On the (Lost) Art of Swearing

The Filth and the Fury: 

Sex Pistols x D. H. Lawrence

 

Obscene language ... what language is that? I speak nothing but the fucking English language. 

And if that's obscene then tough shit. - Johnny Rotten [1]

 

I. 

 

Whilst their manager Malcolm McLaren tried to package the band as a combination of sex, style, and subversion, the press had other ideas following the Bill Grundy incident (see below) and would often discuss them in relation to another trio of terms beginning with the letter S: swearing, spitting, and scandalous behaviour. 

It's the first of these things - i.e., the use of language regarded as coarse, blasphemous, or obscene - that I wish to briefly touch on here with reference both to the Sex Pistols and, firstly, to the writer D. H. Lawrence ...

 

 

II. 

 

Following publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Lawrence conceded that he would henceforth be known as the author who (re-)introduced the so-called obscene words into English literature [2]. 

 

But despite the abuse he received for this, Lawrence insisted on the necessity of having published his book unexpurgated and maintained that "the words that shock so much at first don't shock at all after a while" [3]. 

 

And that's not because we are corrupted by the words and quickly become depraved; rather, says Lawrence, it's because "the words merely shocked the eye, they never shocked the mind at all" [4]. 

 

He continues: "People with no minds may go on being shocked, but they don't matter. People with minds realise that they aren't shocked, and never really were; and they experience a sense of relief." [5]

 

For Lawrence, words such as shit, fuck, cunt, and arse, refer to perfectly natural acts and to organs we all possess: "Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body ..." [6] and so it is the mind we have to liberate, bringing it into harmony with the body and its potencies. Otherwise, we will fall into a kind of madness: like Swift [7].

 

Thus, whether one agrees or disagrees with Lawrence's use of four-letter words throughout Lady C. - and whether one thinks his attempt to cleanse language and free the mind works or fails - it cannot be said that he was merely attempting to épater le bourgeois. 

 

Obviously, it was a novel "written in defiance of convention" [8], but the ridiculous desire simply to shock the respectable middle-class and offend slow-minded and mob-indignant members of the public, was not Lawrence's intention. 

 

The bold (if slightly naive) attempt to give back the body its own phallic language and to startle individuals out of their word-prudery - to remind us that the word arse "is as much god as the word face" [9] - is an attempt to keep society sane.      

 

 

III.

 

I'm not sure that the Sex Pistols shared Lawrence's philosophical concern with revaluing language and preserving social wellbeing, etc. Nevertheless, these foul-mouthed yobs as they were branded, managed to place the question of swearing back on the agenda for discussion - not once but twice.      

 

The first occasion followed what is known as the Bill Grundy incident, in December 1976; a televised early evening interview which, as Paul Gorman says, has attained folkloric proportions within the cultural imagination:

 

"The impact of [Steve] Jones closing the encounter by calling Grundy 'a fucking rotter' - in the process uttering the expletive for only the third time in four decades of British television broadcasting - was to make the Sex Pistols both media demons and free speech causes célèbres." [10]  

Amusingly, one viewer claimed that he had been so outraged by the incident that he had kicked in the screen of his new £380 colour television set, though I suspect he would be one of those mindless morons that Lawrence describes. 

 

Still, it demonstrates that even fifty years after the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover - and sixteen years following the Chatterley trial at the Old Bailey - expletives could still cause shock and outrage amongst some sections of the Great British Public.   

 

 

IV. 

 

The second time the Sex Pistols brought the question of what does and does not constitute offensive language to public attention was in November 1977, following release of their debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks ... [11]

 

The album, banned from sale by several highstreet retailers - including Boots, Woolworth's, and WH Smith - was available at Virgin Records, including the Nottingham branch where, on 9 November, the police arrested the store manager, Chris Searle, for displaying promotional material which included the word 'bollocks' in the window, after previously warning him on several occasions not to do so.  

 

Searle was charged with contravening the Indecent Advertisement Act (1889) and found himself in front of three local magistrates two weeks later. 

 

What might have remained a small matter, became a story of great national interest when Richard Branson - owner of the Virgin Record Stores and the Virgin Records label that the Sex Pistols were signed to - hired the famous barrister John Mortimer QC to (successfully) defend the case.

 

By calling a professor of English at the University of Nottingham as an expert witness, Mortimer was able to show that bollocks in the context of the album title clearly meant nonsense and derived from an Old English term for the kind of rubbish spoken by clergymen in their sermons and had no obscene sexual meaning, even if, etymologically, the term referred to the testicles. 

The chairman of the court hearing reluctantly concluded that as much as he and his colleagues wholeheartedly deplored the 'vulgar exploitation of the worst instincts of human nature for the purchases of commercial profits', they must find the defendant not guilty of any crime. 

 

Helped in part by the publicity surrounding the case, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols topped the charts and quickly went gold; Punk? Call it filthy lucre - a prime example of how to generate cash from chaos, as Malcolm might say. 

 

V.

 

Of course, all of this is a long, long time ago and we live today in a very different world from the one in which Lawrence wrote or even the one in which the Sex Pistols recorded. 

 

Indeed, one is almost tempted to speak now of the lost art of swearing as a once precious verbal resource has almost entirely been robbed of its potency. Rendered banal through endless repetition, the word fuck, for example, no longer shocks, no longer offends, no longer amuses, no longer endears. 

  

That's not to say, however, that the present doesn't have its own list of taboo terms and one smiles to see the content warnings given at the start of TV sitcoms from the 1970s: discriminatory language is what gets Gen Z viewers clutching their pearls and calling for the morality police, not foul language.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I have slightly altered the transcript of an interview that Rotten gave to Dutch TV in 1977. 

      The interviewer asks (rather strangely) about infamous language and although Rotten twice repeats this term in his answer, one suspects that he was aware that the interviewer intended to say obscene language, although, one cannot be quite sure; the Dutch translation that appears on screen is schuttingtaal, which is usually given in English as 'jargon' or 'secret language'. 

      Click here to watch on YouTube.

[2] As he writes in his 'Introduction to Pansies' (1929): "I am abused most of all for using the so-called 'obscene' words [...] all the old words that belong to the body below the navel [...]" - words that cause the censor-morons to get excited and allow policemen to think they have the right to arrest you. See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 664.

 

[3-5] D. H. Lawrence, 'A  Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', in Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 307.

 

[6] Ibid., p. 309. 

      In his 'Introduction to Pansies', Lawrence writes: "What is obvious is that the [obscene] words [...] have been dirtied by the mind, by unclean mental association. The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive emotion. Well then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job." See p. 664 of The Poems, Vol. I (2013). 

 

[7] See Lawrence's remarks on Swift and his horror at the fact that his beloved Celia defecates in 'Introduction to Pansies' ... pp. 665-666. But see also my post entitled 'Celia Shits! Notes on Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room" and (Alleged) Coprophobia' (2 April 2024): click here.     

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'A  Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' ... p. 334

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Pansies' ... p. 664.

 

[10] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 339. 

      For those readers who aren't familiar with the details of the Bill Grundy incident, let me briefly summarise: After Queen cancelled their appearance on the live television show Today show at the last minute, the Sex Pistols were offered the spot in order to promote their debut single, 'Anarchy in the UK', and explain what punk rock was all about. 

      Things started badly and quickly got worse when it was clear that Grundy was hostile and dismissive of the band and that the latter - particularly guitarist Steve Jones - were not prepared to take his bullshit, nor listen to his creepy sexual innuendo when speaking to a female member of their entourage called Siouxsie Sioux. Suggesting to her that they might 'meet afterwards' triggered Jones into calling him a 'dirty sod' and a 'dirty old man'. 

      Stupidly, Grundy then challenged Jones to 'say something outrageous' - which he did; calling Grundy a "dirty bastard" and a "dirty fucker". Grundy responded, "What a clever boy!" to which Jones hilariously replied, "What a fucking rotter!" 

      Predictably, the phone lines to the Thames switchboard lit up and the national press had a field day. Grundy was suspended by Thames and his career effectively ended. The Sex Pistols were fired shortly afterwards by their record label EMI and were now branded as public enemies. 

      The interview - click here - has become one of the most requested TV clips of all time. It will be noted that Johnny Rotten having muttered the word 'shit' prior to Jones's outburst almost apologises at first for his use of a 'rude word'.    

 

[11] The album was originally going to be called God Save the Sex Pistols, but the title was changed based on a phrase favoured by Steve Jones, which, as Rotten explained, was a popular working-class expression meaning 'stop talking rubbish'.

 

 

Destroy! Notes on a Punk Imperative

D. H. Rotten in a Seditionaries Destroy shirt [1]

 

 

I. 

 

If, like me, you are keen to promote the idea of D. H. Lawrence as a Sex Pistol, then one of the key ideas that might be discussed in order to lend credence to such a thesis is the concept of destruction ...

 

 

II. 

 

As I'm sure many readers will know, 'Anarchy in the UK' famously ends with a call to destroy; not so much anything in particular as everything in general, although earlier in the same song Rotten identifies the passer-by as a prime example of the sort of person he wishes to eliminate [2]. 

 

Funny enough, Lawrence too dislikes non-combatants; those gentle readers who refuse to actively engage with his texts are encouraged to curl up with books by other authors [3]. He imagines his ideal reader as a rampageous and ferocious reader; a surly, rabid reader; a hell-cat of a reader - not one who meekly passes by or turns the page on those passages that might shock or offend them [4].  

 

 

III.

 

Lawrence advocates for the necessity of destruction not only if one aims, as an artist, to create a new vision of the world via the liberation of what he terms chaos [5], but as one who actively fights, like Oliver Mellors, to preserve the tenderness of life against those forces of mechanised greed that negate and deaden. 

 

And, like Nietzsche, Lawrence also relates the process of becoming and self-overcoming to destruction: "The man I know myself to be must be destroyed before the true man I am can exist." [6] 

 

 

IV.

 

The notion of the creative potential within destruction is something Malcolm McLaren will later echo when defending the Sex Pistols from critics, such as Giovanni Dadomo, who accuse them of nihilism [7]. 

 

But McLaren, as someone who passionately subscribes to the idea of flamboyant failure [8], is also keen to destroy one ideal above all others: success. If Rotten hates those who pass by on the other side of the road, McLaren hates those who strive to achieve what they posit as a worthy goal or realise what they imagine to be a positive outcome.   

 

And Lawrence too hates those such as the rich, young, Irish playwright Michaelis, cheerfully prostituting himself to the bitch goddess Success, as she roams "snarling and protective" [9] around his heels. 

 

For what is benign success at last, but another form of nothingness?

 

 

Notes

 

[1] This image is based upon an original photo of Johnny Rotten taken by Dennis Morris in 1977, which, along with many other great images, can be found in Destroy: The Sex Pistols, 1977: Jubilee Edition, by Dennis Morris (Creation Books, 2002). 

      The Destroy shirt was designed by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood for sale in their shop - then named Seditionaries - at 430 King's Road, in 1977. Made of muslin, it features extended sleeves, with strait-jacket clasps and D rings and is screen-printed with a design showing an inverted crucifixion scene, a swastika, a Jamie Reid drawing of a Royal Mail postage stamp, and the word destroy written in capital letters. The bottom of the shirt contains lyrics from 'Anarchy in the UK'. 

      As Paul Gorman rightly notes, "this new top [...] epitomised the creative exchange conducted between McLaren and Westwood: her technical daring combined with his graphic understanding and political discourse to produce the most surprising outcomes existing way beyond the purview of fashion". See The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 348. 

 

[2] 'Anarchy in the UK', by the Sex Pistols, was released as a debut single in November 1976 on EMI Records. It can also be found on their album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977). The single (featuring 'I Wanna Be Me' on the B-side) reached number 38 on the UK singles chart. It's essentially a punk call to arms. Click here to watch the band performing the song.

 

[3] See the letter to Carlo Linati (22 Jan 1925) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 201, where he writes: "I can't bear art that you can walk around and admire [...] whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it - if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read someone else." 

 

[4] See D. H. Lawrence, Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 205.    

[5] See the recent post entitled 'On the Art of Destruction and the Creative Potential Within Chaos' (21 Jan 2025): click here. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 34. It's unfortunate that Lawrence relates his thinking on the self to truth (authenticity), but the point remains that destruction is the key. 

[7] In November 1976, the BBC invited the Sex Pistols to be interviewed on the current affairs programme, Nationwide. Along with the regular presenters, they also brought in music journalist Giovanni Dadomo, to challenge the band. He dismissed their music as being derivative and asserted that destruction for its own sake is dull and doesn't offer any hope. McLaren countered by saying: "You have to destroy in order to create [...] You have to break it down and build it up again in a different form."

      Readers interested in knowing more can visit the BBC Culture website: click here. 

 

[8] McLaren picked up his radical idea of failure from one of his tutors at art college; see Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren ... pp. 48-49.

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 21. 

 

 

For earlier posts in this series on D. H. Lawrence as Sex Pistol, click here, here, and here.

On the Art of Destruction and the Creative Potential Within Chaos

Agents of Chaos: Messrs. Rotten and Lawrence

 

 

I. 

 

If, like me, you are keen to promote the idea of D. H. Lawrence as a Sex Pistol, then one of his texts that you might discuss in order to lend credence to such a thesis is his introduction to Harry Crosby's volume of poetry Chariot of the Sun [1]. 

 

Entitled 'Chaos in Poetry', this short text develops the idea not merely of creative disorder that Malcolm McLaren and his young punk protégés will later inject into the moribund UK music scene of the mid-1970s, but of chaos as a realm of infinite possibilities and strange becomings [2].  

According to Lawrence, poetry is not merely a matter of words: essentially, it is an act of attention and the attempt to discover a new world within the known world. 

 

But this discovery of a new world involves an act of violence; the slitting of what he terms the Umbrella and by which he refers to all that is erected between ourselves and the sheer intensity of lived experience (our ideals, our conventions, and fixed forms of every description) [3]. 

 

The poet, then, as Lawrence understands them, is also a kind of terrorist; an enemy of human security and comfort. One whose concern is not with safeguarding the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, or merely experimenting with form and technique, but who wishes rather to unleash the inhuman and forever-surging chaos that punks, animals, and flowers all live within [4]. 

 

 

II. 

 

On 12 February 1976, the Sex Pistols were due to play at the famed Soho music venue the Marquee, supporting the pub rock band Eddie & the Hot Rods. 

 

Shortly before the gig took place, they were interviewed by Neil Spencer from the NME and extracts from this accompanied a review of the above performance, including what has since become a famous quote from guitarist Steve Jones: 

 

"Actually, we're not into music. We're into chaos." [5]    

As Bill Grundy later discovered, Jones always did have a nice turn of phrase. However, I think we can safely assume that he'd picked up this particular term - chaos - from Malcolm, as - along with the word ruins - it had a privileged place within McLaren's thinking.

 

For McLaren, as for Nietzsche, one must always retain a little chaos in one's character if one wishes to give birth to a dancing star [6]; and for McLaren, as for Lawrence, an originary chaos is what lies beneath the ruins of culture and its fixed forms erected to keep us safe and secure, though which in the long run cause us to become deadened. 

 

 

III. 

 

In sum: of course we require "a little order to protect us from chaos" [7], as Deleuze and Guattari recognise. 

 

But so too do we need a little chaos to protect us from the monumental dead weight of civilisation. 

 

And so we need our agents of chaos and angels of destruction - whether they come with red beards like D. H. Lawrence, or spiky red hair like Johnny Rotten.   

 

Sous les pavés, la plage!

 

And surely that's not simply a cry for freedom, so much as for the joy that comes when we smash those structures and systems, narratives and networks, that enframe us within a highly-ordered (and boring) world of discipline, convention, and common sense and get back to chaos.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lawrence wrote the introduction in 1928. A revised version was published under the title 'Chaos in Poetry' in the magazine Echanges in December 1929 (the same month in which Crosby committed suicide). Another version was used for the Black Sun Press edition of Chariot of the Sun (1931). 

      The text can be found in D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116. 

 

[2] I am, of course, indebted to the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari who, in their final work together, argues that philosophy, science, and art all have the essential task of confronting chaos and that each discipline does so in a manner specific to itself as a way of thinking and creating. 

      If philosophy adventures into chaos via a plane of immanence and science via a plane of reference, then art constructs a plane of composition; indeed, this, for Deleuze and Guattari is definitional of art. But by this they refer not merely to technical composition, but an aesthetic composition concerned with sensation. Thus art is a unique way of thinking and of opening a plane within chaos, which, whilst related to science and philosophy, should not be thought of as merely an aestheticisation of these practices. 

      See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (Verso, 1994). And see also my post on this book dated 23 May 2013: click here.   

 

[3] See the post entitled 'On Poetry, Chaos and the Great Umbrella' (10 June 2013): click here.

 

[4] Unfortunately, unlike animals and flowers, even punks can't live within chaos for very long and that is why they soon topple into cliché and become stereotypical; why they parade up and down the King's Road pretending that they are revolutionaries breathing the wild air of chaos, when they are all the while living and dying beneath the Great Umbrella.

 

[5] Neil Spencer's piece in the New Musical Express (21 Feb 1976) was entitled 'Don't look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming'. It was reproduced in The Guardian to mark the 30th anniversary of its publication in 2006: click here. 

      Readers will note that no mention is given to the headlining Eddie & the Hot Rods, who had some of their equipment smashed by the Sex Pistols when the night descended (appropriately and not atypically) into chaos (they, the Sex Pistols, were booed off stage and subsequently banned from playing at the Marquee in future).

 

[6] See section 5 of the Prologue to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

 

[7] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 201.

 

 

For related posts to this one, please click here, here, and here.   

Serge Gainsbourg: l'improbable artiste reggae

Serge Gainsbourg and his Jamaican cohorts 

(including Sly & Robbie)

 

 

I. 

 

Joe Strummer and Mick Jones of the Clash were not the only white recording artists to leave the safety of their European homes in the late 1970s [1] and travel to Kingston Jamaica in the hope of finding inspiration. 

 

Always happy to hop on the latest bandwagon and experiment with musical genres, the French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg also flew to the Caribbean island, in September 1978, with the intention of recording a reggae album with super-talented local musicians and producers Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare [2].    

 

Surprisingly perhaps, it was the 50-year-old Frenchman - whom many regarded by this date as past his prime - and not the younger, cooler duo of English punks then at the top of their game, who seemed to have a better time of it in Jamaica and fit in more easily with the scene; particularly when it was discovered that he was the man responsible for the notorious love song 'Je t'aime ... Moi non plus'. 

 

And it was Gainsbourg, not the Clash, who arguably made the more challenging album ...

II.

 

Released in March 1979, four months after the Clash released their second studio album, Give 'Em Enough Rope - a fairly standard rock record with minimal Jamaican influence, apart from on the opening track - Gainsbourg's Aux armes et caetera is a unique but genuine reggae album; i.e., one recorded in Kingston and featuring some of Jamaica's best reggae musicians, as well as vocal support from members of Bob Marley's backing group, the I Threes [3].

 

The album, which has since been remixed, dubbed, and expanded with previously unused material, is now considered an absolute classic (and I'm not sure that's something that can be said of Give 'Em Enough Rope) and has gone on to sell over a million copies. 

The title track, released as a single, is probably the most notorious; a reggae adaptation of 'La Marseillaise' that is guaranteed to offend the more conservative and reactionary sections of French society. Indeed, it provoked an equivalent amount of media-driven outrage as 'God Save the Queen' by the Sex Pistols had produced in the UK in the summer of '77 [4].  

 

Gainsbourg, however, was so happy with the album and so taken with reggae as a genre, that he recorded another album in 1981, Mauvaises nouvelles des étoiles, employing the same Jamaican musicians and backing vocalists (even though Bob Marley was less than pleased to discover that Gainsbourg had persuaded his wife Rita to sing erotic lyrics). 

 

This album too was eventually given a dub-style remix a decade after Ganisbourg's death (in 2003) and continues to find new fans, although it isn't a patch on Aux armes et cætera and pales in comparison.  

 

 

III.

 

Whether performing Aux armes et caetera live on tour was Gainsbourg's idea or his record company's isn't known, but it was Gainsbourg who insisted that they fly his Jamaican support band - the Revolutionaries [5] - over from Jamaica (sadly, the I Threes were not invited along for the ride).  

 

The short tour in culminated in a number of Paris gigs - the first of which was attended by various French artists and intellectuals (including Roland Barthes) - although it was the show in Strasbourg (4 Jan 1980) that is often best remembered, after a group of angry ex-paratroopers threatened to violently disrupt the event. 

 

Deciding to courageously confront - whilst at the same time disarm the protestors - Gainsbourg walked on stage alone and sang the national anthem, in its traditional form, amusingly obliging the soldiers to stand, salute, and sing along [6].

 

 

Photo of Serge Gainsbourg holding the French flag 

by Jean-Jacques Bernier (1985)

 

Notes

 

[1] See the recent post 'Where Every White Face ...' (11 Jan 2025): click here. 

 

[2] For the full story of this working trip to Jamaica, made at the suggestion of Gainsbourg's producer and musical director, Philippe Lerichomme, see the article by Sylvie Simmons entitled 'Serge Gainsbourg: the Reggae Years' on the Red Bull Music Academy website (26 Oct 2015): click here. 

       Ms. Simmons is the author of the first English biography of Serge Gainsbourg - Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes (Helter Skelter, 2001).

 

 [3] Aux Armes et caetera (Universal, 1979) was the first time a white artist had recorded a full reggae-influenced album in Jamaica. The I Threes consisted of Marcia Griffiths, Rita Marley, and Judy Mowatt.

 

[4] Gainsbourg received (all-too-predictable) death threats upon release of his reggae cover of the French national anthem. But, bravely, he neither backed down nor apologised. In fact, after purchasing the signed manuscript of 'La Marseillaise' at an auction, in 1981 (for a sum of 135,000 francs), Gainsbourg argued that his take was closer to the original than any other recorded version (not least of all in revolutionary spirit). 

      For full details of the reaction in France to Aux armes et caetera, see Sylvie Simmons 'Serge Gainsbourg: the Reggae Years', as linked to above. And to listen to the track, please click here, or here where it comes with an accompanying video.

 

[5] The Revolutionaries were a Jamaican reggae band, formed in 1975. Moving away from roots reggae, they created the new (more aggressive) rockers style. Over the years, numerous musicians played in the band, including Sly & Robbie (on drums and bass respectively). The Revolutionaries played on various dub albums and recorded as a backing band for many artists, including Serge Gainsbourg.

 

[6] Again, for further details, see Sylvie Simmons, 'Serge Gainsbourg: the Reggae Years', as previously linked to. To watch a French TV report from the time with footage from Strasbourg, click here.

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.

 

 

Fuck Everyone and Be a Disgrace! In Memory of the Dada Baroness: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven 

(1874 -1927)

 

"Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life ..."

 

I. 

 

The relationship between dada and punk has long been acknowledged; Greil Marcus, for example, famously traces out a secret history of twentieth-century art in which he discerns a direct lineage from the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 to the Sex Pistols in 1976 [1].

 

And it's arguable that the German-born artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who, via her radical performance of self during the years 1913 to 1923 came to embody dada, might also be described as a proto-punk.

 

For not only did she look and act the part, but she even coined the term phalluspistol in her profane and playfully obscene poetry [2], anticipating the name Malcolm McLaren would come up with for the group operating out of 430 King's Road. 

 

I'm not suggesting that McLaren stole Elsa's idea in the same way as Marcel Duchamp allegedly stole credit for his most notorious readymade from her (see below), but it's an interesting coincidence.

 

II.

Apart from her writings, Baroness Elsa was famous for two things: (i) her numerous love affairs and (ii) her utilisation of found objects - including actual rubbish picked up from the streets - into her work and wardrobe (she once wore a bra, for example, made from old tins cans). 

 

Her aim, she declared, was to sleep with everyone and become a living collage, thereby dissolving the boundary between life and art whilst, at the same time, challenging bourgeois notions of femininity and cultural value. If this made her an embarrassment to her friends and family and a disgrace in the eyes of society, well, she didn't care (again, her attitude and behaviour is now what some would term punk).

 

Her colourful and unconventional life took her to New York in 1913 and it was here that she made a name for herself as a model, artist, and poet [3]. To help make ends meet, Elsa also worked in a cigarette factory like Bizet's Carmen. 

 

Whilst Man Ray once filmed Elsa shaving her pubic hair, it was Marcel Duchamp for whom she had the hots and, in a public performance c. 1915, she recited a love poem whilst rubbing a newspaper article about the latter over her naked body, making her romantic interest explicit. Several years later she would make an assemblage entitled Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1920-22), which was only rediscovered in 1966. 

It was her connection with Duchamp that would lead to a more recent controversy. For there is now speculation that several artworks attributed to other artists of the period can either be partially attributed to Elsa, or that she should in fact be acknowledged as their sole creator - and this includes one of the most famous and important artworks of the twentieth-century ...

 

 

III. 

 

In April 1917, a porcelain urinal signed with the name R. Mutt was submitted by Duchamp for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Duchamp entitled this readymade work Fountain - and the rest, as they say, is avant-garde art history [4].
      

But some have suggested that the work was, in fact, the idea of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven who had submitted it to her friend Duchamp and there is, to be fair, circumstantial evidence to support this claim. Most art historians, however, maintain that Duchamp was solely responsible for this landmark work in twentieth-century art and he remains credited for it [5].   

   

Ultimately, we'll probably never know the truth of this for sure. 

 

 

IV.  

In 1923, the Baroness returned to Berlin, where she lived in poverty and suffered mental health problems.

 

Things improved after she moved to Paris, but, sadly, she died on 14 December 1927 from gas inhalation (whether this was or was not intentional is unclear). 

 

She's buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, so in good company.

 

There have since been several biographies published and every now and then there's an attempt to bring the name Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to wider public attention [6], though one suspects that she'll always remain a marginal figure of interest only to those in the know.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1989). 

 

[2] See the poem 'Cosmic Chemistry' in Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, ed. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo (The MIT Press, 2016). Click here to read on allpoetry.com.

 

[3] Although most of her poems remained unpublished in her lifetime, some were featured in The Little Review alongside extracts from Joyce's Ulysses.

 

[4] The original piece is now lost, but, along with numerous replicas made with Duchamp's permission in the 1950s and '60s, we still have the famous photograph of it taken at Alfred Stieglitz's sudio and published in The Blind Man (a two-issue journal featuring work by dada artists and edited by Duchamp in 1917).

 

[5] See, for example, the letter from Dawn Adès (Professor emerita of art history and theory, University of Essex) addressing this controversy in The Guardian (15 June 2022): click here.  

[6] See for example Irene Gammel's biography, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity (The MIT Press, 2003). Gammel makes a strong case for Elsa's artistic brilliance and punk spirit. 

 

 

Punk's Dead Knot: Reflections on an Essay by Ian Trowell - Part 2: On Big Flavour Wraps and Vicious Burgers

You pays your money and you takes your choice ...

 McDonald's Big Flavour Wraps (2016) [a]

Vs Jamie Reid's Vicious Burger (1979) [b]

 

 

I. 

 

In the second part of Ian Trowell's dead knot essay, he discusses a 2016 TV ad by the "multinational fast-food franchise" [c] McDonald's for a new summer range of Big Flavour Wraps:

 

"Whilst not all of my observations and suggestions will be intentional on the part of the creative teams associated with the instigation and production of the commercial, my own intentions are to examine the ubiquitous, neutralized and atemporal representations of punk that resonate within the images and actions." [189]

 

Having established that, let's go ...

 

 

II. 

 

Via a detailed, imaginative, and theoretically-informed analysis of each scene, Trowell is very good at relaying the anachronistic tension present in an ad that seems designed to appeal to old punks on the one hand and disorientate them on the other: 

 

"How are we meant to feel, how did we used to feel, what has changed?" [190] 

 

Of course, the assimilation of punk began a long, long time before 2016: what is The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) if not a brutal exposure of the way in which big business indecently exploits young flesh and rapidly co-opts, commodifies, and mythologises groups like the Sex Pistols? 

 

Anyone who felt genuinely shocked and outraged by "such an unholy alliance between McDonald's and punk" [195] - or by Virgin Money's issuing of Never Mind the Bollocks and 'Anarchy in the UK' credit cards the year before [d] - clearly wasn't paying attention to what McLaren and Reid were warning about in the Swindle and clearly hadn't read their Guy Debord [e].

 

Punk - and the very word is already a misunderstanding - may have initially wished to "disrupt cultural, social and historical forms and habits through a multitude of methods" [195], but it didn't take long before the majority of punk performers were looking to build long-lasting careers in the music business. 

 

If rock 'n' roll died when Elvis joined the US Army in 1958, then perhaps we can say punk died when John Lydon decided to trust a hippie and sign an eight album deal with Virgin. McLaren and Reid fought a kind of resistance campaign operating behind enemy lines in those months following the breakup of the group - and, personally, I think the work produced in 1978-79 is some of the most provocative and amusing - but the game was basically up.         

Ultimately, no matter how much some of us wish it were otherwise, the majority of Brits like their Big Flavour Wraps [f]. And, as Trowell rightly notes, for all the faux outrage expressed from some quarters when the McDonald's 2016 campaign was launched, what we didn't hear were the voices of "disgruntled and disgusted [...] customers outraged at the linking of punk and the safe, normative environment of McDonald's" [195].

 

 

Notes

 

[a] The McDonald's Big Flavour Wraps campaign (2016) was devised by the American advertising company Leo Burnett - the home of so-called populist creativity. It featured ersatz punk imagery and also incorporated the Buzzcocks' 1978 single 'What Do I Get?', written by Pete Shelley, into a TV ad. Morrissey, like many other old punks, was not best pleased. 

      To watch the 30 second TV ad, dir. Jason Lowe, click here. For further details of the people who worked on the campaign, please click here. 

 

[b] Jamie Reid's promotional poster for the Sex Pistols' single 'C'mon Everybody', released from the soundtrack of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (Virgin Records, 1979), featuring a photo of vocalist Sid Vicious by Bob Gruen. For more details see the V&A Jamie Reid Archive: click here. 

      The Vicious Burger was just one of many imaginary products featured in a fake cinema ad in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980): "Feeling uptight, violent, or tense? Why not take it out on a sizzling Vicious Burger; the gristle ball that gives as good as it gets!"

 

[c] Ian Trowell, 'Punk's dead knot: Constructing the temporal and spatial in commercial punk imagery', Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 5, Number 2 (2016), pp. 181-199. Page references given in the post refer to the essay as published here. 

 

[d] See the post of 12 June 2015: click here. 

[e] Debord used the term récupération to refer to a process by which politically radical ideas and subversive art works are defused, incorporated, and commodified within mainstream culture (usually with the full collaboration of the media). See the post of 26 June 2023, in which I discuss this idea: click here. 

 

[f] According to statista.com, 96% of Brits were aware of McDonald's as a brand in 2023 and 60% not only liked to eat there, but expressed loyalty to the company.

 

  

Musical bonus: Buzzcocks, 'What Do I Get?', (United Artists, 1978): click here for the remastered 2001 version that appears on Singles Going Steady (Domino Recording Co., 2003). And for the official video, which Trowell provides a nice reading of in his essay (pp. 191-92), click here.

To read part one of this post, click here. 

Punk's Dead Knot: Reflections on an Essay by Ian Trowell - Part 1: I Got You in My Camera ...

 

Sex Pistols on Carnaby Street 

Photo by Ray Stevenson (1976)

 

I. 

 

Ian Trowell's dead knot essay [a] provides a fascinating insight into how time and space are encoded in punk imagery and demonstrates how a photograph, for example, is not simply an objective or neutral representation of reality, but an artefact that is both constructed and constructive of the world as we know it.    

 

The essay analyses two visual artefacts: a photograph of the Sex Pistols from 1976 and a 30-second TV commercial for McDonald's from 2016. Here I shall reflect on the first of these, whilst in part two of this post I shall discuss the latter. 

 

 

II.

 

Ray Stevenson's famous photo of the Sex Pistols strolling along Carnaby Street in the spring of 1976 still makes smile almost fifty years later, due mostly to what Trowell terms the performative iconoclasm and punk theatricality that is here captured and preserved on film; a second of their lives ruined for life, as Rotten might say [b]. 

 

According to Trowell, whilst Paul Cook is perfectly content to eat his grapes purchased from Berwick Street Market and remain not only partially obscured but as anonymous as the brown paper bag containing his fruit - and whilst Steve Jones and Johnny Rotten are both happy to clown and pose for the camera - Glen Matlock looks uncomfortable and out of place:

 

"His comportment is akin to Wittgenstein's multi-stable rabbitduck illusion in that he is both relaxed and not relaxed at the same time. He has taken the relaxed pose of a pop star going through the motions of a publicity photograph but it clearly seems that he is out of step with the posed anti-comportment of the rest of the band." [183]

 

Matlock, with his buttoned-up jacket and persona, doesn't quite fit in with a band safety-pinned together or with the wider punk aesthetic and ethos; he's just a little too smart and sensible; the slightly nervous observer of the scene, always hanging back and looking on: 

 

"It is a disorienting picture since he appears to know his time is running out, but at the same time he gives the impression of lingering with admiration and anticipation, an adumbration of what is to come evidently with or without him." [184]

 

If, due to Rotten's "hogging of the frame" [185], locating the picture's true point of magic is made difficult, neverthless, for Trowell, it's not Rotten's ugly mug but the fastened button on Matlock's jacket that forms the pictures punctum - i.e., that troubling detail that disturbs and distracts from the more general field of interest (the photo's studium); that which pricks our attention and often moves us with a certain poignant delight [c]. 

 

 

III. 

 

Glen Matlock's button and Wittgenstein's duckrabbit aside, Trowell gives us many other interesting ideas to consider; about Carnaby Street as a subcultural epicentre; about the staging of photography; and about Rotten's performance for the camera.

 

He suggests, for example, that "Stevenson's photograph bears an uncanny resemblance to Roger Fenton's 1855 photograph Valley of the Shadow of Death" [184]. I don't quite see it myself, however, and might just as easily imagine the Sex Pistols "photoshopped into the immediate foreground" [184] of many an image containing a tapering path. 

 

For instance, here's Jones and Rotten following the yellow brick road:

 

 

 

I wasn't entirely convinced either by Trowell's suggestion that we might consider Stevenson's photograph as "a precisely posed document with the four punk musicians reminiscent of the generic crouched figures of Captain Kirk and his original Star Trek crew materializing on a hostile, alien planet with their phasers at the ready to deal with the subcultural detritus that might turn on them at any moment" [186], although it's certainly an original reading.  

 

These things aside, for the most part one agrees with Trowell's interpretations and marvels at his insights. Rotten's captioning of Stevenson's photo as forced fun at Malcolm's behest is pithy, but one needs Trowell's essay to provide the theoretical and cultural context without which it's just another snap. 

 

The band may never have had much clue as to what was going on or what was at stake, but Malcolm knew exactly what he wanted to do and how he wanted the band to look: "The photograph tries to set out McLaren's deliberate positioning of punk as against the process of accumulation of all music genres and stylistic connotations and manifestations that have gone before." [188]

Obviously, in due course every image loses its power and becomes just another stock photo filed away in an archive: cultural fodder, as Trowell puts it. Some truly great pictures, however, retain their abilty to shock or seduce or to scandalise for decades; others, like this one, now mostly rely on Matlock's button to provide a point of interest.

 

Ultimately, argues Trowell, even the Sex Pistols "cannot escape time and space" [188] just as punk cannot escape being co-opted and commercialised by the forces of capital, as McLaren and Reid conceded in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980).

   

 

Notes

 

[a] Ian Trowell, 'Punk's dead knot: Constructing the temporal and spatial in commercial punk imagery', Punk & Post-Punk, Volume 5, Number 2 (2016), pp. 181-199. Page references given in the post refer to the essay as published here.  

[b] Somewhat surprisingly, Trowell doesn't refer us to the following lines in the Sex Pistols' song 'I Wanna Be Me': 'I got you in my camera / a second of your life, ruined for life'.

      He does, however, refer us to John Berger who argues that the true content of a photograph is invisible as it "derves from a play not with form, but with time ... it isolates, preserves and presents a moment taken from a continuum". See Understanding a Photograph (Penguin, 2013), p. 20. 

[c] Barthes's concept of the punctum raises a problem discussed by commentators such as Michael Fried and James Elkins; if it calls forth a highly idiosyncratic response on behalf of an individual viewer, then how can that experience ever be communicated and theorised? In other words, can Matlock's button ever intensely move anyone other than Trowell himself? I might understand what he says and appreciate what he writes, but is his experience of pleasure (as of pain) not uniquely his own?  

 

 

Musical bonus: Sex Pistols, 'I Wanna Be Me', b-side to 'Anarachy in the UK' (EMI, 1976): click here.  

 

Part two of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

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.