the nightclub and onto the pavement, every gray public building came alive with secret messages of aggression, domination, malignancy.
“The phone never stopped ringing,” said fire Capt. Donald Pearson, 32. “People were calling from all over the state. We now understand the term ‘media event.’ ”
Pearson said, “The most memorable part of the week was when we cut the tree through and the bees started coming out. There were 30 or 40 reporters and photographers around and some of them started running.”
The fire fighters said [Officer] Racicot had the best description of the killer bees.
“The killer bees are the ones with the leather jackets and the punk hairdos,” he said. “You can’t miss ‘em.”
—San Francisco Examiner,
28 July 1985, on the first discovery of “killer bees “ in California
TO MASTER
To master this vision of ugliness, people acted it out. Today, after more than a decade of punk style, when a purple and green Mohawk on the head of a suburban American teenager only begs the question of how early he or she has to get up to fix his or her hair in time for school, it’s hard to remember just how ugly the first punks were.
They were ugly. There were no mediations. A ten-inch safety pin cutting through a lower lip into a swastika tattooed onto a cheek was not a fashion statement; a fan forcing a finger down his throat, vomiting into his hands, then hurling the spew at the people on stage was spreading disease. An inch-thick nimbus of black mascara suggested death before it suggested anything else. The punks were not just pretty people, like the Slits or bassist Gaye ofthe Adverts, who made themselves ugly. They were fat, anorexic, pock-marked, acned, stuttering, crippled, scarred, and damaged, and what their new decorations underlined was the failure already engraved in their faces.
The Sex Pistols had somehow permitted them to appear in public as human beings, to parade their afflictions as social facts. “I was waiting for the Communist call,” Johnny Rotten sang on his way to the Berlin Wall in “Holidays in the Sun”; from the same western side of the wall, the narrator in Peter Schneider’s 1982 novel
The Wall Jumper,
his mind turned inside out by repeated viewings of the ideologically reversed versions of the news offered by East and West Berlin TV, asks the same question punk raised: “Doesn’t every career in Western society, whether that of an athlete, investor, artist, or rebel, depend on the assumption that every initiative is one’s own, every idea original, every decision completely personal? What would happen to me if I stopped finding fault with myself, as I’ve been taught to do, and blamed everything on the state?” More than trash bags or torn shirts, punks wore Adorno’s morbid rash; they inked or stenciled it over themselves in regular patterns. As Adorno’s prepared corpses, more consciously prepared than he could have imagined, they exploded with proofs of vitality—that is, they said what they meant.
In so doing, they turned Adorno’s vision of modern life back upon itself: Adorno had not imagined that his corpses might know what they meant to say. Punks were those who now understood themselves as people from whom the news of their not quite successful decease had been withheld for reasons of population policy—as punk defined the no-future, society was going to need a lot of zombie counterpersons, shoppers, bureaucrats, welfare petitioners, a lot of people to stand in lines and man them. The difference was that these people had heard the news.
I WISH
“I wish I could see us,” Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones said. Maybe that’s what Johnny Rotten meant when he said he wanted “more bands like us.” He got them—dozens of groups, then hundreds, then thousands, that cut their own singles weeks after forming (or, if one goes by the sound of some of the sides, before forming), put them out on one-shot labels with nameslike Raw, Frenzy, and
“The phone never stopped ringing,” said fire Capt. Donald Pearson, 32. “People were calling from all over the state. We now understand the term ‘media event.’ ”
Pearson said, “The most memorable part of the week was when we cut the tree through and the bees started coming out. There were 30 or 40 reporters and photographers around and some of them started running.”
The fire fighters said [Officer] Racicot had the best description of the killer bees.
“The killer bees are the ones with the leather jackets and the punk hairdos,” he said. “You can’t miss ‘em.”
—San Francisco Examiner,
28 July 1985, on the first discovery of “killer bees “ in California
TO MASTER
To master this vision of ugliness, people acted it out. Today, after more than a decade of punk style, when a purple and green Mohawk on the head of a suburban American teenager only begs the question of how early he or she has to get up to fix his or her hair in time for school, it’s hard to remember just how ugly the first punks were.
They were ugly. There were no mediations. A ten-inch safety pin cutting through a lower lip into a swastika tattooed onto a cheek was not a fashion statement; a fan forcing a finger down his throat, vomiting into his hands, then hurling the spew at the people on stage was spreading disease. An inch-thick nimbus of black mascara suggested death before it suggested anything else. The punks were not just pretty people, like the Slits or bassist Gaye ofthe Adverts, who made themselves ugly. They were fat, anorexic, pock-marked, acned, stuttering, crippled, scarred, and damaged, and what their new decorations underlined was the failure already engraved in their faces.
The Sex Pistols had somehow permitted them to appear in public as human beings, to parade their afflictions as social facts. “I was waiting for the Communist call,” Johnny Rotten sang on his way to the Berlin Wall in “Holidays in the Sun”; from the same western side of the wall, the narrator in Peter Schneider’s 1982 novel
The Wall Jumper,
his mind turned inside out by repeated viewings of the ideologically reversed versions of the news offered by East and West Berlin TV, asks the same question punk raised: “Doesn’t every career in Western society, whether that of an athlete, investor, artist, or rebel, depend on the assumption that every initiative is one’s own, every idea original, every decision completely personal? What would happen to me if I stopped finding fault with myself, as I’ve been taught to do, and blamed everything on the state?” More than trash bags or torn shirts, punks wore Adorno’s morbid rash; they inked or stenciled it over themselves in regular patterns. As Adorno’s prepared corpses, more consciously prepared than he could have imagined, they exploded with proofs of vitality—that is, they said what they meant.
In so doing, they turned Adorno’s vision of modern life back upon itself: Adorno had not imagined that his corpses might know what they meant to say. Punks were those who now understood themselves as people from whom the news of their not quite successful decease had been withheld for reasons of population policy—as punk defined the no-future, society was going to need a lot of zombie counterpersons, shoppers, bureaucrats, welfare petitioners, a lot of people to stand in lines and man them. The difference was that these people had heard the news.
I WISH
“I wish I could see us,” Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones said. Maybe that’s what Johnny Rotten meant when he said he wanted “more bands like us.” He got them—dozens of groups, then hundreds, then thousands, that cut their own singles weeks after forming (or, if one goes by the sound of some of the sides, before forming), put them out on one-shot labels with nameslike Raw, Frenzy, and
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