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[sanpaku]

I am reading this Greil Marcus book Lipstick Traces which is nominally about punk music but actually turns out to be a long explainer of Situationism. Marcus will have many pages about Guy Dubord and the Lettrist International, and then say, "as the Sex Pistols demonstrated..." in the most amazing way. I want to ask Greil Marcus (who is still

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[sanpaku]

Oh no, this book is heavily marinated in Boomer stream of consciousness for the first 60 pages or so and it almost made me want to give up on it. In fact I am wondering how much you might have read about situationism before drew on his writing, since he is a giant in music criticism and people quote him endlessly. So I wouldn't necessarily recommend the book if you already understand this stuff. I personally am very obtuse about artistic things so I found him kind of helpful, especially midway through the book where he kind of settles down and explains things like Situationism and dada more clearly.

The line between punk and Trump starts to make sense when you see that nihilism can be a potent force for conservatism. The "fascist regime" he was singing about in 1976 was a Labour government, after all. Marcus is actually pretty good about how this works; he talks about how the futurist component of dada lent itself to Mussolini when the time came. You can find really glib comparisons between Trump and artistic "disruption" today from twerps like Slavoj Zizek. So it is one of those depressing phenomena that makes a certain kind of sense, part of why we don't trust Boomers like my ex-father in law not to be gigantic fucking hypocrites.

My favorite story about Johnny Rotten is that Malcom McLaren apparently intended someone else to be in the band. He said, "get that guy who is always hanging around the store" and they got the wrong guy. The level of fraud intrinsic in the Sex Pistols story is just irresistible.

[alsoname]

I think most of what I've read about Situationism in a punk context was contemporaneous. For example, I have these huge copies of Search & Destroy, a late '70s zine from San Francisco, and they were definitely inspired by a lot of weird art movements. I remember Frank Discussion of the Feederz giving long interviews in which he expounded on the influence of Situationism, for example. They were definitely aware of their influences at the time.

I guess we could get into a "No True Punksman" standoff, but (without reading his argument), I wonder how much of punk was truly nihilist and how much of his argument was just cherrypicking nihilistic bands. I don't know which bands he used as examples, but are the Sex Pistols truly representative of all punk? They were a manufactured band just like the Village People and the Backstreet Boys. I see how their lyrics created a stir 40+ years ago, and their fashion raised eyebrows as well (they were created to advertise a boutique, were they not?), but there is nothing interesting about them musically. I don't remember anyone being impressed by them when I got into punk, which on the one hand was in the early '90s when people had been bleating "Punk Is Dead!" for more than a decade already, but on the other hand was closer to punk's heyday than we are now to the '90s.

On the other hand, there are tons of punk bands who were wonderfully creative, the opposite of nihililstic, often politically engaged. I'm not surprised when I stumbled upon Alice Bag's Twitter feed and find that she is engaged in what's going on here and abroad, tweeting about police brutality, anti-Asian racism, and Putin. I am surprised when I learn that Exene Cervenka or even John Lydon fell off the freakin' rails. I would not call the Dead Kennedys nihilist either, and they railed against the "Zen fascist" administration of Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown - who Jello Biafra endorsed for reelection to governor decades later.

Anyway, I've probably said too much about a book and argument I didn't actually read. I am still intrigued by how he draws those lines, I just wonder if the kind of people who are given to voting for Trump (or liking Trump for his "disruptive" qualities but not actually voting at all) are the kind of people who will be attracted to the more nihilistic corners of punk (or any other subculture, like gun culture) earlier in life. That is, does listening to the Sex Pistols actually cause a Trump vote decades later, or is the person who was going to vote for Trump also more likely to be attracted to the nihilism of the Sex Pistols?