Pistols at dawn despite the X Factor
THE point of rock music, Jack Black tells the kids in the film School Of Rock, is not to get wasted or get laid. The point is to 'stick it to the Man'.
The tributes to the late Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols manager, remind us of a time when rock - or at least its wayward child, punk - did just that.
The music journalist John Savage goes further, claiming punk broke down class barriers.
"Time was compressed," he recalls. "There was an urgency, the burning imperative to do whatever it is you felt you had to do and make it public."
It might well have felt that way to those who were there. But to many of us who were born too late, punk can seem like a wilfully ugly, nihilistic cult fuelled by dirty drugs and prone to racist violence.
And that's before you get to the music itself. Punk's anti-elitism might have been admirable in some ways, but the trouble with being anti-elitist is that you open the doors a lot of mediocre rubbish.
Even Kurt Cobain, who was clearly influence by punk, remarked of going to punk gigs and being shocked that often the musicians couldn't actually play.
And yet when I hear God Save the Queen I can see why the Sex Pistols (who could play) were so exciting - as Savage puts it: "the only thing happening within a moribund, decaying society".
Now, of course, there's plenty happening, and the internet has killed off the culture of scarcity in which punk thrived.
And 'the Man', he has learned to harness the power of rock music for his own ends.
How can you 'stick it to the man' when the Prime Minister invites the leader of the country's biggest rock band for champagne at Downing Street, and the musician accepts?
The notion of sticking it to the man was conspicuously absent in 1997 when Noel Gallagher asked Tony Blair how he'd managed to keep awake on election night, and the new PM joked: "Probably not by the same means you did."
On a nostalgic impulse, I recently bought an edition of Mojo magazine devoted to Britpop - a contentious term used to bracket bands including Oasis, Pulp, Blur and Suede, who formed the soundtrack to my university days.
The novelist Irvine Welsh, one of the most fashionable writers of the time and something of a punk-like figure, told Mojo that the meeting of Blair and Gallagher was not the death of Britpop, but its epitome. Britpop, said Welsh, had always been a conformist movement based on making money.
So much for sticking it to the Man.
The Man is thriving too in the reality TV show branch of the music industry.
Now, when for many artists the only route into a career in music seems to be the chance to prostrate themselves before Simon Cowell, it's inspiring when someone does manage to stick it to the Man, as when the Arctic Monkeys made the big time simply by building support on line, and when Rage Against the Machine beat the X Factor finalist to the Christmas number one slot.
It seems the DIY ethic of punk lives on in the internet age, and will never die, so long as there's a Man to stick it to.
awolstenholme@ywng.co.uk
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Cleckheaton
Friday 25 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 20 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
