Free Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus Page A

about, and at thirty in 1975, he clung to a sixties definition of young—youth was an attitude, not an age. For the young everything flowed from rock ’n’ roll (fashion, slang, sexual styles, drug habits, poses), or was organized by it, or was validated by it. The young, who as legal phantoms had nothing and as people wanted everything, felt the contradiction between what life promised and what it delivered most keenly: youth revolt was a key to social revolt, and thus the first target of social revolt could be rock ’n’ roll. Connections could be made. If one could show that rock ’n’ roll, by the mid-1970s ideologically empowered as the ruling exception to the humdrum conduct of social life, had become simply the shiniest cog in the established order, then a demystification of rock ’n’ roll might lead to a demystification of social life.
    To structure the situation in this way took real imagination, even genius —it doesn’t matter whose it was. In the past, rock ’n’ roll as a version of revolt had always been seen by its fans as a weapon or, more deeply, as an end in itself, self-justifying: a momentary version of the life everyone would live in the best of all possible worlds. Pete Townshend, in 1968:
     
    Mother has just fallen down the stairs, dad’s lost all his money at the dog track, the baby’s got TB. In comes the kid with his transistor radio, grooving to Chuck Berry. He doesn’t give a shit about mom falling down the stairs . . . It’s a good thing that you’ve got a machine, a radio that puts out rock and roll songs and it makes you groove through the day. That’s thegame, of course: When you are listening to a rock and roll song the way you listen to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” or something similar, that’s the way you should really spend your whole life.
    So McLaren heard when a fellow student got up to sing “Great Balls of Fire”—in 1958, the act itself was a negation of social facts. But when rock ’n’ roll had become just another social fact, this was self-defeating, even on the level of the next good song. By 1975, Townshend’s Candideisms removed rock ’n’ roll from the social realities that gave the music its kick. In 1958, even in 1968, a simple rock ’n’ roll performance could open up questions of identity, justice, repression, will, and desire; now it was organized to draw such questions into itself and make them disappear.
    Who could say that “Fire and Rain,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and “Maggie May” were not affirmations of freedom as they were made, and oppressions as they were used? Only those who refused to believe that the affirmation where freedom is grasped is rooted in a negation where freedom is glimpsed—and those people did not include McLaren and the Sex Pistols. Thus they damned rock ’n’ roll as a rotting corpse: a monster of moneyed reaction, a mechanism for false consciousness, a system of self-exploitation, a theater of glamorized oppression, a bore. Rock ’n’ roll, Johnny Rotten would say, was only the first of many things the Sex Pistols came to destroy. And yet because the Sex Pistols had no other weapons, because they were fans in spite of themselves, they played rock ’n’ roll, stripping it down to essentials of speed, noise, fury, and manic glee no one had touched before.
    They used rock ’n’ roll as a weapon against itself. With all instruments but guitar, bass, drums, and voice written off as effete, as elitist accoutrements of a professionalist cult of technique, it was a music best suited to anger and frustration, focusing chaos, dramatizing the last days as everyday life, ramming all emotions into the narrow gap between a blank stare and a sardonic grin. The guitarist laid down a line of fire to cover the singer, the rhythm section put both in a pressure drop, and as a response to what was suddenly perceived as the totalitarian freeze of the modern world the music could seem like a