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ccohanlon · 2 years ago

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my generation, part 3

There was a period between 1974 and 1979 — no more than four or five years at most — when it looked as if we might redeem ourselves. Punk rock is rarely identified with Baby Boomers these days, but it is the one enduring cultural legacy to which my generation can lay sole claim. From its raggedy-assed, New York originators — among them, Iggy Pop (born 1947), Patti Smith (born 1946), Richard Hell (born 1949), Johnny, Tommy, Joey and Dee Dee of The Ramones (born between 1948 and 1952), and The Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra (born 1958) — to the rawer, more politicised and subversive Londoners with whom the public most readily associates punk — among them, The Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten (born 1956) and Sid Vicious (born 1957), The Clash’s Joe Strummer (born 1952), The Banshees’ Siouxsie Sioux (born 1957) and The Damned’s Dave Vanian (born 1956) — and its one great Australian band, The Saints, the late G.G. Allin (born 1956) oh, and Nick Cave (born 1957), still the coolest Australian alive, its protagonists were all, without exception, Baby Boomers.

Punk was unarguably a social as well as a musical revolt, and its raw, self‐negating anger was directed not only at an older generation, but at the majority of its own, which had sold out any chance for genuine social and political change. It was no accident that punk first emerged during the mid-1970s, when the city of New York, under mayor Abe Beame, teetered on the edge of bankruptcy or that many of its most coherent and vehement songs, such as The Clash’s London Calling, were released in 1978 just before the infamous ‘winter of discontent’ under Prime Minister James Callaghan’s Labour government, during which the economy began to collapse under the weight of high unemployment, industrial unrest, and dysfunctional public services. The rising groundswell of Conservative sympathy (and self‐interest) would carry Margaret Thatcher into power the following spring.

Punk’s musical prejudices were many, but a constant in all of them was impatience with its own generation’s obsession with the surface of things. With its pared‐down, DIY approach to recording, total disdain for basic instrumental skills, and simplistic, buzz‐saw‐like songs that were never more than one tempo — fast — two minutes’ duration, three chords and four‐beats-to‐the‐bar, with titles like Too Drunk to Fuck, Blank Generation, White Riot, and Anarchy in the UK, punk slashed at the tie‐died remnants of hippie counterculture — by then, an already long-in-the-tooth Eric Clapton, the legendary guitarist and founder of the ’60s ‘supergroup’ Cream, was appearing in British beer ads — and directed its razor‐edged, amphetamine‐fuelled intensity toward the shimmering glitter of disco and the grandiose posturing of heavy metal rockers, whose stadium gigs were becoming as over‐produced and robotic as Hitler-Jügend rallies in the 1920s and ’30s.

Malcolm McLaren (born on January 22, 1946 — one of the very first Baby Boomers) was punk’s arch manipulator, its media‐savvy Svengali. The then‐partner of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood (who had yet to make her name and fortune as a couturier) and the co‐proprietor with her of a fetish and bondage clothing shop called SEX on London’s Kings Road, McLaren was the dandyish, amoral and rudely cunning (if not downright crooked) manager of Britain’s most infamous punk band, The Sex Pistols, fronted by Johnny Rotten (neé John Lydon) The band was a McLaren creation, inspired by both the disaffected, working‐class kids — prototypical punks — that hung out at SEX, and McLaren’s own encounters with the nascent New York punk scene during a visit there in 1974. The Sex Pistols lasted only a couple of years — releasing just one album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, before Johnny Rotten announced their break‐up during a shambolic American tour in 1978, and the band’s notorious bass player, Sid Vicious, killed his girlfriend in a drug‐addled haze at New York’s Chelsea Hotel the same year, over‐dosing on heroin a few months later at a party to celebrate his release on bail from the city’s Riker’s Island jail — but not before McLaren had demonstrated just how to execute what he would later call “the great rock’n’roll swindle”.

In 1976, McLaren showcased The Sex Pistols during punk’s first festival at the 100 Club on Oxford Street, London, and talked EMI into signing the band for what was said to be a half‐million pound advance — although this figure was probably just McLaren hype — and releasing its first single, Anarchy in the UK, at the end of November 1976. Less than a fortnight after the song hit the UK charts, the band members got into an on‐air slanging match with Bill Grundy, the host of Thames Television’s popular early evening program Today; guitarist Steve Jones called him a “fucking rotter”. It was the beginning of a run of bad press – “Punk? Call it Filthy Lucre” ran the front page headline of The Daily Express – and it was deliberately inflamed by McLaren. It scared EMI enough to terminate its contract with the band at the end of January 1977. Six weeks later, in a ceremony staged (probably by McLaren) outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, the Sex Pistols signed to Herb Alpert’s A&M Records. This time the deal didn’t last the day: at a party back at the record label’s offices, the band members sexually harassed secretaries, picked fights with executives and, in a lurid coup de grace, Sid Vicious trashed the managing director’s office and vomited on his desk. A&M publicly cut the band loose less than a week later.

It was left to one of the first of England’s Baby Boomer entrepreneurs, Richard Branson (born 1950) — who played in an altogether bigger league than McLaren when it came to both opportunism and shameless self‐promotion — to sign the band to Virgin Records for another large advance and the promise of total artistic control. In May 1977, The Sex Pistols released its second single, God Save the Queen. With the help of some well‐planned radio airplay and the usual sensationalist press, it reached number two on the UK charts during the same week as the country celebrated Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee. Later, one of the band‐members, Paul Cook, told a journalist: “It wasn’t written specifically for the Queen’s Jubilee. We weren’t aware of it at the time. It wasn’t a contrived effort to go out and shock everyone.” Maybe not, but Malcolm McLaren convinced the band to change the original title of the song, No Future.

McLaren recently recalled that he made money then “by doing the exact opposite of what most people would think would be correct. I acted the irresponsible, the ultimate, child and everything I did was what society hated.” His public posturing and game‐playing during punk’s last gob‐spit at ‘the system’ would have made Sir Guy Grand proud. Sadly, by the end of the ’70s, punk’s truculent nihilism had dissipated, and a corrosive process of co-option and homogenisation had begun. Within a decade, punk and all the other good things youth culture had encompassed over the previous quarter‐century — and would encompass, briefly, in the decade ahead, such as rave culture, graffiti art, gangsta rap and mash‐ups — would be reduced to an unidentifiable but easily consumable mush. Meanwhile, a faltering global realpolitik, resurgent squabbles in the Middle East, and economic and social disarray in the developed world (especially the United Kingdom) suggested a future more uncertain and dangerous than anything that George W. Bush would have us fear in the aftermath of 9/11. The brittle, pre‐Apocalyptic edginess of the early ’80s was reminiscent of the ’60s.

MTV was launched on American cable networks on August 1, 1981. The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention had just recognised the first cases of AIDS, in five gay men in California. Of course, the two events were unrelated but it felt like the beginning and the end of youth culture.

With its all‐music‐video format modelled on Top 40 radio by former whizz‐kid Baby Boomers fresh out FM radio programming and advertising — the first video that MTV broadcast was The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star — and its use of young, good‐looking ‘video jockeys’, or VJs, who appeared to have been genetically engineered to match a broad cross‐section of the racially diverse, financially disparate, youth demography found in densely populated American urban centres, even if the music it first featured was predominantly white, MTV appeared to dull rather than enliven the collective imagination, despite its popularity. The symbiosis it had with a music industry already absorbed into huge, multinational media conglomerates — MTV itself was itself the product of a joint venture between Warner Communications and American Express, the Warner‐Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, that morphed into MTV Networks Inc. just ahead of an IPO in 1984 — was obvious and a little creepy: apart from hourly entertainment news spots and studio interviews with music stars, MTV’s only content was music video clips produced by the major labels and provided to the new network free of charge (although it would not be long before the network would charge them to put a video into what was called ‘heavy rotation’). In other words, MTV was running ads for the record labels twenty‐four hours a day, seven days a week.

None of its growing audience gave a damn. “Too much is never enough” as one of MTV’s earliest promotional slogans put it. In keeping with the times, the new network was about as cynical as you could get.

“I think the relationship between authentic youth cultural happenings and youth culture consumption is indistinguishable,” Douglas Rushkoff, Professor of Media Culture at New York University, said in a recent interview. He might as well have simplified it to “culture and consumption”, because even by the ’80s the porous membrane between the two had already been breached — and not just among youth. Shopping was the primary cultural activity of most major cities in the developed world, and with more products competing across more programming choices — if not yet more media –—for the exponentially shorter attention of more consumers willing to spend more time and money on themselves than ever before, it was inevitable that marketers would have to look for other ways of ensuring, if not higher (or more conscious) awareness of their brands, then more constant visibility. We needed the brands to become ambient, ever‐present. “Turn it on, leave it on” – another MTV slogan.

It didn’t take genius to figure out that brands should behave like the media they used to distribute awareness of themselves. Nuances of meaning and emotional engagement could be different depending on how and where the brand insinuated itself into a consumer’s awareness: the medium was no longer just the message, as McLuhan had argued when, in 1967, he rewrote his most famous catchphrase, but rather the massage, the effect on our sensorium. Traditional advertising was, and still is, interruptive — it deliberately intersected the periods of attention we allotted to entertainment and information programming across what was, in the ’80s, a limited range of passive media — so the logical step was to create opportunities for brands, their product expressions and values to exist not only within the context of entertainment and information (still mainly as interruptive advertising), but also within the content.

Today, a high percentage of the multi‐million dollar marketing budgets (and sometimes the $100–200 million negative costs) of blockbuster feature films — usually the action‐driven franchises such as James Bond, Spiderman or X‐Men, the so‐called ‘tent‐pole pictures’ that prop up the intrinsically rickety balance sheets of Hollywood studios — are funded by product placement written into the scripts even before shooting begins. For example, Ford’s multi‐picture, multi‐brand relationship (including Aston Martin, Jaguar, and Range Rover) with the most recent series of Bond films starring Pierce Brosnan was said to have cost the ailing US car manufacturer over $US125 million; and in 2000, international courier Federal Express underwrote much of the production and marketing budgets of Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks as your average FedEx executive who is transformed into a modern Robinson Crusoe when the FedEx cargo plane on which he catches a ride crashes on a remote island in the Pacific.

Pop singers such as Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, Jay‐Z, Kanye West and Nelly supplement their already extraordinary earnings from record sales, music publishing and touring with millions more dollars just for ‘name checking’ brands in songs that will pervade, for a short while, the awareness of a huge number of young, impressionable consumers impatient to realise their potential. Agenda, a US youth marketing company, even tracks what brands are mentioned most in the songs on US music charts to create a Top 40 chart of its own, American Brandstand. (The current Gen Y pop stars have studied Boomer formulae for appropriation and hype, now so refined that anyone can use them. Rather than rejecting them, they have embraced these formulae with such enthusiasm that, for the first time since the ’30s, youth culture appears to be ‘aspirationally older’.)

In some cases, entirely new, purpose‐built content has been created as brand vehicles — not only TV programming, film and music but also sporting and cultural events. The array of high profile, sponsored literary prizes in the UK is an example. Another is the unregulated, post‐apocalyptic version of ‘the world game’, played inside a locked cage, that Nike invented to promote its involvement in the 2002 World Cup hosted by both Korea and Japan. Nike featured it in a couple of award‐winning TV ads starring some of soccer’s best‐known international players. Then the US company built a real‐ life arena — a playing field deconstructed as theme park and sci‐fi movie set — in a Tokyo warehouse, where Japanese youth, its target consumers, could play it as well.

All sides of the marketing/media/consumer equation are still dominated by Baby Boomers. We are the most powerful consumer segment in the global economy, with aggregate gross earnings in the United States alone of US4.1 trillion dollars a year (and with a projected global entertainment media spend of $US1.8 trillion a year by 2010). If we are no longer at the white‐hot core of the hyper‐mediated consumerism that passes for popular culture these days, our money — and the parasitic tenaciousness with which we have wormed our way into the imaginative ambitions of other generations, usually to their detriment, since the mid‐60s — enables us to exert influence everywhere.

Advertising strategists, demographic researchers and academics argue that both Generations X and Y are inured to Baby Boomer attempts to market to them on anything but their own terms. “Young people have grown up immersed in the language of advertising and public relations. They speak it like natives,” Douglas Rushkoff writes in his 2000 book Coercion: Why We Listen To What They Say.“As a result, they are more than aware when a commercial or billboard is targeting them. In conscious defiance of demographic‐based pandering, they adopt a stance of self‐protective irony — distancing themselves from the emotional ploys of the advertisers.”

To some extent, this ignores the depth of the Baby Boomers’ experience. Boomers were still young when passive, pre‐programmed mass media began a slow transformation of its hardware, formats and programming, and we not only participated in the early evolution of interactive media — through which individualised information, entertainment, transaction and communication could eventually be accessed any time, anywhere — we were among its inventors. Media are as much a natural element for Boomers as they are for younger generations. We have appropriated, co‐opted or ‘remixed’ the disparate perceptions, attitudes and trends of four generations of youth culture distributed — and preserved — by old and new media in order to commoditise them (while sterilising any inherent idealism): how do you think we came up with the amorphous hip‐ness of The Gap’s t‐shirts and cargo pants, or Starbucks’ Beatnik‐manqué coffee lounges?

Will the younger generations ever break the ageing Boomers’ suffocating headlock on popular culture? To some extent, they have already by sharing music, video, games and software online. Baby Boomer executives, lobbyists and lawyers decry file‐sharing because it deprives a work’s creator of both income and control, and because it threatens all businesses — not just those in entertainment or publishing — which derive revenue and power from the licensing of intellectual property (in other words, most of the world’s largest corporations). Our real dread is file‐sharing’s subversive simplicity. All it needs is mass for it to erase traditional concepts of ownership and value.

The revolution starts there.

Part three of three. First published as part of a single essay in Griffith Review, Australia, 2006.

#culturewars #babyboomers #punk #music #mygeneration #mtv

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