Hard News: The best kind of villain there is
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3410,
Hey, I never said the Beatles were Punk. :)
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At about the same time The Saints were inventing Punk Rock in Brisbane, they certainly weren't part of any movement.
But I'm Stranded was produced by an expat New Zealander.
I think Malc's overwhelming achievement was to encourage a whole generation out there to raise a single middle digit to a lot of things, but most especially the recording industry.
It doesn't matter if the Ramones or Televison or The Rolling Stones were the first punks (I'd argue for Robert Johnson or some of the Harlem jazz-punks from the 1920s myself), what McLaren did was allow us all to re-examine the way we made music and to attack the powers that controlled how it was presented and released.
The independent recording industry we know today, and the way artists deal with majors was a direct result of the punk revolution in the UK and McLaren's machinations. I could go into dreary detail but bands / artists / producers across genres have an artistic currency, or at least an option to exercise that currency, that they never had in the days before UK punk. The credit for running with this goes elsewhere but he forcefully opened the door in a way that it could never be closed again.
He did an awful lot more more besides of course, but it's pretty hard to overstate how revolutionary this wee change was.
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Watch out -- you'll upset Karl du Fresne:
Karl could profitably spend time with Don Lett's brilliant Punk: Attitude and do well to veer away from some of the half baked stereotypes in that post.
Punk legitimised the mad flailings of the talentless.
is just plain vacuous
as is
But in essence punk was political
FFS
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3410,
It doesn't matter if the Ramones or Televison or The Rolling Stones were the first punks (I'd argue for Robert Johnson or some of the Harlem jazz-punks from the 1920s myself)
You're right, of course. Never intended to claimed that the Stones were "the first"; just an example.
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Punk for me, cos i couldn't stand the music, was more an attitude in much the same way hiphop will always be. Very much a DIY and fuck you very much sort of thing.
Few people exist in the music world will ever have the same respect i have for Malcolm Mclaren. If only for bringing the world famous supreme team show to light.
and as for the music industry ?.. she's still lookin like a ho
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Punk for me, cos i couldn't stand the music, was more an attitude in much the same way hiphop will always be
Don'tcha think that McLaren recognised this when he (opportunisticly) pushed his own hip hop band wagon
For me the, it's a shitty phrase but I'll use it anyway, spirit of punk, passed from the indie scene in the UK to hip hop and the experimental post punk scene, to the Chicago / Detroit electronic scenes to the the vast raft of interesting acts and labels making music from the left and right of field, to the crazy haphazard flood of ideas that the net lets us express, find, and mutate.
That's the point that Karl misses when he tries to put punk in a box.
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Greil Marcus on McLaren, from a 1997 interview:
I don't know if punk started out as a rejection of pop music or life in the UK at that time. Certainly, as soon as it started, as soon as the Sex Pistols began to perform as a public outrage and even before they released their first record, a whole conflict of symbolism immediately gathered and was drawn to what they were doing. None of this was accidental because Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid, who were the real college-educated Col. Parkers of this movement, had a Situationist background and were schooled in a haphazard way in nihilist European art politics going all the way back to the 19th century. They knew that architecture could be as repressive as a law (that would) put people in jail for criticizing the government. They believed that the music that people heard every day had as much of an effect on how people thought of themselves as anything people learned in school. They saw records as a way to disrupt the assumptions that people didn't question, that people used to hold themselves together. This is to say that these were the assumptions that held society together. I don't think they saw records, performances and songs as a way to change the world as such. It was more of a theft- 'let's set off a bomb and see what happens.'
Within that perspective, everything was a target. Pink Floyd are no more or no less the enemy than the government.
And on New York punk:
I don't think there's any question that for over twenty years the Ramones have inspired countless people to do all kinds of things. They inspired the Sex Pistols and the Clash. I didn't like them. I always thought they were a bunch of twits. As one of the guys in Gang of Four put it 'these guys must be really thick.' Gang of Four LOVED the Ramones. They just actually believed that you get past the parody/stupidity and find the real stupidity. Television was an arty version of the Grateful Dead. To me, it was just a new form of rock and roll. It was all just a downtown New York bohemian scene. It was a local story. I still believe that. This was local music as far as I was concerned. I don't believe that the reason that punk came to life again and again all over the world is due to anything that happened in New York. It was because of the glimpse of possibility that people got out of the Sex Pistols or the Adverts or X-Ray Spex. These were bands where the most unlikely people suddenly appeared in public and said 'I can say anything I want,' which is the most liberating thing in the world to do. I don't think you ever saw that in New York. What New York said was 'you can become a heroin addict and become cooler than anybody else and you can play guitar and be a real poet, and we obviously know that being a poet is the best thing in the world to be.'
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McLaren's claim that he "invented punk" was spurious, self-serving crap, however. The CBGBs scene in NYC was fermenting nicely without him and the Ramones' debut was out well before any of the British punk albums.
I always get a bit niggly when this issue crops up. The Ramones are great and deeply woven into music and its law. But the punk I knew grew up in London with Vivienne Westwood and the Kings Road. I read somewhere the argument that in America punk was still really a figure of speech -in London it became a proper movement.
I was talking about invention, you're talking about popularisation, which is something else.
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I was talking about invention, you're talking about popularisation, which is something else.
I think it's a non argument both ways. Nobody invented anything. They all grabbed, assaulted and adopted.
If you look at the early (1974) Ramones vids they were nicking Beatles & Beach Boys riffs and aping the NY Dolls, who were aping the Rolling Stones & The Small Faces who were aping James Brown and so on.
The British punk scene threw a whole lot into the mix, not least the Jamaican influences that mutated it a little further, the Americans grabbed it back for No Wave and on we go...
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Don'tcha think that McLaren recognised this when he (opportunisticly) pushed his own hip hop band wagon
No doubt. But hiphop as 'punk for the black kids' would have exploded into what it is today even if it weren't validated by some ingenious white guy near the outset.
The changing attitude wasn't so much linear, as contemporaneous with the times. He more than anyone just captured the zeitgeist permeating that era.
I'm more of a lattice framework guy than a linear trajectorialist :)
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I was talking about invention, you're talking about popularisation, which is something else.
I think it's a non argument both ways. Nobody invented anything. They all grabbed, assaulted and adopted.
When I stoppped and thought about this I realised how awkward the semantics argument would become.
The thought that remains, is that saying somone invented punk is much the same as saying Alexander Fleming invented Penicillin. I suspect nature and the petri dish had a role to play in the latter case. Using words like discovery restarts the semantics argument over again.
Which in itself is a fitting tribute to McLaren, who I am sure would not have been unaware or dissatisfied with the debate generated by his claim that he invented punk.
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But hiphop as 'punk for the black kids' would have exploded into what it is today even if it weren't validated by some ingenious white guy near the outset.
No argument but I can't help feeling that the focus McLaren put on hip hop gave it a huge shove. And hip hop exploded out of the underground urban community outside the US far faster than it did in its homeland and Malcolm's releases were pretty crucial to that crossover.
Also, Buffalo Girls was a massive record in the US hip hop scene too, massively influential at the time.
Don Letts, again, was bang on when he complied this.
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With all due respect to Knox, this sort of revisionist bullshit can’t be allowed to go unchallenged. Attempts to confer musical legitimacy on punk by claiming that the greatest pop band in history were precursors of punk won’t wash.
Dear old Karl. Royally missing the point.
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Punk smunck. Well before my time.
What was in my time was Waltz Darling, and I'll forever remember the day my flatmate bought home this record and played it - it was great and thereafter was on the turntable often.
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Dear old Karl. Royally missing the point.
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No argument but I can't help feeling that the focus McLaren put on hip hop gave it a huge shove. And hip hop exploded out of the underground urban community outside the US far faster than it did in its homeland and Malcolm's releases were pretty crucial to that crossover.
Yeah it's usually how it goes with black music whitened up for airplay. From jazz and American swing bands to UK blues copying bands of the 60's to Kode9 and dubstep recently. Hell, even our own barbecue reggae.
The thing is, it's not enough to philosophise, intellectualise and whitewash shit. In order to connect with the critical masses beyond, the tunes have to be bangin and Buffalo gals is all that and a bag of crisps !
But i reckon that's more 'the world famous supreme team show' than it was Malcolm or the 'art of noise' guy. Still, whatever it was it worked a treat.
Sure nuff tho', Malcolm was definitely a first generation digital pimp so massive kudos for that. And as for the video, i lost count of the times we re wound the 'moonwalk' bit.
On another tangent, it's a shame that hiphop killed the big funk band star. I guess thats why it took a little longer to get traction in the states, cos black america was still in the thralls of their r'n'b funk bands.
Where as disempowered blacks elsewhere, inclusive of pasifikans here, didnt have that tradition, so embraced hiphop for what it was. Ghetto street music.
About time we had a resurgence out of the states for the big black funk band dont you think ? I'm over the one man supa producer. To think all them kids who would have been learning the intricacies of cranking up a stoking horn section are prolly slinging crack instead and dreaming of being the next Pharell, Dream or Ryan Leslie.
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I'd also see him as one of a series of brilliant, devious and opportunistic British managers and pop star manufacturers that goes from Brian Epstein to McLaren to Tony Wilson to Simon Cowell
I've always felt Mclaren to be Pop Music as Warhol was to art, I'd definitely equated him with Epstein but never with Cowell (who I've never really liked). Nice connection philipmatthews, you've put Simon Cowell in a context I can appreciate.
is it a direct line from Sid Vicious to Susan Boyle?
I've been wondering lately if there's a direct line from Danny Boyle to Susan Boyle. Something in those eyebrows.
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Yeah it's usually how it goes with black music whitened up for airplay. From jazz and American swing bands to UK blues copying bands of the 60's to Kode9 and dubstep recently. Hell, even our own barbecue reggae.
The Brits are special, though. They just keep doing it -- Jim Hendrix, remember, was just a jobbing sideman until Chas Chandler got him to London. I love the vitality of British popular culture.
The thing is, it's not enough to philosophise, intellectualise and whitewash shit. In order to connect with the critical masses beyond, the tunes have to be bangin and Buffalo gals is all that and a bag of crisps !
Yeah. I'd forgotten how good that album actually is, but Troy dropped some on bFM's Totally Wired show today, and it was great. Especially in the car.
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I've always felt Mclaren to be Pop Music as Warhol was to art, I'd definitely equated him with Epstein but never with Cowell (who I've never really liked). Nice connection philipmatthews, you've put Simon Cowell in a context I can appreciate.
Not Epstein. Effective as he was, he worked in a department store, and I'm not sure he had more creative input than putting the band in suits. More Andrew Loog Oldham, Tony Wilson and Alan McGee.
Of those, Oldham freaked out and sold his share of the Stones management to that bastard Alan Klein, and Wilson spent his star act's money on influential follies. So, yeah, quite like McLaren.
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Yeah. I'd forgotten how good that album actually is
This is the version you need to find though. Side one is a hip-hop suite which sounds monumental loud and just when you've had enough of the scratch, it segues into a very electro-fied live re-edit of Buffalo Gals.
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This is the version you need to find though.
Didn't take long. Ta.
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Not Epstein. Effective as he was, he worked in a department store, and I'm not sure he had more creative input than putting the band in suits.
To be fair he was set up as boss of the music dept he ran which was so successful they opened a music shop and installed him as boss, he sacked Pete Best, he shopped their demo round for a record deal, he dressed them up, kept John's marriage secret.
But yes Russell, you are right, good promoter but... Not really in the same league in terms of cultural importance, except in terms of the product he was attached to. John Agrees.
http://www.instantkarma.com/johnbioepstein.html
But he certainly didn't package us the way they say he packaged us. He was good at his job, but to an extent he wasn't the greatest businessman. He was theatrical and he believed."
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it segues into a very electro-fied live re-edit of Buffalo Gals.
Aw, yeah. Like that.
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he dressed them up
In October 1961 Leggy Mountbatten, a retail chemist from Bolton, entered their lives... Leggy hated it. He hated their music, he hated their hair, he hated their noise: but he loved their trousers.
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is it a direct line from Sid Vicious to Susan Boyle?
Now that's an idea to conjure with. While I wouldn't wish it on her, being 'led astray' by some kind of Nancy Spungen figure would certainly make Susan Boyle rather more, um, interesting. The world seemed a better place when pop stars named themselves after albino hamsters.
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