Counter-counterculture – The Punk Generation
To get yourself into the right frame of mind for this class, listen to ‘Blank Generation’ by Television. The song of the American Punk Generation.
Last semester, the rise of counterculture – amplified in America by the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement, student protests and opposition to the Vietnam War – was covered. The rise of counterculture brings with it a significant group of people within a generation that are launching an ‘all out’ attack on their own culture. It did not affect everyone, but it did create something new, something never seen before in Western culture. A youth culture, but also a political one, to be reckoned with; young people who became a cultural force
Why is the Punk Generation in itself an important movement? Because it was an important movement, even though it was very short-lived. It lasted less than a decade, and almost immediately splintered into various subcultures. Given that very short life span, it was extraordinarily influential. Its influence was not in relation to its longevity. There is no such thing as a homogenous punk culture. Punk was always a catchphrase, a container term, that lumped together very different, congenial, reactions, lifestyles etc. Punk was not in the first place a literary or a philosophical movement. It was a musical and fashion culture. A way of playing music and dressing and expressing yourself through a certain look. It was a significant semiotic gesture. Clothes do not only mean something to the wearer, they are a language, and the wearer is expressing something through wearing them.
Punk was not a new word, it was even used in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, when a woman sleeps with her husband-to-be, but under the cover of darkness, so the man thinks he sleeps with someone else. Punk, originally, is just another word for a prostitute. Yet, it also means a natural sort of vegetation, mushrooms and so on. The word did not come to mean what it means now until the early 1970s, when a journalist used it to describe what was happening in New York.
“Punk was a musical and sub-cultural phenomenon driven by reaction against the idealism of the sixties counterculture”. – Frank Albers
The sixties were far more political in the US than they were in the UK because of the Vietnam War. When students were shot on the Kent State university campus, that was the symbolical end of the movement. In the seventies, when Punk came around, the political weight or edge, of the counterculture movement, moved from the US to the UK. Punk in Europe, but especially in England, was far more political than punk in America. This time it was not due to a war being fought half a world way, but there was something else which heavily affected England and the rest of Europe: the 1973 oil crisis. It caused an instant problem, and the economic ramifications were enormous. England was among the most heavily affected by the oil crisis. The oil crisis spiraled into huge political, economic, and financial crisis. Which explains the rise of an angry, politically, youth-oriented culture.
American Punk
However, Punk had started in New York with a very famous band that came out of the sixties: The Velvet Underground. They are considered as a forerunner of the punk movement: the crucial band who made the movement possible. Somewhat discovered by the famous American artist Andy Warhol, when playing at CBGB’s at the Bowery. Warhol convinced the Velvet Underground to record an album with the German singer Nico. One of the main reasons for their popularity were the themes over their lyrics, as they wrote lyrics about things that were never written or talked about in American society. Yet, there were themes that very much lived in the underbelly of New York: (gay) sex, drugs, crime, violence, etc.. The same themes that permeate Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. In fact the Beat Generation as a whole formed a huge inspiration, including the work of William Burroughs, whose writings were entrenched in the drug culture, that was of huge influence to the early bands. Punk in America was all East Coast, there was a later movement, Hard Rock/Punk in the eighties on the West Coast. Yet, that it started not with bands, but with magazines. It was not that important, from a cultural perspective.
Patti Smith’s Horses is one of the pre-eminent tracks of American punk. In some ways it is a description of being and suddenly the lights going out, but it is also closer to Howl than it is to popmusic. It is impossible to fully excavate the lyrics. They resist easy interpretation. It could be a shortcut to ‘bullshit’ – it is all nonsense and gibberish – but this is a poem. A poem like Howl that tries to convey a sense of life, of what it means to be alive at this time in this place It tries to convey what it means to feel threatened in that crazy era. Howl did it for a young gay man in the forties, Horses does it for young people in the seventies. The poem will never fully open up to interpretation, the way a newspaper article should open up. There are dark spots in the text that resist interpretation. Yet, that is the strength of the text: these hard knots where images jump at the listener, and yet they cannot make sense of them.
The album cover of Horses is one of the most iconic pictures of the punk movement. It is a cover that transcended its function. It was taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, who is considered one of the best photographers of post-WWII American photography. He was in a relationship with Patti Smith and is one of two important men in Patti Smith’s life. However, they split up later in life, and he was one of the first great artists to die of AIDS. They had an intense romantic life. The other man in her life is Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th century French poet. He was a young poet who also died young. He cofounded the tradition of ‘le poète maudit’, the damned poet. This romantic identity, or stereotype, of the poet who lives a very self-destructive life through drugs, alcohol, sex poverty and violence. The poet who lives on ‘de zelfkant’ of society, the dark side of the moon, in the underworld, the one who looks for extremes. The one who is completely outsidered. Rimbaud writes poetry that is at times very opaque. It is images, languages, sound are very hard to access, but would become very influential to Patti Smith’s work She started reading his work at age twelve and he was her great example as a poet.
In her lyrics – or perhaps poems is more accurate – Smith expresses a fascination with young boys, often depicted like the angel, similarly to how they were depicted in Howl The lyrics constantly hover between evocations of innocence and then violence, threatening or destroying that image. Horses are the central image of the hallucination, they will recur, throughout the songs. Yet, there are images of hope in this version, which is very different from English Punk and for instance the lyrics of the Sex Pistols. Another element is the blurring of gender, which is also clear in Gloria, a cover of a Van Morisson song, she writes from a male perspective. Yet, she also lived with a man who was a sexual hybrid. American Punk incorporates a great deal of what has gone before, both the Beats and Sixties counterculture.
Punk as a movement was enormously short lived. On 5 June 1974, Patti Smith recorded Hey Joe/Piss Factory which is considered to be the first Punk Album. On 15 August 1974, The Ramones played their first gig at CBGB’s. They became an iconic Punk band. Another band that would eventually go in a totally different direction played that day as well: Angel and the Knife, which would later become Blondie. In November 1975, Horses is released. It was the ultimate album of the Punk movement. Yet, it is also just a tiny bit different. The lyrics are much more like poems, it was a masterpiece, and immediately recognized at such. However, it came out relatively late in the Punk Generation. In February 1977, Television releases Marquee Moon and that caps of and summarizes the entire movement.
English Punk
Chronologically, Punk in America and in England emerged around the same time, but American punk was first with bands such as the Ramones, Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. Meanwhile among the British Bands, the biggest names are undoubtedly: the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Damned. Tonally there is also a major shift. While in America Punk was about disillusionment after the sixties, in Britain, Punk was angrier as a result of the economic and political climate The difference is clear from the names alone: The Ramones were ridiculing the Beatles, because Ramone was the first musical pseudonym of Paul McCartney. The Talking Heads, for example, were all people with higher degrees. Unlike a lot of British punk bands, these American bands were not people down-in-thegutter. Meanwhile the UK had bands such as The Clash, The Dead Boys, The Slits, The Damned… There was a second generation of American punk bands, which were more influenced by the UK scene: The Dead Kennedys, The Misfits,… Nevertheless, Punk in England was distinctly political, while in America it never really was all that political. Punk in Britain was also very connected to another movement, Rock Against Racism, which was anti-racist and left-leaning, against the conservative establishment.
When it comes to the British Punk generation, one figure stands is tremendously influential in shaping its form, style and reputation: Malcolm McLaren, who was responsible for the creation the Sex Pistols. He was a manager, a very flamboyant figure, and also a fashion designer. In 1974-1975, he went to New York, where he saw the New York Dolls and Television perform. He immediately thought their music was intriguing, and sensed that it could be marketed. That it was something that
could be used, and that might just work back in the UK. McLaren returned to old Blighty where he decided to test out his theory with one of the newest bands on his label: the Sex Pistols. He remodeled them based on anger, vulgarity, slander, the nasty and the noisy. That was what this time, what this era, was waiting for according to McLaren, and he was right. Yet, their rebellious nature started as a figment of McLaren’s imagination, their whole image was consciously designed by him.
When Punk was unleashed on British shores, the country was almost in a pre-revolutionary state. There were distinct clear reasons that the English Punk movement was so angry –fucking pissed off, in fact. There was over 20 per cent inflation, in real terms, that meant people’s money became worth 20 per cent less year by year. The oil crisis of 1973 had made prices soar by up to 70 per cent. By 1974, unemployment was soaring to Great Depression levels, in some place even higher than it had been in the 1930s. Young people who looked at their economic perspective with despair found solace in the anger of Punk. However, not all music that originated at this point in time was punk, there was another movement that ran parallel to it called ‘glamrock’, with bands such as The Sweet. Additionally, there was David Bowie who was a figure that connected all these genres
The Sex Pistols released their first huge single near the end of 1976: God Save The Queen. Perfectly timed, a few months before all the festivities started for Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee in 1977. It made every headline in Britain. The single sold fifty thousand copies in a week. It was so well-timed that it would top the billboards by the time all the heads of state came to visit. It makes it clear how important the movement was in England. The impact can also be seen in the interview they did with Bill Grundy. They even recorded a clip while playing on the River Thames, to evoke the Queen’s parade sailing up the river.
Once McLaren finished production on their first album in 1978, he organized a tour for the Sex Pistols. As most bands did, after finishing an album, they toured to promote it and sell it. With the reputation of the Sex Pistols well established McLaren decided it would be wise to try and reach an American audience too. Yet, in a stroke of genius he did not schedule gigs in New York or Washington or Boston, the heartlands of Punk, but he decided to take the band to tour venues in the South, from Atlanta to end in San Francisco. Unsurprisingly, this provoked a huge shockwave – some people truly believed they were the coming of the anti-Christ – which led to an enormous amount of publicity. Just like in Britain, controversy would catapult the band to fame. Yet, the tense conditions of that tour also ultimately led to its split.
The Punk movement related to the late capitalist time, when the traditional entities and hierarchies dissolve, and unravel. For instance, nationstates were a politically relevant context before, but with increasing globalisation, will they still be relevant in the future? Another example was the family unit People are born in one, grow up in one, and then start one themselves. These were identity giving roles. The traditional family is a clear image, and what many people strive(d) for. All these hierarchies are much less influential now, than they used to be. One role, one mode of being, that has come to the fore, is the role of the consumer. We have all, perhaps first and foremost, become consumers. What we are, is expressed through the gadgets we buy, our clothing style, our music style, our way of living. Identity has become a much more fluid notion. We can be many more things than if we were
born in the fifties, but it also means, that we are much less. We have to invent an identity, by partaking in that consumer culture. The postmodern condition has problematized the idea of identity: “Who are you?” “What does it mean to be someone?”
That is something that punk, and many other subcultures, have answered in two different ways. Punk was at once a culture of deconstruction and a culture of authenticity. Those are rich, suggestive terms. It is obvious that punk deconstructs a lot. That it, challenges, threatens, rebels, against the culture such as you find it in England in 1975 and as a 16 year-old. “This is not my country, this is not my culture.” That is the prayer of the deconstruction side of the punk movement. There is also the demand of authenticity, it means that they want to be recognized by their culture, for what they really are. They don’t want to be forced to play certain roles. They have certain feelings and you want those feelings to be taken seriously. It is a very forceful desire and demand. These days it is called respect, and affirmative action, and woke and it has been ridiculed. However, in the seventies and in the eighties there was still a claim to be made, there was something at stake in punk culture. The demand for authenticity: “be who you are, don’t be fake, the worst thing you can be is fake.” It links this movement to romanticism. It was the French Romanticist Jean-Jacques Rousseau who introduced your personal emotions as a source of moral authority in the 18th century. At this level, Punk suddenly takes on the meaning that allows it to be understood at a different level: To listen to your heart as and be taken seriously as an emotional human being.
