Canadianjournal ofPoliticalandSocial Theory/Revue canadienne de thEoriepolitiqueet sociale, Volume 14, Numbers 1-3 (1990) .

YOU'RE IN SUSPICION:PUNK AND THE SECRET PASSION PLAY OF

WHITE NOISE

Andrew Herman

Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces.-ASecretHistory oftheTwentieth Century .Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989 . 496 pages, illustrated.

Remembrance of Noise Past

In the fall of 1977 I took up residence in the U.K. as a university ex-change student just at the time when the hype and hysteria concerningpunk wasapproaching its zenith . Simplyby being in the right place at theright time I found myself with the opportunity to witness either arevolution in popular music and culture, or the morbid symptoms of awelfare state in moral and aesthetic decay (it wasonly later that 1 realizedthat the two were not mutually exclusive) . As a budding sociologist forwhom rock musicwasthe most energizing passion ofeveryday life, suchan opportunity was not to be missed . So, in the spirit of culturaladventure andcuriosity, in November of 1977 severalfriends ofmine andI trepidatiously sauntered into the The 100 Club in London, one of theepicenters ofthe British Punk Explosion of 1976-1978, in order to expe-rience the rituals and sonic milieu of punk first hand .Nothing in my experience as a fan of rock normy contact with medi-

ated representations of punk prepared me for the scene into which I in-serted myself that evening. Some ten years later, after punk as amusical

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genre has been exhausted and after almost all the signs of its stylisticsubversion have been recuperated by the dominant culture to take theirplace withinthe cornucopia ofsartorial commodities, it ishard to conveyjust how disruptive and compelling the experience was. Upon enteringthe club I had a palpable feeling that I had crossed an unseen liminalboundary into a region of chaos where all the codes of musical experi-ence, ofperformance, and ofaudience decorum were joyously and quiteconsciously being subverted . Almost immediately my companions and Iwere identified and marked, largely becausewe clearly did not fit into thesartorial regime of punk with our blue jeans and long hair, both asforeigners to the scene and as consumers looking for a new thrill on thecultural marketplace, which is exactly what we were. Various kinds ofthreatening words, epithets, and gestures were thrown our way, themost memorable ofwhich was a snarled "Fucking tourist" accompaniedby a well-aimed gob of spit at my Frye boots . But as there was safety innumbers, we pressed through the bodies that pogo-ed into the air, andinto each other, to the front of the stage, the only possible place whereamidst all that kinetic motion and aggressive posturing one could get aclear view of the performance .This desire to see the performers unobstructed by the audience was an

artifact of a regime of musical experience very different from punk.Within that regime, whether it operated in a multi-purpose indoor sportsarenawith 15,000 fans holding theirlighters aloft orin a small club wherethe audience "intimately" sat around the stage, only the musicians wereendowed with the capacity to act and speak . And whether you were oneofthose 15,000 givingthanks forthe spectacle with your tiny flame or satat a table in club silently letting the waves ofartistic creativity lap aroundyour ears, the subject position offered by the regime was one ofpassivespectatorship with the division between performer and audience firmlydrawn. With the pleasure of fetishistic looking and listening being aboutthe only one available within that regime, it is little wonder that the de-sire for an unobstructed view was overwhelming . I soon came to realizethat such a desire was almost irrelevant in the punk milieu, for it was thescene in its entirety that was the performance and not simply themusicians on stage .The first person to take the stage was a teenager by the name of Patrik

Fitzgerald, whom the club D .J . introduced as "The Poet of Punk." Thishonorific apparently did not sit well with Patrik as he turned away fromthe mike, hurled his beer at the D.J . booth and screamed "I ain't nofucking poet," much to the delight of audience . Then he turned back tothe audience, pointed an accusing finger and spat out "and you ain't nofucking punks either." The crowd eruptedwith shouts of "yes's", "no's",and "who the fuck do you think you are to tell us what we are!" and a hailof spit rained down upon Patrik from all quarters . Letting loose a laughof transgressive delight, he strapped on a cheap acoustic guitar, withseveral strings missing, and launched into a song called "Get Your Punk

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at Woolies [Woolworth's] . " Byhisownadmission Patrik wasno poet, buthe was clearly a prophet as he railed against the incipient commodificationof punk, the selling of its surface appearances as a pale substitute for itsspirit and substance. And what was that spirit?

"Nihilistic" was the first word that stuck in my mind as I stood amidstthe noise, tumult, and shouting, and watched as a youngwoman thrusther fist in the air and slashed at her wrist with a razor until she wasdragged away by the bouncers laughing and screaming that "it's just afucking joke, it's all a joke." (What's a joke?, I thought-Her action? Herlife? Punk? All of these andeverything?) For Patrik that spirit entailed theopportunity to publicly speak of the terror and the boredom of hiseveryday life, which is exactly what he did in his second and final songcalled "I Hate My Room." As he spat out the words the waves ofrejectionspread out in concentric circles from his bed to the walls ofhis room tohis parents downstairs to his neighborhood to his teachers at school tothe London Transport to the BBC to the Labour Government and theT.U.C . to the Common Market andNATO to the United States, Japan, andSouth Africa and finally to God, all ofwhichwere implicated in the samebloody scheme to keep himin a world ofmany pre-determined choiceswith no creative options. Yet all the verbal rejection in the world couldnot beget a negation of these' things soon enough for Patrik, norseemingly for thosewho listened andshouted with or against him. So af-ter his screed he tossed his guitar into the audience and said with a sneer,"Alright, then,you be fucking poets." After a tussle among a small knotof people near the stage, the guitar wasthrown back towards the stagewhere it knocked over part of the drum kit for the next band . A cheerwent up from the crowd and someone shouted "We already are poets,"in response to whichsome guyleapt up on stage andshouted back, "ForGod's sake, let us hope so."As it turned out, that prayer was offered up by the lead singer and

guitarist for the next band which called themselves AlternativeT.V . Theman's name was Mark Perry a/k/a Mark P. (which was his nom deplume). In addition to his musical duties, he was also creator and editorofSniffn Glue, one ofthe most influential fanzines ofthe early punk era.Before punk hit the British music scene in 1975, Mark Perry found hispleasure as a rabid rock fan, and his alienation as an office clerk. In punk,he sawthe opportunityto make the magic leap from fan to performer andin his magazine he vigorously formulated and promulgated one of thecentral tenets of punk ideology: that everybody was, in fact, apoet andshould strap on a guitar, become speaking (or screaming) subjects, andproclaim their experience to world. To this end, the back page of everyissue of Sniff'n Glue was devoted to a diagram of three basic musicalchords, beneath which was a caption which read "Here's one chord . . .Here's a second . . . .Here's a third . . Now form your own band!" But atthe time I first saw him and his band, I knew none of these things . All Isawwasa person whowas brazen enough to stand before what I thought

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to be an unruly mob and challenge them to become what they said theywere .As Alternative T.V. walkedon stage and pluggedthemselves in they too

were greeted by a hail of spit, which prompted me to ask someonestanding by me why people were doing it . She looked at me somewhatincredulously and said, "We're gobbing, that's all ." And as if that answermade all the sense in theworld, I took a swig from my beer and added mysaliva to the spray . "That's the spirit," my neighbor said, adding a newtwisttothe story . This group expectoration was not a gesture ofhostility,but one of blessing and benediction that enveloped the band within thecollective effervescence of the crowd. Within the spiritual matrix ofpunk, it was a gift that could not be refused without destroying the ethosof participation and solidarity that bound performer and audience to-gether in opposition to the world outside . Having accepted the gift, theband returned it in spades, launching an arrow of noise that was aimedstraight at the craven heart of a rock and roll that had become bloated,corrupt, and vacuous . The band kicked off their set by crashing into abarely recognizable cover ofFrank Zappa and the Mother's ofInvention's"Good Times," a classic send-up of let's boogie, get drunk, get fuckedrock and roll . By the way that Mark Perry hurled the words at theaudience it was clear that he did not think that these were the GoodTimes, and, to the extent that rock and roll operated as a good time so-porific for hard times, then rock and roll needed to be destroyed .So too did the myth of the rock musician as poet or artist who was sin-

gularly authorized to speak the dreams, desires, and experiences of anaudience that had its tongue cut out by the spectacle that rock had be-come . For Alternative TVthis meant smashing the idols by shattering thehagiography that constructed the rockstar as artist-poet (and any poet asstar) . As the band cranked up the noise to ear-splitting levels, Mark Perrywent off stage and brought out a bust of the self-proclaimed Dionysianpoet of rock himself, Jim Morrison, and set it at the front of the stage ."Viva la Rock and Roll," Mark screamed :

Paris is the City of the Dead HeroJim Morrison died in a bath, July 3, 1971After that, poor Jim wasn't good for a laughIn 1970 he was a lot offunViva la Rock and RollParis is the City of InfluenceUncle Rimbaud spoke to meThrough New York's New WaveQ'est-ce que c'est?What people sayParis is a wonderful city on forty francs a days

Behind the satirization ofrock icons both old (Jim Morrison) and new(Patti Smith, Talking Heads) was a pointed critique of the valorization ofdead heroes that Marx would have recognized (ifhe could only stand the

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noise) . As the famous passage in the " 18th Brumaire" goes, "The traditionofdead generationsweighs like anightmare upon the minds of living ." 2By borrowing the language and images of past struggles to shape andvalidate those of the present, by engaging in a "world-historical necro-mancy" by which the past is conjured up in order to pass judgement onthe present and the future, the living could not find their own voice orvision . "Leave the dead to the dead," said Marx .3 In different words andwith an entirely different tonality, Mark Perry was saying the same thing:Let's not waste our time touring around a city of dead heroes on apilgrimage to Morrison's grave at Pere La Chaise or to the cafes whereRimbaud held court. Ourfascinationwith deadpoets onlydiminishes ourabilityto make poetry in andout ofoureveryday lives. Thepresent of theeveryday: "Hic Rhodus! Hic Salta! ; Here is the Rose! Dance Here!"(Marx) .' And we danced, sweeping the visage ofMorrison off the stageandsmashing itto pieces to thehyper-pulseofthe band's anthem,"ActionTime Vision" : "Chords and notes don't mean a thing/Listen to therhythm/Listen to us sing/We're in action and the four walls crack/OnA.T.V.V.V.V.V.V ."

Still, all this wassimply satire, a play upon pre-existing codes andiconsof rock music . While it was intended to be a subversion of rock and roll,that subversion waspremised solely upon having an audience that couldread the signs that were being circulated . Who's in action? Who'ssinging? Who's listening? We were listening to a different story, a differ-ent song, but that was all wewere doing. The noise pushed at the bound-aries of rock as a discursive formation and as a performance ritual, but ithad yet to really break through them. The idols had been smashed butwhatabout the temple?Wouldthe fourwalls reallycrack? After all, A.T.V .was still a T.V .

As various members of the audience pogo-stomped the remainingpieces ofJim into a dusty soon-to-be-forgotten memory, the band settledback into a jagged punk dub while, from seemingly out of nowhere, ataped voice that was clipped from a trailer of an underground cinemaclub began to play : "In this space films have been seen by over 80,000people . Films, that before this cinema, would have remained in theircans . Here also battles are fought, imaginations expressed, differencesconfronted . And it is also a space in which all kinds of movements candevelop . . ." The voice was cut off and the statement was amended byMark P. who stepped up to the mike and said "even rock and roll ." Herewasyet another element ofthe punk spirit : the creation of an aural spaceof difference within which there were differences that made a dif-ference; a space where clashes of sonic texture, grains of voice, ideas,sentiments and desires not only drew aboundary between punk andtherest of the culture, but also gave succor and sustenance to those insidethe boundary precisely because it was heterogeneous . This was quite apromise, but one that could not possibly be realized as long as those onstage remained indifferent to the differences that bubbled under the

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surface ofan audience that could hear but could not speak. Andso, as thecrowdchurned and roiled in front ofthe stage, Mark Perry declared thatthe time had comefor anyone whowanted to speak their mind to mountthe stage, grab the microphone, and lead the performance to its nextdestination.By this time I was sweptup in the anarchy of the crowd, pushing and

shoving, jumping anddancing, spitting andshouting . It wasa feeling thatwasbothexhilarating andfrightening. Here wasaplace wherefewof thecodes of accepted behavior held sway-seemingly everything was per-mitted . But where everything was permitted, things could get out ofcontrol . And when things get of control, nobody knows what possiblymight happen. I felt an inchoate fear of possibilities that were unpre-dictable, ofactions whose consequences were terribly uncertain . Some-onemight get hurt, maybe killed . Perhaps the dance of chaos where wegleefully smashed rock and roll icons would not be enough to satisfydesires for transgression that had been let loose . Perhaps we would de-stroythe club andthen sweepup the stairs andonto the streets to destroywhatever we might find .

In retrospect, the simulacrum of violence inside the club was nothingcompared to the real violence that wasenacted daily outside . Early in theyear, the number ofunemployed passed the one million mark, anumberthat just a year before British politicians and pundits had declared to be"inconceivable ." Older urban centers such as Liverpool, Birmingham,Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, and large sections of London reeled underthe impact of deindustrialization and capital flight, as communities andtheir inhabitants were left to fester and decay. Therewas also the grow-ing popularity of the neo-fascist National Front's racist appeals to "Bri-tishness," and in August 1977 there had been street battles betweensupporters of the NF and anti-fascist demonstrators in the Lewishamsection of London. As a result of this event and others, such as the anti-police riot by militant young blacks at the Notting Hill Festival a yearearlier, the state increased its surveillance and harassment of groupsmarginal to an increasingly paranoid white, middle-class Britain . Peoplewere being violated in more ways than one and to some of the people in-side the club, whohadto contend with such violence in their ownlives,perhaps the idea of perpetrating some violence of their own was not sofrightening or foreign . Ofcourse, the possibility that that might actuallyhappenwas remote . But to my white, middle class, American sensibility,the thought that such things mighthappen wasenough to encourage meto psychically, and physically, circle the wagons. And so I drifted off toa corner of the club to watch from a safe distance .Others,whohadno need or desire forthe safety ofanykindofdistance,

charged the stage to accept Mark Perry's invitation . The noise, mainlyemanating from the crowd, was deafening and even with the aid of themicrophone it was hard to hearwhat the people standing on stage weresaying . A woman seemingly catapulted out of the crowd, grabbed the

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microphone, screamed "Defiance!" andleapt back into the maelstrom.Shewasfollowed bysomeonewhoblurted out that the crowdwas boringand staid, a characterization to whichthe crowdvigorously protested bypouring forth a tidal wave ofcatcalls, whistles, andprofanity that prohib-ited the man from pursuing whatever point he was trying to make.Another manpushed him aside and shouted above the roar that he wasfrom "The Dead." Pale, pock-marked, incredibly thin, and with eyesladen with black mascara, he looked as though he was telling the truth.Andindeed he was, as "The Dead" happened to be thepunk band he wasin . By some strange twist of fate that seemed to strengthen the band'sclaim upon their name, their lead singer hadbeen killed (of all places) inFrance . But the man was not all interested in lionizing his dead compa-triot; he couldn't even rememberwhen the manwaskilled ("Our singerwas killed three days . . .one month. . . .no, two weeks ago. . . ") He askedthe audience if anyone was interested in taking the dead man's place inTheDead and hands shot up, indicating an intense eagerness amongthelisteners for achance to stop listening and to start making some noise oftheir own. I had no doubt that one of them would get that chance, andperhaps appear on the stage of the 100 Club the very next week, resur-recting the dead with a vengeance .The next person who gained possession of the microphone tried to

turn the discussion, ifonecan call it that, in apolitical direction by askingthe audience to think aboutwhat they wouldsay ifthey had the chanceto "talk to the people whoare runningthis country." Itwasclearfrom theresponse that there was no interest in talking to such people since every-one understood that it would be a useless enterprise . "Fuck the PrimeMinister!", "Go join the Labor Party", "Why bother? They're as thick asyou are," were some of the retorts, but most people simply ignored thequestion because the whole idea was boring andstupid . If punk was po-litical, it was not political on anyterms that made sense within the spec-tacular discourse of liberal capitalist democracy. Frustrated, the would-be agitator threw up his hands and said, "Alright, what's your favoritefucking T.V . program, then?" This question provoked the most lively re-action yet as almost the entire audience erupted with about half thepeople shouting namesofT.V . showsand the other halfvociferously be-rating the other halffor watching T.V . in the first place. Mark Perry tookthe opportunity to deliver a small speech on the perils of having punkbands appear on television . For some, he said, having the Sex Pistols onthe BBC's Top of the Pops was avictory for punk in the battle for socialacceptance . But this wasno victory since the battle wasnot for social ac-ceptance but for something else whichMark P. couldn't quite articulate .A woman shouted "We know the problems, what's the answer?!" towhichhe replied after a long pause, "You know this is really depressingbecause I don't know the fucking answer ."

In a way, the answer was right in front of all of us : it was in the effer-vescence of the crowd, in the possibility that such a public discussion

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could happen, not only in the midst of such incredible noise but inextri-cably linked to and sustained by it ; it was in the womanwho once againboundedup on stage, screamed "Defiance!" into themicrophone and dis-appeared into the crowd. But, then again, maybe thatwasn't the answereither . So a man took advantage of Mark Perry's lack of an answer toprovide his own: "If you want to change the world you don't sing songsand you don't make your point on stage . You do like the blacks in SouthAfrica and go out and start a war . Words are a bunch of bullocks . Theydon't do anything. You're just a bunch of little boys and girls who don'tknow what they're doing." Before the crowd could respond to this clearchallenge Mark Perry moved to close the debate by saying, "Alright . Hewants chaos. . . well, chaos is finished" and signaled to the band to wrapup its dub in a crescendo of noise .But chaos was not finished . For as Perry turned around to talk to the

drummer a man grabbed the microphone and yelled "If there was a loadofskinheads down here you'd all shit yourselves and you know it!!!" Theviolence that had hung in the air now became palpably real as the clubexploded into bedlam. A score ofpunks rushed the stage to attack the of-fender, accompanied by a veritable mortar barrage of beer bottles andglasses . The skinhead provocateur was dragged off to an uncertain fate,while the bouncers sallied forth into the crowd to restore order. Peoplescattered in all directions as the melee spread on to the stage and acrossthe floor . Visibly shaken and infuriated by this willful self-destruction ofthe fragile space ofdifference, Mark Perry shouted above the sturm anddrang "One ofyou people gets a chance to say something and there's afight . Is that all you can do, struggle with one another? I love all youpeople, but I hate you when you act like stupid idiots CAUSE THAT'SHOWTHEY GRIND YOU DOWN!!!" The show was over.

It is now 1990, nearly thirteen years after that fateful night . The obit-uary of punk was written long ago (by some as early as 19785) eventhough it is not uncommon to see teenagers congregating in HarvardSquare, listening to hardcore, with "Punks Not Dead" painted on theback of their leather jackets . Within the walls of the 100 Club, if it stillexists, I imagine that punk perdures only as a nostalgic echo, a vaguememory of a desire for transgression that is stirred by bands who still donot care whether they can play chords at all . Mark Perry and AlternativeTV still exist . Last summer they released their first album in seven years .But they no longer prowl the same musical terrain, having eschewedtheir assault on the premises and dead history of rock and roll for a nos-talgic immersion in 60s psychedclia . As for the other members of theaudience, I have no idea whether they exist or not . We all dispersed afterthe event, destined never to share the same space again . Outside of theboundaries of the collective performance space, we were left to our owndevices, bereft of the evanescent power of the moment when the fourwalls appeared to fracture, even if only a little . Perhaps the best that wecould hope for was that the fragmented memories of the rhythm-driven

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cacophonyofdifference wouldsomehowmake the facts ofeveryday lifeseem less natural and stolid, more political and fluid, than they did be-fore . As for me, I like to think that I definitely do exist, though my graspon my place in the present keeps slipping as I listen to a recording ofATV's performance that evening, re-membering, re-configuring, rewrit-ing that experience, and trying to make sense of it all in relation to GreilMarcus' Lipstick Traces. A Secret History of the Twentieth Century.

White Punks on Theory

The principal reason whyI have engaged in such a self-indulgent pref-ace to this review is that I wanted to situate myself with regards to mysubject matter in the same waythat Marcus situates himself towards his.Although Lipstick Traces is by no means simply a book about punk, it ismost assuredly abook that not only finds its animating spirit in punk, butalso its motivating inspiration in the carnivalesque maelstrom of a punkperformance. At this performance, whichMarcus claims was "as close tothe judgement Day as a staged performance can be", he wasfascinatedby a screeching, abrasive voice that "denied all social facts, and in thatdenial affirmed that everythingwaspossible"' . Thevoice oftheAvengingAngel was that ofJohnny Rotten at the last Sex Pistols concert at theWonderland Ballroom in San Francisco in January 1978 . It was a voicethat was so powerful and compelling from Marcus's perspective that itblew a hole through the fabric ofeveryday life and its ubiquitous tyranny:

[Rotten's] aim was to take all the rage, intelligence, and strengthin his being and then fling them at the world: to make the worldnotice ; to make the world doubt its most cherished and unexam-ined beliefs; to make the world payfor its crimes in the coin ofnightmare, and then to end the world-symbolically, if no otherway was open . At that, for a moment, he did.'

Much in the same way that I stumbled into the suddenly unreal worldoutside of the 100 Club, Marcus left the Wonderland Ballroom with thefirm beliefthat nothingwouldever quite look orfeel the same again. Andso Marcus leapt through the gaping hole that Johnny Rotten's voiceopened up for him, spending the next ten years trying to make sense ofthat voice, its moment of refusal, and from whence it came.Marcus is certainly not the first to be so movedby what mightbe called

the "passion play" ofpunk. SimonFrithhas arguedthat punkhas been themost theoretically scrutinized and analyzed musical genre and stylisticmovement in the history of post-war popular culture. For many (myselfincluded) punk not only changedtheway one listened to popular musicbut also provided the occasion for thinking about it in a different way.Indeed, more than a few rock critics and academics made their careersand reputations, Frith included, on the basis ofinterpreting the aural and

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visual disruption that punk represented in the popular culture throughan array ofMarxist and post-structuralist theories ofcultural practice thatemerged (at least in the English-speaking world) in the 1970s. Primeexamples include Dick Hebdige's early, work on punk as a subcultureengaged in cultural resistance through semiotic guerilla warfare; DaveLaing's analysis ofpunk as a contradictorymatrix ofeconomic, aesthetic,and ideological discourses drawnfrom mainstream rock, different youthsub-cultures, and the artistic avant-garde-, Larry Grossberg's dense theo-rization ofpunk as an implosive "rock and roll apparatus" that implicitlyundermined the conditions underwhichrock musicoperated as a site ofpleasure and empowerment through its explicit celebration of its ownartifice ; and, most recently, Simon Frith's andArthur Home's interpreta-tion of punk as the most compelling evidence to date of the collapse of"post-modern" popular culture wherethe commodification ofaestheticsand the aestheticization of commodities go hand in hand.'Although these and other analyses of punk in particular and rock mu-

sic in general have pushed forward the frontiers of cultural analysis, Ihave often felt that their authors are more compelled by the music totheorize about it than to theorize with it or through it . When confrontedwith the often inchoate pleasures (and terrors) of music and noise, the.newwave" ofpopmusic analysts tend to flee into a realm of elegant cul-tural theorywhose cool analytic language often obscures the fluidity andmulti-dimensionality of music as a distinctive medium, experience, andcultural practice . Standing at a critical distance from their subject matterthey take careful aim with a sophisticated conceptual apparatus andfrequently miss the mark . This, I believe, is largely because they attemptto impose an alien language upon the music rather than try to develop alanguage that is homologous to the tonality of the music itself. Whitepunks on theory can surely philosophize, but rarely does their analysisvibrate and dance like the aspects of culture they endeavor to explain.

In this regard Lipstick Traces is a rare pleasure in that it is a book whoselanguage and mode of analysis resonate with the spirit of its subjectmatter . Perhaps this is because, as a rock critic for publications as diverseas Rolling Stone andArtForum rather than as an academic struggling forlegitimacy and tenure, Marcus has fewer theoretical crosses to bear.Nonetheless, he is no stranger to cultural theory and for the past decadeand a half he has been one of the more theoretically inclined andpolitically concerned rock critics in America. In fact, Lipstick Traces isanything but atheoretical, as Marcus brings to bear on his subject mattermany theoretical heavy hitters such as TheodorAdomo, Walter Benjamin,Roland Barthes, Henri Lefebvre, Georges Bataille, and, most centrally,GuyDebord andthe Situationists . But one ofthe keyvirtues of the bookis that Marcus deftly avoids the trap that so many of the aforementionedpeople fall into, which is letting the theory all but silence the sound theyare trying to understand . In the context of Marcus's impassioned lyricalprose, Lefebvre's theory of everyday life and Debord's theory of the

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spectacle focus and amplify the sounds and events that Marcus isconcerned with rather than crushing them underneath their density.(Marcus's impassioned prose, the truth be told, sometimes results inridiculous flights ofhyperbolic fancy: e.g ., the claim that events like Elvisbeing called a "nigger" by his guitarist after sensually crooning "BlueMoon in Kentucky" explain most of American Culture ."v) Culturalpractice andtheory are used to evoke andinvoke each other, and in theprocess our appreciation and understanding of both is enriched . Al-though there is nary a page in thebook where this does not happen, oneofthemost compelling andinteresting example of such momentscomeswhen Marcus argues thatAdorno, ofallpeople, canbe interpreted as thetheoretical godfather ofpunk . It is worthquoting at length as an exampleofMarcus's unique style and mode of analysis:

[I]n a way, punk wasmost easily recognizable as a newversionofthe old FrankfurtSchoolcritique ofmassculture. . . Butnowthepremises of the old critique were exploding out of a spot that[Adorno] had never recognized: mass culture's pop cultureheart. Stranger still : the old critique of mass culture paraded asmass culture, at least as protean would-be mass culture. . . .

Probably no definition of punk can be stretched far enough toenclose TheodorAdorno . As a music lover he hated jazz, likelyretchedwhen hefirst heard ofElvis Presley, andno doubtwouldhave understood the Sex Pistols as'a return to Kristallnacht ifhehadn't been lucky enough to die in 1969 . But youcan find punkbetween every other line of Minima Moralia: its miasmicloathing for what Western civilization had made of itself by theend ofthe Second WorldWar, was, by 1977 thestuffofa hundredsongs and slogans. . . . Minima Moralia was written as a seriesof epigraphs, of ephemeralities, each severed block of typemarching relentlessly toward the destruction of whatever inti-mations of hope might appear within its boundaries, eachparagraph headed by an impotent oath, aflat irony, each (chosenat random) a good title for a punk 45: "Unfair intimidation,""Blackmail," "Sacrificial Lamb," "They the People ." After 1977 aspoken rant LP could have been made into into an album calledBig Ted Says No and it wouldhave made perfect punk sense. . .

What Adorno's negation lacked was glee-a spirit the punkversion of his world never failed to deliver. Walking the streetsas pose and fashion, Adorno's prophecies were suffiised withhappiness, a thrill that made them simple and clear. More thantrashbags or torn clothes, punks wore Adorno's morbid rash ;they inked or stenciled it overthemselves in regular patterns . AsAdorno's prepared cor~3ses, more consciously prepared then hecould have imagined, tliey exploded with proofs ofvitality-thatis, they said what they meant.

In so doing theyturned Adorno'svisionofmodern life back uponitself. Adorno had not imagined thathis corpses knew what theymeant to say. Punks were those who now understood them-selves as people from whom the news oftheir not quite success-

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ful decease had been withheldforreasons ofpopulation policy-as punk defined the no-future, society wasgoing to need a lot ofzombie counterpersons, shoppers, bureaucrats, welfare peti-tioners, a lot ofpeople to stand in line and man them . The differ-ence was that these people had heard the news."

The question that obsessed Marcus in this book is how the Sex Pistols,whowere just as surely acommodityas anyotherpop culture product,somehow became part of a different structure ofopportunity within theland ofthe spectacle; a structure of opportunity that enabled people, al-beit temporarily, to choose to get off the spectacle's "Mobius strip ofpure capitalism" and to see that for all the time spent traveling itsrecursive serpentine architecture, one wasn't really going anywhere atall . The answer is relatively simple : ifmost ofmass culture emanated theharmonious sound of the engine of spectacular capitalism smoothlyclicking on all cylinders, the Sex Pistols were a source of culturaldissonance that interrupted what was, according to Debord, the spec-tacle's never-ending discourse about itself. Like all simple answersconcerning the complex and contradictory field ofcultural politics, thisanswer begs many questions, some of which, as we shall see, diminishthe power of Marcus's story. But the importance and the pleasure ofLipstick Traces reside in first, the process by which Marcus constructsthis simple answerand, second, howmuch itis, infact, able to illuminate .

Noises, Traces; Versions

Above all else, Lipstick Traces is a book about noise. Although Marcusdoes not explicitly refer to Jacques Attali's path-breaking work on thesubject, both writers share acommon ground with respect to thepoliticsof sound." Attali's project was to explore the intimate relation ofsoundto power, or aurality to the structuring of differences in society. ForAttali, "music" is tamed noise. It is a code that sonically defines thehegemonic ordering ofpositions of power and difference . Noise, soundthat falls outside ofthe musical code, also falls outside of that ordering ofdifference . If the sound of music is, broadly speaking, harmonious, thesound ofnoise is cacophonous as it throws into question differences thatare assumed to be natural. For this reason, if a dominant sonic framing ofpoweranddifference is threatened by noise, that noise must be silenced,marginalized or incorporated . For this reason also, Attali's work issuggestive of a radical cultural politics that locates a seam of disruptiveand fracturing possibilities within the spectacle sounded large at theinterstices ofmusicandnoise, language andbabble, coherence and utter-ance .Marcus has placed his ear at preciselythese interstices . Thesound that

he hears is the coalescing ofdifferentcurrents ofdisruptive cultural staticand interference into a shout ofrefusal andnegation, a shout that voices

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a "' no' so strong that it would create the will never to take it back . "' z Itwas "a voice ofteeth ground downinto points . . . a near absolute loathingofone's time andplace, the note held into disgust turns into glee . "' 3 Andwhat was being refused and negated? Basically everything that made aprison out of everyday life : alienating work, colonized leisure, thehierarchically organized dispensation of a God that denied sanctity tofree individuals whosought their own deification in pursuit of the plea-sures ofthe material world, the regimented architectronics of space andtime that divided lived experience into fragments that hadno relation toone another, andso on. As Marcus is fond of reiterating time and again,this noisy shout of "no" implied an even noisier "yes", a yes that was "ademand to live not at as an object but as a subject of history-to live as ifsomething actually depended upon one's actions-and that demandopensup unto a free street .,, 14 It is this dialectic of no and yes, accordingto Marcus, that distinguishes the noise of nihilism from the noise of thenegation . Theformer is solipsistic, seeking only to endthe worldfor theone who screams in rage and refusal . What happens to others is incon-sequential . The latter is political, seeking to end the world as it is so thatit can be re-created as it is desired to be in conversation with others . Whathappens to others is a question that cannot be avoided without peril toone's own freedom.This noise is the anarchist grail that Marcus pursues throughout all 450

pages of his book. Although he first heard it in punk, with his ear to theground, he can hear distant echoes of it in the Dada of Zurich and Berlin,in medieval Gnostic heretics, such as the Cathars of Montaillou and theGerman Brethren of the Free Spirit, in the modern Gnostic hereticMichael Mourre who commandeered the altar at the N6tre Dame Cathe-dral during an Easter High Mass to proclaim that God is dead, in Saint-just,the Paris Commune, May 1968, in the Situationists and their precursorsin the obscure group of Left-Bank Parisian avant-grade intellectuals, theLettrists . For Marcus, each of these events, groups, or individuals signi-fied a revolutionary desire to turn everyday life into a Festival, a dance ofecstatic liberation . But what attracts Marcus to these moments orpeopleis essentially theirfailure, theirephemerality asrevolutionary impulses (apoint that we will return to shortly) . They were movements that "led tono official revolutions" and "raised no monuments. 1115 All they left weretraces with no hint oftheir origins, like lipstick traces on a cigarette (andhence the title, taken from a song by Benny Spellman), nor of theirimpossible demands that the world be changed by the sound of theirrebellion . Yet time and again, these demands resurface to be articulatedin a new way by people who are motivated by the same rage and will tofreedom, but who have no idea of either their ancestry or progeny. AsMarcus reasons (probably correctly), "Johnny Rotten hadn't said theword `dada' since he was two."" Nonetheless, there he was in theWonderland Ballroom, recalling nothing so much to Marcus as the dadasorcery of Hugo Ball or Richard Hulsenbeck, attempting to destroy first

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art (or rock) and then the world of seemingly obdurate social factsthrough the language of noise .This then is Marcus's grand project, to tell the story of the secret his-

tory ofanarchist noise; secret because it is history adrift, a history with-out consciousness oflineage orprecedent, particularly when it comes tothe chapter contributedbypunk. It is a history "secret to thosewhomakeit, especially those who make it . In the Sex Pistol's hands, and in thehands of those who turn up in their wake . . . . [there is ] a blind gropingtowards a new story" as if it is being told for the very first time." ButMarcus is not at all interested in simply diachronically mapping all theconnections and linkages between punk, situationism, dada and all therest, which to Marcus is simply adding up the "arithmetic" of history.Rather, he has something more provocative in mind, which is to illumi-nate how the desire for freedom encoded in the noise of negationresurfaces at differentmomentsin time by allowing the participants in itshistoryto have asynchronous conversation with one another. As Marcuseloquently argues his prologue :

If one can stop looking at the past and start listening to it, onemight hear echoes of a new conversation ; then the task of thecritic would be to lead speakers and listeners unaware of eachother's existence to talk to one another. The job of the criticwould be to maintain the ability to be surprised at how theconversation goes, and to communicate that sense ofsurprise toother people, because a life suffused with surprise is better thana life that is not."

Although the declension to this statement is indicative of Marcus's of-ten overblownrhetoric (surprises are nice, but only iftheydo not includeaknock on the door at 4A.M., and for a Berkeley intellectual like Marcus,such surprises are not within the realm of probability, at least not yet),as a whole, it is suggestive of a methodology of cultural analysis andwriting style that is far more suited to evoking the sensibility ofanarchistnoise than the linear narrative of traditional historical discourse . In amanner and tonality that is similar to, though not nearly as erudite orpolitically astute as, the recent writing of Dick Hebdige, Marcus employswhat may be called the methodology of the `version' . '9 Versioning haslong been one of the key characteristics of reggae and other Afro-American and Caribbean musics and occurs when a particular piece ofmusic is re-mixed and modified by different musicians or producers whogive the original soundscape a slightly different architecture . Versioningis not so much an act of musical plagiarism as a gesture of respect and,inspiration, where one uses the original source as a springboard fortelling one's own story. The basic principle of this methodology is, asMarcus himself states, "that there are no truths only versions . "z° (205) .Thus, in bringing his particular secret history to light, Marcus operatesmore as a record producer who delights in conjuring and mixingdifferent versions of the same basic story than a writer who carefully

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builds anargument point bypoint. Infact, I do not thinkthat it is a misrep-resentation to say that Marcus really does think of the main elements ofhis story less as persons, ideas, and events and more as different instru-ments andsounds that make up the history ofanarchist noise: there is theDada of Zurich and Berlin, led by the self-proclaimed "Dada Drummer"Richard Hulsenbeck, pounding out a rhythm that would crush art andlanguage ; there are the Lettrists on synthesizers, armed with IsidoreIsou's particle physics of poetry, twisting and torturing electronic waveforms on a hell-bent mission to smash the wall of linguistic sound; thereis the Situationist's anarcho-Marxist critique of spectacular capitalismand theirwill to radical subjectivity through whicheveryday life is turnedinto art, providing a searing lead on guitar ; there is punk snarling awayon lead vocals, declaring that it was consumer society's own worstnightmare come to life ; and there are a host of ghostly samples throwninto the mix ranging from obscure early doowop singles (The Oriole's"Too Soon to Know") to even more obscure science fiction movies(Quartermass and the Pit) to murderer/folk heroes (Charley Stark-weather) to a garden's variety of religious heretics (the Ranters, theLollards, John of Leyden andthe Brethren ofthe Free Spirit), all ofwhichevoke the delirium ofsliding down the razor's edge between nihilism andnegation . In each chapter (or version), Marcus fashions a differentsounding mix out of the confluence of all these elements, according toone ofthem a dominant place in themixso as turn the story in a slightlydifferent direction .Much of the value and originality of Lipstick Traces lies in this appli-

cation of the principles of versioning to cultural analysis . Many of theconnections that Marcus makes, as he himself acknowledges, had beenmade before . It is a widely knownpart of punk lore that the Sex Pistols'smanager, Malcolm McClaren, and his partner Jamie Reid, had been in-volved in the British branch ofthe Situationist International and, largelythrough them,many sitiuationist slogans from May 1968found their wayinto punk discourse .21 Moreover, most ofthe trails that Marcusfollows onthe road ofhis secret history, such as those to Dada, the Cathars, or to theParis Commune, were already clearly marked out in the writings of theSituationists . But in the true spirit of versioning Marcus is not reallyplagiarising his sources. Rather, both respectful ofandinspired by theseready-made connections, he tries to make events, ideas, andsounds talkto one another across great gaps oftime . What makes his analysis all themore interesting is that the desire for such aconversation was not reallya central part of the tradition by which he is fascinated . Tristan Tzaradeclared that he wasnot at all interested in whether or not anyone camebefore him. The Situationists, although more mindful of their lineage,took great pains to articulate just how avant-garde they were, ruthlesslycriticizing both their predecessors (dada, surrealism, the non-Commu-nist marxism ofLefebvre and Castoriadis) andthose who wouldemulatethem (whom they denigrated as infantile "pro-situs") . And punk, insist-

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ing that is was the embodiment of "no future," denied that it had a pastas well . In this subterranean tradition of negation sui generis, it seemsthat no one was interested in talking to anyone else . This, I suppose, isyet another sad manifestation of the hubris of white western culture,both center and margins, where the author's voice is the only one thatever really matters . It is thus ironic that Marcus must appropriate from adifferent "marginal" culturewhose historyhasbeen denied and erased bywhite "civilization," the methodology to make the conversation happen .What is good about Lipstick Traces is that Marcus does indeed create aconversation where before there was none . What is sad about the bookis that it revels inthe spirit that prevented one from happening in the firstplace .

Dancing on the Offbeat ofthe Worldor the Problematic Politics ofWhite Noise

There is an image in Lipstick Traces that opens and closes the book. Itis a cartoon oftwo women regarding a vagrant stumbling down the streetoutside a soda fountain shop window . The vagrant is mumbling "I yaman anti-Christ!" whilst the woman says with opprobrium and disgust "It'sthat shabby old man with the tin whistle!" The caption to the cartoonreads "It is seventeen long years since Monty was spotted outsideMalcolm MacGregor's Sex `N' Drugs shop . . . . 1122 The denotation of theimage is obvious : the shabby old man is Johnny Rotten, who was indeedmarked as the perfect medium for a frontal assault by Malcolm McLarenon the rock and roll apparatus as Rotten prowled King's Road in Londonin front ofMcLaren's underground clothing and accessories shop named"Sex" in 1975 . For Marcus, the connotation ofimage encompasses a num-ber of different figures who appear in his story : Johnny Rotten, RichardHulsenbeck, Guy Debord; all ofwhom, for a brief, shining moment, ren-dered transparent all of the nefarious constructions ofpower and who,because of their glimpse of this anarchistic void, were sentenced tospend the rest of their lives in futility trying to recapture the halcyonmoment where everything seemed possible . According to Marcus theywere "condemned to roll their greatest hit up the hill ofthe crowd for alleternity, carrying the curse of having been in the right place at the righttime, a blessing that comes to no one more than once . 1123 In the penulti-mate paragraph of the book he suggests that because of the absolute de-mands of their desires "there is a certainty of failure : all those whoglimpse possibility in a spectral moment become rich, and though theyremain so , they are ever after more impoverished ."24 They becomeshabby old men of Sisyphusian proportions, bleating out tunes of nega-tion on tin whistles for an audience that no longer cares to listen .These bookends of imagery are indicative of the problematic cultural

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politics of Lipstick Traces and thewhite noise with which it is so fasci-nated. In essence, Marcus is seduced by the `tragic' stories ofwhite menwho attempt to transcend the oppressive structures and relations ofpower in the 20th century simply on the strength ofan aesthetic screamof refusal. In describing these shabby old men, Marcus waxes wistfullyabout their damaged character and doomed cultural insurgency . Hewrites :

There is a figure who appears in this book again and again. Hisinstincts are basicallycruel: his manner isintransigent . He tradesin hysteria but is immune to it. He is beyond temptation, becausedespite his utopian rhetoric satisfaction is the last thing on hismind . He is unutterably seductive, yet he trails bitter comradesbehind him like Hansel his bread crumbs, his only way homethrough a thicket of apologies he will never make . He is amoralist and a rationalist, but hepresents himselfas a sociopath;he leaves behind not documents ofedification but of paradox.No matter how violent his mark on history, he is doomed toobscurity, which he cultivates as a sign of profundity (218).z5

Despite the power of Marcus' prose, there are several things that areextremely disturbing about this kind of romantic sentimentality, a sen-timentality that pervades Marcus' assessment of his anti-heroes. Themost immediate and infuriating is the telling fact that the passage hasmore male-gendered pronouns than apassage from the OldTestament.Whileperhapsnot intentional, it is all themore insidious for being so un-acknowledged in atext concernedwith tracing a history of cultural sub-version. Asidefrom providingtheseductive nostalgic markings to whichthe title of the book refers, womenlargely remain a secret in Marcus' se-cret history. Marcus wouldno doubtprotest at such a characterization aswomen such as the Dadaist Emmy Hennings, Situationist MichelleBernstein, and punk musicians Poly Styrene and Lora Logic do indeedmake appearances in the story. But that is all they do,make appearances,while Rotten, Hulsenbeck, and Debord are placed at the center ofMarcus' narrative. Theproblem here is notsimply one ofequal opportu-nity history but of the politics of noise as it is sounded out by Marcus . Itis rather inexplicable that womenare so marginal to Marcus's story sinceit is precisely the women who are in the story who, quite literally, pro-duce the most radical noise. It was the Second Empire cabaret singerTheresawho, by subverting the formal conventions of concert singing,provided asoundscape of aural resistance that helped fuel the explosionof the Paris Commune. It was Emmy Hemmings whose shrieking voicewasso disturbing andpowerful that frightened reviewerslikened it to anavalanche loud enough to wake thedead . Itwasanoise thatwasfar moretransgressive than the implosive sound poetry of Ball, Hulsenbeck, orTzara. It was the Slits who took the punk ethos to the limit, not onlymockingprevailing expectations ofwhat women in rock soundlike, butalso breaking every rule concerning what rock itself should sound like .

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Compared to the sonic anarchy produced whenever the Slits picked uptheir instruments, the Sex Pistols were just another rock and roll band .I am not really saying anything that Marcus doesn't know; all ofthese ex-amples can be found in his book. But Marcus is not motivated to askwhere thepowerof these female voices comesfrom, how and why it isdifferent from the voices oftheir male compatriots, andmost importantlyhowwouldthe history look different from their stories . Theirs is a noisethat is absent from Marcus's versioning, and it is an absence that makesthe conversation that takes place somewhat suspect.But questionable gender politics is not the only flaw in Marcus' analy-

sis . As I mentioned before, his romantic sentimentality valorizes the fail-ure of these moments of anarchist irruption to affect social change . ForMarcus, this failure is endemic to projects oftranscendence themselves :those whoseek to turn everyday life into a festival of revolutionary poe-sis are making impossible demands upon the worldandthey know it . Inorder to support this hypothesis Marcus often invokes Debord's state-ment in the founding document of the Situationist International that,"This is our entire program, which is essentially transitory . Oursituationswill be emphemeral, without a future ; passageways."" ForMarcus thisstatement is powerful because it represents a tragic will to freedom thatcould begat nothing but failure. As Marcus says nearthe end ofthe book,"I was drawn to . . . [Debord's] frank and determined embrace ofmomentsin whichthe worldseems to change, momentsthat leave noth-ing behind but dissatisfaction, disappointment, rage, sorrow, isolationand vanity".17

This romanticization offailure is the onlyposition that Marcus cantakewith respect to his subject because he fails to understand the differencebetween transcendence and transformation, andbetweenthe politics ofperformance and the politics of social change . I wonder if Marcus readandunderstoodDebord's conclusion to the abovestatement in whichhesays "Eternity is the grossest idea a person canconceive of in connectionwith his acts . "'I The desire for eternity, the desire to escape from theconcrete materiality ofspaceandtime in a social formation in a search ofself-realization, is a desire for transcendence andnot a desire for transfor-mation . The Situationists, whoprovide the theoretical basis for Marcus'interpretation of the cultural politics of anarchist noise, were mostdecidedly not interested in transcendence. Cognizant ofthe changes inthe materiality of advanced capitalism that consumerism and the mass-mediated representation of "reality" hadwrought, they sought a politicsof transformation that wasappropriate to this newspatial andtemporalorganization of everyday life . They were Marxists, not Romantics ; andbetween the two is a yawning gap of difference .This failure to understand the difference between transcendence and

transformation is all the more perplexing as Marcus draws heavily uponthe Situationist text where that difference is most explicitly drawn out:Raoul Vaneigem's TheRevolution in Everyday Life . One starts down the

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path to radicalsocial transformationby learning to "dance on the off-beatofthe officialworld" arguedVaneigem, and this meantsabotaging powerby turning upside down the language and images by which it circulates .Such a dancewasthe hallmark of "active nihilists," ofwhichDada wasthearchetype .29 But as Vaneigem clearly points out, in their nihilism theDadaists soughttranscendence by diving into the chaotic decay they sawall around them and, as such, their assault on art was only pre-revo-lutionary . Unless onemovesfromtranscendence to transformation, fromart to everyday life, from the performance space to the streets, all activenihilism can produce, as Vaneigem says, is "spurious opposition" .But the question of howone moves from spurious opposition to revo-

lutionary transformation is one that escapes Marcus because he fre-quently elides the difference between the politics of performance andthe politics of social change . For Marcus, the politics ofanarchist perfor-mance revolves around the idea that "in the constructed setting of atemporally enclosed space-in this case a nightclub-anything could benegated . It was the notion that, there, anything might happen, whichmeant finally in the world at large, transposed artistically, anything mighthappen there, too"3°. This, I think, is a profound and insightful statement,equally applicable to both Dada and punk. The problem is that Marcusnever really considers how and under what conditions such transposi-tion can or cannot occur. His thinking about this key issue is ratherschizophrenic . At one moment he inexcusably equates the symbolicviolence of performance with physical violence of social revolution(comparing the last Sex Pistols concert with the Sparticist Uprising inBerlin, 1919) and at another he implies the gap between the two is un-bridgeable (e.g . punk was "a nightclub act that asked for the world, fora moment got it, and then got another nightclub 1131) . In the end, Marcuscan't decide whether the performance space is the "place where thespirit of negation is born or where it goes to die" 3z.And thus we return to the 100 Club, where in one evening I saw and

participated in amore dislocating and dramatic enactment of transgres-sive poesis than I have in a decade of countless rock shows and perfor-mance art events . Like Marcus and the last Sex Pistols concert, I wasprofoundly affected by the experience : the world never looked orsounded the same again. It wasan exquisitely precious moment. But un-like Marcus, I think it is a political error to romanticize it and not to askquestions of its limitations as a site of subversion . Although I have con-tinually returned to similar performance sites, similar sounds, hungry forthe noise that wouldmake a difference, I have realized that noise by itselfcannot make the difference necessary for social transformation . In orderto move beyond spurious opposition, beyond the boundaries of theperformance space, there must be affective alliances between the noiseof subversion and other sites and practices of resistance in work, familylife, sexual relations, the community, in short, in everyday life . Punk, asMarcus quite correctly points out, opened up abreach in the discursive

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economy of rock music so that the politics of everyday life became anexplicit concern . But making or listening to a sonic discourse of subver-sion can only be a beginning .Unfortunately, this beginning point of when and where noise is pro-

duced and circulated is also the end for Marcus . His ultimate stance inregards to the cultural politics of negation is basically that of a passiveconsumer rather than as engaged social critic or organic intellectual . Heregards the events and personages of his secret history like he does thehundreds of recordings he probably receives each week for review : ob-jects to be consumed, listened to, written about, and then filed away.How else can one make sense ofthe closing statement ofthe book as helooks back upon the tragic failures he has chronicled and says, "If all thisseems like a lot for a pop song to contain, that is why this story is a story,ifit is. And it is why any good punk song cansound like the greatest thingyou ever heard, which it does . When it doesn't, that will mean the storyhas taken its next turn" . 33 In the end, the same judgement may be appliedto Lipstick Traces that Vaneigem applied to Dada and juvenile delin-quency : "The same contempt for art and bourgeois values . The samerefusal ofideology. The same will to live . The same ignorance ofhistory .The same barbaric revolt . The same lack of tactics . "311 don't know aboutMarcus, but I would rather notwait for the story to turn . I'd ratherwork,in and through noise, to help shape the turns the story will take . Thepastmay indeed be tragic, but the future can be very bright, but only if weactively make it so .

1.

Allsong lyrics in this section are fromAlternative TV, TheImageHas Cracked: TheFirstAlternative TVAlbum. Deptford Fun City Records (UK), 1978 .

2.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" in David Fernbach, ed. KarlMarx. SurveysFrom Exile, Political Writings Vol. 2. NewYork : Vintage, 1973, p. 146.

3.

Ibid ., p. 149.

4.

Ibid ., p. 150.

5.

Theprime example here is the scathing and scabrous indictment of punk's inevitablecooptation by the music industry by Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, two musicjournalistswholoudlytrumpeted the cause ofpunk as an assault onthe conventions andcomplacency of rock music in the pages ofNewMusicalExpress in the late 1970's, inTheBoy LookedatJohnny: The Obituary ofRock andRoll. London : Pluto Press, 1978 .

6.

Griel Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A SecretHistory ofthe Twentieth Century (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press), 38, 2.

7.

Ibid., 17 .

ANDREWHERMAN

Notes

Department of SociologyBoston College

8.

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning ofStyle . NewYork: Methuen, 1979; DaveLaing, One Chord Wonders :Power and Meaning in Punk Rock . Philadelphia ; OpenUniversity Press, 1985 ; LarryGrossberg, "IsThere RockAfter Punk?" Critical Studies inMass Communication . Vol . 3No . 1: 50-74; Simon Frith andArthurHome, ArtintoPop.London : Methuen, 1988 .

9.

Ibid., 58 .

10.

Ibid ., 70,72-74 .

11 . Jacques Attali, Noise. The PoliticalEconomy ofMusic. Minneapolis, MN : University ofMinnesota Press, 1985 .

12 .

Ibid ., 306-7.

13 . Ibid ., 195.

14 .

Ibid ., 6.

15 . Ibid ., 148.

16 . Ibid ., 200.

17 . Ibid ., 181.

18 .

Ibid ., 23 .

LIPSTICK TRACES

19 .

See. in particular, Dick Hebdige, "Digging for Britain: An Excavation in Seven Parts" inDavid Joselit and Elizabeth Sussman, Eds. The British Edge. Boston, MA: Institute forContemporaryArt, 1987 ; Hiding in the Light, NewYork : Routledge, 1988 ; and Cut N'Mix: Culture, Identityand Caribbean Music. London : Comedia, 1987 . Thefirst chapterofthe last book is devoted toan intriguingdiscussion of Hebdige's appropriation ofthespirit ofversioning for writing.

20 .

Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 205.

21 . One band, Royal Family and the Poor, who recorded for the explicitly situationistinspired Factory Records, took to reading excerpts from key sitiuationist texts againstawall ofnoise. See (or, rather, listen to)Royal Family and the Poor, "The VaneigemMix"on A Factory Quartet , Factory Records, U.K ., 1981 . For an analysis of the directinfluence of situationism upon punkand post-punk see Simon Frith and Arthur Home,op.cit .

22 .

Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 1,447.

23 .

Ibid., 202. .

24 .

Ibid., 447.

25 . Ibid ., 218.

26 . Guy Debord, "Report on the Construction of Situations and on the InternationalSituationist Tendency's Conditions and Organization of Action" in Ken Knabb, ed .,Situationist InternationalAnthology . Berkeley, CA : Bureau ofPublic Secrets, 1981, p.25 .

27 .

Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 446.

28 . Debord, "Report. . . ." 25 .

ANDREWHERMAN

29 . Raoul Vaneigem, TheRevolution inEveryday Life . London: Left BankBooks and RebelPress, (1967) 1983 . p. 136.

30.

Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 241 .

31 . Ibid . p. 442

32 . Ibid., 125.

33 .

Ibid., 447.

34 . Vaneigem, Revolution in Everyday Life, 138.