Lipstick Traces Read online

  A TWENTY

  A twenty-year-old stands before a microphone and, after declaring himself an all-consuming demon, proceeds to level everything around him—to reduce it to rubble. He denies the claims of his society with a laugh, then pulls the string on the history of his society with a shift of vowels so violent that it creates pure pleasure. He reduces the fruits of Western civilization to a set of guerrilla acronyms and England’s green and pleasant land to a block of public housing. “We have architecture that is so banal and destructive to the human spirit that walking to work is in itself a depressing experience. The streets are shabby and tawdry and litter-strewn, and the concrete is rain-streaked and graffiti-strewn, and the stairwells of the social-engineering experiments are lined in shit and junkies and graffiti. Nobody goes out of their rooms. There is no sense of community, so old people die in despair and loneliness. We’ve had a lowering of the quality of life”—so said not Johnny Rotten as he recorded “Anarchy in the U.K.” in 1976, but “Saint Bob” Geldof (first runner-up for the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize because of his work organizing pop-music campaigns to fight African famine) as he repeated the social critique of “Anarchy in the U.K.” in 1985. Reduced to a venomous stew, that was what the song had said—except that as the Sex Pistols performed it, you heard not woe but glee.

  Is this the em pee el ay

  Or is this the yew dee ay

  Or is this the eye rrrrrr ay

  I thought it was the yew kay

  Or just

  Another

  Country

  Another council tenancy!

  It was the sound of the city collapsing. In the measured, deliberate noise, words tumbling past each other so fast it was almost impossible to tell them apart, you could hear social facts begin to break up—when Johnny Rotten rolled his r’s, it sounded as if his teeth had been ground down to points. This was a code that didn’t have to be deciphered: who knew what the MPLA was, and who cared? It sounded like fun, wrecking the world. It felt like freedom. It was the freedom, after hearing the news that a San Diego teenager named Brenda Spenser had, because she didn’t like Mondays, opened fire on her high school and killed three people, to write a song celebrating the event—as Bob Geldof had once done.

  “I Don’t Like Mondays” was a hit; in the United States it might have made number one, save for Brenda Spenser’s superseding right to a fair trial. Too bad—wasn’t a song like “I Don’t Like Mondays” what “punk,” which is what the putatively nihilist music generated by the Sex Pistols would be called, was all about? All about what? In the course of an interview, Bob Geldof’s version of “Anarchy in the U.K.,” like the explanations Johnny Rotten offered interviewers in 1976 and 1977, is perfectly rational: on record, both flesheater Johnny and Saint Bob call up the words of surrealist Luis Buñuel—who, Pauline Kael notes, “once referred to some of those who praised Un Chien Andalou as ‘that crowd of imbeciles who find the film beautiful or poetic when it is fundamentally a desperate and passionate call to murder.’ ”

  It is a question of nihilism—and “Anarchy in the U.K.,” a fan might like to think, was something different: a negationist prank. “‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ is a statement of self-rule, of ultimate independence, of do-it-yourself,” said Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, and whatever that meant (do what yourself?), it wasn’t nihilism. Nihilism is the belief in nothing and the wish to become nothing: oblivion is its ruling passion. Its best depiction is in Larry Clark’s Tulsa, his photographic memoir of early 1960s youths spiking themselves to death with speed rather than becoming what they already look like: local Charley Starkweathers and Caril Fugates. Nihilism can find a voice in art, but never satisfaction. “This isn’t a play, Larry,” one of Clark’s needle buddies told him after he’d taken one too many pictures. “This is real fuckin’ life.” “So other people didn’t think it was a play,” Clark recalled years later, “but I did”—even though he’d been in it, using a shutter timer to shoot the blood running down his own arm.

  Nihilism means to close the world around its own self-consuming impulse; negation is the act that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems—but only when the act is so implicitly complete it leaves open the possibility that the world may be nothing, that nihilism as well as creation may occupy the suddenly cleared ground. The nihilist, no matter how many people he or she might kill, is always a solipsist: no one exists but the actor, and only the actor’s motives are real. When the nihilist pulls the trigger, turns on the gas, sets the fire, hits the vein, the world ends. Negation is always political: it assumes the existence of other people, calls them into being. Still, the tools the negationist seems forced to use—real or symbolic violence, blasphemy, dissipation, contempt, ridiculousness—change hands with those of the nihilist. As a negation, “Anarchy in the U.K.” could be rationally translated in interviews: seeking to prove that the world is not as it seems, the negationist recognizes that to others the world is as it seems to be. But by the time of “Holidays in the Sun,” the Sex Pistols’ fourth and last single, issued in October 1977, just a month short of a year after “Anarchy in the U.K.,” no such translations were offered, or possible.

  BY THAT TIME

  By that time, countless new groups of public speakers were issuing impossible demands, and the Sex Pistols had been banned across the U.K. Waving the bloody shirt of public decency, even public safety, city officials canceled their shows; chain stores refused to stock their records. Cutting “Anarchy in the U.K.” out of the market just as it was reaching its audience, EMI, the Sex Pistols’ first label, dropped them after the televised “fuck” that made Declan McManus’ day, recalled the records, and melted them down. Patriotic workers refused to handle “God Save the Queen,” the follow-up single, a three-minute riot against Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee; A&M, the band’s second label, destroyed what few copies were produced. Finally released on Virgin, the Sex Pistols’ third label, “God Save the Queen” was erased from the BBC charts and topped the hit parade as a blank, thus creating the bizarre situation in which the nation’s most popular record was turned into contraband. The press contrived a moral panic to sell papers, but the panic seemed real soon enough: the Sex Pistols were denounced in Parliament as a threat to the British way of life, by socialists as fascist, by fascists as communist. Johnny Rotten was caught on the street and slashed with a razor; another band member was chased down and beaten with an iron bar.

  The group itself had become contraband. In late 1975, when the Sex Pistols first appeared, crashing another band’s concert and impersonating the opening act, the plug was pulled after ten minutes; now to play in public they were forced to turn up in secret, under a false name. The very emptiness of the terrain they had cleared—the multiplication of new voices from below, the intensification of abuse from above, both sides fighting for possession of that suddenly cleared ground—had pushed them toward self-destruction, into the silence of all nihilist noise.

  It was there from the start—a possibility, one of the alleys leading off the free street. There was a black hole at the heart of the Sex Pistols’ music, a willful lust for the destruction of values that no one could be comfortable with, and that was why, from the start, Johnny Rotten was perhaps the only truly terrifying singer rock ’n’ roll has known. But the terror had a new cast at the end: certainly no one has yet seen all the way to the bottom of “Holidays in the Sun,” and probably no one ever will.

  They had begun as if in pursuit of a project: in “Anarchy in the U.K.” they had damned the present, and in “God Save the Queen” they had damned the past with a curse so hard that it took the future with it. “NO FUTURE”—

  NO FUTURE

  NO FUTURE

  NO FUTURE FOR YOU

  NO FUTURE

  NO FUTURE

  NO FUTURE

  NO FUTURE FOR ME

  —so went the mordant chant as the song ended. “No future in England’s dah-rrrreeming!”: England’s dream of its glorious
past, as represented by the Queen, the “moron,” the nation’s basic tourist attraction, linchpin of an economy based on nothing, salve on England’s collective amputee’s itch for Empire. “We’re the future,” Johnny Rotten shouted, never sounding more like a criminal, an escaped mental patient, a troglodyte—“Your future.” Portrayed in the press as heralds of a new youth movement, with “God Save the Queen” the Sex Pistols denied it; every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled.

  The Sex Pistols were after more than an entry in the next revised edition of a sociology text on Britain’s postwar youth subcultures—just what more, one could perhaps have learned from a fragment that made up part of the collage on the back sleeve of the Clash’s first record, “White Riot”/“1977”: “that there is, perhaps, some tension in society, when perhaps overwhelming pressure brings industry to a standstill or barricades to the streets years after the liberals had dismissed the notion as ‘dated romanticism,’ ” some unidentified person had written at some unidentified time, “the journalist invents the theory that this constitutes a clash of generations. Youth, after all, is not a permanent condition, and a clash of generations is not so fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be a clash between rulers and ruled.” So maybe that was what the Sex Pistols were after: a clash between rulers and ruled. As the number-two London punk band, the Clash’s pop project was always to make sense of the Sex Pistols’ riddles, and this made sense—except that a single listening to “God Save the Queen” dissolved whatever sense it made.

  The consumptive disgust in Johnny Rotten’s voice (“We love our Queen / We mean it, man / God save”—that was the end of the line), the blinding intransigence of the music, so strong it made intransigence into a self-justifying, all-encompassing new value: as a sound, “God Save the Queen” suggested demands no art of government could ever satisfy. “God save”—the intonation said there was no such thing as salvation. A guitar lick ripped the song and whoever heard it in half.

  What was left? Mummery, perhaps: with “Pretty Vacant,” their third single, the Sex Pistols had risen from graves hundreds of years cold as Lollards, carriers of the ancient British heresy that equated work with sin and rejected both. Work, the Bible said, was God’s punishment for Original Sin, but that was not the Lollards’ bible. They said God was perfect, men and women were God’s creation, so therefore men and women were perfect and could not sin—save against their own perfect nature, by working, by surrendering their God-given autonomy to the rule of the Great Ones, to the lie that the world was made for other than one’s perfect pleasure. It was a dangerous creed in the fourteenth century, and a strange idea to find in a twentieth-century pop song, but there it was, and who knew what buried wishes it might speak for?

  “We didn’t know it would spread so fast,” said Bernard Rhodes, in 1975 one of Malcolm McLaren’s co-conspirators at the Sex boutique, later the manager of the Clash. “We didn’t have a manifesto. We didn’t have a rule book, but we were hoping that . . . I was thinking of what I got from Jackie Wilson’s ‘Reet Petite,’ which was the first record I ever bought. I didn’t need anyone to describe what it was all about, I knew it . . . 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 by 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.”

  Socialists like Bernard Rhodes knew it; it was never clear what Malcolm McLaren or his partner Jamie Reid, before Sex an anarchist publisher and poster artist, thought they knew. Unemployment in the U.K. had reached an unimaginable one million by the time “Pretty Vacant” was released in July 1977, and the punk band Chelsea summed up the social fact with the protest single “Right to Work.” But Johnny Rotten had never learned the language of protest, in which one seeks a redress of grievances, and speaks to power in the supplicative voice, legitimating power by the act of speaking: that was not what it was about. In “Pretty Vacant” the Sex Pistols claimed the right not to work, and the right to ignore all the values that went with it: perseverance, ambition, piety, frugality, honesty, and hope, the past that God invented work to pay for, the future that work was meant to build. “Your God has gone away,” Johnny Rotten had already sung on “No Feelings,” the flipside of the first, abortive pressing of “God Save the Queen”—“Be back another day.” Compared to Rhodes’s sociology, Johnny Rotten spoke in unknown tongues. With a million out of work the Sex Pistols sat in doorways, preened and spat: “We’re pretty / Pretty vacant / We’re pretty / Pretty vacant / We’re pretty / Pretty vacant / And we don’t care.” It was their funniest record yet, and their most professional, sounding more like the Beatles than a traffic accident, but Johnny Rotten’s lolling tongue grew sores for the last word: like the singles before it, “Pretty Vacant” drew a laugh from the listener, and then drove it back down the listener’s throat.

  So that was the project—God and the state, the past, present, and future, youth and work, all these things were behind the Sex Pistols as they headed to the end of their first and last year on the charts. All that was left was “Holidays in the Sun”: a well-earned vacation, albeit geopolitical and world-historical, sucking up more territory than the Sex Pistols had set foot on, and more years than they had been alive.

  THE SLEEVE

  The sleeve was charming: on the front was a borrowed travel-club comic strip, depicting happy tourists on the beach, in a nightclub, cruising the Mediterranean, celebrating their vacations in speech balloons Jamie Reid had emptied of advertising copy and filled with the words Johnny Rotten was singing on the plastic—“A cheap holiday in other people’s misery!” On the back was a perfect family scene, dinnertime, a photograph Reid annotated with little pasted-on captions: “nice image,” “nice furniture,” “nice room,” “nice middle age lady,” “nice middle aged man,” “nice food,” “nice photo,” “nice young man,” “nice young lady,” “nice gesture” (the nice young man is holding the hand of the nice young lady), “nice little girl” (she’s sticking out her tongue), and even, at the bottom, “nice sleeve.” “I don’t want a holiday in the sun,” Johnny Rotten began. “I want to go to the new Belsen.”

  He went. Off he goes to Germany, the marching feet of package-tour tourists behind him, drawn by the specter of the Nazi extermination camp that, for the British, serves as Auschwitz does for Americans: a symbol of modern evil. “I wanna see some history,” he says, but history is out of reach; now Belsen is not in Germany at all, but part of something called “East Germany,” less a place than an ideological construct, and so Johnny Rotten finds himself at the foot of the Berlin Wall, the ideological construct symbolizing the division between the two social systems that rule the world, a world that is more like it is now than it ever was before.

  Johnny Rotten stands at the Berlin Wall. People are staring at him, and he can’t stand it; the sound of marching feet grows louder, and he can’t stand that either. As the band behind him spins into a frenzy, he begins to scream: he wants to go over the wall. Is that where the real Nazis are? Is East Berlin what the West will look like in the no-future he’s already prophesied? He can’t stop himself: he wants to go under the wall. He seems not to know what he’s singing, but the music presses on, squeezing whoever might hear it like Poe’s shrinking closet. The shifts in Johnny Rotten’s voice are lunatic: he can barely say a word before it explodes in his mouth. Part of the terror of the song is that it makes no apparent sense and yet drags you into its absurdity and strands you there: time and place are specific, you could plot your position on a map, and you’d be nowhere. The only analogue is just as specific, and just as vague.

  IN 1924

  In 1924 a forty-two-year-old North Carolina lawyer named Bascom Lamar Lunsford recorded a traditional ballad called “I Wish I Was a Mole in the
Ground”—how traditional, no one knows. A reference to “the Bend,” a turn-of-the-century Tennessee prison, might fix the piece in a given time and place, but the reference could have been added long after the piece came into being; all that was certain was the measured count of Lunsford’s banjo, the inexorable cadence of his voice. The song, the music said, predated whoever might sing it, and would outlast whoever heard it.

  “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” wasn’t an animal song, like “Froggy Went A-Courtin’ ” or “The Leatherwing Bat.” It was an account of everyday mysticism, a man dropping his plow, settling onto the ground, pulling off his boots, and summoning wishes he will never fulfill. He lies on his back in the sun:

  Oh, I wish I was a mole in the ground

  Yes, I wish I was a mole in the ground

  Like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down

  And I wish I was a mole in the ground

  Now what the singer wants is obvious, and almost impossible to comprehend. He wants to be delivered from his life and to be changed into a creature insignificant and despised. He wants to see nothing and to be seen by no one. He wants to destroy the world and to survive it. That’s all he wants. The performance is quiet, steady, and the quiet lets you in: you can listen, and you can contemplate what you are listening to. You can lie back and imagine what it would be like to want what the singer wants. It is an almost absolute negation, at the edge of pure nihilism, a demand to prove that the world is nothing, a demand to be next to nothing, and yet it is comforting.