Turning Rebellion Into Money

To what extent was punk rock an expression of dissent?

I wrote this essay for my history degree in 2000. The word limit was restrictive, and I’ve listened to a lot more punk/new wave since I wrote it, but I still got an A. I haven’t included sources because I don’t want anyone stealing the whole essay.

The popular image of punk is typified by the character Vyvyan. He’s played by Adrian Edmondson on the BBC television series The Young Ones. Vyvyan dresses in leather and has metal studs in his forehead. Throughout the series, he randomly destroys the flat that The Young Ones share.

Vyvyan’s actions appear to follow the manifesto communicated by Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols in ‘Anarchy in the UK’; “Get pissed, destroy.” Yet punk music was not about meaningless destruction and chaos; although it was associated with violent elements, as well as theatricism derived from the art-school backgrounds of influential punks.

Equally, and more significantly, punk echoed the failed counterculture of the late 1960s. It was idealistic and sought to create a better environment, or at least hope, for British young people who wanted to enter the workforce when unemployment and pessimism were increasing. If Britain had been prosperous and successful in 1976 there would have been no punk, or at least punk would have had no resonance.

Punk’s origins

Musically, the punk rock style originated in New York as a response to the counterculture’s failure. Groups played simple, raucous music. They celebrated elements of popular culture that the counterculture and other sophisticated members of society rejected, such as junk food and B-movies. The originators of the style were the New York Dolls who played hard, nihilistic rock, documenting the change in mood from sixties naivety to seventies cynicism.

By 1975 several musicians followed the do-it-yourself aesthetic derived from the New York Dolls along with Jonathan Richman’s insecure, realist lyrics. This diverse group included poet Patti Smith, Talking Heads, and The Ramones. Punk, however, failed to gain more than cult acceptance, because America was too affluent at the time to relate to the anxiety expressed in the lyrics.

Malcolm McLaren

In 1972 the New York Dolls toured Europe. While in London, they visited “Let It Rock,” a clothing boutique managed by entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren. Impressed by their attitude, McLaren became besotted by the group and their “inverted aesthetic,” which he perceived as being “so awful” that it became “magnificent.”

McLaren grew up in the 1950s, obsessed by the evil image of London’s Teddy Boy gangs and raw rock music. During the Paris protests of May 1968, McLaren was an art school student involved in a parallel sit-in in London. Inspired, he joined a situationist gang, King Mob, based on a combination of French revolutionary theory and slogans, and popular culture. King Mob indulged in petty acts of situationist sensationalism such as an instore anti-Christmas protest where the members distributed toys straight from the shelves to children. The gang was disbanded, however, when it was outmoded by more notorious terrorist groups the Weathermen and Baader-Meinhof in the late 1960s.

Instead, McLaren formed an ideology, based on his art-school background, that a musical group could use to impact society. He first attempted to implement his strategy in 1975, when he briefly managed the disintegrating New York Dolls. McLaren gave them a provocative Communist image while the United States was still involved in Vietnam. “Not for the first time, Malcolm McLaren went too far.”

McLaren’s group

While in New York, McLaren left behind a young rock band, tentatively named the Sex Pistols, that he was assisting with colleague Bernie Rhodes. This original group consisted of Steve Jones, whom McLaren met while apprehending him for stealing clothing from the shop, and his friend Paul Cook.

The pair had systematically stolen musical equipment, intending to form a band, for several years, including a BBC studio drum kit, guitars from Rod Stewart’s mansion, and the PA system and microphones from a David Bowie concert. McLaren teamed Cook and Jones with his Saturday shop boy Glen Matlock, a competent musician from an affluent suburban background.

Upon McLaren’s return to London, the first public punk manifesto was issued, in the form of a T-shirt produced by the shop. It listed elements of society the ideology found acceptable (IRA terrorists, working-class heroes) and those it did not (faded rebels, repressive institutions).

England’s discontent

The T-shirt encapsulated England’s discontent, particularly among youth. England faced a falling GDP (largely the effects of repayment of the loan incurred during the Second World War), a fall from the ranks of world superpowers, and high youth unemployment. Callaghan’s socialist government lacked strong leadership, and its nature did not pre-dispose the IMF towards helping with the financial crisis.

The language used in the media reflected a sense of apocalypse, as did the public feeling as evidenced in journalist Jon Savage’s diary entry for 2/12/75; “London suburbia: sterility – cynicism, boredom ready to spill into violence; incipient right-wing backlash. Fuck London for its dullness, the English people for their pusillanimity and the weather for its coldness and darkness.”

This environment was perfect for punk to develop. Bernie Rhodes states “I was listening to the radio in ’75, and there was some expert blabbing on about how if things go on as they are there’ll be 800,000 people unemployed in 1979, while another guy was saying if that happened there’d be chaos, there’d be actual anarchy in the streets. That was the root of punk. One knew that.” Notting Hill, a multi-racial suburb of London, was a particular hive of discontent. Notting Hill was known for anarchist activity, racial protest, and squatters.

Johnny Rotten

John Lydon, the oldest child of an immigrant Irish family, was squatting in Notting Hill in late 1975. Looking back on the situation in the BBC documentary series “Dancing in the Street” Lydon comments “All my life I was told I would never amount to very much because of my social status.” After leaving school, his jobs included rat poisoning in London’s sewers and working part-time at a kindergarten.

Rhodes recruited Lydon in August 1975 when he visited McLaren’s shop with a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words “I hate…” added above the group’s name. Lydon auditioned by miming along to a jukebox in a pub. He was accepted into the group and renamed Johnny Rotten due to the state of his teeth.

Punk’s main players

The Sex Pistols

The Sex Pistols played their first show on 6 November 1975. Their radical image and approach quickly attracted media attention. In February 1976, the New Musical Express ran an extended article entitled “Don’t look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming.” The article included a defining comment from Steve Jones; “Actually, we’re not into music. We’re into chaos.”

McLaren and Rotten worked on developing the group’s image from this auspicious beginning. Music journalist Jonh Ingham comments about McLaren “I admired him immensely because he’d seen how to package the frustration I’d been feeling for a couple of years.” By this time, the influences that McLaren sought to weave into his group were late-1960s radical politics, sexual fetish material, pop history and youth socialism. Savage writes that McLaren had two intentions; to “act out his fantasies of conflict and revenge on a decaying culture,” and to sell lots of bondage trousers.

McLaren had named his group with the most ridiculously offensive name he could think of, which also served to promote his shop, now renamed ‘Sex.’ Later, in the film The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, McLaren claimed the Sex Pistols were a prank to show how easily the public could be manipulated. Salewicz comments “what happened in London in 1977 can seem like an art-school version of May 1968, with events whipped up by an adept agent provocateur.”

Johnny Rotten’s lyrics

However, as Marcus writes “The Sex Pistols were a commercial proposition and a cultural conspiracy, launched to change the music business and make money off the change – but Johnny Rotten sang to change the world.” This began with writing lyrics for the songs the Sex Pistols were learning. In his autobiography, Rotten claims that he was solely responsible for the group’s lyrical radicalism and that the other Pistols disagreed with his stance. “Quirky little pop songs was what they wanted. You should have seen their faces when I slapped down the lyrics to “Anarchy in the UK.” It was classic. I wish I had had a camera.”

Rotten’s lyrics weren’t intended to be destructive but to awaken Britain from a stupor; “You don’t destroy things offhand and flippantly. You’ve got to offer something in its place.” A clear Utopian strand was inherent in Rotten: “We want chaos to come. Life’s not going to get any better for the kids or the dole until it gets worse first.” Disaffected youth related to Rotten’s views and he found himself the figurehead of a new musical movement. McLaren may have created publicity, but Rotten’s realism and charisma were the reasons for the Sex Pistol’s resonance and success.

The Clash

As the Sex Pistols gained notoriety, McLaren took more responsibility, leaving Bernie Rhodes in limbo. He formed a band to rival McLaren’s, with Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and singer Joe Strummer. Rhodes encouraged his group, The Clash, to write about reality. This was made possible on 30 August 1976, when Strummer and Simonon became involved in the Notting Hill riot. They joined in the brick-throwing at the policemen; Simonon still enthused about the event in an interview a decade later.

The incident channelled the disparate energies of the Clash into a political whole; Jones’ indoctrination of anti-authoritarian rock music, Strummer’s experience in society’s underbelly, Simonon’s former football hooliganism, and Rhodes’ situationist theories. The experience led to Strummer and Jones writing the group’s first single ‘White Riot.’ Soon afterwards ‘Career Opportunities’ was written about Jones’ coercion into opening suspicious mail for his employer British Mail during the IRA letter bombing campaign because he looked subversive.

Other punk bands

Other youth followed the example of the Sex Pistols and formed bands. Notable punk groups of the time included the Damned, the Jam, and the Buzzcocks. The movement was abetted by fanzine Sniffin’ Glue which worked to build solidarity between the groups and present a unified front.

This was ineffective; as Salewicz writes “everyone seemed to play this particularly petty game. The-Jam-slag-off-the-Clash-the-Clash-slag-off-the-Stranglers-John-Lydon-slags-off-anyone-he-can-think-of-everyone-slags-off-the-Police.” The Police were the particular object of antagonism, consisting of three ageing pop musicians who pretended to be punks to secure a record deal.

Similarly untrue to the perception of punk as rebellion were The Jam, managed by leader Paul Weller’s father. Weller states that much of punk was similarly unrebellious, commenting that while Rotten was genuinely working-class and angry, the punk scene as a whole was actually elite and art-school based. However, he also states there was a positive correlation between genuineness and success.

Punk’s tenets

A central tenet of punk was that it represented life as closely as possible; songs that were unrealistic were irrelevant. Freedom of the individual was another important tenet: the teenagers whose clothing mimicked Johnny Rotten did not realise that a central concept of punk was individuality. Strummer states that he became a punk after watching the Sex Pistols and admiring their stance; “We don’t give a toss what you think……this is what we like to play and this is the way we’re gonna play it.”

Individualism

David Byrne of the punk band Talking Heads, who sounded nothing like the Sex Pistols, comments that punk was not a musical style, but an attitude. Along with the freedom of the individual was the belief that one only had to have ideas to communicate to become a musician; no virtuosity was required.

Notable punk journalist Caroline Coon wrote in 1976; “When, for months, you’ve been feeling that it would take ten years to play as well as Hendrix, Clapton, Richard…..there’s nothing more gratifying than the thought: Jesus, I could get a band together and blow this lot off the stage.” Along with this came the rejection of apathy; youth had no reason to be bored when they could go out and form bands.

Freedom of the individual

Believing in the freedom of the individual, punk can be seen as a continuation of the counterculture. In comparison, punk was more energetic and violent, but this was shaped by environment rather than differences in inherent philosophy. The biggest influence on punk’s form was the drug of choice (or default, as it was cheap), speed, which kept users on edge and awake. In comparison, marijuana was a relaxant.

Social Upheaval

Both the counterculture and punk aimed to bring a more utilitarian society as a response to the failure of material culture, although neither was pragmatic. Punk, however, seemed more willing to work within a capitalist structure than the counterculture. Accordingly, a strong leader could have saved England from punk in 1976.

One of punk’s themes, especially The Clash, was the decline of England. “This is England?” questioned Strummer, “The land we’re supposed to die for?” Punk felt that the government had failed and that something needed to be done to wake England from stupor. Hence, punk was not rebellion for rebellion’s sake, although the rebelliousness attracted fans. Wellington media personality John Campbell explains his teenage punk obsession as “middle-class designer angst.”

Anarchism

Although punk was political it was not aligned to a particular party. By nature it was closest to anarchism due to its art school origins. McLaren, however, was solitary in destructive urges. While his objective was to disrupt the current system, the younger punks were more idealistic and wished for a more utopian society, although they had no concept of how the utopia would be formed. Later, punk would become moulded into various political forms: most notably Rock Against Racism, which opposed the National Front. Hebdige argues that the involvement in Rock Against Racism steered punk from a degree of nihilism and racism to a healthier left-libertarian multiculturalism, although it was more the perception than the reality that was changed.

Fascism

Part of the perception that punk was fascist came from the practice adopted by punks such as Sid Vicious and Siouxsie of wearing swastikas. However, wearing swastikas had little to do with fascism: instead, it was the erosion of meaning, a disgust with everything.

It should also be remembered that many of the punks were straight out of school. Paul Weller was nineteen when he made a controversial statement about his boredom with punk’s default left-wing stance, claiming he would vote Tory in the next election. Weller matured into a liberal with a social conscience, demonstrated on songs like ‘The Eton Rifles’.

Punk’s breakout

In late 1976 Mick Jones commented to a journalist that the punk scene was exciting, but “when it gets popular it’s going to get really stupid.” This occurred on 1 December 1976, when the Sex Pistols made an unscheduled appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today show, which screened at 6pm.

Grundy knew nothing about the group. He enlivened the show by encouraging the group to act outrageously and flirting with a member of their entourage. When Steve Jones, assuming that he would be edited, responded with a stream of expletives, the Sex Pistols entered the nation’s conscience as public enemy number one; “a mixture of Genghis Khan and Satan.” The next morning’s Daily Mirror headline read “The Filth and the Fury.” It contained the story of how a 47-year-old lorry driver kicked his television screen to maintain his eight-year-old son’s innocence.

From that point, the Sex Pistols and punk rock lost their focus and creative energy. It instead became a showpiece for the media to feed on. Steve Jones reminisces “The music went out the window. It was more like what outrageous thing are they going to do next?”

On the following Anarchy tour, Jones and Cook were approached by tabloids and encouraged to do some damage to their hotel. The tabloids had compensated the hotel in advance. The pair uprooted one plant in the lobby. The next day the Daily Mirror reported “The four-man Punk Rock group wrecked the lobby of a luxury hotel, uprooting ornamental plants, hurling plant pots around the room and scattering soil over the carpets.” The continuing scandals were largely McLaren’s responsibility as he sought publicity for his group and his shop.

The commercial dilemma

Along with publicity came the dilemma of whether signing to major record companies contravened the punk ethic. Most major bands including the Sex Pistols and the Clash signed major-label deals, justifying themselves by statements such as “there’s no point screaming to the converted….We wanna be heard, fuck being a cult.”

On the other hand independent punk band Crass refused to sign to a major record company because their principles would be violated. They operated similarly to a political party, issuing texts with a clear “radical anarcho-pacifist, anarcha-feminist” agenda,

The Clash would regret their decision as, among many disputes, CBS released a weak song as a single without their permission. In an attempt to be thrown off the label, the Clash retaliated with ‘Complete Control’: “They said we’d be artistically free when we signed that piece of paper/They meant let’s make a lot of money and worry about it later.” The Clash also felt that CBS attempted to muffle their rawness; “They’re training us to take a helicopter to the supermarket.”

The Sex Pistols were more successful in alienating labels. Their second, A&M, paid them 75,000 pounds to leave after a drunken meeting where Sid Vicious smashed a toilet bowl and Steve Jones propositioned secretaries in the women’s toilets.

Censorship

Punk also faced communication barriers from censorship. The Sex Pistol’s single “God Save The Queen” was released just before Jubilee week, when Queen and country celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of her ascension to the throne. Rotten’s lyrics attacked the monarchy (“the fascist regime”) as unnecessary, his view being that supporting the Monarchy made Britain inefficient. The song had already caused contention among the group when Matlock protested against it because his mother disapproved of it. Matlock was replaced by the late, and extraordinarily musically inept, Sid Vicious.

The song was banned on almost every radio station but due to the Sex Pistols’ publicity it sold well. Worried that it would reach number one during Jubilee weekend, the authorities changed the chart rules for the week so that the shops likely to sell the most copies were excluded. The Sex Pistols were presented at number two as a blank space.

The song was the rallying point for those who disagreed with the Monarchy. There was otherwise unanimous support for the celebrations despite economic problems and growing nationalist movements in Wales and Scotland. Johnny Rotten successfully expressed a collective thought. As he states “the record of course took off. It was bound to because so many people felt the same way.” To add to the publicity, McLaren hired a riverboat to sail the Sex Pistols down the Thames two days before the Queen was due to. Police boats arrived and forced he river concert to stop.

Repression

Jubilee weekend marked the high point for punk in terms of exposure. From this point on, punk faced added repression. Their continued media presence meant the Sex Pistols were well-known faces, while their notoriety meant they would rarely play concerts in England again. In the fortnight following Jubilee Weekend, both Rotten and Cook were attacked by Monarchy supporters. Even though the attacks were violent and unprovoked, police refused to press any charges.

The Sex Pistols and the Clash were arrested frequently between 1976 and 1978 and found themselves under constant police surveillance. During Clash rehearsals in early 1978, Simonon and new drummer Topper Headon tested an air rifle on some nearby pigeons. The police had already been warned that the Clash were present in the rehearsal rooms, and arrived in force with helicopters and the CID. The police had assumed that the “anti-establishment” band were indulging in terrorist activities and shooting at trains.

Punk’s decline

At the end of 1977, the Sex Pistols were nominated as “Young Businessmen of the Year” by the financial press in honour of McLaren’s media manipulation and the sales it generated. The group, however, was losing unity and Sid Vicious was a heroin addict. Despite this, the group left for America to play a series of concerts in the Deep South.

The tour was a disaster. Lydon left the Sex Pistols at its conclusion after McLaren announced his intention to take the group to Brazil to work with Ronnie Biggs (part of the Great Train Robbery). By this point, McLaren had lost touch with reality, still under the belief that he was the main impetus behind the group. Surprisingly, he was partially vindicated as he continued to milk money from inferior Sex Pistols recordings featuring Sid Vicious.

Losing impetus

Perhaps every punk group lost impetus after one successful album because success took them away from the reality that punk attempted to describe. In addition, punk as an art form had a limited palette of sounds and subject material that the artists could work with: in his review of the Clash’s inferior second album, Savage wrote “It’s hard when you define a period so accurately.” Strummer agreed, likening the Clash’s live sound to “a mad seal barking over a mass of pneumatic drills.”

The death of punk

The symbolic death of punk was on February 2 1979, when Sid Vicious died of a drug overdose. The saga of Vicious had raised much moralising amongst conservative society about punk. However, Vicious’s problems were due to his rock stardom obsession, which most punks shunned. Vicious, a school friend of Rotten, had started as an ardent punk fan, but he developed a heroin habit and was imprisoned after the death of his girlfriend. The death of Vicious was a significant signal that failure was inherent in punk.

The Clash continue

Disillusioned with police harassment and aware that punk was in its last throes, the Clash launched their social protest in another direction. Simonon explained this in 1980: “we realised that if were a little more subtle…we might reach more people.” The next single the Clash released was ‘London Calling,’ an apocalyptic vision inspired by the threatened nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island. In it the group disavowed any responsibility to lead the punk movement: “London calling, now don’t look to us/Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust.”

In the accompanying album of the same name and its follow-up Sandinista! they explored many left-wing issues such as anarchic archaism in ‘Spanish Bombs’, pacifism in ‘The Call Up’, and loss of revolutionary fervour in ‘Clampdown’ and ‘Death and Glory’ (“Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world/And ends up making payments on a sofa or a girl”); and pledged their support to the recent Nicaraguan revolution and hostility to US international intervention in ‘Washington Bullets.’

Other former punks, such as Elvis Costello and The Jam, successfully expressed left-wing dissent once outside punk’s narrow style. In other words, many of punk’s ideals were left intact despite the demise of the musical style.

Margaret Thatcher

At this point, however, Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister of Britain. Given rising unemployment, a controversial war in the Falklands, and an oppressive government, there should have been plenty of ammunition for punk. Instead, it was as if Thatcher had too much authority for anyone to oppose. This was illustrated in 1985 when the Clash reformed without Mick Jones in an attempt to return to fundamental punk. Unemployment was still rising, and a 1984 miners strike ensured plenty of scope. Indeed as Gray states, “the Clash of ’76 had managed to generate a righteous anger and capture the imagination of the nation’s youth on less fuel than this.”

The resulting Cut the Crap album found Strummer unable to recapture the edge that the Clash once had. The only song of quality, or of dissent, on the album is “This is England,” where Strummer writes of himself as an outsider, unable to re-incite the riot and only able to contemplate the ruins. “This is England…..Land of one thousand stances.” The artistic failure of “Cut the Crap” saw the Clash disintegrate. The only punk band to survive this period with dignity were the Crass who were unaffected by changing musical styles, and continued to produce aural dissent such as 1982’s “Sheep Farming in the Falklands.”

Punk in the 1990s

The 1990s have only seen an even worse effort at maintaining the punk ethic by the Clash and the Sex Pistols. Both groups have unabashedly sought to make money from their groundbreaking efforts earlier. In 1991, Mick Jones agreed that the song ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’ be used in a Levi jeans commercial. This resulted in the first number-one single for the Clash and violated punk principles of creativity and idealism over commercial exploitation.

Even more ironic given the Clash’s anti-American intervention stance, was when, during the Gulf War, the first song played on the Allied Forces radio network was the Clash’s ‘Rock the Casbah.’ Meanwhile, in 1996 John Lydon was again Johnny Rotten. Rotten, Matlock, Cook and Jones were on the ‘Filthy Lucre’ tour, with the sole aim of earning from nostalgia. The Sex Pistols now indulged in the activities Rotten had criticised twenty years earlier.

Punk’s impact

Punk significantly impacted Western society, although not necessarily where it was intended. On a purely musical basis, punk injected new life into rock music. Many popular bands of the late 20th century, such as REM, U2, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam, were tangibly influenced by punk.

Punk advanced the acceptance of social equity. For possibly the first time in a cultural movement women were treated equally, although the most high-profile punk musicians were male. Coon states that this was demonstrated by the fact that “Rotten had his safety pins holding his clothes together! No more women’s work!” Notable female punk musicians included Patti Smith, The Slits, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads.

Punk also had an impact on racial tolerance, most notably in Rock Against Racism. Punk was in fact intertwined with black protest music. Initially, it derived radical influences from reggae as, during the punk era, Jamaica was in the grasp of revolution. Many punk bands worked with Jamaican producers, notably the Clash with Lee “Scratch” Perry. The influence was reversed with Bob Marley’s “Punky Reggae Party.” The next wave of musical dissent was hip-hop, which punk helped to promote. The Clash recorded hip-hop-flavoured songs and invited rap artists to open their concerts.

Conclusion

Punk was a bizarre synthesis: an equal mix of art-school theatricism and genuine anger and dissent. This impurity of origin did not necessarily diminish the impact of punk. As Marcus states “For every third-hand pose, there was a fourth-hand pose that turned into a real motive.”

For a brief moment, punk threatened revolutionary impact, just as the counterculture had in the previous decade. In 1977, a Clash supporter rang the group to invite them to join the opposition to the National Front march at Lewisham. The group refused because they were having their hair done, to the caller’s dismay: “I can see now that it’s ridiculous to expect a band to behave like a political party, but I think a lot of people did then.”

That the moment failed to succeed was not surprising. Vicious’s death indicated punk’s self-destructive tendencies. Punk never expected to have a revolutionary impact, it was simply a forum for dissent, providing hope for young people where the system did not. Furthermore, the movement was not unified, and Lydon, punk’s most prominent spokesman, accepts that the movement was misdirected.

While the socialist government of the time was not functioning effectively (Lydon: “We were blaming the wrong people”), the presence of the Sex Pistols and their contemporaries advocating an even more radical form of left-wing politics, mixed with unsavoury elements such as violence and aesthetic unattractiveness served to scare the British public into restoring tighter control; “In our own way, I suppose, the punks absolutely guaranteed that Margaret Thatcher would take over.”

Despite its unconventional origins and unusual form, punk shares a trajectory in common with many other contemporary movements of dissent. Punk was responsive to outside influences: the oppressiveness of government and economic welfare. In the 1990s punk suddenly became popular in America, where it had failed to take root fifteen years earlier. As Lydon states “It’s not a music for the over-privileged………as their economy’s going down the toilet they’re turning a definite eye towards punk. Now they get it.”