Lipstick Traces Read online

  “I loved that book. It was a crazy, wild, at times almost inarticulate attempt to do something nobody else had done before.”

  —Malcolm McLaren, Select, 1995

  John Lydon: “It’s so mad, it’s so daft, it’s so off the wall—it’s thoroughly enjoyable . . .”

  Interviewer: “But you don’t think he’s completely wrong?”

  John Lydon: “No, he’s not wrong.”

  —Tension, 1991

  “We are living in hell, and this book makes me proud to be alive in hell—to be a good citizen of hell.”

  —Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre, KRCW, Los Angeles, 1989

  “I first read Lipstick Traces as a penniless traveler, hiding in the bathroom of a late-night express train from Cologne to Berlin. My paranoia was considerably eased as I delved into the lives of various misfits and aesthetic revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century. As dawn broke and the train pulled into the station, I disembarked, feeling not shell-shocked from the conductor’s repeated passes to my stall, but decidedly refreshed.”

  —J. Scott Burgeson, East Bay Express, 1998

  “C. C. Club/Address 2600 S Lyndale Ave., Minneapolis, 55408—Here come the regulars indeed—the C. C. Club is the Minneapolis landmark that inspired the famous Replacements song, which should make it a must-see on any rock fan’s itinerary. Once you’ve perused the famously interesting jukebox, and played the famously good pinball selection, settle into a booth for some not at all famous but still very satisfying grill grub. The BLT comes stuffed with fat planks of good bacon, the patty melts have the gloss of a grill well used for years and years. Not a place to bring your niece or boss, but when you want to be alone with your hangover, your racing form, or your copy of Lipstick Traces, there’s none better.”

  —Dish Dining Guide, City Pages, 2008

  “The ‘secret’ of Marcus’s history is its poetry . . . widely separated persons and events call out to each other and ‘connect’ precisely because so many of ordinary history’s causal and syntactic arrangements have been positively negated.”

  —Jerome McGann, London Review of Books, 1989

  “Lipstick Traces has the energy of its obsessions, and it snares you in the manner of those intense, questing and often stoned sessions of intellectual debate you may have experienced in your college years. It was destined, in other words, to achieve cult status.”

  —Ben Brantley, New York Times, 2001

  “Greil Marcus has developed an ability to discern an art movement, or an entire country, lurking inside a song.”

  —New Yorker, 2004

  “Probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson.”

  —D. D. Guttenplan, London Review of Books, 2007

  LIPSTICK TRACES

  LIPSTICK TRACES

  A SECRET HISTORY

  of the TWENTIETH CENTURY

  GREIL MARCUS

  THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Copyright © 1989 by Greil Marcus

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 1990

  Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Pace Trust, David Orr, Administrator.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marcus, Greil.

  Lipstick traces: a secret history of the twentieth century / Greil Marcus,

  p. cm.

  Bibliography: p.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-674-03480-8 (paper)

  1. Popular culture—History—20th century. 2. Avant-garde (Aesthetics). 3. Art and society—History—20th century. 4. Sex Pistols (Musical group). 5. Punk rock music—History and criticism. I. Title

  CB428.M356 1989

  306′.4′0904—dc19

  88-24678

  CIP

  MN

  Designed by Heather Shaff Beaver

  To John Rockwell, who got me started.

  To the Firesign Theatre and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, who got me through it.

  CONTENTS

  Note to the 2009 edition

  Prologue

  VERSION ONE: The Last Sex Pistols Concert

  VERSION TWO: A Secret History of a Time That Passed

  Faces

  Legends of Freedom

  The Art of Yesterday’s Crash

  The Crash of Yesterday’s Art

  The Assault on Notre-Dame

  The Attack on Charlie Chaplin

  Lipstick Traces (on a Cigarette)

  Epilogue

  Works Cited and Sighted

  Sources and Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  NOTE TO THE 2009 EDITION

  Since this book was first published twenty years ago, a number of the actors and voices who appear in its pages have died. It is humbling to mark their passage: the political critic and patriot Walter Karp, 1934–1989; the photographer Ed van der Elsken, 1925–1990; the political philosopher Henri Lefebvre, 1901–1991; the filmmaker and founding member of the Lettrist International and of the Situationist International Guy Debord, 1930–1994; the sound poet, collagist, and founding member of the Lettrist International Gil Wolman, 1929–1995; the orator and teacher Mario Savio, 1942–1996; the visionary and Lettrist International member Ivan Chtcheglov, 1933–1998; the singer and founding member of the Clash Joe Strummer, 1952–2002; the Lettrist International member Jean-Michel Mension, 1934–2006; the founder of lettrism Isidore Isou, 1925–2007; the historian Norman Cohn, 1915–2007; the editor and member of the Situationist International Christopher Gray, 1942–2009; and the singer Michael Jackson, 1958–2009.

  Over the same period of time, an enormous amount of material drawn on for this book—obscure, fugitive, untranslated, or long-unavailable books, journals, flyers, films, paintings, collages, and sound recordings, from the nineteen-teens on—has found its way into the light, and I’ve tried to keep pace in the section now called Works Cited and Sighted. Except for the correction of errors, the main text of the book remains as it was.

  PROLOGUE

  From inside a London tea room, two well-dressed women look with mild disdain at a figure in the rain outside. “It’s that shabby old man with the tin whistle!” says one. A battered fedora pulled down over his eyes, the man is trying to make himself heard: “I yam a antichrist!” “It is,” reads the caption to this number of Ray Lowry’s comic-strip chronicle of the adventures of has-been, would-be pop savior Monty Smith, “seventeen long years since Monty was spotted in the gutter outside Malcolm MacGregor’s Sex ’n’ Drugs shop . . .”

  Years long enough: but as I write, Johnny Rotten’s first moments in “Anarchy in the U.K.”—a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets—

  I AM AN ANTICHRIST

  —remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record today—listening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sang—my back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat. “When you listen to the Sex Pistols, to ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ and ‘Bodies’ and tracks like that,” Pete Townshend of the Who once said, “what immediately strikes you is that this is actually happening. This is a bloke, with a brain on his shoulders, who is actually saying something he sincerely believes is happening in the world, saying it with real venom, and real passion. It touches you, and it scares you—it makes you feel uncomfortable. It’s like somebody saying, ‘The Germans are coming! And there’s no way we’re gonna stop ’em!’ ”

  It is
just a pop song, a would-be, has-been hit record, a cheap commodity, and Johnny Rotten is nobody, an anonymous delinquent whose greatest achievement, before that day in 1975 when he was spotted in Malcolm McLaren’s Sex boutique on King’s Road in London, had been to occasionally irritate those he passed on the street. It is a joke—and yet the voice that carries it remains something new in rock ’n’ roll, which is to say something new in postwar popular culture: a voice that denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible.

  It remains new because rock ’n’ roll has not caught up with it. Nothing like it had been heard in rock ’n’ roll before, and nothing like it has been heard since—though, for a time, once heard, that voice seemed available to anyone with the nerve to use it. For a time, as if by magic—the pop magic in which the connection of certain social facts with certain sounds creates irresistible symbols of the transformation of social reality—that voice worked as a new kind of free speech. In countless new throats it said countless new things. You couldn’t turn on the radio without being surprised; you could hardly turn around.

  Today those old voices sound as touching and as scary as they ever did—partly because there is an irreducible quality in their demands, and partly because they are suspended in time. 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. So did some of those who, for a time, found their own voices in his. In the small body of work they left behind, you can hear it happen. Listening, you can feel yourself respond: “This is actually happening.” But the voices remain suspended in time because you can’t look back and say, “This actually happened.” By the standards of wars and revolutions, the world did not change; we look back from a time when, as Dwight D. Eisenhower once put it, “Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.” As against the absolute demands so briefly generated by the Sex Pistols, nothing changed. The shock communicated by the demands of the music becomes a shock that something so seemingly complete could, finally, pass almost unnoticed in the world of affairs: “This was actually not happening.” Music seeks to change life; life goes on; the music is left behind; that is what is left to talk about.

  The Sex Pistols made a breach in the pop milieu, in the screen of received cultural assumptions governing what one expected to hear and how one expected to respond. Because received cultural assumptions are hegemonic propositions about the way the world is supposed to work—ideological constructs perceived and experienced as natural facts—the breach in the pop milieu opened into the realm of everyday life: the milieu where, commuting to work, doing one’s job in the home or the factory or the office or the mall, going to the movies, buying groceries, buying records, watching television, making love, having conversations, not having conversations, or making lists of what to do next, people actually lived. Judged according to its demands on the world, a Sex Pistols record had to change the way a given person performed his or her commute—which is to say that the record had to connect that act to every other, and then call the enterprise as a whole into question. Thus would the record change the world.

  Elvis Costello recalled how it had worked back when he was still Declan MacManus, a computer operator waiting for his train to Central London. It was 2 December 1976, the day after the Sex Pistols appeared on a television talk show to promote the record that was to change the world: “‘God, did you see the Sex Pistols on TV last night?’ On the way to work, I was on the platform in the morning and all the commuters were reading the papers when the Pistols made headlines—and said FUCK on TV. It was as if it was the most awful thing that ever happened. It’s a mistake to confuse it with a major event in history, but it was a great morning—just to hear people’s blood pressure going up and down over it.” It was an old dream come true—as if the Sex Pistols, or one of their new fans, or the commuters beside him, or the television itself, had happily rediscovered a formula contrived in 1919, in Berlin, by one Walter Mehring, and then tested the formula to the letter, word for word save for the name of the game:

  ??? What is DADAyama ???

  DADAyama is

  to be reached from railroad stations only by a double somersault

  Hic salto mortale /

  Now or never /

  DADAyama makes

  the blood boil like it

  enrages the crowd

  in the melting pot /

  (partly bullfight arena—partly Red Front meeting—partly

  National Assembly)—

  1/2 gold plate—1/2 silver-plated iron

  plus surplus value

  Echoing each other across half a century, Costello and Mehring raise the question that shapes this book: is it a mistake to confuse the Sex Pistols’ moment with a major event in history—and what is history anyway? Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured—new institutions, new maps, new rulers, new winners and losers—or is it also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language? To fix a precious disruption, why is it that both Mehring and Costello find themselves talking about train platforms and blood pressure? The happenstance of specific words in common is an accident, but it might suggest a real affinity. The two men are talking about the same thing, looking for words to make disruption precious; that may not be an accident at all. If the language they are speaking, the impulse they are voicing, has its own history, might it not tell a very different story from the one we’ve been hearing all our lives?

  THE QUESTION

  The question is too big to tackle now—it has to be put aside, left to find its own shape. What it leaves behind is music; listening now to the Sex Pistols’ records, it doesn’t seem like a mistake to confuse their moment with a major event in history. Listening to “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “Bodies,” to Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model, to the Clash’s “Complete Control,” to the Buzzcocks’ “Boredom,” X-ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” and Germfree Adolescents, Essential Logic’s “Wake Up,” the Raincoats’ “Fairytale in the Supermarket,” Wire’s Chairs Missing, the Mekons’ “Never Been in a Riot,” Joy Division’s “An Ideal for Living” and Unknown Pleasures, the Slits’ “Once upon a time in a living room,” the Gang of Four’s “At Home He’s a Tourist” and “Return the Gift,” the Au Pairs’ “Kerb Crawler,” Kleenex’s “Ü” and (after Kimberly-Clark forced the band to change its name) Liliput’s “Split” and “Eisiger Wind,” to the Adverts’ Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts (on the sleeve, a smear of color around a photo collage of a public housing complex and a white billboard with the words “Land of Milk and Honey” running in bureaucratic type: the sound was millenarian from the beginning, certain to lead the listener into the promised land, or forty years in the wilderness)—listening now, and listening especially to The Roxy London WC 2 (Jan–Apr 77), a shoddy live album where behind table talk and breaking glass one can hear various groups of public speakers which before Johnny Rotten announced himself as an antichrist had not existed even in the minds of those who made them up—listening to this relatively small body of work, now exiled to cut-out bins, bargain racks, collectors’ sales, or flea markets—I feel a sense of awe at how fine the music was: how irreducible it remains.

  What remains irreducible about this music is its desire to change the world. The desire is patent and simple, but it inscribes a story that is infinitely complex—as complex as the interplay of the everyday gestures that describe the way the world already works. The desire begins with the demand to live not as an object but as a subject of history—to live as if something actually depended on one’s actions—and that demand opens onto a free street. Damning God and the state, work and leisure, home and family, sex and play, the audience and itself, the music briefly made it possible to experience all those t
hings as if they were not natural facts but ideological constructs: things that had been made and therefore could be altered, or done away with altogether. It became possible to see those things as bad jokes, and for the music to come forth as a better joke. The music came forth as a no that became a yes, then a no again, then again a yes: nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false. If nothing was true, everything was possible. In the pop milieu, an arena maintained by society at large both to generate symbols and to defuse them, in the only milieu where a nobody like Johnny Rotten had a chance to be heard, all rules fell away. In tones that pop music had never produced, demands were heard that pop music had never made.

  Because of Johnny Rotten’s ludicrous proclamation—in one sense, he was from his first recorded moment a shabby old man in the rain trying to get out his crazy words (“I want to destroy pass–ers–by,” croaks the Antichrist, reading from his smudgy broadsheet; you give the bum a wide berth)—teenagers screamed philosophy; thugs made poetry; women demystified the female; a nice Jewish girl called Susan Whitby renamed herself Lora Logic and took the stage of the Roxy in a haze of violence and confusion. Everyone shouted past melody, then rhyme, then harmony, then rhythm, then beat, until the shout became the first principle of speech—sometimes the last. Old oaths, carrying forgotten curses, which themselves contained buried wishes, were pressed into seven-inch pieces of plastic as a bet that someone would listen, that someone would decipher codes the speakers themselves didn’t know they were transmitting.

  I began to wonder where this voice came from. At a certain time, beginning in late 1975, in a certain place—London, then across the U.K., then spots and towns all over the world—a negation of all social facts was made, which produced the affirmation that anything was possible. “I saw the Sex Pistols,” said Bernard Sumner of Joy Division (later, after the band’s singer killed himself, of New Order). “They were terrible. I thought they were great. I wanted to get up and be terrible too.” Performers made fools of themselves, denounced their ancestors, and spit on their audiences, which spit back. I began to wonder where these gestures came from. It was, finally, no more than an art statement, but such statements, communicated and received in any form, are rare. I knew a lot about rock ’n’ roll, but I didn’t know about this. Did the voice and the gestures come out of nowhere, or were they sparked? If they were sparked, what sparked them?