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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] and that desire for authenticity transcended considerations of popularity or major-label success. One of the dominant themes that runs through Ramones interviews from this era is the belief that the band plays the way it plays, with a purity of sound and expression that has nothing to do with success. The myth that early punk was somehow opposed to success is dispelled in page after page of the underground music press. In the second issue of New York Rocker from 1976, Fredda Lynn posed the question Excuse Me, Are You in it for the $$$? to a host of musicians. A few, like Richard Lloyd, flat-out answered no, but most gave a more complicated answer: Joey Ramone: Not completely. I guess I m in it for a little of everything glamour, glory, and money. Chris Frantz (Talking Heads): I ve always wanted to accumulate some money. It s not all I think about but it would be nice to have a big bundle. 99 Clem Burke (Blondie): My ego says I m in it more for the fame than the money. It s a fine line between the two. Dee Dee Ramone: YEAH! I want a lot of money. I need it. You know I need it. There s nothing I want but the money. Give me the money anytime. 126 It s interesting that we hold musicians to a different standard of authenticity than, say, writers, even writers of literary fiction and poetry, for whom signing a contract with a known publisher is something to be celebrated. Perhaps it s the nature of fan culture, or perhaps, as suggested in Nick Hornby s excellent novel High Fidelity, we view music as a more personal, intimate archive of who we are. In any case, an underground or alternative band gets a lot more heat for trading up to a major label than an author does for trading up to a bigger publisher. Would we consider the work of experimental writer Ben Marcus any less experimental because his books have been published by Random House? The other mythologizing force at play here and I hesitate to mention this because it implicates me, as well is what happens to something like punk when it becomes the object of academic study. Now this isn t to say that there are not some terrific academic studies of punk, especially, as I ve mentioned earlier, those by Dick Hebdige and Greil Marcus. This is not the place to trace the rise of the field broadly called cultural studies in academia, but I think it s important to at least acknowledge the impact of this on the shaping of punk in the public imagination. Cultural studies, which emerged as a force in the 1960s and 1970s, although we could trace its threads back decades 100 earlier, takes from Marx the notion that all cultural productions art, literature, music, painting, architecture, fashion are political insomuch as they emerge out of specific historical conditions and are thus imbued with historically specific political and social values. Here is Marx: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. 127 This notion that culture is basically ideology the expression of the groups producing and controlling the dissemination of culture was a powerful framework for cultural studies theorists, especially in the 1970s, as they began addressing the forces of popular culture. If Marx suggested that literature and art were political, insomuch as they were produced by folks from the middle to upper classes (or at least by those who had the material luxury to create them), then cultural studies theorists suggested that pop music, including punk, could also rightly be explored through these lenses. The result has been some seriously exciting writing about popular culture over the years by people like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Roland Barthes, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, and others. But the result has also been some pretty depressing and unimaginative studies that, one suspects, allow their 101 authors to find what they knew they would find over and over again. What does this have to do with punk? A lot, I think, because it provides one of the main sources for the authentic versus not authentic division that still characterizes much of the current discussion about punk. This division was largely something that emerged after the initial mid-1970s punk explosion. It emerged both from fans and bands who, in light of punk s acceptance into the mainstream attempted to reposition punk as radically alternative, and it emerged from academic and historical treatments of the rise of punk, which were written by scholars who came of age within the cultural studies model. In fact, punk transformed the rejection of politics into a gesture of defiance. When asked by Mary Harron in 1977 if the anarchy thing has been misrepresented, Johnny Rotten responded that people are trying to make it out as a bit of a joke, but it s not a joke. It s not political anarchy either. It s musical anarchy, which is a different thing. 128 Now, this gesture has not been adequately captured in writing (with the possible exceptions of Bangs and Meltzer), but how could it be? The other problem with trying to make claims about authentic punk is that punk, much like Warhol, selfconsciously cultivated celebrity not simply as a by-product, but an art form in itself. Richard Hell has noted that you realize that as a commodity, who has all the same intentions and attributes [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |