Read Online Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Greil Marcus
Ads: Link
an ordinary social fact, like a commute or a highway construction project. It became a habit, a structure, an invisible oppression.
A mythical era even as it unfolded, the sixties were based in the belief that since everything was true, everything was possible. Among rock stars, that Utopian ideology was by the 1970s reduced to a well-heeled solipsism. On the terms of the barefoot solipsism of extermination camp survival, even a fantasy of resistance—which by its nature almost had to be a fantasy of collectivity, of solidarity—was Utopian; insisting on the sensitivity of the individual as the source of all value, rock stars made a utopia out of solipsism. Like movie stars, they had made so much money that they remained untouched by and uninterested in what was happening in the world, and their renderings of a life of ease or of small problems proved attractive to a very large audience. There was no need for change; “change” began to seem like an old-fashioned, sixties word. The chaos in society at large called for a music of permanence and reassurance; in the pop world, time stood still. For years that seemed like decades, you could turn on the radio with the assurance that you would hear James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.” It was all right; they were good songs.
SOME PEOPLE
Some people began to lose their taste for surprise; others had never known it. “People pay to see others believe in themselves,” Kim Gordon of the New York punk band Sonic Youth wrote in 1983. “On stage, in the midst of rock ’n’ roll, many things happen and anything can happen, whether people come as voyeurs or come to submit to the moment.” Such words would not have been written in the mid-1970s, when people paid to see others believe that others believed in them. As the concerts of the time ended, fans stood up, lit matches, held them high: they were praying.
It was 1974. Malcolm McLaren was briefly in the United States, managing the New York Dolls, then on their last legs. They had wandered into his shop, played him their records; he’d laughed. “I couldn’t believe how anybody could be so bad,” he said long after, citing the moment as the inspiration for the Sex Pistols. “The fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force that I began to realize, ‘I’m laughing, I’m talking to these guys, I’m looking at them, and I’m laughing with them’; and I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well. Whether you were able to even know about rock ’n’ roll to the extent that you were able to write songs properly wasn’t important any longer . . . The Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.”
No doubt a year later McLaren would be playing Dolls records for the Sex Pistols, just as two decades before Sam Phillips had played old blues records for his new rockabilly singers. A banner McLaren painted up and hoisted over the Dolls’ last stages captured the dead time they never escaped: “ WHAT ARE THE POLITICS OF BOREDOM ?”
IT WAS
It was, once removed, a situationist slogan. “Boredom is always counterrevolutionary,” the situationists had liked to say. McLaren’s question mark was his way of asking how much power might be secreted in the slogans he put such stock in; to find the answer, you had to use the slogans. “Boredom is always counterrevolutionary”—the line was typical of the situationiststyle, of its voice, a blindside paradox of dead rhetoric and ordinary language floated just this side of non sequitur, the declarative statement turning into a question as you heard it: what does this mean?
You already know, the situationists had answered: all you lack is the consciousness of what you know. Our project is nothing more
A mythical era even as it unfolded, the sixties were based in the belief that since everything was true, everything was possible. Among rock stars, that Utopian ideology was by the 1970s reduced to a well-heeled solipsism. On the terms of the barefoot solipsism of extermination camp survival, even a fantasy of resistance—which by its nature almost had to be a fantasy of collectivity, of solidarity—was Utopian; insisting on the sensitivity of the individual as the source of all value, rock stars made a utopia out of solipsism. Like movie stars, they had made so much money that they remained untouched by and uninterested in what was happening in the world, and their renderings of a life of ease or of small problems proved attractive to a very large audience. There was no need for change; “change” began to seem like an old-fashioned, sixties word. The chaos in society at large called for a music of permanence and reassurance; in the pop world, time stood still. For years that seemed like decades, you could turn on the radio with the assurance that you would hear James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” the Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.” It was all right; they were good songs.
SOME PEOPLE
Some people began to lose their taste for surprise; others had never known it. “People pay to see others believe in themselves,” Kim Gordon of the New York punk band Sonic Youth wrote in 1983. “On stage, in the midst of rock ’n’ roll, many things happen and anything can happen, whether people come as voyeurs or come to submit to the moment.” Such words would not have been written in the mid-1970s, when people paid to see others believe that others believed in them. As the concerts of the time ended, fans stood up, lit matches, held them high: they were praying.
It was 1974. Malcolm McLaren was briefly in the United States, managing the New York Dolls, then on their last legs. They had wandered into his shop, played him their records; he’d laughed. “I couldn’t believe how anybody could be so bad,” he said long after, citing the moment as the inspiration for the Sex Pistols. “The fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force that I began to realize, ‘I’m laughing, I’m talking to these guys, I’m looking at them, and I’m laughing with them’; and I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well. Whether you were able to even know about rock ’n’ roll to the extent that you were able to write songs properly wasn’t important any longer . . . The Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.”
No doubt a year later McLaren would be playing Dolls records for the Sex Pistols, just as two decades before Sam Phillips had played old blues records for his new rockabilly singers. A banner McLaren painted up and hoisted over the Dolls’ last stages captured the dead time they never escaped: “ WHAT ARE THE POLITICS OF BOREDOM ?”
IT WAS
It was, once removed, a situationist slogan. “Boredom is always counterrevolutionary,” the situationists had liked to say. McLaren’s question mark was his way of asking how much power might be secreted in the slogans he put such stock in; to find the answer, you had to use the slogans. “Boredom is always counterrevolutionary”—the line was typical of the situationiststyle, of its voice, a blindside paradox of dead rhetoric and ordinary language floated just this side of non sequitur, the declarative statement turning into a question as you heard it: what does this mean?
You already know, the situationists had answered: all you lack is the consciousness of what you know. Our project is nothing more
Similar Books
