunt me and this paragraph from McLaren on reclaiming history (rather than just pissing on it) now seem to me of crucial importance: 

 

"The question I find most interesting is how you reclaim history. This is a very different thing from repackaging it. It's not about nostalgia, which is basically dead tissue. Living yesterday tomorrow should be about reclaiming history then reversing it into the future. If you can discover how to do that, you are probably doing everything an artist genuinely wishes to be involved in. One must aim to use certain disruptive practices to challenge the dominant cultural forms and relax the grip of authority." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The song I refer to is entitled 'Mon Dié Sénié' and can be found on McLaren's album Paris (1994): click here to play.

 

[2] See what Benjamin writes, for example, in the well-known essay 'On the Concept of History', in Selected Writings, Vol. 4., (Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 389-400. Composed of twenty numbered paragraphs, this short work by Benjamin is essentialy a critique of historicism.

 

[3] Malcolm McLaren, quoted by Paul Gorman, in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2002), pp. 718-19. 

 

Rats Are Us

A happy rat seen celebrating on April 4th

 

 

I.

 

Apparently, one of the things that neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp discovered in the late 1990s was that rats laugh and enjoy being tickled. Their laughter may not be what we would recognise as such - consisting as it does of ultrasonic chirps undetectable by the human ear - but laughter is what it is. 

 

We already knew that these intelligent and social animals liked to play, but we didn't know just how much they enjoyed it - literally squealing with joy and giggling with delight.    

 

 

II.

 

Apparently, rats also have a sense of time; possessing memories of past experiences and the ability to think ahead. This enables them to learn cognitively complex skills and, despite having brains much smaller than ours, there are some tasks in which they can outperform humans. 

 

Perhaps most surprising, however, is the fact that rats seem to feel empathy: "Since the 1950s and '60s, behavioural studies have consistently shown that rats are far from the egoistic, self-centred creatures that their popular image suggests." [1] 

 

In fact, rats do not wish to harm one another, feel distress when they witness other rats suffering, and will actively try to help rats that are trapped. In short: rats know what it is to care. But many people - including many scientists - simply don't want to face up to this fact, despite there having been a lot of (cruel) research since 2011 into rodent empathy [2].

 

Why? Because rats "are seen as cheap and disposable research tools" which are conveniently not covered by any pesky animal welfare legislation; "scientsts can legally do whatever they want to them" and hundreds of millions of rats are exploited and killed in labs around the world each year (so many in fact, that there is no official statistic). 

 

The justification is always the same: we wish to advance human knowledge and alleviate human suffering by discovering new drugs and therapies. 

 

But, of course, this ends justify the means defence is questionable from an ethical perspective when it comes to animal experimentation. Unless we are Nazis, we don't carry out horrific and deadly experiments on other human beings. And nor do we now inflict pain and suffering on fellow primates, such as chimps, having recently (and somewhat reluctantly) recognised them as thinking, feeling agents - just like us. 

 

But then, so are rats, it turns out; they too are sentient beings that love and laugh: "It is only our moral short-sightedness and relentless anthropocentrism that have prevented us from taking them into account."

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Kristin Andrews and Susana Monsó, 'Rats Are Us', Aeon (2 March 2020), ed. Sam Dresser. Click here. All quotes in the above post (and in note 2 below) are from this essay by Andrews and Monsó. 

[2] As Andrews and Monsó write:

 

"Scientists are now tinkering with rats' empathy in order to find ways of treating human psychopathologies. In some cases, rats are given treatments that temporarily disable their empathic capabilities, such as anxiolytics, paracetamol, heroin or electric shocks. In other cases, the harm is permanent. Rats are separated from their mothers at birth and raised in social isolation. In some studies, their amygdalae (the brain area responsible for emotion and affiliation) are permanently damaged. The explicit goal of this research is to create populations of mentally ill, traumatised, emotionally suffering rats." 

 

On the Philosophical Comeback

jakelikesonions.com / @jakelikesonions 

 

 

 

In philosophy, as in comedy, there have been many great comebacks, ranging from the retort courteous and the quip modest to the reply churlish and countercheck quarrelsome, to borrow, if I may, some of the seven categories humorously established by Shakesepeare in As You Like It [1].

 

Personally, I've always liked Karl Popper's response when challenged by a poker-wielding Wittgenstein to produce an example of a moral rule: Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers [2]. It's an amusing and (a quite literally) disarming response; Wittgenstein threw down the poker and stormed out the room after Popper delivered this zinger.

 

But I think my favourite debate-ending comeback involving philosophers is one reported on by Nicholas Blincoe and involves Nick Land leaving a fellow member of the faculty at the University of Warwick speechless when confronted by his inhumanism:

 

"Every month staff would give readings from work-in-progress. Nick's first talk was entitled: 'Putting the Rat back Into Rationality,' in which he argued that, rather than seeing death as an event that happened at a particular time to an individual, we should look at it from the perspectives of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe; that is, as a world-encircling swarm, without any specific coordinates, or any sense of individuation. An older professor tried to get his head round this idea: 'How might we locate this description within human experience?' he asked. Nick told him that human experience was, of course, worthy of study, but only as much as, say, the experience of sea slugs: 'I don’t see why it should receive any special priority.'" [3]

You can't argue with that. 

 

Nor can you come to any kind of agreement with a thinker like Land, who, of course, gave up on that idea a long time ago. Like Deleuze and Guattari - and to his credit - Land is more concerned with the creation of provocative concepts rather than entering into interminable discussion [4].    

 

Notes

 

[1] See Act V, scene IV.  

[2] See David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (HarperCollins, 2001). 

[3] Nicholas Blincoe, 'Nick Land: the Alt-writer', in Prospect (18 May 2017): click here.

[4] See what Deleuze and Guattari say about genuine philosophers having a horror of discussion in What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 28-29.