PUNK AND SUBARU IMPREZA

The hegemony of the dominant class's elites can be perceived in their virtual monopoly of the means of communication, of the electronic cathedrals of the spectacle. The spectacle lets us glimpse heaven, but can never let us in. Nothing comes to mean everything, and everything comes to mean nothing. Eternal alienation is assured in the fiber-optic dystopia of the cult of appearances.

"THERE IS NO FUTURE IN ENGLAND'S DREAMING"

Response to the hegemony of the spectacle can take many forms. One of those forms is violent reaction, whether that is meant metaphorically or not. Like the Sex Pistols, one can smash the dreams of everyday life, exposing the falsehoods of ideology. Singing "No future, No future, No future for you, no future for me," (Sex Pistols, 1977) you can shock individuals into consciousness of the spectacle's creeping control of hegemonic ideology. Johnny Rotten wanted to change the way people saw the world, wanted to destroy people's perceptions (ideological) of reality. Maybe the other Pistols just wanted to get rich, but at least the singer "Johnny Rotten sang to change the world." (Marcus 1989:2) Singing songs about the decadence of the Queen, tourist trips to Nazi concentration camps and the Berlin wall, an aborted fetus, S&M, and the "pretty vacant" life in London's workingclass slums, the Sex Pistols forced their audience to acknowledge the dirt of reality that lay hidden beneath the gleaming surface of ideology. More than just nihilistic lyrics, Rotten's songs were aural assaults on all culture, breaking with all conventions of what music should be. The Sex Pistols signed with three different corporate record labels; the first two corporations terminated their contracts with the band because the they had a habit of going beyond the furthest imaginable limits of decent behavior. (They destroyed the office of one corporation, and said filthy things about the Queen's sexual anatomy in front of millions of TV watchers.) Of course the spectacular hype from their calculatedly offensive attitude helped them to succeed even more.

Lipstick Traces has a paragraph that describes better than I can the potential effect of a Sex Pistols record:

The Sex Pistols made a breach in the pop milieu, in the screen of received cultural assumptions governing what one expected to hear and how one expected to respond. Because received cultural assumptions are hegemonic propositions about the way the world is supposed to work-- ideological constructs perceived and experienced as natural facts-- the breach in the pop milieu opened into the realm of everyday life: the milieu where, commuting to work, doing one's job in the home or the factory or the office or the mall, going to the movies, watching television, making love, having conversations, not having conversations, or making lists of what to do next, people actually lived. Judged according to its demands on the world, a Sex Pistols record had to change the way a given person performed his or her commute-- which is to say that the record had to connect that act to every other, and then call the enterprise into question. (Marcus 1989:3)

Now whether it has changed the world or not in some small way is still arguable, but punk has changed the way of seeing of not a small number of individuals, the way they perceive their everyday actions and the way the world seems to work.

Punk style, the subculture's member's personal appearances, were just as much an affront to mainstream hegemonic assumptions as the Sex Pistols's songs. Hebdige writes that "the punks wore clothes that were the sartorial equivalent of swear words, and they swore as they dressed-- with calculated effect." (Hebdige 1979:114) He sums up the punk philosophy as being that "the forbidden is permitted, but . . . nothing, not even these forbidden signifiers (bondage, safety pins, chains, hair-dye, etc.) is sacred and fixed." (Hebdige 1979:115) Everything sacred (ideologically 'naturalized') is to be assaulted, even the signifiers of a potential counter-hegemonic force. Not even punk was sacred. Truly with "No Future," the Sex Pistols project imploded in a flurry of drugs ODs, and lawsuits soon after it began.

Though not having originated with them, the violently confrontational attitude of punk toward everything sacred was popularized and disseminated across the world by the Sex Pistols. Spreading back to the U.S. (it had begun in New York City in the early 70's), punk's seeds became firmly planted. Greil Marcus describes an event at a punk rock concert in Los Angeles in the late 70s: "a woman strides naked onto the bandstand as Vox Pop plays, collapses into the bass drum, rises, pulls a Tampex from her vagina, and hurls it into the crowd-- 'grown men, skinheads, turned white and ran away.'" (Marcus 1989:213) "That was punk" he comments. That was what the punk banner of refusal --to abide by, to destroy hegemony's order-- looked like as it was carried farther and farther. The flying Tampex wasn't just thrown at a horrified crowd, it was also thrown, like an anarchist's bomb, at a whole hegemonic complex of ideological assumptions.

Many people say that punk saved corporate rock'n'roll, by giving it a transfusion of the life-blood of rebellion, and saving it from a vapid demise to disco and pop. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Though it has evolved in many directions, you can still turn on the radio at any time of the day in Portland and hear some song that contains a bit of the spirit of Johnny Rotten in it. A punk rock album with the weary title "Nevermind" by three poor Seattle musicians (Nirvana) surprised everyone in early 1992 when it became the number one hit on the music charts, selling millions of copies of punk attitude to a new generation, and spawning a new (old) pop genre and subculture style: "grunge."

Soon after finding themselves instant millionaires, the members of Nirvana posed for the cover of Rolling Stone, the squirmishly liberal magazine of rock'n'roll's hegemonic establishment. Kurt Cobain, the band's singer, wore a t-shirt saying "Corporate Magazines Still Suck." Even with celebrity and money rolling in, for Cobain there was still nothing sacred.