I think the awful weather has led me to pull out those 70s punk albums sitting idle. Which in turn has led me to dust off my copy of Griel Marcus’s Lipstick Traces. I find it an odd read, simply because Marcus certainly has a feel for punk and can explicate a Sex Pistols song to the fault of forcing things a bit - yet, he seems oddly uninterested in the music as music. Or rather, he starts off interested in the music, but the book ultimately uses the punk movement (and the Sex Pistols at that) as part of a larger utopian moment of the political avant-garde that subtends the 20th century. Which is useful if you’re interested in a work championing said avant-garde, but not exactly possessing the critical distance I would like from a work of popular music criticism.
Which made me think: what comprises such criticism, either in the academy or at its margins? The best example I can think of is still Simon Frith’s work, the shining example that I’ve read is a 1983 essay “Art Ideology and Pop Practice” (in the Marxism and Interpretation of Culture anthology), which states from the outset,
There is still remarkably little cultural theory, Marxist or otherwise, that makes sense of the pop and rock process. Adorno remains, after nearly fifty years, the key referent (think, by contrast, of the development of film theory in the same period).
Add Dick Hebdige to the above referent and the sentence could read with the same force. Or could it? I’m removed from the venues - American studies, cultural studies, sociology, musicology - where such work might be undertaken.
In any case, more than Marcus, Frith seems to me to explain - in a surprisingly pithy way - what punk meant. Framing the question as one between the politics of rock (centered around an authentic rebellion against consumerism) and the politics of pop (centered around a manipulation of symbolic gesture), he writes
Current pop debates start by accepting, celebrating even, music’s commodity statu, by defining revolt as style, politics as gesture (as with Fun Boy Three’s flag burning). THis discursive shift is one of the important effects of punk. Punk was the most theorized form of popular music ever, and this was in part because if coule be used to stand for so many ideas at once. On the one hand, punk was a raw restatement of the rock argument - a challenge to multinationals’ control of mass media, an attempt to seize the technical and commercial means of music production, a rank and file youth expression of class solidarity. On the other hand, punk was an art movement, a deliberate attempt by bohemian demimonde of the fashion industry to make a spectacle, to manipulate the media, to con the kids, to make money = ‘cash from chaos’ in Malcom McLaren’s slogan.
If this sounds similar to my scribbles about music and commodity form on this blog, well it’s because I’ve been channeling the Simon Frith I’d read long ago and forgotten about.
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