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March 06, 2007
Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century has a story to tell about music and culture which be summarized thus:
The question of ancestry in culture is spurious. Every new manifestation in culture rewrites the past, changes old maudits into new heroes, old heroes into those who should never have been born. New actors scavenge the past for ancestors because ancestory is legitimacy and novelty is doubt---but in all times forgotten actors emerge from the past not as ancestors but as familiars. I n the 1920s in literary America it was Hermann Melville; in the rock 'n roll 1960s it was Mississippi blues man Robert Johnson of the 1930s; in the entropic Western 1970s it was the carefully absolutist German critic Walter Benjamin of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1976 and 1977, and in the years to follow, as symbolically remade by the Sex Pistols it was, perhaps, dadists, lettrists, situationists, and various medieval heretics. (p.22-23)
It's an interesting story. I'm puzzled by the link to the lettrists and their concern to efface language. I guess punk music effaced the rock music that preceded it. Did it efface Captain Beefheart or the Velvet Underground to make a new culture out of the old chords?
Marcus goes on to say that:
Punk was not a musical genre; it was a moment in time that took shape as a language anticipating its own destruction , and thus sometime seeking it, seeking the statement of what could be said without words or chords. It was not history. It was a chance to create ephemeral events that would serve as judgments on what ever came next, events that would judge all that followed wanting--that too was the meaning of no-future. (p.82)
Words and chords? What has happened to image? Wasn't punk about the image?
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I heard The Saints, Stranded, before I ever saw them. I saw the Pistols before I ever heard them.