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A School for Singing: The Poetics, Politics, and Aesthetics of the CBGB Scene

Shaun Michael Cullen

Springfield, PA

M.A., Humanities, University of Chicago, 2005

B.F.A., Cinema Studies, New York University, 2002

A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty

of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English Language and Literature

University of Virginia

December, 2013

Shaun Cullen

November 2013

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ABSTRACT

On August 16, 1974, exactly one week after Richard Nixon’s resignation, the Ramones

made their debut at CBGB. Over the next ten years, the club would become synonymous

with the punk aesthetic that the Ramones embodied. By shifting, however temporarily

and by no means completely, the focus of punk studies (and by extension, cultural

studies, American studies, urban studies, and queer studies) back to an often disavowed

origin point, CBGB and New York City, “A School for Singing” rediscovers a utopian

imaginary inherent in that scene often taken to be one of the most shambolic and

nihilistic in the history of postmodern arts and letters. Punk was not just a musical

movement, it was an artistic event that had wider ramifications, felt across the art world,

from the dingiest clubs to the most rarefied art galleries, publishing houses, and runways.

Just this past year, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its

fifth most popular exhibit of all time, “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” which features, among

other mementos of the punk era, a faithful recreation of the CBGB bathroom, where “all

the action happened,” as Patti Smith once quipped.

“A School for Singing” returns us to the space of CBGB, not just the bathroom,

but the awning, the bar, the stage, and the street outside in order to understand the

aesthetics, politics, and poetics of this space. Spaces tell a story, and “A School for

Singing” attempts to speak the language of the stones. It takes its title from W.B. Yeats:

“Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence,” and

speculates that the CBGB scene intervened on Yeats’s classical modernism and the

avant-garde at a moment of cultural and political crisis. It linked the modernist struggle

for autonomy, poetically, to contemporary political struggles over working class rights,

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queer identity, and deindustrialization in an aesthetic language that was literary,

musical, and visual, and was also equally indebted to the vernacular of popular culture. In

the process, the CBGB scene sowed the seeds for all punk scenes and all punk aesthetics

to come.

At its core, the CBGB scene was a product of the cultural crisis that gripped the

U.S. at the beginning of the 1970s. Besides Nixon’s resignation, the Ramones’s first

appearance coincided almost exactly with the one-year anniversary of the Case-Church

Amendment, ending the Vietnam War, in theory if not in fact. In their songs, the

Ramones sang about Vietnam, as well as Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, and the recent

film Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Patti Smith dedicated her first single to the memory of

Jimi Hendrix and the spirit of Patty Hearst. In other words, the CBGB scene was imbued

with what Frank Kermode once called, in partial reference to William S. Burroughs, a

fixture at the club, “a sense of an ending.” Burroughs was a particular hero to Richard

Hell, who gave the club and its scene an anthem, “Blank Generation,” the blank in which,

literally represented by silence on the song’s studio recording, was meant to signify not a

lack of origins but a desire for them, for what Michel Foucault might describe as a

“heterotopic” space, in which his generation could thrive.

“A School for Singing” interrogates this heteropian desire for any-space-

whatsoever in a series of case studies starting, in the introduction, with the Ramones’s

first appearance at CBGB in 1974. It then turns, in the first chapter, to the germinal

musician in the CBGB scene and Velvet Underground co-founder Lou Reed, and the

extraordinarily important influence two figures within the queer culture of the 1960s,

William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol, as well as his poetic mentor Delmore Schwartz,

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had on his music, lyrics, and performance career. Reed’s work is analyzed within the

specific frame of the “queer child,” offered by literary critic Kathryn Bond Stockton,

which the chapter contends was central to the CBGB scene’s political and aesthetic

imaginary. This interest in the queer child carries over into the dissertation’s second

chapter, on punk appropriations of girl group pop music, which tracks this figure of the

queer child through the contemporary subcultural theory of Judith Halberstam, Tavia

Nyong’o and José Muñoz, all of whom have written on punk.

The third and fourth chapters of “A School for Singing” focus on the Ramones,

often thought of as the most demotic of the CBGB artists. To the contrary, the Ramones

were far more conceptually sophisticated than other critics have realized. For instance, an

early admirer of the Ramones was the conceptual artist Dan Graham, alongside whose

work the Ramones’s performances are read dialectically in the dissertation’s fourth

chapter, especially the Ramones’s 1980 album End of the Century (which to this point

has received very little critical attention), and Graham’s two video artworks

Performer/Audience/ Mirror and Rock My Religion. The Ramones and Graham, who also

wrote critical essays about punk, were participating in a larger cultural dialogue

concerning working class identity, sexuality, and deindustrialization in the U.S. at the end

of the 1960s, which links their work back to figures such as Reed, Burroughs, and

Warhol, as well as the historical avant-garde so beloved by other CBGB artists, such as

Patti Smith and Richard Hell.

The central portion of “A School for Singing” ends with two chapters on the

literary afterlives of the CBGB scene in the fictional works of William S. Burroughs, who

participated in the scene, and William Gibson, who followed it. In particular, these

chapters develop my notion of the CBGB scene as a heterotopia. These chapters

describe how the concerns with space, expressed in these two literary works, responded

to the CBGB scene’s original interest in queer visibility and the crisis of urban

redevelopment.

The coda to “A School for Singing” explores the cultural memory of the CBGB

scene in the present. Despite the way in which the original poetics, aesthetics, and politics

of the CBGB scene are reappropriated, commodified, and assimilated in cultural

productions as various as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from a Goon Squad, the recent “Chaos

to Couture” exhibit, the Pussy Riot protest, and Occupy Wall Street, this coda insists, as

does the rest of the dissertation, on uncovering, in the tradition of cultural critics—

Marxist, queer, feminist, and otherwise—the utopian spirit of punk that imbues the

scene’s memory, which refuses to concede to its reification. The cognitive mapping of

the CBGB scene offered here is ultimately intended as a blueprint for how this resistance

might continue in the twenty-first century, and is intended to be read alongside other

periodizing works within American studies, such as Michael Denning’s The Cultural

Front, Scott Saul’s Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t, and Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward

Bound, to name just a few.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements............................................................................................................. 1

Introduction: The Punk Event…......................................................................................... 5

Excursus: “Land” ............................................................................................................. 25

Chapter One: Punk, Between Beat and Pop; or, Lou Reed as Queer Child..................... 28

Chapter Two: How Do You Spell Love? Girl Group Pop and the Politics of Punk

Appropriation.................................................................................................................... 75

Excursus: Swastika......................................................................................................... 103

Chapter Three: Punk Rock In-Formation: The Concept of the Ramones....................... 106

Chapter Four: Dan Graham’s Conceptual Reflections................................................... 141

Excursus: “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” ................................................................ 168

Chapter Five: “There Is No Way Out of the Valley:” The Heterotopian Aesthetics of

William S. Burroughs and Television............................................................................. 170

Chapter Six: Cyberspace as Any-Space-Whatsoever: William Gibson’s Post-Punk

Soundscapes.................................................................................................................... 193

Coda: Occupy the Bowery, Occupy the Blank............................................................... 215

Bibliography................................................................................................................... 221

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project officially began at a meeting of a cultural studies reading group at the

University of Virginia, organized by Ben Fagan, during which we discussed Dick

Hebdige’s Subculture. After that initial discussion, I met with Sylvia Chong, who

encouraged me to pursue my interest in music and youth culture more seriously as a

research project. Later, Eric Lott came onboard as my dissertation director and advised

me to indulge my love for CBGB punk and explore the meaning of that club as a space.

The rest, as they say, is history, and Sylvia and Eric deserve thanks, more than anyone

else, for any insight contained herein. All of the shortcomings are my own. Richard Will,

as well, has been an encouraging interlocutor on all things musical since I first took a

graduate seminar with him on folk revivals in the year before I began the project, and

Michael Levenson graciously agreed to offer his own insights into the project at the

eleventh hour, which will surely benefit the dissertation as it transforms into a book.

Other faculty members at the University of Virginia have been equally engaged and

encouraging. Among these, Jennifer Wicke has been perhaps the greatest champion of

my career and thinking, and David Golumbia provided an invaluable space for

intellectual inquiry by organizing the department’s Theory Reading Group.

Throughout the drafting of this dissertation I met with the best writing group a

pint of beer or a cup of coffee can buy. Wes King, Erich Nunn, Scott Selisker, Nathan

Ragain, and Chris Forster all offered sage advice at some step of the process, not only in

terms of writing and research, but also in terms of becoming a better colleague, a better

thinker, and a more seasoned drinker. I hope that my intellectual exchange with all of

them will continue well into the future. Glenn Brewer, Walt Hunter, and Jason Kirby

have also offered critical interventions into the project in less formal ways, as both

colleagues and friends. Other colleagues that read chapters or parts of chapters and

offered their advice were Sarah Bishop, Elizabeth Lindau, Emily Gale, and Anna

O’Keefe, the latter two as part of a Mellon Summer Dissertation Seminar in the summer

of 2013 on “Poetics and the Modern Emotions,” where I drafted the bulk of chapter one. I

would also like to thank John Lyons for organizing that seminar, and for his own advice

on that chapter, as well as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their stipend support.

Parts of the dissertation were also shared at the Futures of American Studies Institute at

Dartmouth College in the summers of 2009, 2010, and 2011, and the Annual Meeting of

the American Studies Association in 2010. I thank the UVA Department of English for

the research support to attend those conferences. At Dartmouth, I thank Don Pease and

my other faculty contacts, Elizabeth Dillon, Soyica Diggs-Colbert, and Hamilton Carroll,

for the perspicacious understanding of American Studies as a field that they have

provided me, as well as my Dartmouth buddies Laura Portwood-Stacer, Meghan

Minarich, and Jonathan Beecher Field for the same (and for always keeping the party

going). Barry Shank offered critical interventions into my understanding of Rancière and

Richard Hell at ASA. During the summer of 2011, I also received fellowship support

from UVA to attend the School for Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, where I

had the great benefit of participating in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s seminar “Queer

Childhood in a Global Frame,” which was the signal influence on the first two chapters of

what follows (which were actually written after the other four). Kathryn’s influence, and

the influence of all of my friends in that seminar, especially Chase Dimock, has truly

revolutionized the style and focus of my theoretical work.

Additionally, I would like to thank my family and friends, not only those I met

in graduate school, but also and especially those with whom I have been playing music

and discussing it for as long as I can remember. Most importantly, I thank my parents,

Bob and Terri Cullen, for their support, both financial and emotional; my sisters, Meghan

and Maura; and my uncle, Frank “Duke” McLaughlin, who introduced me to most of the

bands in this dissertation. I hope that everyone gets to have someone in their life like

Duke that gives them such wonderful musical tools for expanding their understanding of

the world. The many conversations about music and art, and the late night listening

sessions I have had with Dave de la Vergne, Pat McGinty, Dan Sullivan, Sarah Edelman,

Dave Sim, Bob Keates, Dan Ferry, Chris Gorman, Andy Lastowka, Christian Eckman,

and Jon Wallin provided the spiritual core of this dissertation, and I hope that the work

contained herein recreates in some way, however attenuated, the passion for those topics

that I discovered in those conversations, the scope of which transcends the narrow

horizons of the ivory tower. I also thank other grad school friends for their intellectual

support and camaraderie, Katie Matson, Andrew Fippinger, Laura Goldblatt, Lindsay

O’Connor, Jean Franzino, Anna Ioannes, Rebecca Strauss, and Jason Saunders, to name

just a few. Among my friends, I would also like to give special acknowledgement to

Brendan McGillicuddy, who I met during the first weekend of my freshman year of

college and whose path through academia has followed a similarly circuitous route ever

since. I look forward to our continued collaboration as friends first and colleagues

second.

Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to a true rebel girl, Kristina Meshelski. I told

my students the other day that whatever you do, you should find someone smarter than

you to spend your life with, because you’ll never get bored, and I meant it. Kristina, you

changed my life and this dissertation, and it couldn’t have been completed without you. I

thank you for everything.

INTRODUCTION: The Punk Event

On August 16, 1974, exactly one week after Richard Nixon resigned from office and a

year after the Case-Church Amendment was passed, ending U.S. involvement in the

Vietnam War in theory if not in fact, in the midst of the oil crisis and the 1970s recession,

from which we may still be recovering, a brand new rock band called the Ramones made

their debut on the stage of a dingy biker bar at 315 Bowery in downtown Manhattan

called CBGB-OMFUG or CBGB for short. CBGB-OMFUG stood for Country Bluegrass

Blues and Other Music for Upstanding Gourmandizers, but the original idea of its owner

Hilly Kristal, to feature the same sort of roots music mentioned in its name, never took

off.

Instead, between its opening in December 1973 (nobody seems to know the exact

date), until its closing on October 15, 2006, CBGB became synonymous with another

genre of rock music called punk.

As several commentators have noted, Tavia Nyong’o and Stacy Thompson in

particular, “punk” is a complicated term, the full range of meanings of which would be

difficult to describe.

In his recent article “Brown Punk,” Nyong’o offers the following,

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Most histories of CBGB regard the original purpose of the bar, as a kind of honky-tonk,

meant to spearhead a country music revival downtown, as a weird coincidence. However,

it is interesting to wonder if Kristal’s original purpose for the bar might have had

something to do with what historian Bruce Schulman has called the “southernization” of

U.S. politics and culture during this period. As part of this southernization, for instance,

in 1973, as Schulman notes, New York mayor John Lindsay created Country Music Day

in the city to honor the Country Music Association’s choice to hold their annual

conference there (xiv). The 1970s in general were also the period when southern rock and

country music began the incredible commercial revival that they still enjoy today. See

Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Politics, and Society

(NY: Da Capo Press, 2002).

Tavia Nyong’o, “Brown Punk: Kalup Linzy’s Musical Anticipations,” TDR: The

Drama Review 54:3 (Fall 2010), 71-86; “Do You Want Queer Theory (or Do You Want

the Truth)? Intersections of Punk and Queer in the 1970s,” Radical History Review 100

punk “gathers to it the outside or underbelly of society, less through a specific semiotics

than through what is frequently, if amorphously, termed an attitude. Punk attitude

presents a hole or aperture in the symbolic order, through which history gleams.”

Within

the context of musicological discourse, Bernard Gendron’s traces the etymology of the

term punk in a chapter on the genre in his book From Monmartre to the Mudd Club:

Popular Music and the Avant-Garde.

As a noun, the Oxford English Dictionary offers at

least three divergent meanings—a prostitute, a tool for punching holes, and a piece of

“soft decayed or rotten wood.”

Associated with the latter meaning, a “punk” is also a

spark used to start a fire. Of course, as Nyong’o has pointed out, the term also had a life

of its own in prison discourse, and is still deployed widely as black vernacular slang,

describing the bottom in an act of gay sex.

As I mention below, Nyong’o traces the

interesting intersections between punk’s recent usage both within African-American,

queer, and musicological discourse. According to Gendron, the term was first used in

explicit reference to music in the writing of rock critic Greg Shaw and later took on a life

of its own when Lenny Kaye used it the liner notes to his celebrated 1972 compilation

Nuggets.

For now it should be noted that punk refers, in this context, not only to a

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(Winter 2008), 103-119; and “Punk’d Theory,” Social Text 23:3-4 (Fall-Winter 2005),

19-34; and Stacy Thompson, Punk Productions: Unfinished Business (Albany: SUNY

Press, 2004).

Nyong’o, “Brown Punk,” 75.

Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the

Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

"punk, n.3". OED Online. September 2013. Oxford University Press.

http://www.oed.com.libproxy.csun.edu/view/Entry/154687?rskey=E9JAHE&result=3&is

Advanced=false (accessed October 31, 2013).

Nyong’o, “Punk’d Theory.”

Shaw, qtd. in Gendron, 232; Lenny Kaye, ed. Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First

Psychedelic Era (Los Angeles: Elektra Records, 1972).

musical genre, but also to what I call, following Michael Denning and Raymond

Williams, a larger “cultural formation,” which includes the contributions of artists,

writers, celebrities, and other media personalities.

In this dissertation, I am specifically

concerned with this formation as it gathered around CBGB.

The Ramones were not necessarily the first punk band, nor was their CBGB show

on August 16 their first performance, nor were they even necessarily the first punk band

to appear on the CBGB stage. Nevertheless, for many, this event was the word made

flesh of the spirit of punk that had circulated downtown for several years. Ever since

Andy Warhol’s band, The Velvet Underground, had crashed the annual banquet of the

New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry at Delmonico’s on January 12, 1966, there had

been a sense in New York City that some sinister force, some new artistic idea was

struggling to represent itself, either through music or literature, underground cinema or

performance art.

There had been several stabbing tries at diagnosing a sickness at the

heart of what Theodore Roszak had famously called “the counterculture,” for instance,

the sophomorish humor of the Fugs, Patti Smith’s early poetry, or the glam rock of the

New York Dolls, but the Ramones seemed to trump all these artists, both in their

perspicacity and their commitment, not because they seemed especially aware of their

malaise, but totally engrossed in it.

As many critics and historians have already noted,

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Raymond Williams, qtd. in Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of

American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), xx.

Grace Glueck, “Syndromes Pop at Delmonico’s,” The New York Times (January 13,

1966), reprinted in Albin Zak, ed. The Velvet Underground Companion: Four Decades of

Commentary (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), 3-5. This event is discussed at greater

length in chapter one.

Theodore Roszak, The Makings of a Counter Culture: Reflections of the Technocratic

Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).

the 1970s were a confusing decade in the U.S. Coming hot on the heels of Watergate,

the recession, and the end of the Vietnam War, the Ramones both responded to that

confusion, and like a broken mirror, reflected and refracted it, within their music, their

look, and the way they carried themselves. This refractive quality was, in turn, borrowed

by the Ramones’s punk followers, as well as the conceptual artist Dan Graham, discussed

in my fourth chapter below.

If you were not there, it is impossible to know exactly what an early Ramones’s

gig might have felt like, but we can get an idea from a concert video of three songs from

their thirteenth gig, the earliest existing footage of the band, filmed at CBGB less than a

month after their debut, on September 15, 1974.

The band appears onstage in a rough

approximation of their trademark look, although there are still some trappings of their

members’ former lives at glam rock wannabes. Joey Ramone had actually sung for a

glam rock band called Sniper for a period of time. On September 15, the guitarist Johnny

is decked out in his glam rock finery, sporting tight pants, maybe spandex, and a bolo

jacket with leopard print lapels. The band can barely keep it together. During the second

song, “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement,” Joey seems to fall down in a weird

impersonation of James Brown dropping to his knees during a song’s most melodramatic

moment. Otherwise, his performance is mincing, verging on the campy, what the cultural

critic and musical provocateur Drew Daniel might call “queer minstrelsy.”

Indeed,

some spectators might have found this aspect of Ramones’ performance offensive, but as

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The performance is included as part of Ramones, It’s Alive (Burbank, CA: Rhino

Home Entertainment, 2007). DVD.

Drew Daniel, “Why Be Something that You’re Not?” Punk Performance and the

Epistemology of Queer Minstrelsy,” Social Text 31:3 (Fall 2013), 13-34.

Daniel argues, queer minstrelsy in punk has sometimes challenged traditional notions of

queer epistemology, as in the case of the Meatmen singer Tecso Vee, and the Ramones’

performance would seem to have a similar effect. As Joey Ramone’s own brother,

Mickey Leigh has written of the earlier glam rock era,

It was like a love-in run amok. Though the sixties credo was that everybody

should do their own thing, homosexuality had still been concealed—even in rock

& roll. Bowie, Reed, and Andy Warhol did just about everything to change all

that. The difference now was that the boundaries of gender didn’t separate male

from female but included them both. You were what you were, at whatever time

you chose to be. . . . Jeff was neither athletically inclined nor macho. Finally it

didn’t matter.

Claiming the Ramones as queer anti-heroes is somewhat risky business. After all, the

cultural politics of their guitarist Joey were quite reactionary, although he never spoke out

on this particular issue, but in this performance, the band is playing with audience

expectations not only regarding how a rock band should sound, but also how they should

act, and taking the campy persona of prior rock stars, like Mick Jagger or Little Richard,

to their absurd extreme. At points, the entire spectacle seems to break down, for instance,

between songs, when the band argues about what to play next. It is unclear whether this is

a cleverly staged bit of performance art or whether the band members are really

bickering, but it serves as an emblem for the entirely uncanny nature of their

performance. As early admirer Roberta Bayley, who took the photograph for their first

album cover, and was part of the pre-Sex Pistols scene surrounding Malcolm McLaren’s

shop Let It Rock, would put it, “It was very strange, seeing them for the first time,

because you didn’t have any precedent for the look or the sound or the really short songs,

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Mickey Leigh and Legs McNeil, I Spent the Night with Joey Ramone: A Family

Memoir (NY: Touchstone, 2009), 90.

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even. They played a really short set. It was almost like conceptual art, thinking about

it. It was weird but great.”

We will return to the Ramones’s connections to conceptual

art in chapters four and five, which were actually more solid than Bayley might have

realized, but for now, we will merely pause to recognize that it is the uncanny

undecidability regarding what was actually going on at these Ramones performances that

made them so provocative. As literary critic John Lyons has mentioned, the experience of

the uncanny, for Sigmund Freud, was not an intellectual but an emotional experience.

represents a return of the repressed, the repressed feeling of pre-cognitive plenitude that

the baby experienced before it was severed from the mother’s breast by language, what

Jacques Laçan called “the name of the father,” its moment of interpellation into

language’s symbolic order.

It was this experience that the Ramones revived at CBGB,

the reversal of the law of the father, symbolized by his name, although it was not

regressive. Rather, it was animistic, recapturing a lost energy for rock and roll, and

recapturing a downtown space in Manhattan that was slipping from its former denizens’

grasp.

As another early CBGB performer Richard Hell put it, it was important that the

Ramones and their cohort chose this bar on the Bowery as their headquarters since “the

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Roberta Bayley, quoted in Everett True, Hey Ho Let’s Go: The Story of the Ramones

(NY: Omnibus Press, 2002), 20.

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny (1919),” The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis

and Other Works, edited by James Strachey (NY: Norton, 1976), 217-256; and personal

conversation with John Lyons, June 27, 2013, University of Virginia, Andrew W. Mellon

Dissertation Seminar.

Jacques Laçan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,”

in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink (New York:

Norton, 2006), 230.

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Bowery has signified drunkenness, dereliction, and failure for as long as anyone can

remember.”

He continues, “Such is the mental space of its physical space.”

Its name is

derived from an antiquated Dutch word for “farm.” It started out as a road for cattle, but

by the early 1800s had become the city’s first entertainment district. During the 1840s, it

served as the incubator for blackface minstrelsy, the U.S.’s first form of popular culture,

featuring an impressive number of saloons, brothels, and cheap hotels. By the time the

Ramones arrived, the area had been in steep decline. It was the site of stabbings and

shootings, and many homeless men and women called it home, in part because of the

many cheap flophouses that lined the street until very recently. Nowadays, the area has

been profoundly changed by gentrification, and CBGB was one of the casualties.

Looking south from the pavement in front of the former club, the first thing one sees is a

branch of the Chase-Manhattan bank. Inside the club, there is now an upscale clothing

and overpriced record store owned by fashion designer Jon Varvatos. Instead of

flophouses, across the street there is now the boutique Bowery Hotel, and in either

direction are the shiny new exteriors of the New Museum and Cooper Union, the latter of

which many critics view as a testament to the ascendance of the 1%. In the wake of the

renovation, Cooper Union announced that for the first time ever that it would attempt to

charge its students tuition, a decision that is still being disputed during this writing.

Spaces tell a story, and this dissertation, “A School for Singing,” attempts to

relate that story regarding CBGB. Perhaps more richly than any song, novel, film script,

or painting, the material traces we leave on built space function as a social text from

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Richard Hell, “CBGB as a Physical Space,” in Dominic Molon, ed. Sympathy for the

Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007), 27.

Ibid.

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which can be read the myths and legends of a disembodied age. Just as history has

deposited in us “an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory,” as Antonio Gramsci

once put it, so too do we leave our marks across the flesh of history, embedded in

persons, places, and things.

The technocratic need for abstraction and symbolization, in

computer codes, genetic sequences, and financial derivatives, often comes off like an

attempt to erase these sloppy marks of our earthly legacy, but they persist, ineluctably,

testifying, bearing witness for or against us. As Theodore Dreiser wondered along with

his protagonist Carrie Meeber, gazing at the talking collars and shoes at Partridge’s,

“Who shall translate for us the language of the stones?”

“A School for Singing” is such

an attempt.

It takes its name from a couple lines in W.B. Yeats’s poem “Sailing to

Byzantium,” “Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own

magnificence,” and argues that the CBGB scene intervened on Yeats’s classical

modernism and the avant-garde at a moment of cultural and political crisis by attempting

to erect a vernacular alternative at a bombed out site in downtown Manhattan.

CBGB was making its claim to fame, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were

being erected just a couple miles away. Throughout this dissertation, I read the CBGB

scene as a direct cultural response to the process of what Randy Martin has called

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Antonio Gramsci, “The Study of Philosophy,” in Selections from the Prison

Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New

York: International Publishers, 1971), 324.

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900; New York: Pocket Books, 2008), 102.

William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” in Selected Poems and Four Plays, 4

edition, M.L. Rosenthal, ed. (NY: Scribner, 1996), 102-103.

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“financialization” that the Twin Towers represented.

As we will see at the conclusion

of “A School for Singing,” the memory of CBGB has played an important role in our

cultural memory after the loss of these towers as well. According to this argument, the

CBGB scene linked the classical modernist struggle for autonomy, poetically, to

contemporary political struggles over working class rights, queer identity, and

deindustrialization in an aesthetic language that was literary, musical, and visual, and was

also equally indebted to the vernacular of popular culture. In the process, the CBGB

scene sowed the seeds for all punk scenes and all punk aesthetics to come.

As it has been discussed in this introduction, the Ramones first performance was

the punk event around which this scene or cultural formation grew. In his book Being and

Event, Alain Badiou defines an event as an absent presence that enacts a void in a

previous situation, whether it be scientific, artistic, political, or amorous.

In the

Lacanian terms mentioned above, and in the terms employed across Nyong’o’s work on

punk, the event may be thought of as a break or interruption in the symbolic order of

daily life. The Ramones grew out of a void in the counterculture, from which each of

their members had been rejected. Joey, their leader, born Jefrey Hyman, was a gawky

Jewish kid from Forest Hills, Queens. He was actually born physically deformed because

the fetus of his undeveloped twin brother had fused to his spine, causing him

awkwardness and discomfort throughout his life.

He was also mentally ill, suffering

from crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder until his death in 2001. On guitar was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Randy Martin, The Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University

Press, 2002).

Alain Badiou, Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum,

2005), 178-183.

Leigh and McNeil, 2.

14!

Johnny, the most controversial member of the band, born John Cummings. John was

an all-American boy gone bad, the reactionary yin to Joey’s progressive, sensitive yang.

Cummings claimed he formed the band because he was laid off from his job as a

construction worker because of affirmative action.

The underlying racism of this

statement betrays a larger tension that runs throughout the Ramones’s work and the punk

cultural formation more generally. In the song “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World”

from their first album, Joey proclaims himself a “shock trooper in a stupor…a Nazi

schatzi gonna fight for the Fatherland.”

The fact that a Jew delivered these lines and

that the son of Holocaust survivors was sitting behind the drum kit does little to dispel the

threat of these lyrics. The Ramones at their best, like punk more generally, were

grotesque and disturbing, and this was at least part of their charm. After all, wasn’t the

U.S. at this juncture grotesque and disturbing too? In another song from the same album,

“Glad to See You Go,” they proclaimed that “in a moment of passion,” they would “get

glory, like Charles Manson.” Why Manson and not Marlon Brando or James Dean?

Because the Ramones’s performances attested to their existence within what Mark

Seltzer has called the U.S.’s “wound culture,” so saturated by violence and trauma as to

be virtually unlivable.

This is the reason the Ramones sing about Manson, Patty Hearst,

and the Nazis (not Hitler, but “little German boys”): through them, they were trying to

garner some insight into the U.S.’s real monsters, Lieutenant William Calley, Richard

Nixon, or Anita Bryant, for instance. The drummer Tommy (born Erdélyi) was the son of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ibid., 105.

Ramones, Ramones (New York: Sire, 1976).

Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York:

Routledge, 1998).

15!

Hungarian Holocaust survivors and the only member who actually had any real

experience in the music industry prior to joining the band. He had played in the semi-

notable Queens band the Tangerine Puppets (at least they were an inspiration to the other

Ramones), and worked at the Record Plant in New York, engineering such famous

records as Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys.

He had also put in time at the Museum of

Modern Art in their film library and would later claim that one of the primary influences

on his ideas for the band was the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

Dee Dee, the bassist

and heart and soul of the band, born Douglas Colvin, was brought up as a military brat in

Germany where he would collect Nazi artifacts in the fields around his house. He was a

punk before punk existed, having worked as a hustler to earn money for clothes when he

was laid off from the same job as Johnny. He would later commemorate this period in his

life in the song “53

& 3

,” from the band’s debut album, and one of their most

effective—“Then I took my razorblade / Then I did what God forbade / Now the cop’s

are after me / But I proved that I’m no sissy.”

As mentioned above, the critical theorist Tavia Nyong’o has recently argued that

the term “punk” has acted as what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have called a

“floating signifier” for the intersections between racial and queer identity since the genre

first emerged in the early 1970s.

Although I quibble with some of his readings in what

follows, this work and the work of Nyong’o’s colleagues, some of which has been

collected in a recent issue of Social Text, has informed the overall shape of this project

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jimi Hendrix, Band of Gypsys (Los Angeles: Capitol, 1970).

True, 19.

See Nyong’o, “Punk’d Theory;” and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony

and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2

ed. (New York:

Verso, 2001).

16!

and been generative for its argument.

What Nyong’o’s work, along with that of José

Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, Mimi Nguyen, and others has informed us is that punk has

always been non-white, and female, despite the fact that so many of its straight, white,

and male spokespeople have gotten most of the credit.

To some extent, I walk a shaky

line in this dissertation by returning to CBGB, which for some symbolizes the very worst

tendencies towards whitewashing, sexism, ableism, and homophobia within the punk

pantheon, but as I hope what follows shows, returning to this original site of the punk

cultural formation reveals to us unnoticed ways in which the scene was diverse,

especially when it came to matters of gender and sexual experimentation. In fact, it is a

central argument of what follows that the CBGB scene was a sometimes grotesque, but

always invigorating response, especially, to two major events in downtown Manhattan—

the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 and the beginning of the financial crisis in 1973, which

lead to the city declaring bankruptcy in 1975. In the face of these developments, punk, as

embodied by the Ramones’ first performance, was an artistic event intended to reclaim

space in downtown New York and establish what Michel Foucault once called a

“heterotopia” in downtown New York.

As Foucault defines it, a heterotopia is a space

in which traditional cultural values are overturning, if only temporarily. He gives the

example of an airport, a graveyard, or a Chinatown. Although for Foucault, heterotopias

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Punk and Its Afterlives,” special issue of Social Text 31:3 (Fall 2013), edited by Jayna

Brown, Patrick Deer, and Tavia Nyong’o.

See Muñoz and Halberstam’s contributions the special issue listed above; also Judith

Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NY:

NYU Press, 2005) and Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay, White Riot: Punk

Rock and the Politics of Race (NY: Verso, 2011), which includes essays by Nguyen

along with many others.

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16:1

(Spring 1986), 22-27.

17!

exist, to some extent, by virtue of their institutional function. In what follows I explore

the heteropian as an institutional as well as an aesthetic concept in terms similar to

another follower of Foucault’s, Jacques Rancière. For Rancière, the beautiful aesthetics

of heterotopia are opposed, politically, to a sublime aesthetics of what he calls

“heteronomy.”

Each of these concepts are explored in greater depth in chapters three,

five, and sex below.

Another important theoretical interlocutor in the first two chapters of this work is

the queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton. In her book, The Queer Child, Stockton argues

that her titular figure has been a ghostly figure haunting what Ellen Key called “the

century of the child” before it even began, in the year 1900.

Stockton convincingly

argues that all children are queer because they are not felt capable or responsible enough

of exhibiting adult sexuality. Of course, there may be good reasons for this denial,

concerning children’s ability to consent not only to sexual activity but any other number

of adult decisions, but as Stockton reveals, especially in her chapter on the twentieth

century classic of childhood sexuality Lolita, which Frederic Jameson has described in

another context as emblematic of the whole of aesthetic modernism, discerning a child’s

motives and intentions is perhaps no easier or harder than those of an adult, and society’s

unwillingness to acknowledge this fact in a straightforward and responsible manner

perhaps accounts for our larger inability to care for children, especially children of color,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge,”

Critical Inquiry 36 (Autumn 2006), 1-19.

Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth

Century (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009).

18!

girls, and the non-gender-conforming.

As each chapter of a “School for Singing”

reveals, the punk scene, as an extension of earlier rock scenes, was a kind of coming out

party for the queer child, which I think has allowed this figure its higher level of public

visibility in recent years, among Lady Gaga’s “little monsters,” on the show Glee, or as

part of the nationwide anti-bullying campaigns. Every bullied kid is also a queer, whether

they know it or not, and the excavation of punk’s queer roots in this dissertation might

help them discover that.

Finally, the dissertation’s title, in its invocation of schooling and the lyrical voice,

besides its reference to Yeats, is also meant to gesture towards the CBGB scene’s

position within a larger Cold War cultural formation that encompassed punk but has also

rejected it. Besides the containment culture described by historians such as Elaine Tyler

May and Alan Nadel, “A School for Singing” also argues that the CBGB scene was the

kind of high-school-dropout-stepbrother to the so-called “program era” that Marc McGurl

has described as being promoted and erected by their college-age siblings.

In his book

The Program Era, McGurl makes a convincing argument on behalf of the creative

writing program’s role in shaping the cultural networks that govern literary expression

and the wider cultural imagination today. Unlike many other academic critics, McGurl

does not see the writing program as a bureaucratized alternative to a thriving avant-garde,

but rather an extension of that avant-garde’s political and aesthetic concerns into the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Stockton, 119-154; and Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology

of the Present (NY: Verso, 2002), 197-210.

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988),

(New York: Basic Books, revised and updated 1999); Marc McGurl, The Program Era:

Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009);

and Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the

Atomic Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995).

19!

mainstream. For him, institutionalization is not necessarily a bad thing as long as it

produces literature that is communitarian and progressive; however, questions linger at

the end of his book, partially as a function of its focus on narrative fiction. However,

whither poetry, and whither especially lyric poetry, and specifically the most popular

form of lyric poetry of the twentieth century, the popular song, the production of which is

institutionalized, for sure, but which occurs for the most part outside of the colleges?

Within the larger field of post-WWII and contemporary cultural poetics, this is one of the

central concerns of “A School for Singing.” An implicit argument that runs throughout

this dissertation is that something like the CBGB scene is where post-WWII poetic

lyricism tout court resides after the collapse of the historical avant-gardes and political

literary modernism occurred somewhere over Hiroshima or perhaps on the CBS Nightly

News with Walter Cronkite. Whichever story you tell about it, I read the CBGB scene as

a politically-committed salve to postmodernity in its torturous Marxist variant so

eloquently explored by Jameson, not as a symptom of it.

In what follows, I make these arguments over the course of six chapters, three

interludes or excurses, and a coda. In the first chapter, “Punk, Between Beat and Pop; or,

Lou Reed as Queer Child” I explore the CBGB scene’s connections to two artistic avant-

gardes that immediately preceded it, the beat formation in literature and the pop art scene

centered around Andy Warhol’s Factory in midtown Manhattan. I trace the influence of

these two scenes, especially, on the career of the proto-punk par excellence Lou Reed,

who I attempt to claim as a queer child of the sixties counterculture and the Cold War

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,

NC: Duke UP, 1991).

20!

containment culture. By tracing Reed’s influences through beat and pop, and taking

seriously his connection to the earlier modernist poet Delmore Schwartz, I argue for the

ways in which the CBGB scene offered an alternative to these previous cultural

formations in terms of sexuality, style, and gender relations. In particular, I discuss the

way in which Reed’s masochism, expressed in his music, lyrics, and performance

practices exemplified a kind of subjectivity different from the one endorsed by Herbert

Marcuse in his epoch-making Eros and Civilization and much closer to Michel

Foucault’s ideas regarding “the care of the self,” which he expressed in the third volume

of his similarly influential History of Sexuality.

In the second chapter, “How Do You

Spell Love? Girl Group Pop and the Politics of Punk Appropriation,” I explore a

similarly constitutive aesthetic dimension of the CBGB punk scene that also attests to the

importance of the queer child within that scene’s aesthetic and poetic imagination. The

conclusion of the chapter traces these influences into punk’s future after CBGB by

discussing them in relation to two important west coast punk bands, the Germs and Go-

Go’s, and the contemporary girl group revival by Kathleen Hanna, the Breeders, Sonic

Youth, Courtney Love, and others.

In my third chapter, “Punk Rock In-Formation; or, the Concept of the Ramones,”

I return to the subject of this introduction, the Ramones, whom some critics consider the

most demotic of the CBGB punk bands, but whom I actually claim was one of the most

conceptually rich. I explore the band’s connection to the queer artist Arturo Vega, who

designed their clothes, stage setup, and insignia, and trace his influences further into the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Michael Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self (New York:

Vintage, 1984); and Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry

(New York: Beacon Press, 1955).

21!

New York queer underground than has previously been attempted. In the fifth chapter,

“Dan Graham’s Conceptual Reflections: On the Ramones and CBGB,” I discuss the

reinterpretation of the band’s work by the conceptual artist Dan Graham, who was one of

the first critics of any stripe to write about punk seriously as more than just a pop music

fad. Through close analysis of one of Graham’s signature works, Performance/Audience/

Mirror, and some discussion of his video art piece Rock My Religion, I argue that

Graham and the Ramones should not be seen as members of completely different artistic

worlds but as part of what the philosopher Jacques Ranciére might call the same

“distribution of the sensible.”

In the case of the Ramones, I relate this distribution of the

sensible to the queer kinship system implied by their public appearance as brothers, and

the queer punk undercommons discussed by José Muñoz.

In my final two chapters, “There Is No Way Out of the Valley: The Heterotopian

Aesthetics of Television and William S. Burroughs,” and “Cyberspace as Any-Space-

Whatsoever: The Punk Soundscapes of William Gibson,” I discuss some of the literary

sub-formations of this queer punk undercommons that two cyberpunk writers, William S.

Burroughs and William Gibson, have explored in the fiction they wrote after the CBGB

scene, which was inspired by it. In these chapters, I engage most directly with the spatial

dimensions of heterotopia as an aesthetic concept, in order to explore the ideas about

urban space that these writers intuited from listening to and hanging out with CBGB

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jacques Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible,

translated by Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2006).

José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New

York: NYU Press, 2009), and “‘Gimme Gimme This . . .Gimme Gimme That:’

Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons,” Social Text 31:3 (Fall 2013),

95-110.

22!

artists. From 1973 to 1981, Burroughs lived less than a mile away from the club at 222

Bowery in a refurbished YMCA gymnasium that he called the Bunker. Patti Smith,

Richard Hell, and the members of Blondie were frequent guests there, where they would

discuss literature, take drugs, and philosophize. I argue that Burroughs, in a trilogy of

novels he wrote in the eighties, Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and

The Western Lands, was reflecting on his participation in the CBGB scene and its legacy.

In particular, I compare his work to that of the band Television during their CBGB

heyday in order to explain how they were thinking the same way about heterotopia,

financialization, and modernity. In my chapter on Gibson, I explain how Burroughs’s

primary artistic inheritor, along with J.G. Ballard and Kathy Acker, repurposed this

legacy in his sensational postmodern novels Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition, and

Spook Country.

The latter part of this chapter, especially, feeds into my coda, “Occupy the

Bowery, Occupy the Blank” which meditates specifically on the importance of the CBGB

scene’s ideas regarding urban space and sexuality in a post-9/11 world. I begin by

discussing Jennifer Egan’s popular 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I

argue is literally haunted by the memory of the CBGB scene. I also trace the reiterations

of the CBGB spirit in three other important cultural productions of the last few years—

the Occupy Wall Street protests near Ground Zero in New York, Pussy Riot’s occupation

of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2012, and the recent exhibit Punk: Chaos to

Couture, which ran at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during the Summer

of 2013.

23!

As I am writing this, too, a new fiction film on the history of CBGB is being

released, and the second annual CBGB film and music festival is being held in New York

City. I wish I could be there, but I live in L.A. now, a situation that I worry about as the

author of this dissertation, but don’t regret. I gave New York a try once, and even visited

CBGB on a random drunken night when I went to college there, but by that time, the club

was feeding off its own legacy, not really booking challenging bands anymore. The

atmosphere was still there, but not the reason for being, and I feel, to some extent, that

New York City rejected me too. As a suburban kid from Philadelphia, travelling to New

York and living there was, in many ways, the epitome of making it big, but I wonder

anymore if I really belonged there. Growing up, I was always more attracted to the glitz

and glamour of L.A.—as a lover of Disney cartoons and Hollywood movies—as well as

L.A.’s sleazy side, the stuff of noir fantasy. Like David Byrne, a member of the CBGB

scene expressed in a recent editorial, I wonder whether either of these things—sleaziness

or glamour—can be found in New York anymore on an artist, student, or professor’s

budget.

Do these people even exist anymore in the way they did in 1973? This is what

Occupy Wall Street has lamented and the CBGB scene celebrated. Passing back through

this moment in time, intellectually, like Walter Benjamin through the arcades of Paris, is

intended, in part, to imagine a way back to that time sans the homophobia, racism,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

David Byrne, “Will Work for Inspiration,” Creative Time Reports,

www.creativetimereports.com, October 7, 2013. Accessed October 10, 2013.

24!

sexism, or ableism.

Hopefully, it is a worthy attempt. For now, the music, and art,

and literature, and film…Roll tape.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by

Howard Elland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2002).

25!

EXCURSUS: “Land”

The penultimate song on Patti Smith’s first album Horses is called “Land.”

It is a song

suite made up of three sections: “Horses,” “Land of a Thousand Dances,” and “La Mer

(de).” The song begins with Smith’s unaccompanied voice reciting a seemingly

spontaneous bit of beat poetry: “The boy was in the hallway drinking a glass of tea /

From the other end of the hallway a rhythm was generating / Another boy was sliding up

the hallway / He merged perfectly with the hallway / He merged perfectly, the mirror in

the hallway.” In the 2008 biographical documentary of Smith, Dream of Life, she claims

in voiceover, while discussing the influence of her mentor William S. Burroughs, that the

hero of “Land,” later named as “Johnny,” “was truly a descendant of Johnny and the

wild boys,” the main character (if one can call him that) in Burroughs’s experimental

novel The Wild Boys originally published in 1971.

Later, as Smith is joined by the

churning guitar of Lenny Kaye, and pounding drums and bass of Jay Dee Daugherty and

Ivan Kral, she describes Johnny being “pushed against a locker,” apparently raped,

while being surrounding by “horses,” an incantation that Smith repeats throughout the

conclusion of this first section of “Land.” Then suddenly, a little over one minute into the

song, the chaos stops. The band clicks in, and they begin playing the classic 1962 pop hit

by Chris Kenner, “Land of a Thousand Dances,” later popularized by Headhunter and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Patti Smith, Horses (New York: Arista Records, 1975).

Patti Smith, Dream of Life, directed by Steven Sebring (New York: Celluloid Dreams,

2008); and William S. Burroughs, The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (New York: Grove

Press, 1971).

26!

the Cannibals and Wilson Pickett, whose version was the most commercially

successful.

The shift is jarring, but it gets your head nodding. It does not seem to fit,

exactly, the lyrical universe that Smith sketched earlier in the composition, which is

otherwise quite erudite and esoteric, including the Burroughs references and several

strange puns, such as the title of the third section, mer de/merde = sea of/shit, or the riff

between “sea of possibilities” and “one who seizes possibilities.” It is in this interval

between beat and pop where punk begins, between the beat of the drum and the pop of

lyrical signification, and also between two genres of avant-garde literary and artistic

production—beat literature and pop art. This space also functions as what Jacques

Derrida has called, following Plato, Socrates, and Martin Heidegger, a khora—what is

translated in Heidegger as a “clearing” in space that is also a place illuminating the gap

or distance between being and non-being, which for Derrida are parasitic concepts.

Smith sings later on the track, in the transition to “Land”’s final section, “the sea of

shit,” “There’s a little place / A place called space / It’s a pretty little place / It’s across

the tracks / Across the tracks / And the name of the place is a I like it like that.”

This

interval or khora may also be describes in Tavia Nyong’o’s terms as a “black hole,”

ripped open in the sonic fabric not just of this song, but also of late modernity; between

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Headhunter and the Cannibals, “Land of a Thousand Dances” (New York: Rampart,

1965); Chris Kenner; “Land of a Thousand Dances” (New York: Instant, 1962); Wilson

Pickett, “Land of a Thousand Dances” (New York: Atlantic, 1966).

On the clearing, see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie

and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper-Collins, 2008), 169-172. See also Jacques

Derrida on the khora, “As If It Were Possible, ‘Within Such Limits…’” translated by

Benjamin Elmwood with Ellen Rottenberg, in Negotiations: Interventions and

Interviews, 1971-2001 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 343-370.

“I like it like that” is a reference to another Chris Kenner song of the same title (New

York: Instant, 1961).

27!

the highbrow and the lowbrow, and the avant-garde and the vernacular.

Smith, Lou

Reed, the Velvet Underground, the queer girl groups before her, and their punk

appropriators after her occupies this space in the same richly poetic way suggested by

recent political movements. Let’s step into this hole, this khora, this hallway, adorned

with mirrors, which also has erotic connotations, and look around.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nyong’o, “Brown Punk,” 75.

28!

CHAPTER ONE: Punk, Between Beat and Pop; or, Lou Reed as Queer Child

Before punk there was the beat, not just the beat of the drum, but beat literature of the

kind popularized on college campuses and coffee houses throughout the 1960s—Allen

Ginsberg’s Howl, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch

and Nova Trilogy, as well as issues of the Chicago, Evergreen, and Partisan Reviews.

Beat literature was the literary basis upon which punk was founded, and through which it

gathered its aspirations to high art.

At the forefront of this orientation towards the beat is Lou Reed, a middle class

Jewish boy raised on Long Island and born in Brooklyn, who in 1964 founded the Velvet

Underground with John Cale and Angus MacLise. The Velvet Underground were the

proto-punk band bar none. They perfected their style during their time with Andy

Warhol, playing in his multimedia show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and they also

borrowed from the black and white R & B and soul musicians that Reed so instinctively

admired, but it was beat literature and the partially commodified attitude of the beatnik or

urban hipster that it spawned lie at the core of the Velvet Underground’s political and

aesthetic concerns (to the extent that they might be said to have had the former). As the

musicologist Elizabeth Lindau has argued, the Velvet Underground were essentially

concerned with minimalism and repetition as avant-garde aesthetic ideals, meant to bring

about transcendental spiritual states and mock repetition elsewhere in U.S. popular

culture, which connected them not only to Andy Warhol’s Factory, where they hung out

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1959); Allen Ginsberg,

Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956); and Jack Kerouac, On

the Road (New York: Viking, 1957).

For a sweeping survey of the historical connections between beat and punk, see Victor

Bockris, Beat Punks (NY: Da Capo, 2000), on which I draw throughout this chapter.

29!

and practiced, but also to the academic world of modern classical composers, such as

Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich (to name just a few).

However, as Victor Bockris describes in his autobiography of Reed, Transformer,

reading the beats and the existentialist philosophers, such as Søren Kirkegaard and

Friedrich Nietzsche, whom the beats, such as Burroughs and Kerouac, so deeply admired,

served, at least in Lou Reed’s case, as an entry point into the world of underground art,

literature, and media, a black hole from which he has never escaped (not that he would

want to).

Taking (or perhaps faking) the beatnik pose, which Jack Kerouac originally

intended to be “beatific,” allowed Reed to position himself inside and astride prevailing

Cold War discourses of politics and sexuality, especially as they governed queer sexual

identity, through his experimentation with the masochistic social and erotic contract.

Lou Reed’s relationship to both beat and pop, as well as his modernist mentor

Delmore Schwartz, was lateral, transgressive, and sideways—in a word, queer. He was

born three months after Pearl Harbor, in the midst of what Elaine Tyler May and Alan

Nadel have called “Cold War containment culture.”

He received electroconvulsive

therapy (electroshock treatment or ECT) in 1956, at the Rockland County Psychiatric

Center, northwest of Manhattan, as a treatment for what Bockris suggests his parents

considered “homosexual behavior and alarming mood swings.”

As Bockris describes it,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

See Elizabeth Lindau, “Art Is Dead. Long Live Rock! Avant-Gardism and Rock Music,

1967-99” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Virginia, 2012).

Victor Bockris, Transformer: The Lou Reed Story (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 30. I

have relied on this work by Bockris for historical background throughout this chapter.

See May, Homeward Bound, and Nadel, Containment Culture.

Stockton uses this term in The Queer Child, 6.

30!

Reed had developed “an effeminate way of walking.”

This treatment occurred one

year after the publication of Lolita, the novel that Kathryn Bond Stockton points out did

more to define the sexual child in the twentieth century than any other cultural text.

Ginsberg’s “Howl” was performed for the first time in the same year, and mentioned

Rockland, the same place where Ginsberg met that poem’s dedicatee Carl Solomon, both

of whom were seeking treatment for their own gay desires.

Reed participated in Andy

Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable “happenings” between 1965 and 1967, a coming

out party of sorts for Warhol’s queer children that presaged the Stonewall Rebellion in

1968. He released his most acclaimed album Berlin in 1973, the same year that

homosexuality was removed as a disease from the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, only to

be replaced by Gender Disorder in Children in 1981, the same year that Reed released

one of his most confessional albums, Growing Up in Public, which seemed to allude,

however cagily, to his dalliances with gay sex, transgenderism, and masochism during

the 1970s.

On the song “Make Up,” from his 1972 album, Transformer, he sang,

“We’re coming out / Out of our closets / Out on the streets,” a slogan that his sometimes

lover and Warhol confidante Billy Name claims Reed took directly from a popular flyer

around New York City at the time, posted by the post-Stonewall group the Gay

Liberation Front.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ibid.

Stockton, 119-154.

Ginsberg, Howl; and Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (Paris: Olympia, 1955).

Lou Reed, Berlin (New York: RCA, 1973), and Growing Up in Public (New York:

Arista, 1981).

Reed, Transformer (New York: RCA, 1972); and Billy Name, qtd. in Bockris,

Transformer, 169.

31!

In other words, in Lou Reed’s work with the Velvet Underground during the

1960s and 70s, and his own solo work, at least until the 1982 album The Blue Mask, Reed

synthesizes a queer identity and aesthetic that is slippery and motile, that grows sideways

in the fashion that Stockton suggests all queer children grow during the twentieth century

since they cannot really “grow up” in the terms enforced upon them by the parent

culture.

Reed’s corpus grows plump with meanings as it moves laterally through the

course of late twentieth century history, queer history, and punk history, and endows to

the CBGB scene a queer aesthetic, a sideways aesthetic, that defines that scene’s

orientation towards history and the cultural politics of the late twentieth century.

Lou Reed, Delmore Schwartz, and the Queer Cultural Politics of Late Modernity

In 1960, after a brief stint at NYU’s Bronx campus, Reed left his childhood home to

attend Syracuse University in upstate New York, where he met the poet and short story

writer Delmore Schwartz, who served as something of a queer father to Reed, despite his

palpable discomfort with Reed’s bisexuality.

Schwartz belonged to Reed’s parents’

generation and had similar roots, the son of Jewish parents who were born in Romania

and brought him up in Brooklyn. Schwartz was briefly a cause célèbre among modernist

writers, including T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound, as well as the

New Critic Allen Tate, who praised his first book In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Stockton, 1-57.

Bockris, Transformer, 62.

32!

published by New Directions in 1938.

He won the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1959,

for his book Summer Knowledge, although by that time he had become disenchanted with

the literary world after the negative critical response to his epic poem Genesis, published

a decade earlier. By the time Reed arrived at Syracuse, Schwartz was already in the

advanced stages of alcoholic dissipation, and also addicted to speed. However, from all

accounts, Schwartz and Reed developed a close emotional relationship, and Schwartz

considered Reed an inheritor of his artistic legacy, even though he had not read a word, to

that point, that Reed had written. According to Bockris, it was apparently some spark of

youthful enthusiasm that attracted Schwartz to Reed, or perhaps just his young disciple’s

reverence.

Despite his disdain for the youth culture that Reed represented and his

bisexuality, Schwartz was attracted to his proto-punk, beatnik pose, which lead Reed to

connect his musical experiments, which were already occurring in high school, with

various R & B bands, to his literary ones.

Reed has recently published a tribute to Schwartz in Poetry magazine, in which he

describes his teacher as “the greatest man [he] ever knew.”

He also dedicated a song to

Schwartz, “European Son,” on the Velvet Underground’s debut album The Velvet

Underground & Nico, and mentions Schwartz in the song “Our House,” the leadoff track

from The Blue Mask. In other words, Schwartz’s poetical figure bookends Reed’s career

as a queer artist. He was there at its inception in the heady days of collegiate discovery at

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Norfolk, CT: New Directions,

1938). I have relied on James Atlas, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

(NY: Avon Books, 1978) for biographical information.

Bockris, Transformer, 68.

Lou Reed, “O Delmore how I miss you: Dreams from his teacher,” Poetry 200 (June

2012), 264.

33!

Syracuse, and Reed invokes him in “Our House,” where he describes Schwartz

appearing before him and his new wife Sylvia (nee Morales) as a ghost, summoned by

using a Ouija board. On the album that preceded The Blue Mask, 1980’s Growing Up in

Public, Reed described Sylvia as an “angel,” and proclaimed that his “love [for her was

there] to stay.” Despite the fact that they later divorced, Reed’s relationship with Sylvia

marked the end of his flirtation with a queer public persona. Since then, he has hinted at

this persona, for instance, on the song “Halloween Parade” from New York in 1989 or in

his collaborations with the transgender artist Antony Hegarty, but he has not been as open

about his bisexuality as he was in the 1960s and 70s, when he publicly dated both men

and women, including the transwoman Rachel, to whom he dedicated his 1976 album

Coney Island Baby.

As Reed narrates on Growing Up in Public and The Blue Mask, this

evolution in his sexual personality was accompanied by his newfound sobriety, and in a

way, these albums might be understood as Reed bidding adieu to his queer youth.

As Kathryn Bond Stockton argues, the queer child haunts the gay adult, as well as

the straight world, to whom it is merely a ghostly or even a monstrous presence, literally

unimaginable within our current sexual epistemology.

On “Our House,” it is the ghost

of Lou Reed’s queer father Delmore Schwartz who haunts him and his wife, for the love

of whom Reed seems to overcompensate throughout both Growing Up in Public and The

Blue Mask. For instance, on the latter, he includes the song “Women,” an ode to the fairer

sex that, coming from a formerly out bisexual man, borders on the parodic. Insipidly,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Antony and the Johnsons, I Am a Bird Now (Bloomington, IN: Secretly Canadian,

2005); and Reed, Coney Island Baby (New York: RCA, 1976), and New York (New

York: Sire, 1989).

Stockton, 17-22.

34!

Reed repeats the mantra, “I love women,” over and over during the song’s chorus, as

though he is attempting to convince himself of it. On one hand, this mantra is also

misogynistic, but the listener cannot help but sympathize with Reed, who was literally

tortured by his parents and the state during his most formative years in order to exorcize

his love of men.

Schwartz’s relationship with Reed as queer mentor or father figure would be

relatively unimportant if it were not for the larger literary influence that Schwartz might

have had on Reed and hence the whole of the CBGB scene and punk more generally, as

well as the way in which Reed’s relationship with Schwartz helps us place the former’s

poetics within the larger field of post-WWII cultural production from the point of view of

sexual dissidence. Schwartz is probably one of the most admired literary artists of the

mid-twentieth century to receive so little critical acclaim today. Besides his early critics

mentioned above, he also had a poem dedicated to him by Robert Lowell in his

breakthrough volume Life Studies in 1959; he is the dedicatee of John Berryman’s Dream

Songs, as published 1969; and he served as the inspiration for the character of Von

Humboldt Fleisher in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, published in 1975.

In that

novel, a roman à clef, Von Humboldt Fleisher’s relationship with the aspiring novelist

Charlie Citrine was intended, by Bellow, as a thinly veiled depiction of his own

relationship with Schwartz. Saul Bellow and Lou Reed—it is difficult to imagine two

more awkward literary bedfellows, Bellow an opponent of counterculture who partially

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (New York: Viking, 1975); John Berryman, The Dream

Songs (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1969); and Robert Lowell, “To Delmore

Schwartz” (1959), in Life Studies and For the Union Dead (New York: Farrar, Strauss,

and Giroux, 2007), 59-60.

35!

inspired Allan Bloom’s 1987 jeremiad The Closing of the American Mind, and Reed

the enfant terrible of rock and roll who took the anti-authoritarian gestures of Bloom’s

hated Rolling Stones to their most decadent extremes.

That both artists should trace

their literary heritage back to Schwartz is more than a coincidence and in fact marks the

paces through which the avant-garde was put by the U.S. bureaucracy during the Cold

War era that virtually killed it.

As Robert von Hallberg has written, the Cold War was a difficult time for the

U.S. avant-garde in part because of the pressure that bureaucratization put on that

formation, in the form of CIA surveillance as well as the social pressures faced from

organizations like the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

During the

Cold War, there was a disavowal and downright paranoia regarding bureaucratization,

institutionalization, and absorption on the part of the avant-garde, at the same time that

they either suffered or enjoyed their greatest prominence within the U.S. academy. In the

case of literary writers, this story of bureaucratization is told in optimistic if not

Pollyannaish terms by Mark McGurl in his recent book The Program Era.

In that book,

McGurl offers a systems-theoretical approach to the kind of literary writing done in post-

WWII creative writing departments that argues in favor of those departments’ particular

aptitude for creating high quality prose that is responsive in a comforting and entertaining

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed

Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Penguin, 1987).

Robert von Hallberg, The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8: Poetry

and Criticism, 1940-1995, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), 13-22; see also, Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold

War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2001).

Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009).

36!

way to the challenges of a pluralistic, democratic society. McGurl’s approach runs

contrary to most academic and critical writing on the period in that it does not see the rise

of the creative writing program as a fall from grace for contemporary U.S. literary fiction

but instead the very means through which its initial avant-garde promise came to fruition

in the form of popular literary writers like Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, and

Maxine Hong Kingston, all products of creative writing programs as well as teachers,

who write fiction that is easily intelligible to the literary masses as well as challenging,

tackling difficult political issues of community, racism, and social belonging that have

been particularly compelling in the U.S. context over the past 75 years.

Both Reed and Bellow, and also Schwartz, have been touched by this cultural

formation—there is really no way for a contemporary U.S. writer not to be—but they

have subsequently rejected it, each in his own way. Reed studied creative writing at

college, but has done everything in his power to distance himself from the literary elite as

is possible in his career as a rock star. In a 1965 essay that he wrote for the multimedia

magazine Aspen, a special issue of which was edited by Andy Warhol, Reed wrote, “The

colleges are meant to kill,” and he mocks academic poets like Robert Lowell and Richard

Wilbur by name, nevermind the fact that Lowell was actually a close friend to Schwartz

before his literary fall from grace.

Saul Bellow, in a different way, as Simon During has

argued in the compelling final chapter of his 2012 book Against Democracy, positioned

himself alongside contemporary liberal academia, which he has criticized for its

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lou Reed, “The View from the Bandstand.” Aspen 3 (December 1966), 1-4. As part of

the magazine’s multimedia aspect, the essay was printed as a mimeograph on pink paper

and stapled at the corner. This essay and the rest of the magazine, which included a

Velvet Underground record, was packaged in a box.

37!

complicity with an identitarian logic of conflict abatement and narcissistic self-

fulfillment.

Despite his frequent slippage into politically incorrect and downright

offensive stereotyping, especially of African-Americans, During reads Bellow as one of

the sole inheritors to a conservative literary tradition that is also anti-authoritarian and

anti-capitalist. As During puts it in his introduction, perhaps problematically, the problem

of the twenty-first century is too much, not too little democracy, and whereas one might

quibble with this formulation in the case of a China, Egypt, Syria, or Iran, the reader can

see his point in a case like the U.S. or Western Europe where a technocratic elite have

lead what they see as the unwashed masses down a path of austerity that is unfulfilling

for most of its inhabitants even as it is simultaneously unjust and untenable.

Under this

system, democratic elections function more as a pressure valve than an expression of

popular will. In fact, it is difficult to say whether “the people,” however you construe

them, really know what they want. Bellow, according to During, offers his readers a way

of imagining a pluralistic political community that is also detached from the vicissitudes

of a spiritually deadening technocracy and a narcissistic culture of complaint.

At the root of both of these anti-authoritarian visions, Reed’s and Bellow’s, there

is the peculiar figure of Delmore Schwartz. What he represented for both these men,

Robert Lowell, and John Berryman as well might be espied in his breakthrough story “In

Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” published in the Partisan Review in 1937.

Since the

story is concerned with the optical fantasy of the primal scene, it is perhaps unsurprising

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Simon During, Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations

(New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 123-148.

Ibid., 1-13.

Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Norfolk, CT: New Directions,

1938), 11-22.

38!

that both Reed and Bellow, who seem so ideologically opposed, should find the origin

of their aesthetics there. In the story, the unnamed narrator, who we assume is Schwartz,

has a dream about watching a movie in which his father asks his mother to marry him.

The scene fills Schwartz with dread. He has the foresight to know that this love story, if

we can call it that, will not end well, primarily because it will turn him and his sibling (of

unknown gender) into “children whose characters are monstrous.”

The title contains an

ironic pun or paradox. Schwartz is having a dream, presumably about the lust of his

parents, but whose responsibility is beginning? On one hand, his parents are being

prosecuted, because they did not take responsibility for their lust. His father chose

marriage because he thought it would be comfortable. Schwartz writes, “He wants to

settle down. After all, he is twenty-nine, he has lived by himself since he was thirteen, he

is making more and more money, and he is envious of his married friends when he visits

them in the cozy security of their homes, surrounded, it seems, by the calm domestic

pleasures, and by delightful children.”

The final sentence of this quotation continues for

another quarter page, the longest in the story. On the other hand, Schwartz himself is the

guilty party. At the end of the story, he is removed from the theater because he screams at

the screen, warning his parents about their mistake. The story, in this way, reads as a

challenge that the author is issuing to himself, to take personal responsibility and not

surrender to the empty promises of bourgeois life and domesticity. The other people in

the theater scold Schwartz for his transgression against the spectacle. To them, his

outburst is a symptom of his immaturity. At the end of the story, it is difficult to tell

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ibid., 17.

Ibid.

39!

whether the narrator has made a break with his parents’ lifestyle, mistakes, and fate, or

if he is doomed to repeat them.

In 1974, Lou Reed released the song called “Kill Your Sons” on his album Sally

Can’t Dance, which discusses the consequences of his electroshock therapy treatments at

age fifteen.

It covers similar thematic territory to Schwartz’s story. In the first verse,

Reed describes the consequences of the therapy. He sings,

All your two-bit psychiatrists

Are giving you electroshock

They said they’d let you live at home with mom and dad

Instead of mental hospitals

But every time you tried to read a book

You couldn’t get to page 17

‘Cause you forgot where you were

So you couldn’t even read

He laments the fact that the treatments left him so forgetful that he could not get past the

seventeenth page of a book without turning back. Reed describes this experience from the

second-person point of view, even though he is relating he own experience, “You

couldn't even read.” He ends the first verse with this line, clearly signifying his utter

disgust with his parents for condemning him to this fate, merely because of his difference

from their Long Island, middle-class ideals. The second verse echoes Schwartz’s fears

regarding the “monstrous character” that his parents have created. Reed describes how

his father “took an axe” and broke a table. It is unclear whether this line really happened

or is meant to be symbolic. He also discusses how his sister has married a man “without a

brain,” but he suggests that his parents are more comfortable with this choice rather than

Reed’s own life as a hustler and bard merely because of the reputed security it provides.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Reed, Sally Can’t Dance (New York: RCA, 1972).

40!

However, Reed sees through this myth, as evidenced by his father breaking the table.

As in Schwartz’s story, there is more than meets the eye in the case of bourgeois

domesticity—fathers filled with homicidal rage because their spouses and children

represent not pleasure and satisfaction but failure and disgust.

Schwartz’s story is written in an iceberg style, adapted from Ernest Hemingway

and Sherwood Anderson, but tempered by his interest in psychoanalysis and the

unconscious.

Schwartz does not create a typically heteronormative, patriarchal exterior,

like Hemingway and Anderson, around the subconscious anxieties expressed in

“Dreams,” which are clearly somewhat sexual in nature. Instead, he indulges these

anxieties. Whereas the iceberg writing of Hemingway and Anderson was meant to

narrativize political and sexual traumas (WWI in particular), to put them in their place, so

to speak, in the lifeworld of the analysand, Schwartz's evocative and vague language, his

short sentences punctuated by long outbursts is meant to prize the veil of domesticity

apart. Domesticity is what represses trauma. Writing, in Schwartz and Reed’s case,

initiates self-analysis and forces readers to take responsibility for their choices. In asking

Schwartz's mother to marry him, Schwartz's father was avoiding what an existentialist

like Jean-Paul Sartre or Martin Heidegger would call the more “authentic” option, to

remain alone and single, despite one’s fears, because in doing so, the father would have

remained true to himself and hopefully had a more successful passage into adulthood.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Paul Smith, “Hemingway’s Early Manuscripts: The Theory and Practice of Omission,”

Journal of Modern Literature 10:2 (June 1983), 268-288.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), translated by John Macquarrie and Edward

Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), and Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and

Nothingness (1943), translated by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press,

1993).

41!

Within the modernist firmament, Schwartz occupies a similarly anti-patriarchal

position. Although Eliot and Pound praised him, he resented their respectability and

conservatism. Schwartz clung fast to the avant-garde idea of artistic transgression, the

utopian dreams of his surrealistic forefathers. His poetry and writing was an attempt to

create an avant-garde in the U.S. that could be accepted by the young people of his

generation, the children of immigrants in the Jewish diaspora, like Lou Reed’s parents;

instead, he ended up appealing to their sons. Schwartz dismissed the aristocratic

pretensions of Eliot, the populism of William Carlos Williams, or the reactionary

outbursts of Wyndham Lewis and the futurists. His poetics were slyly critical of his own

putatively middle-class values.

Another work by a canonical mid-century poet testifies to Schwartz’s

significance. Robert Lowell’s poem, “To Delmore Schwartz,” included in his

breakthrough volume Life Studies in 1959, occurs during that book’s third part, a series of

odes to writers that he admired or who inspired him—Ford Madox Ford, George

Santayana, Hart Crane, and Schwartz.

“To Delmore Schwartz” recounts a memory of

the poet in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1946. The poem is a bitter recollection of a cold

and fearful afternoon spent getting drunk with Schwartz after a botched meeting with

T.S. Eliot’s brother, Henry Ware, who Lowell had hoped would be able to secure him an

academic position at Harvard. As the literary critic, Philip Beard points out, “To Delmore

Schwartz” was one of the first poems Lowell composed for Life Studies, his breakthrough

book in which he abandoned the staunch formalism of his earlier verse for the freer, more

unrepressed voice that he would be associated with for the remainder of his career, the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lowell, 55-64.

42!

confessional voice that he leant to post-WWII America as a means of transition

between the high modernism of Eliot and the postmodern verse of poets such as those

associated with the New York or L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. schools.

The poem tells of how

Lowell and Schwartz spent the day getting drunk, playing with a “stuffed duck” that

Schwartz had brought to Lowell’s house.

The stuffed duck image is whimsical,

especially when Schwartz and Lowell crown their afternoon’s drunkenness by sticking its

foot “in a quart of gin we’d killed,” but in light of Schwartz’s later degeneration, which

had already begun in 1946 and was certainly well underway by 1959, the blended

atmosphere of death and drunkenness is just as foreboding as it is Dionysian.

As Beard

suggests, “To Delmore Schwartz” marks a break for Lowell with his modernist past as an

admirer of Eliot and W.H. Auden, but it also invokes the creepy atmosphere of Cold War

repression when it weirdly invokes Stalin in a non-sequitur that ends a series of lines

rewriting Wordsworth,

“We poets in our youth begin in sadness;

thereof in the end come despondency and madness;

Stalin has had two cerebral hemorrhages!”

These lines are spoken by Delmore in the poem, and he is quoted earlier saying, “…Let

Joyce and Freud, / the Masters of Joy, / be our guests here.”

Beard points out the puns

in the latter line. (Freude is German for “joy.”) But even as Delmore cracks jokes, he

invokes a spirit of genocidal doom, Stalin, whose authoritarian personality would haunt

not only confessional poets like Lowell during the Cold War, but also confessional rock

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Philip Beard, “Lowell’s ‘To Delmore Schwartz,” The Explicator 62.1 (2003), 47-50.

Ibid., 59.

Ibid., 60.

Ibid. Italics in original.

Ibid., 59.

43!

stars like Reed, in the form of Soviet-style bureaucracy and its paranoiac reaction

formation in the U.S.

The same atmosphere of paranoia imbues Reed’s own ode to Schwartz,

“European Son,” which appears as the last song on the Velvet Underground’s debut

album The Velvet Underground and Nico.

The song, even more than Lowell’s poem,

contains an explicit break with the past when it includes the dissonant sound of a bottle

shattering two minutes into the song. Even at the end of the Velvet Underground’s

thoroughly shocking debut, this sound comes as a surprise every time you hear it. After

the bottle breaks, the track is overwhelmed by a squelch of feedback that ends the first

section of the nearly eight minute recording, and begins its last six minutes, a wordless

mash of propulsive rhythm and blues accompanied by swirling layers of feedback guitar

and amplified viola.

Like the music on the track, the words of “European Son” also depict a break with

the past as they narrate the life of a mysterious protagonist. Addressing the protagonist

directly, Reed sings, “ You killed your European son / You spit on those under twenty-

one.” It is unclear who any of these people are—the son, the spitter, or the juveniles

under 21. Reed claimed that he dedicated the song to Schwartz just because it had the

fewest lyrics and Schwartz hated rock music. He apparently thought Schwartz might be

more comfortable having his name associated with “European Son” because it ends up

less like a rock song than an electronic experiment. In other words, besides the rockish

backing with which the song starts, a Bo Diddley drumbeat, for the most part, the song

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground and Nico, audio recording (New

York: Verve, 1967).

44!

lacks the grounding structures common to rock in its second half—lyrics, a melody

line, or vocal harmonies, for instance. The beat persists throughout the song but the

guitarists and John Cale’s viola solo freely during the song’s longer, final section.

Choosing this song to honor Schwartz makes sense because it expresses Reed’s vexed

relationship with his mentor, who also served as a tragic father. Reed clearly admired

Delmore, but he probably did not seek to emulate him, and this distance is captured

dramatically in the apparently disgusted lyrics of Reed’s song. The lyrics in the song

come quick and venomous, and end almost before the song begins. They are made up

mostly of short images that depict a hateful world that is nevertheless colorful. Reed

mentions that the protagonist’s “blue cars are gone,” and that he “painted” his

“wallpapers green.” Not much happens in these lyrics, which makes it plausible that the

band’s dedication of the song to Delmore was merely incidental, but sonically it does

summon an atmosphere similar to that of Lowell’s poem. For both Reed and Lowell, it

becomes apparent that Delmore Schwartz’s short and brilliant life, cut short by his own

excesses, was both an inspiration and a cautionary tale, and a testament to the social and

historical pressures being placed on the poet during that strange moment in the 1960s

before the psychedelic revolution and the almost total ascendance of the youth culture.

As a poet, Scwhartz bridged the gap between the print-based literary avant-garde

from which punk emerged, and the semiotic literacy that its arrival heralded—the queer

plumpness of punk’s sideways aesthetic. Punk’s semiotic literacy was based not only on

the ability to “read” print texts—it was perhaps based on that ability least of all—but on

the subject’s ability to “decode” cultural artifacts that may include text but also included

visual images, sounds, and later, manipulable objects of the kind familiar to computer

45!

programmers and, on a lesser scale, everyday users of the world wide web. Like

surrealists, punks create assemblages. Although punk’s social mission was rarely

articulated in such terms, singers like Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, and Patti Smith, and

writers like William S. Burroughs foretold the hallucinatory world of everyday

psychedelia captured in William Gibson’s notion of the matrix or “cyberspace.” Punk, in

a relatively straightforward way, was media about media. Through song (lyric poetry), it

lodged a critique of the song-producing industry, but as usual, media about other media

are never about the media they manifestly claim to address. Instead, on an unconscious

level, the lyrics of the punk songs were not about the song-producing industry, but about

another technological development just then emerging from the cultural-industrial system

of the post-WWII consensus—the new digital realm of simulacra, images, and MP3s.

Punk’s embrace of the “spirit of rock and roll” was, from the first, a nostalgic one, but not

a reactionary one necessarily. Later punks’ overidentification with this nostalgia

transformed punk into a reactionary event, but in its early stages, identification with a

rock and roll past was first of all a tactical method for dealing with a media world that

was beyond the grasp of the artist’s control. Comparing Lou Reed’s tribute to Delmore

Schwartz with those of Lowell, Berryman, and Bellow, brings into high contrast the

epistemological shift that had taken place in the literary underground. This shift was not

merely a popularization, commodification, or fetishization of the literary, but the place

where the literary went in the postmodern era with the institutionalization of the literary

project.

46!

Modernist Shock and the Queer Gesture: Reed and Warhol

Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground first became associated with Andy Warhol during

their stint as part of his multimedia show, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, between 1965

and 1967. This show had its debut under the title Uptight! at the annual banquet of the

New York Association for Clinical Psychiatry at Delmonico’s steakhouse in New York

on January 12, 1966. During the performance, the Velvet Underground played music

onstage while Factory superstars Edie Sedgwick and Gerard Malanga performed

suggestive sado-masochistic dances in front of them, and Warhol projected films and

colored gels on top of the whole spectacle. Filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Jonas Mekas

circulated throughout the crowd, confronting the assembled guests with crude questions,

such as, “What does her vagina feel like? Is his penis big enough? Do you eat her out?

Why are you getting embarrassed?”

The psychiatrists had asked Warhol and his

entourage to visit them in order to gain exposure to the burgeoning youth culture, but

they got more than they bargained for. It might be a stretch, but it was almost as though

Warhol and his cohorts, many of whom were struggling with their sexual identities, were

confronting the assembled party with their particular brand of art terrorism in order to

take revenge on a biomedical institution that had labeled them as sick or perverted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the response was not good, but the conception of the

event neatly exemplifies the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol’s terroristic stance

towards heteronormativity in the band’s early, pre-Stonewall days. Even Andy Warhol’s

sexuality, at this point, was a strange and barely understood thing to the art-buying and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Andy Warhol describes the event in POPism: The Warhol Sixties, with Pat Hackett

(NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 147.

47!

image-consuming public at large, and his profile suffered, to some extent, from rumors

of his homosexuality. Nowadays, of course, such a closeted existence is almost

unimaginable for the twentieth century’s most fabulous gay artist, but at the time, figures

like Reed and Warhol were still struggling within themselves to come to grips with their

queerness in a public culture that was downright hostile to the anti-heteronormative.

In a chapter of his book Cruising Utopia, on the queer drag performer Kevin

Aviance, José Muñoz puts forward an aesthetic theory of what he calls the queer

“gesture.”

As he puts it, “Gesture…signals a refusal of a certain kind of finitude,”

especially when it is performed on behalf of a queer minority whose lives are structured

by repression, shame, and risk.

In a painful but touching moment in Muñoz’s text, he

recounts the experience of being taunted by his macho brother, cousins, father, and uncle

for the “way he walks.”

As Muñoz suggests, moments like these inform queer subjects’

lived relationships towards their own bodies and the world around them. A similar

process was at work when Lou Reed was subjected to electroshock because of

“homosexual behaviors,” not gay sex.

The fact that these gestures were apparently a

real manifestation of queer desire is immaterial to understanding the significance that

tactics like those that Warhol and Reed employed at Uptight! might have had for them

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 65-67.

Ibid., 65.

Ibid., 68.

Bockris, Transformer, 13.

48!

and their colleagues, acting as literal counter-shocks to the system of publicity in

which they were interpellated.

Such an interest in shocking gestures and poses carries over into the Velvet

Underground’s entire career as both performers and recording artists, and into Reed’s

longer solo career. What early admirers of the Velvet Underground like Lester Bangs,

Ellen Willis, and the editors of Punk magazine, who put Reed on their first cover, so

admired about him and his band was their incorporation of aesthetic confrontation or

rupture into popular music, what Walter Benjamin actually called “shock,” or Bertolt

Brecht and Viktor Shklovsky “alienation” or “distancing” (in different contexts).

The

Velvet Underground’s first album is marked by breaks or ruptures in the sonic fabric of

the traditional pop song, like the one in “Land” that introduced this chapter, or the bottle

breaking in “European Son” mentioned above. These confrontational gestures “refuse

finitude,” as Muñoz might put it. Elsewhere, on the song “I Heard Her Call My Name,”

from the 1968 Velvet Underground album White Light/White Heat, Reed provides

perhaps the most jarring of these interruptions when he transitions from chorus to guitar

solo with the lines, “I heard her call my name / And then my mind split open.”

Just at

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Warhol was also bullied for his feminine affect, his relationship with his mother, and

his contraction of St. Vitus dance, which caused him to have spasmodic outbursts as a

child. Ric Burns, Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (New York: PBS, 2006).

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in

Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217-252; Bertolt

Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development

of an Aesthetic, translated and edited by John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964),

91-99; and Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in The Theory of Prose, translated by

Benjamin Sher (Bloomington, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 1-14.

The Velvet Underground, White Light/White Heat, audio recording (New York: Verve,

1968).

49!

this moment, Reed triggers an overdrive pedal attached to his guitar and lets out at a

screech of feedback, the sound of which, for the listener, verges on the uncomfortable.

To that point on the album, Reed has made multiple jokes, in its lyrics, about

emasculation and castration. On the song “The Gift,” an audio experiment with stereo

separation, the band plays their instrumental composition “Booker T.” on one side of the

stereo band, and bassist and viola player John Cale reads a story written by Reed at

Syracuse on the other. The story is about a young college student in Pennsylvania, Waldo

Jeffers, who arranges to have himself shipped in a large box to his girlfriend Marsha in

Wisconsin. Unbeknownst to Jeffers, Marsha is tired of their relationship and unenthused

when his package arrives at her doorstep. In the process of carelessly opening it with a

pair of scissors, Marsha stabs Waldo in the head and kills him, spoiling, in the most

grotesque terms, his already absurd plan. It is not difficult for the listener to perceive

Jeffers’s murder as simultaneously a kind of castration performed by what

psychoanalysts might call a “phallic woman” or femme fatale getting her revenge on an

impotent and ineffective man. The Velvet Underground, of course, had a song called

“Femme Fatale” on their first album as well. Elsewhere on White Light/White Heat, Reed

makes a series of crude jokes about oral sex in the song “Sister Ray,” where he utters the

barely audible phrase “sucking on a ding-dong,” or the otherwise elegiac “Here She

Comes Now,” where he describes the woman in the title as “looking so good” and being

“made out of wood.” It is not hard for the listener to imagine that the woman mentioned

in the title might actually be a man or perhaps even a man’s penis belonging to one of the

many transgender “superstars” that Lou Reed encountered at Warhol’s Factory. In other

words, whether he does so intentionally or not, Reed develops throughout the lyrics of

50!

White Light/White Heat and The Velvet Underground and Nico a symbolic matrix for

interpreting moments like the guitar solo on “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the smashed

glass on “European Son,” or the chair scraping across the floor on “Heroin.” These are

queer gestures meant to signify the band’s difference both from the heteronormative

world of rock music performance and the queer underground of pop art and performance

in New York City. The Velvet Underground exists somewhere between these two

cultural formations, which was what made their queer imaginary so appealing to the

CBGB artists they inspired. In developing this imaginary, they also left behind some

musical masterpieces and signposts in the larger literary history of the twentieth century

for their queer brothers and sisters at CBGB to follow.

Lyric Poetry and the Musical Voice

Printed poetry is silent music. It used to be audible, when all poetry was sung. Now only

some of it is. Some poets, however, have combated this silence. At mid-century, there

was a vogue for performance poetry among the Beats and confessionals, and among

musicians with literary pretensions—folk singers, rockers, and later punks, especially the

punks in the New York scene, centered at the rock club CBGB's.

An important conduit

between all these scenes—the Beat, the punk, the confessional, and the folk—was the

lead singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter for the New York proto-punk band the

Velvet Underground, Lou Reed.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On the link between confessional poetry and performance, see Christopher Grobe,

“The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959.” PMLA 172, no. 2

(March 2013): 215-230. Grobe claims that “no other form of poetry has had so clear an

effect on performance practices as confessional poetry has,” excluding (as usual) sung

poetry and later, hip-hop lyrics.

51!

Lou Reed is a multimedia artist and a writer, as well as a musician, although his

music, performances, and lyrics have not often been discussed in this way. The materials

of his art are not just the sound of his songs or their lyrics, but also the method of their

presentation in terms of their recording and performance. Like Charles Olson thought of

the poem, Reed conceived of the song as an “open field,” meant to “project,” as Olson

put it, the author’s energy into the future through what Olson called “percussive”

effects.

Olson uses a musical metaphor. For Olson, the field of the poem was the page,

as the field of the painting was the canvas. Percussive effects were created on the page by

emulating the poet’s breath, either through line length, punctuation, diction, or meter. For

Olson, the smallest unit of poetic meaning was the syllable, for Reed, the chord. For

Reed, the field of the song was its recording (in his case, magnetic tape) or performance

situation (as part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, or upstairs at Max’s Kansas City).

Reed approached these recording and performance situations at one ironic remove,

imbuing his productions with an abstract quality, as though they were presented “in

quotes,” as other high pop artists dealing in camp, like Warhol or the New York Dolls,

might present their work.

In her essay on the Velvet Underground, Ellen Willis

distinguishes between “art rock” and “rock art.” She claims that art rock is based on “the

idea of making rock-and-roll more musically and lyrically complex, of combining

elements of jazz, folk, classical, and avant-garde music with a rock beat, of creating ‘rock

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Charles Olson, “Projective Verse” (1950). Poetry Foundation, accessed July 11, 2013.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237880?page=1.

Van M. Cagle describes the New York Dolls’s performances occurring “in quotes” in

the essay “Trudging Through the Glitter Trenches: The Case of the New York Dolls,” in

The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture, edited by Sheldon Waldrep (New

York: Routledge, 2000), 125-154.

52!

opera’ and ‘rock poetry.’”

“Rock art,” on the other hand, for Willis, “has much more

in common with ‘high art’—in particular avant-garde art—than the ballyhooed art-rock

syntheses: it involved more or less consciously using the basic formal canons of rock-

and-roll as material (much as the pop artists used mass art in general) and refining,

elaborating, playing off that material to produce what might be called rock-and-roll

art.”

100

For her, the Velvet Underground fall into the latter category. For another artist

working across or at the intersection of media, the open field might consist of the

filmstrip, the laptop, or the dance studio. Like other ambitious songwriters, such as Bob

Dylan or Patti Smith; underground filmmakers, like Stan Brakhage or Jonas Mekas; or

his mentor Andy Warhol, Reed was returning the term “poem” to its original Greek

meaning of creation or “making” (poiesis) in its most general sense, through the material

aesthetic process of multimedia art.

The way in which Lou Reed’s return to poetry as a material art in the form of the

song, either in performance or record, set the stage for the punk event at CBGB's in 1974.

His performance practices signified a certain queer identity embraced by the performers

there. In The Queer Child, Kathryn Bond Stockton discusses the way in which the gay

children exist as ghosts to their parents, their community, and themselves, because the

gay child, from the point of view of history, does not yet exist.

101

Stockton connects this

structure of delay to Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of masochism in his book Coldness

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ellen Willis, “Velvet Underground,” in Albin Zak, ed. The Velvet Underground

Companion: Four Decades of Commentary (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 71.

100

Ibid., 71-72.

101

Stockton, 17-22.

53!

and Cruelty.

102

For Deleuze, the temporal delay associated with masochism, namely

the forestalling of pleasure in lieu of pain, is specifically anti-patriarchal and opposed to

the kind of rationality, which he sees as sadistic, upon which modernity is based. In this

way, for Deleuze, mascochism is specifically aesthetic and anti-authoritarian. Reed's

interest in poetry as multimedia art was influenced by his experiences both with Delmore

Schwartz at Syracuse and Andy Warhol in New York City, and this multimedia practice

occurred within the larger context of Cold War poetics, in particular William S.

Burroughs’s concept of “the Reality Studio,” similar to Louis Althusser’s concept of the

Institutional State Apparatus (or ISA).

103

Discovering this concept had a similar effect on

Reed as it did on the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, both of

whom admired Burroughs, and who were writing their most important works at the same

time as Reed. Ultimately, Lou Reed's artistic practice paralleled these men’s

philosophical practice in terms of how it thought about human freedom. This practice in

turn informed the queer aesthetic of punk in terms of its larger political and philosophical

commitments, especially as they were expressed in masochistic fantasies of dominance

and submission.

The members of the Velvet Underground understood themselves as acting in

direct opposition to the hippies, who dominated rock culture at the time they were

performing and recording. For instance, in the PBS documentary on Lou Reed’s life,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

102

Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty (1967), in Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-

Masoch, Masochism, edited and translated by Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books,

1989), 9-142.

103

Burroughs first mentions the reality studio in The Soft Machine (New York: Grove,

1961); Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an

Investigation) (1970)” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly

Review Press, 2001), 85-126.

54!

Rock and Roll Heart, Moe Tucker discusses the band’s tours to California as assaults

on the hippie establishment.

104

The hippies stood for peace, love, and a utopian use of

drugs to benefit human society. The Velvet Underground weren’t necessarily opposed to

these ideals, but they appreciated how they were severely limited by the politics of the

time, in terms of their understanding of gender and sexuality. Unlike the hippies, the

Velvet Underground were political realists, a position that oftentimes threatened to come

off as cynicism, although this was not really warranted. On the other hand, the Velvet

Underground associated themselves directly with the beat subculture that had preceded

them, even if that culture was in some ways ideologically opposed to the pop art

subculture of “superstars” in which they found themselves at Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Like the beat writers, the members of VU were dedicated to the almost nihilistic pursuit

of “kicks,” not only in terms of drug-taking and casual, kinky sex, but also in terms of the

appreciation of rock music itself, which was considered a lower art form, a quick fix.

105

All three of these subcultures—the proto-punk, the hippie, and the beat—were

responding directly to what other critics and historians of the Cold War have called

“containment culture.”

106

One of the basic precepts of containment culture was mental

hygiene through practices such as psychiatric therapy, psychoanalysis, and social work.

The use of electroshock therapy during this period was part of this larger complex of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

104

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart (NY: WNET, 1998).

105

In an interview with Ian Svenonius, Mike Watt, the bassist for punk band the

Minutemen, mentions that Richard Hell once related to him his view that “kicks” were

what connected the beat and punk subcultures. Ian Svenonius and Mike Watt, Soft Focus,

vice.com, September 4, 2011, http://www.vice.com/soft-focus/mike-watt.

106

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, and

Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic

Age.

55!

discourses described by Eli Zaretsky in his history of psychoanalysis as psy-

complexes.

107

Lou Reed received electroshock at one of the same state hospitals

discussed by Allen Ginsberg in his poem “Howl.” Ginsberg’s mother and the addressee

of that poem, Ginsberg’s friend Carl Solomon, also received electroshock for their mental

illness, as do the protagonists in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Ken Kesey’s One

Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the latter at only one remove from the hippie milieu from

which the Velvet Underground distanced themselves, and the former part of the same

jazz milieu or underground jazz subculture that so impressed Lou Reed. and which

inspired some of his music with the Velvet Underground.

108

In other words, electroshock

was part of a larger structure of control that touched many lives, including Reed’s, during

this period.

In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz discusses queerness as an unfinished project, both at

the level of the self and society.

109

He draws on the theories of Ernst Bloch and Giorgio

Agamben, regarding utopia and potentiality, and argues that queer artworks offer their

audiences hopeful glimpses of the future not so much through their content but at the

same time or more so through their performance of an idealized queer identity that does

not yet exist.

110

Amongst many other examples, Muñoz points to an Andy Warhol

drawing and a Frank O’Hara poem to illustrate the kind of “gee whiz” utopianism and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

107

Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis

(New York, Vintage, 2005).

108

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), and Ken Kesey, One

Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York: Viking, 1962).

109

Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1-18.

110

Ibid., 2-5, 9.

56!

queer potentiality inherent in what might be considered minor or ornamental acts of

artmaking.

111

Much of the Velvet Underground’s reputation as dark, brooding nihilists was

constructed by straight, male rock critics who accomplished a great deal in terms of

explaining the Velvet Underground’s accomplishment within the rock canon, but

simultaneously sought to decouple that accomplishment from the queer subcultural

milieu from which it originally emerged. For instance, it is clear in Lester Bangs’s

famous interview with Reed, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves,” that Bangs

was disturbed by Reed’s relationship, at the time of that interview, with a transgender

woman named Rachel, whom Bangs depicts in the interview as frightening and

freakish.

112

There has been a tendency throughout Reed’s career, on the part of rock

critics, to see his struggles with his sexuality as coincidental to his larger musical output,

but in fact, many of his stranger musical moves only make sense when placed in the

larger context of queer cultural production. Throughout his career, Reed himself has not

been exactly confident in his sexual identity, as either a queer, gay, or bisexual man,

although he has not been ashamed of his desires either. Nevertheless, while he might not

have embraced a queer identity in himself, he did celebrate it in the other members of

Warhol’s Factory who surrounded him, for instance, the famous drag queens Candy

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

111

Ibid., 5-9.

112

Lester Bangs, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, or, How I Slugged It Out

with Lou Reed and Stayed Awake,” in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, edited

by Greil Marcus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 169-183.

57!

Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn about whom Reed sings in his biggest hit

“Walk on the Wild Side.”

113

Candy, in particular, acted as something of a muse for Reed throughout his career,

for instance, on the track “Candy Says” from the Velvet Underground’s third self-titled

album.

114

Much of the band’s reputation as a precursor to punk rests on the abrasive sonic

experimentalism in which they engaged throughout their career, but this album, most of

which is filled with gentle ballads, serves as evidence that the Velvet Underground were

a sonically diverse band capable of touching moments of sensitivity to go with their

bombastic significations of alienation and confusion. “Candy Says” is part of a larger

cycle of songs with the word “says” in the title—“Caroline Says,” “Lisa Says,” and

“Stephanie Says”—in which Reed explores feminine subjectivity, in this case, from the

point of view of a transgender woman. The song begins with the lines,

Candy says

That I’ve come to hate my body

And all that it requires

In this world

Candy says

I want to know completely

What other souls discreetly

Talk about

I wanna watch

The bluebirds fly

Over my shoulder

I wanna watch

Them pass me by

Maybe when I’m older

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

113

Lou Reed, Transformer.

114

Somewhat confusingly, the Velvet Underground’s first album was titled The Velvet

Underground and Nico and their third simply The Velvet Underground (New York:

MGM, 1969).

58!

What do you think I’d see

If I could walk away from me?

It is curious to imagine what conversation with Candy might have provoked Reed to

imagine this monologue for her. It is difficult to say whether the body dysmorphia

depicted in the song’s first lines – “I hate my body” – was really experienced or

expressed by Candy, or whether it was imagined by Reed. In any case, the sound and

delivery of the song seems to indicate a deep and intimate identification with Candy on

Reed’s part, even though Doug Yule, the bassist who replaced John Cale on the Velvet

Underground’s last two albums, sings the song. Yule delivers the lyric in a high register,

approaching falsetto, almost as though he were imitating a woman, which might have

been the band’s intent. However, although the tune may seem whimsical at points, it is

never absurd or mocking. The singer and lyricist sincerely respect Candy’s point of view

and want to take it seriously. In both verses, Candy is depicted as a carefree, loving

character whose sense of biological displacement in the world translates into a blasé

detachment from it. As a whole, “Candy Says” might be Lou Reed’s most succinct

expression of a queer subjectivity, but it is a subjectivity that he only obliquely glances

and wispily points his listeners towards, like the artists in Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, a

queer subjectivity that would be revived by Reed’s followers at CBGB some years later.

59!

Masochism and the Social Contract

In the December 1966 issue of the multimedia art magazine Aspen, edited by Andy

Warhol, Lou Reed wrote an editorial titled “The View from the Bandstand.”

115

In the

editorial, Reed asserts, “Everything is dead,” and that the only thing keeping his

generation from going “crazy” is rock music.

116

He praises rock and pop songwriting

teams, such as Brian and Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier; Jeff Barry and Ellie

Greenwich; Burt Bacharach and Hal David; and Carol King and Gerry Goffin, as the

greatest artists of his age, and contrasts them directly with highbrow poets, such as

Robert Lowell and Richard Wilbur.

117

For Reed, Lowell and Wilbur are the nadir of

poetic art. They are part of the same world as the colleges and the military, and as Reed

explains, “The colleges are meant to kill, and if they don’t succeed, “the draft will.” He

explicitly associates Lowell, Wilbur, and “the Yale Poetry Series” with the colleges.

118

Reed’s editorial may be dismissed as the petulant scribblings of an amphetamine-

fueled dilettante, but between the lines of his rant, he offers some sincere insights into the

poetic project on which he thought he was embarking with his new band the Velvet

Underground, which just that past year had been “discovered” by Andy Warhol. Midway

through the editorial, Reed praises rock music for one aesthetic quality above all others—

repetition. Reed compares the repetition in rock songs to the repetition of Warhol’s films

or the repetition that he thinks he hears in what he calls “Eastern music.” Presumably,

“Eastern music” refers, in this context, to the music of India that had recently been

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

115

Lou Reed, “The View from the Bandstand.”

116

Ibid., 1-2.

117

Ibid., 2.

118

Ibid., 1.

60!

introduced to the rock audience by performers such as the Beatles and Rolling Stones,

or perhaps Indonesian gamelan, with which Reed might have been familiar via his

bandmate John Cale who had studied that genre with his mentor La Monte Young. In his

essay, Reed claims that repetition is “fantastic” because it is “anti-glop.” “Glop” to him is

the mainstream of U.S. consumer society, a society of differentiation, which presumably

demands endless variety so that it can sell more stuff. (Stuff=glop.) Repetition is

undifferentiated and calming. As Clement Greenberg might put it, it is anti-kitsch.

119

cuts through mass-cultural noise and gives Reed something upon which to focus. As he

puts it, “Listening to a dial tone in Bb, until American Tel & Tel messed and turned it

into a mediocre whistle, was fine…Andy Warhol's movies are so repetitious sometimes,

so so beautiful. Probably the only interesting films made in the U. S. Rock-and-roll films.

Over and over and over. Reducing things to their final joke. Which is so pretty.” For

Reed, modern life is filled with complications and distractions—differentiation.

Intriguingly, rock n’ roll, which for others might be part of the mass-cultural noise, helps

Reed find focus, to realize his potential as an aesthete, invested in the frightening, the

beautiful, the sublime.

Reed’s position contrasts with that of cultural theorist Jacques Attali. In his book

Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Attali argues that music is a “simulacrum of

ritual murder.”

120

It was a primary means through which primitive societies differentiated

themselves from nature and the animals, and a primary means by which we still

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

119

Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kistch” (1939), in Art and Culture (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1961), 3-21.

120

Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977), translated by Brian

Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 26-27.

61!

differentiate ourselves from nature, the animal, and the industrial din. In a manner that

parallels that of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their criticism of the culture

industry and modern popular music especially, Attali complains that “repetition,” in the

form of musical recordings, massively reproduced, commodified, and distributed, is a

simulacrum for the fallen, dystopian world of consumer capitalism characterized by

unjust disparities in wealth and power, and the exploitation of the working classes. Lou

Reed, in his essay, celebrates this exploitation. For Reed, the exploitative character of

consumer society—its glop—is taken for granted. Rock music, in its repetition, like

Warhol’s film, Eastern music, or the dial tone, provides relief from glop. For Reed, this is

all the postmodern subject can ask, for a lateral position or subjectivity alongside

consumer society, speaking back to it and rearranging its coordinates in a queer way.

In his book Coldness and Cruelty, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze argues that

masochism should not be considered a perversion.

121

For him, masochism represents a

logical response to the conditions of modernity to which the masochism of Leopold von

Sacher-Masoch, who described its symptoms in his 1870 book Venus in Furs was

particularly attuned.

122

In direct opposition to Freud’s famous interpretation of the

masochistic symptoms, Deleuze argues that the masochist does not choose self-

punishment because the super-ego has eclipsed the ego (as is the case with the sadist).

Instead, the masochist strikes a contract for self-punishment with the master in order to

reassert the ego function over the super-ego. Masochism is a fantasy in which the slave

represents not just the masochistic subject, but in symbolic terms, the subject of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

121

Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty.

122

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, in Masochism, 143-272.

62!

modernity writ large. The master, on the other hand, whether male or female, takes on

the role of what Deleuze describes as the “oral” mother, a figure Masoch celebrates, but

which the phallogocentric symbolic order tends to efface.

123

According to the masochist,

the oral mother occupies an imaginary space between what Deleuze calls “the primitive,

uterine, hetaeric mother,” and the “Oedipal mother,” the mother to whom the masculine

adult is attracted.

124

Forsaking these two mothers for the oral mother, Deleuze claims, is

not an act of regression, but of psychological and political liberation in a phallogocentric

modernity that is cold, cruel, rationalized, and sadistic.

125

As Reed would put it, dead. For

the subject in the masochistic fantasy to embrace the oral mother and relinquish the law

of the father, which is the masochist’s birthright, the masochist replaces one social order

with another.

The theme of masochism is evident throughout Lou Reed’s work with the Velvet

Underground and beyond, even on his earliest recordings. Reed met John Cale while

working at Pickwick Records, a label that issued quick knockoffs of novelty records,

dance crazes, and genre pieces. In 1964, they recorded their first collaboration and only

one for the label, “The Ostrich,” as part of a prefabricated pop band called the

Primitives.

126

The reputed inspiration for “The Ostrich” was the vogue that season for

both ostrich feathers and other dance songs, which it parodies. “The Ostrich” is a

somewhat inconsequential footnote to the Velvet Underground’s recorded legacy, since

only half the band appeared on the track and it was obviously produced under

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

123

Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, 131.

124

Ibid., 55.

125

Ibid.

126

The Primitives, “The Ostrich” (NY: Pickwick, 1964).

63!

circumstances that were not necessarily conducive to artistic autonomy or creativity.

However, it does touch on the theme of masochism explored on their other records, and

despite its inauspicious musical beginnings, contains some formal innovations that

anticipate the band’s later efforts to duplicate the masochistic ritual in sound.

The lyrics to the song encourage self-harm, and its sound is confrontational, to

say the least. The band’s sound fits their name—primitive, simplistic, unrehearsed. The

drums are plodding and only roughly coordinate with the tempo of the other instruments.

In the lyrics to “The Ostrich,” Reed commands his listeners to “get down on [their] face

and step on [their] heads,” a joke that may have been intended as a double entendre, with

the word “head” referring both to the dancer’s penis and cranium (or that of the dancer’s

partner).

127

When John Cale arrived to play bass on the song, he was impressed with the

way that Reed tuned each string on his guitar within the same pitch class. The purpose

behind this technique, for Reed, was simply to record more quickly, without having to

waste time transposing chords or figuring out more complex forms of accompaniment. It

also sounded rowdier, as though the band couldn’t be bothered to tune their instruments

or learn the proper chord shapes. Such techniques would be taken to their logical extreme

by later CBGB punk bands like the Ramones whose guitarist Johnny Ramone would use

only barre chords when playing his instrument. Such a use of barre chords, at high

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

127

As mentioned above, the “head/phallus” pun or malapropism appears in a few songs

from the Velvet Underground’s second album White Light/White Heat, including the

songs “Lady Godiva’s Operation,” “The Gift,” and “I Heard Her Call My Name,” in

which characters from each song have their “minds” or “heads” “split open.” In the case

of Lady Godiva, the offending act takes place on an operating table, in “The Gift,” at the

hands of an impatient girlfriend who doesn’t realize her boyfriend has arrived in her

apartment inside a package. The last song on White Light, “Sister Ray,” infamously

describes oral sex as “sucking on a ding dong.”

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volumes, leads to the production of overtones, which the Ramones and later, more

experimental punk bands like Sonic Youth, have used to produced a synaesthetic,

hallucinatory, and disorienting effect. When John Cale first encountered this technique at

the Pickwick studios, he appreciated its synaesthetic inventiveness. For him, its

production of drones was not unlike the process music he was pursuing at the same time

with the avant-garde musician La Monte Young at the Dream House. For Young and

Cale, the production of drones was intended to bring about the same dreamlike,

supersensual state described by the protagonist of Venus in Furs during the masochistic

ritual. Although Cale’s interest in the supersensual, dreams, and drones might have come

from a different ideological point of view than Reed’s, they both ended up in a similar

place, invested in misusing rock instruments for ritualistic purposes. Such an offhanded

repurposing of the tools of mainstream music-making on the part of Reed and Cale also

previews their collaborations with Andy Warhol, who would similarly seek to redeem the

everyday shortcuts of commercial art-makers, for instance, silkscreen printing and the use

of the assembly line, as serious art that comments on the production process even as it

participates in it. “The Ostrich” does not match the band’s later music in terms of the

volume or intensity of its sonic assault, but it is quite violent for a song that was supposed

to be recorded for primarily commercial purposes. At the very least, the song compares

favorably to other similarly heavy, violent, distorted songs recorded by garage bands

during what Lenny Kaye, the curator of the 1972 garage rock compilation Nuggets, called

the “first psychedelic era.”

128

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128

Lenny Kaye, Nuggets.

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Perhaps the band’s most straightforward evocation of the masochistic theme

was the song “Venus in Furs,” named after the Masoch novel, which was one of the first

songs the band recorded as a demo in 1965, and which eventually appeared on their debut

album The Velvet Underground & Nico in 1966.

129

On the formal level of sound, the

song also evidences the band’s increasing commitment to rock music performance as

masochistic ritual. On the 1965 demo, John Cale sings; on the commercial version, Reed.

The verses of the song contain a rather straightforward, simplified retelling of Masoch’s

tale. Its point of view is unclear. At times, the narrator sings in the third person, watching

the masochistic exchange between Wanda, the dominatrix, and Severin, her slave, but the

narrator’s viewpoint also shifts or slips at times to that of Wanda herself, commanding

Severin, for instance, to “bleed” for her. The chorus of the song is obscure. In it, Reed

sings, “I am tired / I am weary / I could sleep / For a thousand years / A thousand dreams

/ That would awake me / Different colors / Made of tears.” These lines do not occur in

Masoch’s novel, although they do resemble the terms of the masochistic contract signed

between Severin and Wanda in its English translation. Besides the document in which

Severin pledges his life to Wanda as her slave, he also signs a document that reads only,

“Having been for many years weary of existence and the disappointments it brings, I

have willfully ended my useless life.”

130

Wanda has Severin transcribe this document in

his own handwriting. In the case that she should want to put him to death, which is within

the bounds of their agreement, she would then have an alibi. The point of this contract, in

the context of Masoch’s fiction, is not really to justify Severin’s possible murder, but

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129

The demo version appears on the first disk of the Velvet Underground box set, Peel

Slowly and See (Santa Monica, CA: Polydor, 1995).

130

Masoch, 221.

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rather to raise the relationship between Severin and Wanda into the realm of what

Masoch describes as the “supersensual.”

131

The supersensual is an enhanced erotic state

meant to combat what Deleuze called the “coldness and cruelty” of contemporary

existence.

Musically, “Venus in Furs” is designed to bring about this supersensual state in a

way that was formally innovative at the time of its recording. Along with other songs on

the Velvet Underground’s debut album, “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” “Heroin,” “The Black

Angel’s Death Song,” and “European Son,” it prominently features John Cale’s drone-

like viola playing, and self-consciously defies the three or four chord patterns that had

dominated blues- and Tin-Pan-Alley-based rock songwriting to that point. Throughout

the verse, the band lingers on a D-minor chord. The effect is not unlike that of a tragic or

lachrymose folk ballad in the English tradition, but the verse’s wearied, pained effect is

heightened by the presence of Cale’s viola, which lingers on a single note. Cale

repeatedly bows a high D in such a way as to emulate the crying or wailing of the

masochistic subject. In its repetitiveness, the song is not unlike some other psychedelic

music of the time, but the effect is nowhere near as uplifting or transformative as most

early psychedelic performances, for instance by the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane,

were intended to be. Rather, the mood of “Venus in Furs” is frightening and oppressive.

Elsewhere on The Velvet Underground and Nico, the band increases the intensity of their

sonic assault, but there is an unsettling yet pleasing unity of form and content on this

song meant to bring about what Masoch might have described as a supersensual reverie.

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131

Masoch, 151.

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Taunting the listener with the song’s outré subject matter and unsettling sonic

construction, the Velvet Underground seeks a kind of agreement with their listeners on a

track like “Venus in Furs.” There seem to be three main influences on the songwriting on

their first album—psychedelic music, the protest tradition of folk songwriting, and R &

B. “Venus in Furs” is most indebted to the first two. Yet instead of functioning like most

psychedelic folk music, to accompany or enhance the drug experience, “Venus in Furs”

seems designed to bring about its own state of altered consciousness, similar to the state

that Masoch described as supersensual. The supersensual is immanent and lateral, an

aesthetic of intensity, neither sublime nor necessarily transcendental. In the terms

proposed by Jacques Rancière and explored in more depth in chapter five, it might be

considered heterotopian.

132

“Venus in Furs” and other songs on The Velvet Underground

& Nico seem designed to bring about the same state. For instance, in the song “Heroin,”

Reed tries to imagine, in music and words, the exhilaration of the drugtaking experience.

The tempo of the song shifts with what Reed describes as the “rush” of his high. A

similar sort of imagination occurs in “Venus” vis-à-vis the “supersensual” experience of

the masochistic contract. The Velvet Underground’s music frequently causes pain, in at

least abstract contradistinction to most popular music in the U.S., which most listeners

rely upon as an entertainment medium for the delivery of aesthetic pleasure.

Other listeners have noted the Velvet Underground’s fascination or interest in

sadomasochism as a perversion on par with drug addiction or other forms of kinky sex.

For these listeners, sadomasochism was at best a kind of fetishism for Lou Reed, the

band, and Warhol. At worst, it was just a sick joke. In fact, the band named themselves

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132

Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension.”

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after a sensationalistic “tell-all” book called The Velvet Underground, published by a

man named Michael Leigh, in 1963.

133

The book purported to expose the

sadomasochistic underworld in New York City, but its main purpose was to titillate rather

than edify, as most of its details were invented, and it was marketed as soft-core porn

rather than scientific study. Michael Leigh’s credentials as a physician were in fact

fabricated to get the book past censors. The band did not name themselves after this book

because they took its content seriously, but rather because they liked the sound of the

name and wanted to shock their listeners. Originally, they were named the Warlocks, as

well as the Falling Spikes.

In embracing sadomasochism, Lou Reed was embracing repetition as well as

perversion as a means to combat the social structures that had produced those repetitions

and perversion. Like the writer William S. Burroughs, who influenced him, Reed was

waging war on the Reality Studio. Within the U.S. context, it is usually thought that the

psychedelic bands, to whom the Velvet Underground are often contrasted, intended to

circumvent the Reality Studio by establishing what the historian Michael Kramer has

described as “the republic of rock.”

134

However, as critics from within the rock

subculture, such as Burroughs, Reed, and others recognized, the republic of rock suffered

from many of the same limitations and prejudices as the bourgeois public sphere it was

intended to counter. Specifically, it was just as patriarchal and often more homophobic

and racist than the official bourgeois public sphere in the U.S. itself. To confront this

alternative public sphere with more publicity (what Michael Warner might call counter-

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133

Michael Leigh, The Velvet Underground (New York: Macfadden Books, 1963).

134

Michael Kramer, Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties

Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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counter-publicity),

135

for instance, punk songs mocking the “summer of love” or

hippies, might be effective in its way, but instead the Velvet Underground, learning

perhaps from Warhol, sought to undermine the identitarian assumptions underlying all

forms of publicity. The establishment of a masochistic contract with the audience was

one of their primary ways of doing so. When the band performed “Venus in Furs,” they

would be accompanied onstage by the dancers Gerard Malanga and Mary Woronow, who

would pantomime a masochistic ritual of mastery and obedience, with Woronow

pretending to whip Malanga, dressed all in black, under harsh strobe lights.

While the hippies in San Francisco were celebrating the “Summer of Love” at the

“human be-in,” the Velvet Underground were lamenting “the Long Hot Summer” of race

riots throughout the U.S.’s industrial, urban dystopias. In September 1967, the band

entered Scepter Studios in New York City to record White Light/White Heat, with

producer Tom Wilson. No matter how you looked at it, the summer just past had been

momentous, but depending on your point of view, it was either joyous or horrific. On

June 1 of that year, the Beatles had released their own album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely

Hearts Club Band, which kicked off what many in the hippie counterculture and the

media called, “The Summer of Love.”

136

“The Summer of Love” had been preceded by

the first “Human Be-In” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on January 14 of that year,

and it would continue through the Monterey Pop Festival, held between June 16 and 18,

as thousands of young people traveled to San Francisco to soak in the vibes, and

experiment with psychedelic drugs and casual sex. In Victor Bockris’s biography of Lou

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135

Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (NY: Zone Books, 2002).

136

The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Los Angeles: Capitol, 1967).

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Reed, he claims that Jackson Browne told him that Lou Reed attended a New York

City equivalent of the be-in.

137

West of the Mississippi, the hippies were exploring new

horizons of human experience, but back East a very different climate reigned.

On White Light/White Heat, the Velvet Underground extended the avant-garde

experimentalism of their first record into more extreme, far out, mind-expanding

directions, but they tempered this experimentalism with a rough destructiveness that had

rarely been heard on a rock record before. Besides the overdriven title track, which

resolves in 40 seconds of near-white-noise, there was the even more infamous, “Sister

Ray,” which chronicled the exploits of speed freaks and drag queens over a seventeen

and a half minute drone of pulverizing electric organ and distorted guitars. In between,

there were weird sonic experiments such as “Lady Godiva’s Operation,” which at one

point disintegrates into a cacophonous rumble of disjointed lyrics and sound effects, and

arguably the album’s most intense track, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” which featured

guitar-playing by Lou Reed that instantly expanded the palette of the electric guitar in

terms of volume and brutality.

The trope of “minds splitting open,” which Reed mentions in the song “I Heard

Her Call My Name,” is echoed across the songs on White Light/White Heat. The title

track, which starts the album, begins, “White light going messing up my mind,” and

continues riffing on this theme throughout its two minutes of lyrics. Presumably, the

“white light” sung about in this line, and the “white heat” in the next are a reference, first

of all, to the adrenaline rush of speed, which was the Velvet Underground’s drug of

choice during this period, but the trope is articulated differently elsewhere. For instance,

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137

Bockris, 150.

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“Lady Godiva’s Operation” recounts an horrific brain surgery gone bad, and perhaps

the album’s strangest song, “The Gift,” at least from the point of view of sonic

construction, features a spoken recital of a Lou Reed short story by John Cale that ends

with its hero’s “head split open” by his girlfriend when she stabs him with scissors after

he tries to mail himself to her at college.

White Light/White Heat, no doubt, devolves around dirty jokes and double

entendres, but caught between two cultural dominants—liberating fantasy and repressive

backlash—these jokes signify more than tawdriness. Like all jokes, according to Freud,

the humor has a target, aimed squarely at resolving the tensions that informed White

Light/White Heat’s cultural moment and the artistic concerns of its creators at that

moment and beyond.

138

The album is fueled by the adrenaline rush of psychedelic

experience and sexual expressiveness indebted to the countercultural scenes in New York

and across the continent in San Francisco, but it is also a carefully constructed

chiaroscuro study in light and darkness that echoes, in an oblique way, the social conflicts

that accompanied its construction. The album never explicitly addresses racial conflict,

but the opposition between black and white is used to frame the album’s experimental

soundscapes. Its cover is an all-black composition created by Warhol Factory denizen,

Billy Name, like the Black Paintings of Robert Rauschenberg a decade or so earlier. The

cover contains a photograph of an upper arm with a skull tattoo, but the tattoo is barely

perceptible and can only be seen in a certain light. In point of fact, it is hardly seen at all

since the original LP is so rare and reissues do not necessarily reproduce the authentic

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138

Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, translated by James

Strachey (NY: Norton, 1960).

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cover image. Name toned the photo so darkly that the arm and the tattoo are only two

slightly different shades of black. Above this image, the cover contains the title of the

album, the band’s name, and their record company’s logo. The cover is a study in

minimalism, and the band’s second cover to feature retrofitted, pop art anamorphosis.

Their first album featured Warhol’s famous “banana” cover that encouraged the listener

to “Peel Slowly and See” what was behind the banana, which was a sticker. Underneath,

perhaps anticlimactically, there was a hot pink, skinless banana. As usual, the Velvet

Underground, here accompanied by Warhol, were playing around with phallic imagery.

Name’s cover for White Light/White Heat extends the lyrics’ punning into the visual

realm.

Throughout their career, the Velvet Underground were perceived as loud, brash,

and confrontational. In standard punk history books like Please Kill Me and From the

Velvets to the Voidoids, the Velvet Underground are described as a “proto-punk” band,

meaning their fashion sense, sound, and attitude, seemed to contribute something in terms

of confrontation or alienation first to the early CBGB scene and later to the international

punk scene more generally.

139

Oftentimes, this contribution to the larger punk narrative,

or to punk poetics, on the part of the Velvet Underground is dismissed as a kind of

transgression for transgression’s sake. It is imagined that the only purpose of the music,

on the part of the musicians who make it and the fans who consume it, is to act out some

sort of symbolic fantasy of youthful rebellion through self-harm, drugtaking, or music

played at extreme volumes and speeds. Certainly, this is the purpose of a good deal of

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139

Clinton Heylin, From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock

(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1993), and Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please

Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New York: Grove, 1996).

73!

punk, especially in its less arty, more populist variants, but there is also a more

forward-thinking, one might even say utopian, orientation to a music like the Velvet

Underground’s. Even when they engage in the production of pure noise, it is intended as

a metaphor or symbol of a deeper alienation, for instance, during their stage show or on

album tracks such as “Run Run Run,” “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” “European

Son,” “White Light/White Heat,” “I Heard Her Call My Name,” and “Sister Ray,” or

later on lead singer Lou Reed’s infamous Metal Machine Music album. This deeper

structure of feeling or symbolic representation of alienation on the part of the Velvet

Underground is extra-linguistic, but it is enhanced by the band’s use of language and

imagery, the former of which was created by Reed, who from the very early days of the

band considered himself just as much, if not more so, a poet than a songwriter or

musician. Although some of this romantic consideration on Reed’s part may be dismissed

as dilletantism, there is something to Reed’s pose when it is considered within the wider

field of Cold War poetics and the cultural politics of the late 60s and 70s. Ultimately, it

seems unfair to saddle Reed with the status of poseur at a moment when poetry itself was

undergoing revolutionary shifts in production, distribution, and institutional status to

which Reed’s work as a solo artist and with the Velvet Underground might be seen as a

response. Reed’s adoption of a poetic persona was actually a symbolic act meant to

counter the political and emotional alienation he felt within an increasingly reactionary

Cold War poetic and political establishment.

Between their founding, in 1965, and the departure of Reed, in 1970, confronting

audiences with their own alienation was the Velvet Underground’s business. As the

members of the Velvet Underground have repeated in multiple interviews, they

74!

understood their music to be a specific response to the “good vibrations” emanating

from the west coast of the U.S. and London during the Summer of Love.

140

Reed’s

masochism is a protest against the hippie ideology, against the Cold War security state,

the psy-complexes, and the academy within the larger history of the Cold War culture

industry. The masochistic contract that Reed established with his critics, his audience,

and his patrons was meant to counter the patriarchal power and norms of the Cold War

security state, or what Deleuze described elsewhere, drawing on the theories of

Burroughs, “the society of control.”

141

The origin of the punk aesthetic can be found in

this oppositional stance.

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140

Bockris, Transformer, 133.

141

Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3-7.

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CHAPTER TWO: How Do You Spell Love?

Girl Group Pop and the Politics of Punk Appropriation

Punk occurs between beat and pop. For us, Lou Reed represents the beat side of this

equation, but what about pop? Before there was punk, there was pop, specifically girl

group pop, made by bands like the Shirelles, Crystals, Shangri-Las, Ronettes, and Angels

in the 1960s. Listening to this music while absorbing the “popism” of Andy Warhol,

punk rockers, both male and female, discovered an ecstatic poetic grammar of pleasure

and identification. Punk rock references to and borrowings from the girl group tradition

are myriad, starting with the musical (and sometimes sartorial) transvestitism of the New

York Dolls and Ramones; continuing through the high girl group camp of Blondie; the

chart success of former punks like the Go-Go’s and Bangles; and the feminist girl group

recovery projects of artists like Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Kim Deal of the Breeders

and Pixies, and Kathleen Hanna, as a member of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, and working

alone under the pseudonym Julie Ruin.

142

Perhaps because of subcultural studies’ overwhelmingly masculine, heteronormative

emphasis on young, white, male subcultures, scholars have paid relatively less attention

to the influence of girl group pop on various punk scenes than, say, avant-garde art, Beat

literature, glam rock, or reggae.

143

Yet punk rockers have embraced the girl group

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142

Throughout this chapter, I retain the original spelling of the Go-Go’s name, assuming

this won’t cause confusion when being used as a possessive.

143

I have in mind, in particular, the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies’ approach to

subcultural studies, especially the work of Dick Hebdige, Subculture, and the

contributors to the field-defining anthology, Resistance through Rituals: Youth

Subcultures in Post-War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (New York:

Routledge, 2006). Drawing on the work of the feminist, dissident Birmingham cultural

scholar Angela McRobbie, Judith Halberstam offers a trenchant critique of these

prejudices in the final chapter of her book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender

76!

tradition throughout their genre’s history in order to theorize that music’s relationship

towards rock music’s past and the politics of that past in terms of racial genealogy, sexual

liberation, and erotic expression. In this way, punk appropriations of girl group pop may

be understood to occur at a site of intersection between the cultural and political legacies

of the feminist movement, post-Stonewall gay liberation, and the ethnic revival

movement that gained momentum during the 1970s. These influences endow punk

appropriations of girl group style with a transgressively erotic quality—so much so, in

fact, that one may say that the influence of girl group pop on punk is constitutive of the

genre. Ultimately, I want to suggest that punk’s engagements with girl group pop can be

read, from a queer, feminist point of view, as redemptive and indeed utopian acts of

historical recovery. Punk appropriations of girl group pop are anterior of punk, occupying

a social and sonic space beyond CBGB, the Sex Pistols, and even riot grrrl that has

endowed punk performances with a queer, empowering vitality.

L-U-V Spells Love: Girl Talk and The “Good Bad” Grammar of Punk Appropriation

Punk rock appropriations of girl group sounds begin with a misspelling—a queer place to

start, in more ways than one. On their 1973 self-titled debut album, the New York Dolls,

arguably the first New York punk band, start the song “Looking for a Kiss” with a line

cribbed from the Shangri-Las’ song “Give Him a Great Big Kiss.” “When I say I’m in

love, you best believe I’m in love, L-U-V!”

144

The line serves as a transition out of the

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Bodies, Subcultural Lives, “What’s That Smell? Queer Temporalities and Subcultural

Lives” (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 152-188.

144

New York Dolls, New York Dolls (New York: Mercury, 1973) and Shangri-La’s,

“Give Him a Great Big Kiss” (New York: Red Bird, 1964).

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“personality crisis” that gives the album’s first track its name. It transports the listener

from the confusing mental space of the first song’s narrator to the streets of New York

that provided both the Shangri-Las and the Dolls with their foremost inspiration.

“Looking for a Kiss” is a saucy riposte to the Shangri-Las’ song narrated from the point

of view of that song’s male love object. Whereas the singer in “Give Him a Great Big

Kiss” describes her new boyfriend to her girlfriends as “good bad, but not evil,”

“Looking for a Kiss” finds that boyfriend alone on a Sunday morning in New York acting

real bad, looking for love in all the wrong places. The somewhat foreboding romanticism

of the Shangri-Las’ song is reflected in the tender vulnerability of the Dolls’ lyrics,

initiating a set of reflections on the rock n’ roll genre’s past that hinges on the specific

appropriation of a certain facet of that past—the girl group tradition of 1960s pop.

By cribbing one of the Shangri-Las’ most distinctive lines, which derives its

humor from the rhetorical use of intentional misspelling, the Dolls, in an almost charming

way, insert themselves into a conversation conducted using what girl group expert

Jacqueline Warwick has called “girl talk”—grammatical mistakes, onomatopoeia, and

nonsense words that evoke emotions and experiences that “good girls” aren’t supposed to

share.

145

Warwick considers this sort of girl talk to be a form of what the French theorist

Hélène Cixous famously called “écriture feminine,” “writing through the body [that] can

resist the language of patriarchal discourse.”

146

When the Dolls enter into this

conversation, they don’t reappropriate it for the patriarch, but instill it with a queer sense

of intimacy, of chatter between bad boys and girls, including bad boys in girls’ clothing.

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145

Warwick, Jacqueline, Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the

1960s (NY : Routledge, 2007), 33-50.

146

Ibid., 40.

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The Shangri-Las were founded in the Cambria Heights section of Queens, New

York in 1963. From 1964 to 1966, they had a series of pop hits including “Give Him a

Great Big Kiss,” “Out in the Streets,” “(Remember) Walking in the Sand,” and most

famously, “Leader of the Pack.”

147

All of these hits and most of their other songs were

produced by the pop eccentric George “Shadow” Morton, whom the New York Dolls

would later enlist to produce their second album, Too Much, Too Soon, in 1974.

148

The

Shangri-Las were part of a second-wave of white girl groups that emerged in the mid-60s

in the wake of earlier breakthroughs by black groups like the Shirelles, Crystals, and

Ronettes.

149

Like the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las were the archetypal “bad” girl group;

onstage and on record they projected an air of rebelliousness, and they were more

forthright, although still subtle, about their sexuality and attraction to rebellious male

characters. In tones that were still for the most part saccharine, they invited their listeners

to take a walk on the wild side, and apparently many punks were listening.

Besides the New York Dolls, another artist who has publicized her debt to the

Shangri-Las is the bassist for the second-wave New York punk band Sonic Youth, Kim

Gordon, who is still engaged in a successful rock career today. In 1995, Sonic Youth, in

collaboration with Kim Deal, bassist of the Pixies and guitar player and lead singer for

the Breeders, released a track called “Little Trouble Girl” on their album Washing

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147

All of these songs appear on the compilation Shangri-La’s, Myrmidons of Melodrama:

The Definitive Collection (London: RPM, 2002).

148

New York Dolls, Too Much Too Soon (New York: Mercury, 1974).

149

Throughout this essay, I have relied on Charlotte Grieg’s account of girl group culture,

Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Girl Groups from the 50s On… (London: Virago,

1989) for historical background and insight.

79!

Machine.

150

Originally produced for the soundtrack to the film Grace of My Heart, the

song is a cunning pastiche of the girl group pop of the 1960s that that film sought to

explore, especially the work of the Shangri-Las.

151

“Little Trouble Girl” contains the basic musical ingredients of a Shangri-Las

song—a spoken interlude, airy harmonies, echo, and a backbeat—but it renders these

elements uncanny through subtle manipulation. The spoken interlude of “Little Trouble

Girl,” for instance, is stretched well past its normal length in a Shangri-La’s song, of one

verse, to take up nearly two minutes in the song’s center. Through this dilation, which has

a creepy, uncanny effect, the band transforms the interlude into something more like a

speech or a testimonial, engaging again in the kind of “girl talk” described by Warwick,

occurring outside the strictures of musical melody, harmony, or rhythm. The vocalist,

Kim Gordon, is addressing her mother. At the beginning of the speech, she acknowledges

that she and her mother were once “close, very very close,” but now she’s “close, very

very close” to her man. The sexually suggestive epizeuxis, or rhetorical repetition of

words, in the phrase “close, very very close” is borrowed directly from the Shangri-La’s

song, “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” when the lead singer responds to a question by her

backup singers about how her new boyfriend dances, “close, very very close.” In “Little

Trouble Girl,” this close contact with a male suitor doesn’t just set the singer apart from

her girlfriends in the band, it has transformed her into a sex-positive proto-feminist,

someone the song suggests is very different from her mommy’s little girl.

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150

Sonic Youth, Washing Machine (Santa Monica, CA: Geffen, 1995).

151

Alison Anders, Grace of My Heart (Santa Monica, CA: Gramercy Pictures, 1996).

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Such a transformation could be interpreted as the traditional one from daughter

to wife, but it seems far more likely in the context of this song that the singer is breaking

tradition, pursuing this relationship solely for her own pleasure, and creating “trouble” in

a system of courtship that would discourage such pairings. The latter interpretation is

reinforced, especially, in the video that was made to promote the song, in which the “little

trouble girl” of the title is depicted as a space alien navigating a sci-fi landscape that

looks oddly outdated, like a 1950s vision of the future that never came to pass. Both the

song and the video dramatize a political movement away from the 1950s housewife

towards feminine liberation. It confronts the feminine mystique head on, and it does so

using the aesthetic tools of musical production that existed prior to second-wave

feminism. However, it uses these tools in critical, oppositional ways. “Little Trouble

Girl” gestures towards girl group pop’s proto-feminism in whimsical and nostalgic if

perhaps oblique ways. In this context, the alien child in the “Trouble Girl” music video

begins to resemble the ghostly gay child recently described by theorist Kathryn Bond

Stockton in her book The Queer Child. According to Stockton, all children are essentially

queer because of their sideways or lateral relationship to the parent culture and its

Victorian ideals of sexual development. For this reason, the ghostly gay child, who

actually acts on the sexual desires that Sigmund Freud described it as having, invisibly

haunts the cultural history of the twentieth century, which Ellen Key famously described

as “the century of the child” before it even began.

152

“Little Trouble Girl” and its

accompanying video seem to embody Stockton’s concepts of “cubist” or “sideways”

growth for the queer child during the twentieth century, plumping the productive

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152

Stockton, 8.

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interface between girl group pop and punk with additional erotic meanings, especially

when it comes to sexual rebellion and self-expression by teenage girls.

153

The New York Dolls, also, stood in this sideways relationship to the girl group

tradition. They appeared onstage in drag. Instead of sanitizing a rock n’ roll medium that,

as George Lipsitz (1990, 99-132) has suggested, proved a fertile ground for dialogue

between white, black, and brown working class musicians, the Dolls were attempting to

reclaim that ground and queer it through their ostentatious sartorial choices and what

their lead singer David Johansen called “trisexuality” (“I’ll try anything!”), which were

influenced by their exposure to the drag scene at Andy Warhol’s Factory, the nightclub

Max’s Kansas City, and Mercer Arts Center performance venue.

154

The Dolls held a kind

of dominion over the Mercer before it literally collapsed in 1973.

This intense, expansive body of meanings speaks to us, grotesquely, lustfully, in

songs like “Looking for a Kiss” and “Little Trouble Girl” when standard grammars, the

structures of spoken and musical language, break down. The appeal to girl group history

on the part of the New York Dolls and Sonic Youth is an appeal to inauthenticity, at least

according to the standard rules of rock n’ roll performance, which places them in a queer

relationship with rock n’ roll’s masculine, patriarchal history. By 1973, when the New

York Dolls first appeared on the New York scene, the standard rules of rock performance

required or at least encouraged performers to write their own material and play their own

instruments, to dress and comport themselves in a certain masculine if sometimes campy

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153

Ibid., 11-17.

154

George Lipsitz, “Against the Wind: Dialogic Aspects of Rock and Roll,” in Time

Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1990), 99-132.

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way; yet girl group pop resisted these norms. The female performers of girl group pop

were all image, making no claims to musical proficiency, even if they could sing, and

they were controlled by pop svengalis like Shadow Morton, Phil Spector, or Richard

Gottehrer, each of whom experienced a career revival working with New York punk

bands—the Dolls, Ramones, and Blondie, respectively. Gottehrer also produced the first

Richard Hell and the Voidoids album and the Go-Go’s album, Beauty and the Beat,

discussed below. Instead of disavowing the girl groups’ contagious streak of

inauthenticity within the rock n’ roll tradition, the punk rockers embraced it, pulling at

one of the threads that stabilized rock’s racialized, gendered, and sexualized meanings.

The punks remind rock listeners that the girl group sound always had a hold over

their genre’s most respected innovators. Artists such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys

covered girl group material in earnest, and the Shangri-Las toured with the Rolling

Stones. To a large extent, also, the Beatles, especially, emulated the girl groups onstage

with their manners and attitudes. Although the members of these groups might have been

loath to admit it, this emulation of girl group style leant their music a uniquely feminine

subjectivity that was virtually unknown in popular culture before that time. As Jacqueline

Warwick has written, “the tremendous popularity of girl groups . . . marked the first

instance in U.S. history of a music centered around adolescent girls and their experiences

coming of age, in a society where teenagers were emerging as a newly significant

group.”

155

Although the lyrics of girl group pop were not always progressive when it

came to gender roles (and the male rock bands who covered girl group songs would often

edit them to restore the patriarchal gender dominant), the mode of feminine being

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155

Warwick, 3.

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displayed in girl group songs was a big step forward from the June Cleaver-esque

stereotypes of the 1950s. Working within the culture industry of the 1960s that

intellectual critics such as Dwight Macdonald and Theodor Adorno had dubbed

“totalitarian,” girl group performers, along with their corporate handlers and brilliant

songwriters, who were often also female, such as Carole King, Cynthia Weil, and Laura

Nyro, authored scripts in which teenage girls could be erotic. Some of rock music’s most

charismatic male performers also identified with and subsequently repurposed these

scripts. Thus, when David Johansen acknowledges his appreciation of girl group pop at

the beginning of “Looking for a Kiss,” or Kim Gordon and Kelly Deal revive it, they are

not exactly breaking away from rock’s old guard; they are talking back to them.

The Dolls and the Ramones, another band who participated in punk rock’s first wave in

New York City, accelerated this dialogue in dizzying, manic ways that often threatened

to overwhelm the masculine norms of rock performance. When the Ramones, especially,

tackle girl group material like “Baby, I Love You,” originally by the Ronettes, or girl

group-derived material, like the outtake from Rocket to Russia, “SLUG,” they exude a

desperate vulnerability.

156

No less an authority than the queer feminist rocker Carrie

Brownstein, guitarist in the all-female rock band Sleater-Kinney, who wrote the song “I

Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” described that band’s lead singer, Joey, as “a performer

who embodied diffidence and grandiosity. Here was a man who was simultaneously

awkward, eyes hidden by hair, and also larger than life.”

157

Although it was never

completely clear to his fans whether this affect of “diffidence and grandiosity” was

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156

Ramones, End of the Century (NY: Sire, 1980) and All the Stuff (and More!), vol. 2

(NY: Sire, 1990).

157

Qtd. in True, 277-278.

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natural or part of the act, what is certain is that it was brought out of the closet, so to

speak, at least in part, by Ramone’s encounter with non-normative sexuality during the

glam rock period. As his brother, Mickey Leigh, writes in his biography of Joey, I Slept

with Joey Ramone, during the glam rock era, “You were what you were, at whatever time

you chose to be . . . [Joey] was neither athletically inclined nor macho. Finally it didn’t

matter.”

158

The New York Dolls, of course, were the leaders of the New York glam rock

scene, and Joey Ramone participated in that scene by performing under the name Jeff

Starship in the band Sniper before joining the Ramones.

Like the New York Dolls, when they worked with Shadow Morton on Too Much,

Too Soon, the Ramones announced their allegiance to girl group pop when they worked

with Phil Spector on their 1980 album, End of the Century. This album contained the

band’s cover of the Ronettes’ girl group song “Baby, I Love You,” the Ramones’ only

real hit during their careers, and girl group-indebted songs like “Rock n’ Roll High

School,” “Danny Says,” and “Do You Remember Rock n’ Roll Radio?” Although seen

by many Ramones’s fans as their first misstep after a blistering series of great records in

the 1970s, the album, in Joey’s case at least, seemed to come from the heart and speak to

his reasons for becoming a punk rocker in the first place, not to become the antichrist,

like Johnny Rotten, but to become a tough girl, like Ronnie Spector or perhaps David

Johansen. This is a punk position at least as defiant as Johnny Rotten’s and perhaps more

ethical, or at least in different ways. As Tavia Nyong’o has shown, punk and queer

emerged alongside each other in the 1970s to challenge similar structures of

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158

Leigh and McNeil, 90.

85!

heteronormativity.

159

With the Ramones’s and the New York Dolls’s appropriations of

girl group pop, such a challenge emerges from a perhaps surprising place, establishing a

grammar for erotic engagement that female punk performers like Deborah Harry, the lead

of singer of the band Blondie, and close confidante to Ramone, advanced.

The “X” in Sex: Blondie and the Law of Genre

Deborah Harry, the lead singer of Blondie, translates the contradictions inherent in girl

group appropriations into sonic pleasures that are surprisingly subversive, especially for

listeners familiar with narratives of Blondie’s career that disavow them as inauthentic

sellouts. Many others on the punk scene, for instance Richard Hell, didn’t like them.

Judging by the constant cleverness, craft, and promiscuity of their songs, however, this

disavowal is revealed for the misogynistic slander that it was. What doesn’t come as a

surprise, in this context, is Joey Ramone’s love for Blondie’s music, which he surely

appreciated for just this subversive potential, especially when it came to gender

transgression and sexual pleasure.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Deborah Harry’s success as the lead singer

of Blondie was that her career didn’t break until she had already cracked the age of 30.

The sexual persona that Harry projected on her Blondie records and in performance

wasn’t that of a naïve youngster, as many people took it; instead, it was that of a mature

woman growing sideways (as Kathryn Bond Stockton might put it), fluidly exploring

aspects of her sexuality beyond the laws of gender that frequently render women passive

receptacles for masculine attitudes about what they lack. In this way, Harry’s persona, as

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159

Nyong’o, “Do You Want Queer Theory (or Do You Want the Truth)?”

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social text, stood in the same relation of submission and dominance towards other

members of her genre that Jacques Derrida once called “hymenal” in his essay “The Law

of Genre,” a form of belonging to a genre that I explore in more detail below.

160

In her

music with Blondie, Harry pursues a sex positive persona that talks back to punk

appropriators of girl group pop, like the New York Dolls and the Ramones, not just in

terms of gender and sexuality, but also in terms of racialization, playing a tricky game

with racial signification that I want to claim can be understood and cautiously appreciated

within the context of the 1970s ethnic revival.

From the very first track on their first record, which was also their first single,

Blondie started to delineate a sonic space of sexual possibility in contrast with the boys’

club that existed at CBGB’s, New York punk’s home turf, and they did so by

appropriating girl group material. The first track on Blondie’s self-titled debut, “X-

Offender,” is one of the most slyly subversive songs to emerge from the first wave of

New York punk.

161

In apparent deference to the girl group tradition, it starts with a

spoken introduction and covers similar thematic material, telling a story of lost and tragic

love, although this version is considerably more perverse than a typical girl group song.

“X-Offender” was written by Blondie bassist Gary Valentine in collaboration with the

band’s lead singer Deborah Harry and was produced by Richard Gottehrer. As mentioned

above, Gottehrer had made his name in the music business by working with girl groups in

the 60s. He wrote the hits “I Want Candy” and “My Boyfriend’s Back,” the latter of

which went to number one on the Billboard pop chart when he recorded it with the

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160

Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” translated by Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7

(1980), 55-81.

161

Blondie, Blondie (New York: Private Stock, 1976).

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Angels in 1963. The original title of Blondie’s song was “Sex Offender,” which

referred to a character in the song, and it was supposed to tell the story of a teenage boy

accused of statutory rape for sleeping with his girlfriend. Apparently, this material was

judged inappropriate for commercial release, so the band changed the plot of the song to

focus on a young prostitute. In the course of the song’s three minutes and fifteen seconds,

this prostitute falls in love with a cop who picks her up for turning tricks on the street.

She pines for him in prison and at the end of the song takes heart in her belief that he will

want her “to be sex offensive” for him again when she gets out.

The song’s lyrics and scenario are a cunning jab at state authority, which is

embodied in the figure of the cop. In the great tradition of proto-punk writers like Jean

Genet and William Burroughs, Blondie’s song exposes the sexual fetishism upon which

this state authority relies. In The Thief’s Journal, Genet reports his attraction towards the

cop’s badge: “The metal object had for me the power of a cigarette lighter in the fingers

of a workman, or the buckle of an army belt, of a switchblade, of a caliper, objects in

which the quality of males is violently concentrated.”

162

As Michael Taussig argues, such

objects do not become fetishes for Genet; he does not disavow them.

163

Gazing upon the

cop’s badge, Genet desires to break the law: to “slip [his] hand under the lapel where

cops usually wear the badge . . . I would have then trembled just as if I had been opening

his fly.”

164

Genet shares this compulsion both with Burroughs and the narrator of

Blondie’s song, and the three mimetically bequeath this compulsion to their audience

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162

Jean Genet, qtd. in Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge,

1991), 136.

163

Ibid., 140.

164

Qtd. in Taussig, 136.

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when they perform, either on the page or on record. Like Genet, the character in “X-

Offender” recognizes the fetish power of the cop’s badge but desires to disarm it (or

“defetishize” it, in Taussig’s term), in other words, to be “sex offensive.”

165

At her trial,

the narrator of “X-Offender” fixates on her cop’s “badge and rubber boots,” not the

reality of her inevitable incarceration. Genet and the “X-Offender,” according to Taussig

(141), “reenchant” the world by breaking the law, although the “X-Offender” does so in a

much more literal way, since her action takes the form of an actual enchantment—a song.

Serving as Blondie’s debut single and the first track on their self-titled debut album, “X-

Offender” has what one might call a “vestibular effect,” engaging the listener’s body in

an aural pas de deux of symbolism, sound, flesh, and desire as they begin their

engagement with this band, their movement into its sonic space.

Alongside provocations like “X-Offender,” on their first album, Blondie offers a

response to the racial ventriloquism that sat awkwardly alongside the New York Dolls’

girl group appropriations. This ventriloquism also haunted Blondie’s music, which was

marketed as racially white, but often drew from black musical traditions. Later in

Blondie’s career, they would have megahits by crossing over into musical genres that are

often thought of as stereotypically black, first disco with “Heart of Glass,” then hip-hop

with “Rapture,” and finally reggae with a cover of the ska song “Tide Is High.”

As the girl group historian Charlotte Greig explains in her useful history of the

genre, even as the complexion of girl groups shifted, in the mid-1960s, from black groups

like the Shirelles and Crystals to white groups like the Shangri-Las and Angels, the genre

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165

Ibid., 140.

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was still ethnically marked.

166

Most of the girl groups’ songs were written by Jewish-

American songwriters, and many of the bands were populated by the descendents of

working-class Italian, Jewish, Irish, and German immigrants. Identification with this

ethnic past is also evident in Blondie’s music, even if it turns up in odd places in tracks

like “Kung Fu Girls” and “A Shark in Jets Clothing” on their first album. Recently,

historians of punk like Jon Stratton and Steven Lee Beeber have argued that the first

wave of punk, including Blondie, whose main songwriter, Chris Stein, was Jewish, was a

specifically Jewish-American cultural formation, and they are right to point out that a

surprising number of early New York punks were of Jewish descent, and that this

heritage had some influence on the music’s themes, for example, genocide, and its sense

of humor, which shared something with the dark worldview of comics like Lenny Bruce

and Woody Allen.

167

However, the genre may also be understood as participating in the

broader ethnic revival movement that overtook the U.S. throughout the 1970s and

included white ethnics of many different backgrounds. As the cultural historian Matthew

Frye Jacobson has pointed out, the ethnic revival served a variety of purposes, both

progressive and conservative, but as a whole can be understood as a specific response to

the threats to U.S. racial whiteness in the face of first the Civil Rights movement, then the

Black Power movement and other non-white ethnic identity movements.

168

In this

context, punk can definitely be seen, in some ways, as contributing to this reconsolidation

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166

Grieg, 69-100.

167

Steven Lee Beeber, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk

(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006) and Jon Stratton, “Jews, Punk, and the

Holocaust: From the Velvet Underground to the Ramones—The Jewish-American

Story,” Popular Music 24 (2005), 79-105.

168

Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights

America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006), 8-9.

90!

of white identity, but when not directly racist, as it was in some cases, punk

engagements with ethnic identity, like its appropriations of girl group pop, seemed more

like an exploration of the musicians’ own otherness or encounter with otherness than a

hateful response to it.

Such a sentiment seems to be operative in the song “A Shark in Jets Clothing,”

which harkens back to an earlier moment of ethnic expression to consolidate Blondie’s

identification with the working-class, ethnically marked outsider. The title to “A Shark in

Jets Clothing” is, of course, a reference to one of the Cold War’s great racial melodramas,

Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s rewrite of Romeo and Juliet, West Side

Story, which restages the conflict between the Capulets and the Montagues as a racial

conflict between white and Puerto-Rican gangs in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of

New York City. Although there are no other specific lyrical allusions in “A Shark in Jets

Clothing” to the songs of West Side Story, it covers similar thematic ground. In the song,

a narrator who identifies herself as white during the verse warns her presumably Puerto-

Rican boyfriend not to “cross the line” between white and Puerto-Rican neighborhoods in

order to see her. Instead, they’ll meet in a subway car, which she describes as a “neutral

zone,” in order to carry out their tryst.

Blondie weaves their girl group appropriations back into a narrative of U.S.

racialization that includes ethnic as well as racial others. Later girl group appropriations

by punk musicians will be used to position themselves as race neutral, that is, racially

white, absent the racial signifier. Yet as Blondie shifts between musical genres on their

first album, moving from girl group pop to straightforward punk to surf music, and later

dabbles in disco, rap, and reggae on later albums, they also cross lines of gender and race,

91!

hinting at the ways in which the latter are bound up with generic, gendered

considerations. Although the “neutral zone” of cross-racial coupling described in “A

Shark in Jets Clothing” isn’t fully elaborated in that song, it harkens back to what I called

the vestibular, anterior space beyond the law of gender and now genre and race that we

heard on “X-Offender.” As I’m suggesting, the whole of Blondie’s excellent first album

establishes a general ambience of transgression, which is behind and marked by an “X”,

which, following Derrida, we might call “hymenal.”

169

This ambience emerges according

to a different logic than the patent shock tactics of the New York Dolls, but it is still

indebted to them, especially when it comes to establishing the grammar of girl group

appropriations. In the case of the New York Dolls, the Ramones, and Sonic Youth, punk

appropriations of the girl group tradition not only influenced their style, they also, in a

sense, punctured the skin of their musical language, resulting in rhetorical figures like

intentional misspelling and epizeuxis that they wore as masochistic stigmata of

subcultural affiliation. In the case of Blondie, the extent of their girl group appropriation

goes farther to transform the skin of their song not just into a surface that is punctured or

wounded with stigmata, but into wholly new generic substance, a hymenal surface over

which racialized, gendered, and erotic signifiers move and slip in promiscuous and

subversive ways. This formal promiscuity is doubled, for instance, in the lyrics to their

song “In the Flesh.” That such a music should have emerged at the end of the 1970s, after

Stonewall and at the height of the women’s movement and the white ethnic revival

should not come as a great surprise since all three of those movements were advocating a

micropolitics of the body and the sign in the post-emancipation aftermath of the 1960s,

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169

Derrida, 74.

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the emblem of which is Michael Foucault’s publication of Discipline and Punish in

Paris in 1975.

170

Blondie’s music seemed to dwell in a hymenal genre space that Deborah

Harry herself called “power pop”—girl group pop inflected with the raw power of

punk.

171

Within the skin covering this space, a punk-influenced band called the Go-Go’s

would emerge in Blondie’s wake to grant punk appropriations of girl group style its most

public airing.

The Beat and the Beastly: The Go-Go’s and The Birth of Punk Rock Tragedy

Turning to the Go-Go’s, we move from New York in the 1970s to Los Angeles at the

dawn of the 1980s to look at a band whose link to punk rock is tenuous, but whose

subsequent influence has been distinctive and powerful. The Go-Go’s album, Beauty and

the Beat, released on July 24, 1981, still holds the distinction of being the only LP written

and performed by an all-female band ever to reach number one on the Billboard album

chart.

172

Just a few years earlier, when the band formed in 1978, such an outcome would

have seemed very unlikely. The Go-Go’s emerged out of an L.A. punk scene that was

defiantly anti-commercial and anti-authoritarian. They shared practice space with another

L.A. band, X, whose signature song, “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,” told the story of a

sex slave raped once every hour for 24 hours; they played their debut gigs at the iconic

L.A. punk club the Masque; and lead singer Belinda Carlisle had briefly played drums in

perhaps the most anarchic L.A. punk band, the Germs, whose performances often ended

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170

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan

Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977).

171

Harry, qtd. in Lester Bangs, Blondie (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 8.

172

The Go-Go’s, Beauty and the Beat (Santa Monica, CA: IRS, 1981).

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with their lead singer Darby Crash covering himself in peanut butter or cutting open

his chest. Crash committed suicide at age 22 by drug overdose on December 7, 1980, just

months before Beauty and the Beat debuted.

In the immediate aftermath of Crash’s death, Beauty and the Beat could be

understood, on one hand, as a violation of his spirit, which had arguably provided the

L.A. punk scene with what Friedrich Nietzsche might have called its “Dionysian”

spark.

173

Indeed, Crash was a great admirer and attentive reader of Nietzsche. In this

context, then, the Go-Go’s sweet harmonies, sparkly keyboards, and pop hooks might

have been reverting back to a corporatized, deodorized Apollonian past, which in

Nietzchean terms, was uniquely Californian. On the other hand, the Go-Go’s success

might also be understood as the punk power play par excellence, in Harry’s terms, taking

the means of production out of the hands of the boys in order to produce a pop image that

was both sexy and serious. Their version of the L.A. Apollonian was not uncomplicated,

relying on a sometimes-critical form of pastiche that many women found empowering.

From the cover art to the arrangements to the lyrics of the songs and Belinda Carlisle’s

vocal style, the Go-Go’s played a cunning game with the rules of pop, demonstrating

mastery over both sides of what historian and urban theorist Mike Davis has called the

“sunshine-noir dialectic,” the symbolic play of light and dark that provides L.A. with its

unique frontier imagery

174

. The Go-Go’s offered more than a safe alternative to Crash’s

dangerous suicidal tendencies. They indirectly criticized them in a necessary way, and

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173

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1844), translated by Francis Golffing (New

York: Doubleday, 1956).

174

Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso,

1990).

94!

this criticism depended upon the band’s embrace of the lighter side of the pop

equation, which in their case meant a critical reflection on a girl group tradition in rock n’

roll that has always been susceptible to charges of fakeness, inauthenticity, and weakness.

Among the bands that I have discussed in this chapter, the Go-Go’s were perhaps

identified most strongly with the girl group tradition, whether they liked it or not, because

of the actual gendered makeup of their band, whereas the other groups I’ve discussed

only invoked that tradition. The band was directly marketed, nostalgically, as a girl group

throwback, a circumstance that they could have resented since they were much more

accomplished as musicians than most members of the early girl groups. Instead, they

seemed to acknowledge their status as commodity, but distance themselves from it in

tactical ways. The voice on the Go-Go’s records is not necessarily more authentic or

complex than what we hear from other female performers, but it does speak in a different

way because it was so uniquely positioned within the field of rock n’ roll spectacle.

The Go-Go’s acknowledge their weakness as female performers within a male-dominated

performance culture, but assure their audience that to perceive them in this way is a

mistake. In fact, they manipulate these audience misapprehensions in order to gain their

strength. Their play at this weakness begins, like all the punk bands I have been

discussing in this essay, at the level of grammar and the sign, in this case taking the form

of a perhaps trite but nonetheless amusing pun on “beast” in the title of their debut album.

This play, however unintentionally, but nevertheless strikingly, puts the Go-Go’s into

dialogue with Belinda Carlisle’s former mentor, Darby Crash, who described himself

variously, in the titles of his songs, as a “manimal” and “lexicon devil,” and in one of his

most striking, Nietzsche-inspired lyrics as “a puzzled panther, waiting to be caged.” If

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Crash’s short, intense career was a dramatic exercise in “becoming animal,” as Gilles

Deleuze might have it, the title of the Go-Go’s album simultaneously invokes that

transformation, disavows it, and construes its micropolitical power alongside another sort

of immanent power, that of the beat, which is also addressed in the lyrics of their most

famous song.

There is an undeniable power to the lyrics of the Go-Go’s first single “We Got the

Beat,” released in 1981, however sloganistic they might be. The song is, ultimately, a

rewrite of the Ramones’s signature punk anthem “Blitzkrieg Bop” (and by extension

many other dance pop hits), a similarity that becomes more apparent when listening to

the original version released on the UK independent label Stiff Records in 1980, which

relies on crunchier, louder guitars, much like the Ramones. Also like the Ramones song,

“We Got the Beat” explains how “the kids” “are forming in a straight line,” a line from

“Blitzkreig Bop:” each of the Go-Go’s verses end with “people,” “the kids,” and

presumably the band itself “falling in line.” Throughout the song, the meaning of this

latter phrase is subtly transformed; in the first verse, with reference to “the people,” it

clearly is being used in its colloquial sense of obedience to authority, but later in the

song, when it refers to what is presumably a line dance, it takes on another, possibly more

liberating meaning, as the band’s audience falls into line in order to lose themselves, lose

their ego, in the dance.

In this song and throughout their first album, Beauty and the Beat, the Go-Go’s

are imagining a form of punk eros to counter the death drive or thanatos of Darby Crash,

which was admittedly very powerful. Instead of simply confirming myths about

femininity in U.S. culture, the Go-Go’s music subtly challenges these myths as the band

96!

fabricates a sound skin marked by silences and elisions that morph the weaknesses of

the feminine mystique into strengths. On the cover of their album they are pictured

wearing cosmetic mud masks, simultaneously plying and withholding their beauty from

the male gaze. They lay out this program on another of their hits from the album, “Our

Lips Are Sealed,” which is an archetypal “girl talk” song of the kind Warwick described,

imbued with deep ironies and double meanings. In this song, the Go-Go’s perform

femininity in quotes. The singer, Belinda Carlisle, addresses an unnamed interlocutor,

possibly a lover but just as likely a friend, a girlfriend, like the girls in her band. In the

face of “rumors” and “lies,” she encourages this interlocutor to use “a weapon . . . in

[their] defense / Silence.” Of course, within the context of a song being sung, this line has

a playful effect. It provides what Carlisle calls a “shield” for the singer and her confidant.

She mentions elsewhere in this song that other “people” don’t possess this shield.

Silence, in this song, is an open secret, and its content is never revealed. Coincidentally,

the Germs play with a similar open secret in their song “What We Do Is Secret,” but

whereas the lyrics to that song are a nearly inscrutable, anti-authoritarian rant, especially

when delivered by Crash, the lyrics to the Go-Go’s song are crystal clear but all the more

mystifying because of it. Although it may seem like a stretch, their secret is erotic, with

the sealed lips of the song’s title referring not only to the lips of the singer’s mouth but

also her vagina. The secret that these lips withhold is not only spoken, it is covered by the

hymen. In “Our Lips Are Sealed,” the Go-Go’s return their listeners to an ecstatic point

of identification between girls and their guys or maybe only among themselves, the same

point, I have been arguing, that the New York Dolls started us at when they quoted the

Shangri-Las, a point between genres, genders, and ethnicities. From that point onward,

97!

punk appropriations of girl group pop were an open secret, with all the suggestiveness

and contradictions that that term might imply, although the majority of punk historians

have been hesitant to fully explore this zone of pleasure and identification. Instead, they

have focused on figures like Darby Crash, who were assuredly brilliant, but offer a rather

weak model for speaking truth to power, survival, moving on.

Conclusion: Another Hot Topic

The death of Darby Crash served as a model for another rock n’ roll suicide in 1994, that

of Kurt Cobain, the first punk rocker to take that genre to the top of the charts. Perhaps

not surprisingly, in this context, a girl group revival emerged in his wake that seemed to

reflect critically and draw spiritual sustenance from the history that I’ve been describing

here. Emblematic of this revival was a performance as part of MTV’s Unplugged series

by Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, in 1995, of perhaps the most troubling girl group

song from the 1960s, “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss),” which was written by Gerry

Goffin and Carole King, produced by Phil Spector, and performed by the Crystals in

1962. As Jacqueline Warwick explains in an essay on “violence, masochism, and anger in

girl group music,” this performance seemed to draw on a set of spiritual resources for

coping with violence towards women inherent in the girl group form, the first popular

genre of U.S. music to express the feelings and needs of young girls directly in the public

sphere.

175

The lyrics of the song tell of a woman battered by her boyfriend who is

nevertheless attracted to him because the violence lets her “know” that he “loves” her.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

175

Warwick, “He Hit Me, and I Was Glad: Violence, Masochism, and Anger in Girl

Group Music,” in She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence, and

Class in 1960s Music, edited by Laurie Stras (Farham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 89-112.

98!

Love’s performance of the song figures Cobain’s suicide as an act of unforgivable

violence towards her that nevertheless endears her to his spiritual memory. The

performance places Cobain’s death in a unique perspective from the point of view of the

mourning wife, as well as the long history of girl group music’s filial relationship with

the punk tradition. Although the performance sheds light on Cobain’s unwitting

cooperation with the norms of mainstream, patriarchal musical culture, it might also

remind us that he was inspired by punk feminism. For instance, the title of his most

famous song was adapted from a bit of graffiti that riot grrrl leader Kathleen Hanna wrote

on the wall of Cobain’s apartment, “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” Teen Spirit was a

brand of deodorant marketed to teenagers at the time.

Love’s performance is but one example of an ongoing girl group revival that

began in the mid-1990s and continues today. Although music continued to be released by

female vocal groups between the late 1960s and mid-1990s, it often seemed as though

these performers and their handlers wanted to project a more “mature” image for their

stars as women, not girls. This attitude began to change, of course, with two musical

developments in the 1990s of very different kinds. Beginning in the early part of that

decade, punk women in the Pacific Northwest, Washington, DC, and the UK began to

gather under the banner of riot grrrl, an insurgent movement within punk that sought to

take the genre back from the boys and insert a feminist voice into the degraded,

patriarchal rock n’ roll spectacle. Only a few years later, a prefab singing group from

London called the Spice Girls brought their own brand of what they called “girl power”

to the international masses.

99!

These developments have had significant bearing on the shape of the ongoing

girl group revival. Subsequent years have seen the massive popularity of international

pop stars like Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Amy Winehouse, and Christina Aguilera, to

name just a few, all of whom seem to owe something to the Spice Girl’s girl power,

either in terms of ideology or marketing tactics. In 2005, Rhino Records released the

magisterial box set One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds, Lost and Found,

which served up four CDs worth of girl group rarities in a package designed to look like a

hat box.

176

Perhaps more intriguingly, female punk rockers, including some of those

involved in the original riot grrrl movement, have turned back to girl group pop as well.

In just the last few years, a number of female garage bands, like the Dum Dum Girls,

Best Coast, and Vivian Girls, have emerged, seamlessly blending girl group influences

and punk sounds. Even before them, electroclash acts (a blend of dance and punk) as well

as riot grrrls rediscovered these roots.

Perhaps the most visible spokesperson of riot grrrl, Kathleen Hanna, fanzine

editor and frontwoman for Bikini Kill, has been emblematic in this shift in punk

sensibilities. In 1997 she released a solo record under the name Julie Ruin and a year later

she formed a new band Le Tigre. Both of these projects paid oblique homage to girl

group pop by relying on samplers and synthesized beats. Putting down their guitars to

embrace studio technology, in a nevertheless lo-fi way, Le Tigre looked and sounded

much more like a girl group of the 1960s than Bikini Kill, even if they were still a far

way off. Still, unlike Bikini Kill, and much like the girl groups, they were much more

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176

One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds, Lost and Found (Los Angeles:

Rhino, 2005).

100!

focused on creating danceable, fun music that traded riot grrrl’s politics of rage for an

arguably more subtle politics of corporeal pleasure and withholding centered around what

the Go-Go’s have already identified for us as a primary modality of punk power and

struggle—the beat.

With Le Tigre, Hanna began to adopt a vocal style similar to Belinda Carlisle’s,

although no doubt for ironic, comic, critical effect. Like Carlisle on the tracks discussed

above, Hanna hiccups her way through tracks as Julie Ruin and on Le Tigre albums in a

nasal tone that seems specially designed to sound something like the valley girl or mallrat

of masculine, anti-girl fantasy, the stereotypes typically presented of girls in the media

when marketers aren’t trying to seduce them. As I’ve tried to suggest above, Carlisle

might have fit this stereotype, but she did so knowingly, in quotes, instilling a sense of

playfulness and danger in her otherwise ethereal music. Nonetheless, as Hanna has

hinted, however obliquely, in a recent interview with CNN online, this is one of the only

“real” voices women have had in rock music since the genre began, and speaking or

singing in it, when done correctly, can be empowering.

177

Speaking or singing in quotes

reminds the listener that all speech acts have a performative character, vocalizing, among

other things, the gender of the speaker. As a matter of style, such performatives can

reconfigure gender constructions, permitting new voices into the discourse. When invited

to comment on the need for female singers to look good as well as sing well by CNN,

Kathleen Hanna laments the fact that singers have to offer “the whole package,” that they

have to fit into what she calls an “American Idol reality.” She counterpoises the Go-Go’s

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177

Abbey Goodman, “The Original Riot Grrrl on Katy Perry, 90s Revival.” CNN, June 7,

2011. Accessed July 15, 2011. http://www.cnn.com/2011/SHOWBIZ/Music/06/07/

kathleen.hanna.documentary/index.html.

101!

to this reality, commenting, “The Go-Go's were one of the biggest all-girl bands ever.

What other all-girl band has ever been really famous? There's never women playing

instruments.”

178

To some extent, Hanna overstates her case, but it suggests the logic that

might have informed her move from Bikini Kill to Le Tigre. Instead of appropriating

what the boys had, why not rediscover the musical power that women in rock and punk

had had all along?

When they answer this question, Le Tigre squares the hermeneutic circle of punk

appropriations of girl group pop. Girl groups weren’t just a peripheral influence on the

punks, along with Beat poetry or avant-garde art, they were, in an important sense, a

wellspring of the punk genre that runs through it like a red thread. In the song “Hot

Topic” from Le Tigre’s 1999 first self-titled album, which Judith Halberstam has also

praised, Le Tigre engages in a series of shoutouts to queer and feminist icons, musical

and otherwise—Yoko Ono, Eileen Myles, and Angela Davis, to name just a few.

179

They

do so in the context of a girl group song. Most of the ingredients are there—a charismatic

lead singer, spoken interlude, call and response, vocal harmonies, and a good dance beat.

All that’s missing are the strings. Reflecting on Jacqueline Warwick’s bold observation

that girl group pop was one of the first public airings of young girls’ thoughts and

feelings, we may also notice that the emergence of girl group pop marked the first

instance of the same in the lives of punk rockers growing sideways within and beyond

adolescence.

180

Understanding this anterior space for punk’s development is key for

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178

Ibid., n.p.

179

Halberstam, 170.

180

Warwick, Girl Groups, Girl Culture, 3.

102!

understanding the genre within a queer, feminist history within which it rightfully

belongs.

103!

EXCURSUS: Swastika

Before he joined the Ramones as their art director and costume designer, queer artist

Arturo Vega, who had moved to New York from Mexico, produced a painting of four

swastikas, set in circles, against a solid background, akin to the Nazi flag. The square

canvas is divided into four quadrants, each with a different color scheme. The top left

quadrant is painted in barely perceptible variations of white, the bottom right in black.

The two opposing swastikas are painted in dayglo fluorescents and earth tones. As Vega

mentioned in a recent interview, he chose fluorescent colors because they are actually

harmful to the human eye. As he describes it, Nazism is a “manmade evil” and these are

manmade colors, which do not really occur in nature.

181

For Vega, the swastikas, which

actually hung in an apartment that he shared with the Ramones bassist and vocalist Dee

Dee and Joey Ramone, were a “closet Nazi detector.”

182

In other words, Vega claimed,

the only people that would really be offended by them were spectators who harbored

fascistic feelings themselves, opposed to the use of certain symbols in art in any context,

which Vega clearly understood as a limit on his artistic freedom. Produced by a gay

immigrant from Mexico and hanging on the wall of an apartment shared by two

ambisexual rock stars, one who had grown up in post-Nazi Germany, and the other

Jewish, the swastika paintings, in this context, may be read as expressing self-loathing on

the part of their creator and admirers, but also evidence a forceful effort on the part of

the artists to poke a hole in the symbolic order of late modernity that had rendered such

representations not only taboo, but also unspeakable. They may verge on the tasteless,

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181

Ethan Minsker, “Antagovision – Arturo Vega,” YouTube,

http://youtu.be/yVmJh35E_c0 (accessed October 27, 2013).

182

Ibid.

104!

but like the space between punk and pop heard in “Land,” between the land of a

1000 dances and the sea of shit, these swastikas, which are literally blinding, produced a

khora or clearing in the punk imagining of Vega and the Ramones.

183

In his essay on Jews, punks, and the Holocaust, Jon Stratton argues that early

punk, of the kind performed at CBGB, was an attempt of the part of its performers, many

of whom were second or third generation Jewish immigrants, to overcome and cope with

the stigmatizing memory of the Holocaust in Jewish-American life.

184

Vega’s dayglo

swastikas, in this context, become a potent symbolic bridge across subcultural affiliation

groups in the postmodern, pop art, CBGB milieu. In this context, the swastika, like the

semi-fascistic leather regalia that the Ramones wore as their on-stage costume, becomes

a fetish around which to organize a new system of queer, cross-ethnic affiliation. The

Ramones proclaimed on a 1977 track from the album Rocket to Russia that they were a

“happy family,” even though the family on that track sounded far from it.

185

As the

Ramones put it, their “daddy…liked men,” and they were “in all the magazines…gulping

down thorazines.” Of course, the Ramones all took the same last name. The joke here

was that the Ramones were a kind of queer family or gang, a joke that operates across

their recorded output. In this way, the Ramones were a kind of primordial queer family

or “band of brothers,” as Freud might put it, overthrowing the fascistic authority of their

rock and roll elders, just as Vega was trying to disperse the authority of his artistic

forebears in the Warholian pop world. Their gestures were anti-authoritarian, as well as

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183

There is an interesting metaphoric resonance with Heidegger’s word for the khora

here – der Lichtung – or “lighting” in the sense of illumination. See translator’s notes to

Heidegger, 169-172.

184

Stratton, “Jews, Punk, and the Holocaust.”

185

Ramones, Rocket to Russia (New York: Sire, 1977).

105!

utopian, engaging in a masochistic ritual play that was also opposed to sadistic,

patriarchal fantasies of dominance and mastery. This utopian spirit lies at the core of all

the Ramones cultural productions, the CBGB scene’s, and punk more generally, although

it has of course often been portrayed as utopia’s opposite. The Ramones, perhaps more

than any other band, were faithful to this legacy, this spirit, this truth, and in fact

instantiated it. Not only was their triumph artistic, it was also conceptual. This is some of

their story.

106!

CHAPTER THREE: Punk Rock In-Formation: The Concept of the Ramones

According to the Ramones, the twentieth century ended on February 4, 1980. At least

that’s what they claimed when they released their fifth studio album End of the Century

on that date. On the album’s first track, “Do You Remember Rock N’ Roll Radio?” Joey

Ramone sings, “It’s the end, the end of the 70s / It’s the end, the end of the century,” and

who are we, as listeners, to question his bad math? After all, it occurs on a track as catchy

and infectious as anything the Ramones had produced to that point, and as the

philosopher Alain Badiou has recently reminded us, it is no easy thing to count a century,

even if you are a Ramone.

186

Especially in our postmodern, secular, global society, in

which what Badiou elsewhere calls “the Christ event” no longer holds sway over our

historical or existential imaginary in the same way it once did, where do we begin and

end our count?

187

1968? 1989? The French Revolution? Or do we adopt some other

calendar altogether—the Muslim? the Chinese? Badiou quotes the seventeenth century

French theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet who wrote, “What are a hundred years, a

thousand years, when a single instant effaces them?”

188

This single instant is what Badiou

calls the “event.”

The Ramones set out to identify the event, a truth around which to structure their

political and aesthetic consciousness, when they name their album End of the Century.

Both the Ramones and Badiou begin their accounts of this century, their accounts of

history, not with an actuarial table of times and dates, but with an emphasis on the event’s

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186

Alain Badiou, The Century, translated by Alberto Toscano (Cambridge, UK: Polity

Press, 2007), 1.

187

See Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, translated by Ray Brassier

(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2003).

188

Badiou, The Century, 1.

107!

capability to shape history and our status as subjects to it. They set out to discover

what Badiou calls a “truth” upon which to found an ethics.

189

The Ramones’ song in

which they declare the end of the 70s the end of the century is structured around an

obvious gap. When they ask their listeners to “remember rock n’ roll radio,” they do not

invoke their halcyon days starting out at the New York rock club CBGB, appearing

alongside other punk bands such as Television, Patti Smith, Suicide, Talking Heads, and

the rest. Instead, they plunge the listener into a 50s and 60s radio world that is wracked

with nostalgia and payola, the very things that early New York punk was often

understood to be rebelling against—Hullabaloo, Upbeat, Shindig, Ed Sullivan, Alan

Freed, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Murray the K. Even once we get to hear about some rough

contemporaries of the Ramones, they are distinctively pre-punk—John Lennon, T. Rex

and “Ol’ Moulty” (one-armed drummer for the Boston-based garage rock band The

Barbarians)—icons of the British Invasion and psychedelia, glam rock, and garage rock

respectively. Punk rock does not fill the gap between rock n’ roll radio and the end of the

century. Instead, it exists as a ghostly absence around which the Ramones’ wish for a

return to rock n’ roll innocence may be structured.

190

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189

Badiou’s use of the term “truth” should be read with the inflection of something like

“noble truth” in the Buddhist sense or virtue in the Nietzschean, a slogan or maxim

around which to build an ethical system. Good examples, for Badiou, of a truth that was

worth fighting for include St. Paul’s dictum “In Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew,”

later changed to “East nor West,” or Mao’s “One divides into two.” See Badiou, Saint

Paul, and “One Divides Into Two,” translated by Alberto Toscano, Culture Machine 4

(2002), http://www.culturemachine.net/ index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/270/255.

190

As Badiou argues, the event first appears as an absence in the previous political,

aesthetic, romantic, or scientific situation, which the subject then endows with a name.

Such naming is the constitutive political, aesthetic, romantic, or scientific act, and is

analogous to a religious type of benediction, not unlike the process of naming discussed

108!

Thus, the Ramones’ desire to remember rock n’ roll radio is neither nostalgic

nor reactionary; it is utopian. The Ramones end the century on February 4, 1980 because

they wish to instigate a new American century of their own design on that date. They

mean to serve as subjects to history that would forego the forces of Reaganite reaction

then overtaking the American populace. The Ramones’ new century is meant to repair the

traumatic gap that was opened up in the national imaginary during the painful transition

that took place in national life from 1972 to 1974.

191

New York punk did not fill this gap;

it signaled its emergence. The Ramones’ new century was intended as a counter-century

to the one instantiated by the Reagan Revolution, the first victories of which more or less

accompanied the 1980 album’s release.

192

By identifying the gap around which the

fantasy of their new century may be structured, they identify the annus horribilis of the

short, sharp decade just past as 1973, the year just before the Ramones formed, and the

year from which all of their 70s music sought to recover, the same year that the Reagan

Revolution sought to erase. 1973 was the year that the Vietnam War ended, the

Watergate scandal began to dominate U.S. cultural consciousness, and a frustrating

economic recession seized the U.S. as a result of failed monetary policy and the oil

embargo. Although 1968 is often named as the year that Reaganism and later neo-

conservatism sought to erase, it was actually 1973, the year that first revealed the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

in Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity. See Badiou, Being and Event, 173-200; and Saul

Kripke, Naming and Necessity (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991).

191

Frederic Jameson identifies this two year period as “the definitive end of what is

called the 60s.” Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text 9/10 (Spring-Summer,

1984): 178-209.

192

Joey Ramone, in particular, was a defiant Reagan hater, and the band released one of

the most poignant Reagan-era protest songs, “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” in 1985, a rare

foray into directly topical, political songwriting for the otherwise highly conceptual band.

109!

limitations of the Reaganite right’s revolutionary program, which they really had to

erase from public memory, and of course they more or less did. Its ghosts have only

started to reemerge publicly, on a mass level, since 2008, when the most recent financial

crisis has encouraged many Americans to openly reconsider socialism as a viable

alternative to neo-liberalism’s painful, tragic cycles of boom and bust, and occupy

everything.

The 70s are a decade that historians still struggle to comprehend, and the

Ramones’ music helps us do it.

193

It offers contemporary listeners special insight into that

decade’s unconscious desires and social fantasies. Since they first appeared on-stage on

March 2, 1974, the Ramones have been universally heralded as a key member of the rock

n’ roll canon, and sometimes as the original punk rock band or purest example of the

punk rock style, but these accolades have been both a blessing and a curse. Too often,

praise of the Ramones recognizes the importance of their sound, but obscures the ways in

which this sound can be read as a critique of the urban landscape from which it emerged.

The Ramones are not just a good time rock band. For the cost of having fun while

listening to their music is the price of putting up with an awful lot of noise in order to get

there. The Ramones music does not offer any easy answers. Specifically, inherent within

their music is a certain fantasy of queer and working class belonging at which most of

their critics have only hinted. It is the task of this chapter to recover it.

The Ramones’ noise remade social space. As the theorist of sound Jacques Attali

has famously noted, noise has the power of prophecy. It is a “simulacrum of ritual

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193

As So-Cal punk rocker and Minutemen founder Mike Watt puts it on his 1994 track,

“The kids of today should defend themselves against the 70s.” Mike Watt, “Against the

70s,” Ball-Hog or Tugboat? (Los Angeles: Columbia Records, 1994).

110!

murder” that has the potential to transform social space through the composition of

new social collectives and new forms of consciousness.

194

Attali did not predict that the

prophetic music of the future would sound anything like the Ramones—he saw much

more potential in the revolutionary sounds of the free jazz movement—but he does

identify rock music like that of the Rolling Stones, rock n’ roll predecessors to the

Ramones, as an important signal of the necessity for some radical, dialectical change in

the contemporary mode of musical production.

195

He describes this change as the move

from repetition to composition, from the monotonous stockpiling of creative labor in the

form of plastic media to the unbridled release of creative energy in free improvisation. He

writes that the Rolling Stones’ song “Satisfaction,” just as much as a piece of music

theory by John Cage, “announces a rupture in the process of musical creation, the end of

music as an autonomous activity, due to an intensification of lack in the spectacle. They

are not the new mode of musical production, but the liquidation of the old.”

196

Susan

McClary, in her afterword to the English translation of Noise, notes that some of what

Attali endorses in the final chapter of his book, “Composing,” as a mode of musical

production designed to bring about a revolutionary change in social consciousness, was

realized in the British punk movement led by the Sex Pistols, what she describes as the

“New Wave.”

197

But in fact the Sex Pistols and the British punks’ methods of

composition were anticipated and some may say perfected by bands like the Ramones at

least two years earlier.

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194

Attali, Ibid., 28.

195

Ibid., 138-140.

196

Ibid., 137.

197

Susan McClary, “Afterword” to Attali, 157-158.

111!

One of the Ramones’ biographies is subtitled An American Band, which is

supposedly an appellation that the band preferred, but the emergence of the Ramones’

sound from the streets of New York in 1974 is not a reason for nationalistic pride.

198

Instead, it should be read as an index of the moral and psychological depths to which the

U.S. sunk in the post-Watergate period. Nevertheless, it was not a symptom of stagflation

(as it has often been read), but a tactical response to it. The formation of the Ramones

signaled an important change in the way the rock music public understood itself that was

equal to the times of stress and strain that that public was going through psychologically,

politically, and socially after the Vietnam War and Watergate, during the worst financial

crisis it had faced since the Great Depression.

199

Their music initiated a shift from a

narcissistic self-understanding on the part of male rock stars and their public to one based

more on mutual recognition and the formation of guerilla counterpublics, especially

around concerns of working class identity and queer belonging. These creative moves on

the part of the Ramones were so efficient and economical that they seem almost invisible

to us today.

In a series of recent books and articles, Jacques Ranciére has argued that our

aesthetic judgments are governed by what he calls the “distribution of the sensible,”

partitions of the human sensorium that dictate what we can sense and thus what we can

think and feel.

200

The Ramones, along with the other New York punk bands and

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198

Jim Bessman, Ramones: An American Band (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993).

199

On rock counterculture as a public sphere, see Michael Kramer, Republic of Rock.

200

See, in particular, Jacques Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the

Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006); “The Aesthetic

Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 36 (Autumn 2006); The

112!

conceptual artists in New York that constituted their aesthetic milieu, dissolved these

partitions of the sensible in a quest for what the surrealist George Bataille described as

“the formless,” surreal juxtapositions of urban iconography that stand corporate strategies

of domination on their head and reveal the tragic ironies inherent in urban dwelling

during the postmodern period. Mutual recognition of and by the Ramones’ audience of

their role in this strategic game of representation is the first step towards the development

of a new consciousness of self among that audience, the rock counterpublic.

The Broken Mirror: Ramones as Reflection and Refraction

The appearance of the Ramones in downtown New York in the early 1970s did not

simply signal the appearance of a great new rock band. It also marked the emergence of a

new class consciousness among rock music spectators that differed sharply from the one

envisioned by classic Marxist cultural critics like Georg Lukács, as well as Marxist class

commentators that were more contemporary with the Ramones, such as Christopher

Lasch, Richard Sennett, or Jonathan Cobb.

201

Class consciousness for the Ramones is not

structured around some nostalgic notion of class solidarity but instead upon a knowing

recognition of class’s existence as a structuring category—a category that is intersected

by other identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality, and a category that exists

to be prodded and parodied. Class consciousness for the Ramones might even be

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Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2009); and

Aesthetics and Its Discontents (London: Polity Press, 2009).

201

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics,

translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971); Christopher

Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

(New York: Norton, 1979); and Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries

of Class (New York: Norton, 1972).

113!

described more accurately as “trash consciousness,” a consciousness of one’s own

abject position within a totalizing class discourse. It is also “camp” consciousness, in the

fullest sense of that term offered by Susan Sontag.

202

Rock critic Tom Morgan touches

upon this possibility of the existence of trash consciousness in the Ramones’ music in his

essay on their third album Rocket to Russia.

203

He writes, “One of the chief delights of

rock music is that it’s trash music for a trash culture…[The Ramones’] reveling in the

trashy vitality of such an overwrought atmosphere was a life-affirming manifesto.”

204

The Ramones were not the only group to revel in this trash consciousness during the

period—the New York Dolls and the Dictators come immediately to mind—but they

were perhaps the most effective. Recently, musician and cultural theorist Drew Daniel

has written about the potential for acts of queer minstrelsy in a punk rock context to

disrupt homo- and heteronormative standards of authenticity, especially when it comes to

political identity.

205

The Ramones, more than any other punk band, may have been ahead

of the curve here—as Daniel partially suggests—as they blended queer minstrelsy with

real queer life.

206

The sexual identity of Joey Ramone was always in question, an aspect

of his persona that he camped up, especially in his early performances, but the

polymorphous bisexuality of the band’s bassist Dee Dee Ramone was never in doubt, and

in fact promoted by the band in one of their most fetching early songs “53

& 3

,” in

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202

Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” Partisan Review 31:4 (Fall 1964), 515-530.

203

Tom Morgan, “Rocket to Russia,” in Greil Marcus, ed. Stranded: Rock and Roll for a

Desert Island (1978; New York: Da Capo, 2007), 111-113.

204

Ibid.

205

Drew Daniel, “Why Be Something You’re Not?” 13-34.

206

Daniel mentions the Ramones album title Leave Home as a kind of slogan for the type

of anti-anti-authentic identity play he endorses. See Daniel, 32.

114!

which Dee Dee narrates his time on that street corner, working as a hustler. The real

& 3

in New York City is now the site of the Citibank building.

As Morgan goes on to suggest, the Ramones’ message was all the more poignant

because it emerged from a specific time and place, the urban milieu of New York in the

70s. As he puts it, “Very little of 70s rock is genuinely urban; in fact, most of it has no

sense of place at all…The triumph of the Ramones is that they were urban.”

207

The

emergence of trash consciousness in the Ramones’ music can be read politically as a

protest against corporate strategies of domination and control over the production of

space, and the rhythm of everyday life in New York during the early 70s. At the time

when the Ramones first appeared on-stage, a unique set of social forces were coalescing

on New York’s downtown scene to which their performances responded—

financialization, the end of the Vietnam War, urban “development,” the collapse of the

counterculture, and new identity movements—but two countercultural developments in

particular seem to have informed their performing identities, deindustrialization and the

Stonewall Rebellion of 1969. The Ramones artistic director Arturo Vega was a gay man

directly influenced by this spirit of simultaneous gay liberation, in the form of Stonewall

and Warholian pop art, and disappointed or depressed by the passing of a certain spirit of

working class life in the city. He sought to capture the effervescence of both energies in

the Ramones’s visual style, which was equally indebted to the working class tough guy

images of James Dean and Marlon Brando, as well as the clone and leather daddy looks

then gaining popularity in New York’s underground gay scene, of which he was a part.

During the early days, Dee Dee lived with Vega and they were rumored to have been

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

207

Ibid., 112.

115!

lovers. It was this cross-cultural energy, the bisexual construction worker from

queens, and the gay, Mexican aesthete who had escaped to Manhattan that informed the

Ramones’s early sound, style, and performances.

The Ramones’ sound was born out of social chaos. As Attali suggests, new

technologies of musical production produce new knowledge. In the case of composition,

this new knowledge is “cartography, local knowledge, the insertion of culture into

production and a general availability of new tools and instruments.”

208

The Ramones’

sound helped their audience cope with the social chaos that surrounded them by

establishing a space, a place, a scene, a khora, in which they could dwell. As David

Harvey has written, downtown New York has been a proving ground for technologies of

capitalist domination during the neo-liberal period.

209

The Ramones’ compositional

technologies were a response to these corporate technologies, but in the necessary queer

riposte to Harvey, which Judith Halberstam describes in her book In a Queer Time and

Place, they were intended not to resuscitate a dusty, straight, homophobic, and

masculinist working class sensibility, but a new working class, queer sensibility equally

indebted to the city’s past and its queer future, just then in bloom.

210

The Ramones, in cahoots with other conceptual artists and their collaborators on

New York’s downtown scene, either dissolved or rearranged the partitions of the sensible

that had ruled that scene during the 60s. The Ramones’ “conceptualism” set them apart

from the average rock band in the early part of the 70s. Most rock bands, by that point,

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208

Attali, 147.

209

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of

Cultural Change (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995).

210

See Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 1-21.

116!

had settled into either a blues-based format of riff-centered rock or followed the Sgt.

Pepper-era Beatles down the neo-classical road of high concept, “progressive,” or prog

rock. Blues rock, epitomized by bands like Grand Funk Railroad and Led Zeppelin, has

been characterized by metal and punk scholar Steve Waksman as promising its spectator

a polymorphic, utopian merging with “the Crowd” in the grand spectacle of the arena

show.

211

Prog rock, on the other hand, epitomized by bands like Pink Floyd and Yes,

encouraged aesthetic distance between rock performer and rock spectator, severing a

bond that during the 50s and 60s was at least putatively populist. Pink Floyd signified the

severing of this bond during their stage show in support of their 1982 album The Wall.

Inspired in part by punk’s indulgence in feelings of alienation, Pink Floyd would end

their concerts by literally erecting a wall between themselves and their audience. The

wall was supposed to signify the band’s disgust with the rigors of record company

pressure and touring, but it could also be interpreted as a gigantic middle-finger turned

towards their audience. The Ramones’ specific articulation of a populist conceptualism

within New York City’s early 70s downtown milieu stands out as a highly politicized,

dialectical response to this waning of rock n’ roll spectacle at the close of the 60s

counterculture moment.

When asked about the creative evolution of his band, Joey Ramone explained,

“The first album was kind of, uh, I guess, a conceptual album more or less, ‘cause it was

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211

Steve Waksman, This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy

Metal and Punk (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 19-69. This goal of

arena rock is also reflected upon negatively in the lyrics to Watt’s “Against the 70s:”

“Stadium minds with stadium lies gotta make you laugh.”

117!

something nobody’s ever done or heard before.”

212

According to Joey, the Ramones

self-titled debut was intended to be something more than just another fun rock n’ roll

record, although it was most certainly that too. The band’s original drummer, and the

producer of many of their best albums, Tommy Ramone, echoes Joey’s comments in a

1979 interview with Rolling Stone’s Timothy White:

We used block chording as a melodic device…and the harmonies resulting from

the distortion of the amplifiers created countermelodies. We used the wall of

sound as a melodic rather than a riff form: it was like a song within a song—

created by a block of chords droning…I’ll tell you what else was distinctive…the

hypnotic effect of strict repetition, the effect of lyrics that repeat, and vocals that

dart at you, and the percussive effect of driving the music like a sonic machine.

It’s very sensual. You can put headphones on and just swim with it. It’s not

background music.

213

Prior to joining the Ramones, Erdelyi had worked as a record engineer for such rock n’

roll luminaries as Jimi Hendrix, and was involved tangentially in New York City’s

underground film scene. He is a reputed fan of Luis Buñuel, and the creator of some

avant-garde films himself before joining the Ramones.

214

Joey Ramone’s mother owned

an art gallery in Queens where Joey worked (and briefly lived) before joining the band.

His brother, Mickey Leigh, even reports in his recent memoir and biography of his

brother (co-authored with Punk magazine co-founder Legs McNeil) that Joey tried his

own hand at painting for a time, attempting to one-up Warhol by not painting a

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212

Ramones: It’s Alive, 1974-1996. The DVD includes no videographic information

about the date of the interview, location, or identity of the interviewer. The interviewer

asks Joey about the band’s 1977 recording of “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” so one can

safely assume that the video was made after that date. It was probably made no later than

“the early ‘80s,” since band manager Danny Fields alludes to the late 70s/early 80s music

scene as though it is contemporary in another section of the same set of videotaped

interviews.

213

Reprinted in True, 55.

214

See Robert Christgau, “Ramone,” Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics,

http://www.robertchristgau.com/ xg/rock/ramone.php (accessed April 3, 2010).

118!

Campbell’s soup can but actually painting with Campbell’s soup.

215

The problem

with the paintings was that they would degrade rapidly and thus could not be displayed

for any length of time. These experiences in New York City’s wider artistic community,

along with the influence of the Ramones’ designer, Arturo Vega, who created their on-

stage “costume,” had just as much of an influence on the Ramones as comic books, fast

food, the Beatles, and bubblegum records.

216

In the interview with White, Tommy lays out the conceptual building blocks of

the Ramones’ sound—what he calls “block chording,” repetition, vocals up front and

high in the mix, and harmonic distortion. Presumably, “block chording” would refer to

the “blocking out” of harmonic progressions on the guitar using barre chords, the root

notes of which are doubled by the bass guitar, creating a tone cluster, which when played

live at high volumes, creates a cloud of sound that is felt bodily, what Tommy refers to as

an underwater or swimming effect. Extensive use of block chords constituted the

standard arrangement for a Ramones’ song until about their fourth album, Road to Ruin,

in 1978. Played at high volumes and with maximum distortion this technique would

produce a new set of overtones to accompany the major triads “blocked out” by barre

chords on the bottom three strings of Johnny Ramone’s guitar. These overtones produce a

refractive effect: while the guitarist is fulfilling the role typically occupied by the rhythm

guitarist in a four-piece rock band (e.g. John Lennon in the Beatles or Brian Jones in the

Rolling Stones), his guitar also takes on certain harmonic and melodic responsibilities

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

215

Leigh and McNeil, 86-87.

216

Robert Christgau insists on this term, “costumes,” which had nothing to do with the

Ramones preferred sartorial choices outside of the band and everything to do with

projecting a group identity. The same goes for their shared, adopted last names.

Christgau, “Ramone,” n.p.

119!

typically fulfilled by the lead guitarist. Johnny’s playing can be said to produce riffs,

licks, and solos where they do not really exist, through a phase effect created by

harmonic distortion and stereo separation. As Tommy puts it, the Ramones’ conceptual

techniques produce “a song within a song.” They produce a sonic effect that pushes on

the limits of rock song form and allows their listeners to appreciate their music on a

second, more conceptual level. The Ramones’ early records owe a debt both to the full-on

synaesthetic experience of the psychedelic movement as well as to the purely intellectual,

conceptual understanding of art production posited by gallery artists who were part of the

New York City and wider international art worlds during the late 60s and early 70s—

artists like John Cage, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, and Andy Warhol.

“Conceptual” and “concept art” were buzzwords around New York City’s

downtown arts scene in the late 60s and 70s, a scene of which the Ramones and their

famous home venue, CBGB’s, were very much a part. Rock writers, such as Clinton

Heylin, Nick Rombes, Everett True, Mickey Leigh, Legs McNeil, and Gillian McCain,

all acknowledge this possible conceptual heritage for the Ramones’ music, but for the

most part it remains under-explored.

217

Yet the Ramones’ conceptualism was apparent to

anyone in the 70s with the willingness to see it. Despite the Ramones’ self-fashioning as

rock music savants, quotes like those from Joey and Tommy betray their sophistication

and their high level of artistic self-consciousness. The sentiment is also echoed

throughout fan recollections of the band and critical accounts of their music. In a

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217

See True; Leigh and McNeil; Nick Rombes, Ramones (New York: Continuum, 2005);

Heylin, From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World

(New York: Penguin, 1993); and McNeil and McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored

Oral History of Punk.

120!

biography of the band, Everett True interviews Roberta Bayley, the photographer

who took the picture that served as the Ramones’ first album cover on their self-titled

debut in 1976. She recalls her first experience seeing the Ramones live: “It was very

strange, seeing them for the first time, because you didn’t have any precedent for the look

or the sound or the really short songs, even. They played a really short set. It was almost

like conceptual art, thinking about it. It was weird but great.”

218

Similarly, punk rock

music critic Nicholas Rombes begins his excellent book-length essay on the Ramones’

self-titled first album by writing, “Ramones is either the last great modern record, or the

first great postmodern one. Fully aware of its status as pop culture, it nonetheless has

unironic aspirations toward art.”

219

Finally, in his important oral history of punk, From

the Velvets to the Voidoids, Clinton Heylin identifies “a central conundrum in attempting

to ascertain the Ramones ‘significance’—how (self-)conscious their original concept

was.”

220

In sum, it was never uncommon to ascribe deeper conceptual motives to the

Ramones’ apparent simplification of rock music’s core artistic ingredients. Playing fast,

hard, and loud did not just stagger or impress. It tapped into a cultural zeitgeist, and

amidst its formless chaos, it signified something very poignant about the similarly chaotic

social world from which it emerged—New York City’s nascent downtown scene in the

first half of the 70s. As the Ramones’ manager, Danny Fields, put it, “When the Ramones

appeared on the stage, they were like something I’d unconsciously been waiting

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

218

Bayley, quoted in True, 20.

219

Rombes, 3.

220

Heylin, 167.

121!

for…They were perfect. I didn’t want to change anything about them.”

221

In other

words, it was an emotional experience, similar to the uncanny, a return of the repressed, a

hole in the symbolic, a formless artistic event.

Hearing the Ramones for the first time, avant-garde guitarist and composer, Rhys

Chatham, who for part of the 70s was the artistic director of downtown New York’s most

prominent performance space, the Kitchen, experienced what scene chronicler Tim

Lawrence has described as an “epiphany.”

222

According to Chatham, “While hearing [the

Ramones], I realized that, as a minimalist, I had more in common with this music than I

thought…I was attracted by the sheer energy and raw power of the sound as well as chord

progressions which were not dissimilar to some of the process music I has been hearing

at the time.”

223

The Ramones added to this minimalistic conception of contemporary rock

music a distinctively satirical and nostalgic, but nevertheless critical, obsession with the

detritus of American popular culture that gave their music a popular, politicized edge not

found in most minimalist compositions (of, say, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, or Terry

Riley, often considered the three most important practitioners of the style). For listeners

like Chatham, however, the Ramones’ simplicity did not occupy a lower rung on

downtown New York’s cultural hierarchy than the more sophisticated productions of a

Philip Glass or Arthur Russell (the main subject of Lawrence’s book). Their music

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221

Fields quoted in Steven Lee Beeber, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History

of Jewish Punk (Chicago: Chicago Review Press), 35.

222

Tim Lawrence, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music

Scene, 1973-1992 (Durham: Duke UP, 2009), 116.

223

Quoted in Lawrence, 116. Robert Christgau reports a similar conversion narrative for

his friend Tom Johnston, who he describes as a “laconic explicator of Reich and Glass

and the ‘one-note music’ of Rhys Chatham…who had little interest in pop but lots in

minimalism.”

122!

occupied a nodal point in what Lawrence, borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari,

describes as the “rhizomatic” structure of that downtown scene, nourishing it and being

nourished by it in a way that subsequent stratifications and hierarchizations of downtown

Manhattan have made increasingly precarious and difficult.

224

1974, the year in which the

Ramones began playing in downtown Manhattan was a unique moment at which an

unsigned rock band from Queens could afford to live downtown in close proximity to

progressive art venues such as Warhol’s Factory, the Kitchen, and the St. Mark’s Poetry

Project. Art market speculation had not yet sullied the dream of a Warholian republic of

losers.

225

The Ramones’ aesthetic was a subtle and progressive reworking of the styles and

tropes preferred by glam rock bands like the New York Dolls and the Stooges in the U.S.,

and David Bowie and Marc Bolan overseas. It emerged out of campy riffs on those

styles. The Ramones’ image was crafted as a rough parody of urban machismo in

collaboration with Arturo Vega. As mentioned in my introduction, Mickey Leigh ascribes

his brother Joey Ramone’s attraction to glam rock in the early part of the 70s as having

just as much to do with sound and fashion as it did with sexuality. Although the

Ramones’ visual image is clearly meant to connote an air of “toughness” or “hardness”

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224

Lawrence, 87.

225

In his essay “After Laughter,” on graphic artist Raymond Pettibon, who started his

career as a designer for the punk rock record label SST and is brothers with the guitarist

of the hardcore punk band Black Flag (Greg Ginn), Benjamin Buchloh describes how the

meaning of the Warholian dictum, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen

minutes,” was reversed during the 70s. Originally intended as a rewriting of the beatitude,

“The meek shall inherit the earth,” by the 80s this dictum was used to justify cultural

mediocrity. A surplus of fame was used to justify the existence of an unproductive class

of fame consumers. Benjamin H.D Buchloh, “Raymond Pettibon: After Laughter,”

October 129 (Summer 2009): 13-50.

123!

this image must also be read, in part, as a sort of parody within the larger context of

the Ramones’ sound, lyrics, and on-stage personas.

226

The Ramones are looking tough for

other men, and almost playing the part of children, brothers, assembled into a strange,

queer family, which is also invoked in the lyrics to “We’re a Happy Family.”

Besides the shortness of their songs and the loud volume of the Ramones’ early

music, which the band members compared explicitly to the sound of a chainsaw, their

early performances included out of tune instruments, forgotten chords, drunken

stumbling, and on-stage fistfights. Lyrically, the Ramones’ early songs recounted cartoon

versions of Vietnam combat training, Cold War espionage, Manson family-style slayings,

and Nazi posturing. In a very self-conscious manner, the band seemed to be lampooning

all the social and cultural forces that had made them what they were—youth, in its

strictest empirical sense, passive consumers of cultural goods such as rock music, leather

jackets, comic books, hamburgers, and cheap drugs. The artist and critic Dan Graham,

who was also a great early Ramones fan, specifies the identity of the typical rock music

consumer during the countercultural period:

In the 1950s a new class emerged, a generation whose task was not to produce but

to consume; this was the “teenager.” Freed from the work ethic so as not to add to

postwar unemployment and liberated from the Puritan work ethic, their

philosophy was fun. Their religion was rock n’ roll. Rock turned the values of

traditional American religion on their head. To rock n’ roll meant to have

sex…NOW.

227

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226

Tom Morgan makes a similar point: “Their leather jackets and strung-out streetwise

pose weren’t so much an imitation of Brando in The Wild One as a very self-conscious

parody” (108).

227

Dan Graham, “Rock My Religion” in Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects,

1965-1990, ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

1993), 85.

124!

The appearance of the Ramones represents the most highly self-critical reflection on

this new social role for youth as a consuming class in rock music to that point. Starting

out as members of the glam rock scene—Johnny Ramone wore a leopard print shirt and

tight black leather pants during most of the band’s early performances—the Ramones

sublimated the 60s countercultural desire for sexual experimentation and release into

their desire to play “hard.” On one hand, this new desire may be understood as a form of

repression, but it is also productive of a new subject position for rock fans and rock

musicians with its own set of aesthetic norms and potentials. As has been well established

in the cultural history of the period, the 60s counterculture in many ways excluded certain

racialized, gendered, and sexualized others. For all its reputed revolutionary force, the

60s counterculture remained more or less negro- and homophobic as well as misogynist.

The Ramones did not necessarily overcome all of these discriminatory practices, either in

word or in deed, but they did open up new spaces of identification between themselves,

their female and queer fans and a transnational audience that has embraced them

throughout the global south (particularly in places like Argentina and Mexico). On one of

the standout tracks of queer, feminist punk band Sleater-Kinney’s 1996 album Call the

Doctor, “ I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” they celebrate their identification with

Ramone in an openly universal way.

228

As guitarist Carrie Brownstein put it in an

interview with Everett True, Joey Ramone “embodied both diffidence and grandiosity.

Here was a man who was simultaneously awkward…and also larger than life…The song

has us stepping into a male rock performer’s shoes and by doing this we get a glimpse of

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228

Sleater-Kinney, Call the Doctor (Portland, OR: Chainsaw, 1991).

125!

the absurdity, the privilege, and the decadence we didn’t feel was inherently afforded

to us.”

229

Listening again to the Ramones’ early music, it may seem repetitive in a way that

more closely resembles mass produced pop music than that of British punk bands like the

Sex Pistols or the Slits, but because of their simultaneous blending of pop songcraft with

transgressive sonic experimentation, the Ramones’ music is never boring or obtuse in a

way that the Sex Pistols and the Slits quickly became. The Ramones’ music maintains its

identity as part of the great pop ritual, the Satanic inversion of all that the parent culture

considered holy, and refuses the temptation of sanctimonious preaching, a fatal flaw of

much subsequent punk production. Experimenting with repetition, among minimalist

composers and other downtown New York artists, was a preferred mode of transgressive

aesthetic production in the early 1970s that responded tactically to repetition elsewhere in

the cultural and social field—on television advertisements, in late modern architecture

(like Minoru Yamazaki’s design for the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center), and in

pop music itself. The Ramones tap into this spirit of repetition that is only mindless in the

sense of being ritualistic, meant to bring about a heightened state of consciousness in

which the subject’s social and political priorities are reordered.

230

In this way, their music

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229

Carrie Brownstein, qtd. in True, 277-278.

230

The Ramones’ emphasis on repetition in some aspects of their music’s formal

construction may seem to contradict Jacques Attali’s theoretical ideas about the need for

a transition from repetition to composition as the dominant mode of musical production

during the contemporary period. In his book, Attali does not consider nascent modes of

minimalist production like those of either the Ramones or the downtown minimalist

composers (Glass, Chatham, Riley, Reich, etc.). In the Ramones’ music repetition is

transformed from a mindless stockpiling of creative energy to a means through which to

cathect creative energy. In this way, it avoids the accusations against repetition that Attali

enumerates.

126!

is supersensual like the Velvet Underground’s, or the masochistic rituals originally

described in Venus in Furs.

The Ramones’ performances were a broken mirror, chaotically reflecting back to

the downtown scene the scattered history of pop art and performance that had taken place

in the preceding decade. On the Ramones’ first album, Ramones (1976), each song

consists of two, three, or at most four chords arranged in simple A/B, verse/chorus

patterns. There are no guitar solos. Melody lines or “licks,” the definitive formal feature

of most blues-based early-‘70s guitar rock music, are never picked out or clearly

articulated. Using only one finger or a pick, the bassist, Dee Dee Ramone, always

doubles the bass of the current chord being strummed by Johnny in a strict pattern of 8-

notes to the bar on the bottom two strings of his bass. Johnny’s strums are often muted

with the guitarist’s palm so as to focus their rhythmic energy as opposed to highlighting

any harmonic complexity or development. The drumming, similarly, follows a

militaristic eighth-note pattern. On most songs, the movement into the chorus is signaled

by the drummer when he uncrosses his arms to move from the high-hat to the ride

cymbal. Only in this very slight moment of timbral variation does the rhythm section

betray any semblance of artistic expression or self-identity. Otherwise, all their psychic

energy seems focused on the artistic goal of playing “hard,” that is, fulfilling their

prescribed role as the members of that most banal suburban creation, the garage band, as

similar to every other garage rock band as they are singular in their sonic informality.

Only the voice of Joey Ramone, strangely melodic, strangely charming, floats above this

din and endows it with any sense of human character or embodied presence. Otherwise,

the rest of the ensemble seems to perform constantly under erasure, their courage

127!

screwed, fits clenched, their stomachs balled up in knots. If all rock music

performance can be viewed as a sort of ritualized masturbation, the Ramones’

performances can also be understood as a form of ritualized self-torture. Such a brutal

realization of the prophetic power of rock n’ roll noise was exactly what the New York

scene needed to exit the 60s, a dead ideological project anyway, and begin to explore the

70s, the traumatic gap between the end of rock n’ roll and the end of history.

Behind the Broken Mirror

The Ramones deconstructed the identity categories underwriting countercultural

authenticity. They captured the brutalizing affective experience of trash consciousness

not only in their lyrics but also in the sound of their music. Yet all of this sound and fury

might have signified nothing if they had not also intuited in rock music what an art critic

might describe as the “support” underlying the creation of popular music and rock

records in particular. This additionally deconstructive aspect of their aesthetic

presentation is important to my point about the Ramones’ music expressing a mentality

that was qualitatively different from that of other rock bands. The Ramones accurately

identified the vampiric record industry as the art system that sonically supported their

music, and undermined it by orchestrating their songs as brutalist deconstructions of

previous song forms, by imbuing them with what I will describe later in this section as

“punk rock in-formality.”

Everything about the Ramones’ first performances at the rock club CBGB

provided their audiences with an off-putting but ennobling aesthetic experience of the

real—in the Lacanian sense of unknowable sublimity, but also musical realism—imbued

128!

with the ironic sensibility of the surreal. Even the architecture of the club added to

this experience of surreality and the intensification of experience embodied in the music.

For instance, the club’s bathroom was located behind the main stage, so that in order to

access it you would have to negotiate the assembled crowd and cross the band’s

sightlines. In order to take a piss, in order to deposit your waste, you would literally have

to penetrate the spectacle, to step behind the looking glass through which that night’s

talent was projecting their fantasy of the rock n’ roll lifestyle. A contributor to the

website urinal.net comments, “Most likely every rock star has used this urinal at one

point in their life…and so have I.”

231

Penetrating the lower depths of this club provided

its audiences with a literal sense of abjection meant to channel their alienation and

transform it into something ritualistically liberating, almost sacred.

One of CBGB’s earliest and most famous performers, Richard Hell, focuses on

this liberating aspect of the club’s décor in a brief essay that he wrote about the space of

the club for the book that accompanied a 2008 museum exhibition, Sympathy for the

Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967. Hell notes that “CBGB’s is located on the

Bowery, a street the very name of which has signified drunkenness, dereliction, and

failure for as long as anyone can remember. Such is the mental space of its physical

space.”

232

The street also signifies transience and transgression, having served as the

gathering place for many of New York City’s immigrant communities throughout its long

history, and as a burlesque entertainment center during the antebellum period. For Hell,

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231

Topher Cox, “The Urinals of CBGB’s,” urinal.net, http://www.urinal.net/cbgb/.

232

Richard Hell, “CBGB as a Physical Space,” in Dominic Molon, ed. Sympathy for the

Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007), 27.

129!

this iconography is best embodied in the graffiti that covered the walls of the club’s

infamous bathroom (along with the rest of the backstage area).

The effect of the surfaces of CBGB’s dark, crazed insides is eerie, haunting. It’s

like a dead-quiet, chillingly colorful cemetery. Or autopsy: all of complicated

history sliced open to view. It’s not so much that the graffiti evokes the endless

procession of individual kids who’ve attended the club, but that it evokes their

absence, their faceless selves buried under the next pretty layer of pointless

assertion. The walls are an onslaught of death and futility as much as they are of

life and vitality.

233

For Hell, gazing at these graffiti covered walls is a lot like staring back into the toilet.

What you see there reminds you of mortality even as it affirms your existence, your

ongoing biological life. Stepping beyond the looking glass of the CBGB stage does not

lead onto some higher reality, does not provide you with insight into the kernel of the

rock n’ roll fantasy; instead, one fantasy gives way to another. In the CBGB bathroom,

each spectator was offered special purchase, a privileged view, not on the truth of history,

but its catastrophic workings. As Hell expresses it, the CBGB graffiti was an “autopsy,” a

cross-section laid bare to the social historian in all of us. Like shitting, a necessary

wallowing in bodily abjection, there is a certain violence embedded in this space.

Imagine the cardiac pulse of the CBGB bathroom, underneath the stage, the whole thing

acting like one big subwoofer with you in it. To describe the scene as womblike, at this

point, would border on the insipid if it weren’t for the truth of natality that resides here,

the rebirth of dreaming.

Architectural historian Eric Darton has written, echoing the comments of Gaston

Bachelard, that “the design of tall buildings demands, as the price of its extreme

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

233

Ibid., 28.

130!

verticality, the sacrifice of a ‘dream cellar,’” what Bachelard calls “oneiric space.”

234

What the CBGB bathroom and the Ramones self-presentation seeks to re-instantiate is

exactly this oneiric space, the space demolished when skyscrapers and other vertical

monstrosities are built on top of neighborhoods where people live, work, and congregate.

Skyscrapers are “oneirically incomplete;” they contain no “dream cellar,” and hence no

mystery.

235

The emergence of the rock scene at CBGB’s was roughly simultaneous with

the erection of the World Trade Center towers in downtown Manhattan, twin symbols of

the city’s increasing domination by finance capital. CBGB’s could only evolve into a

space of aesthetic free-play as an unintentional, positive result of Robert Moses’s

otherwise disastrous plans for the redevelopment of downtown Manhattan and the other

four boroughs.

The Ramones’ effort to re-instantiate this oneiric space is reflected both in their

song lyrics and in their off-stage behavior as junkies and louts compulsively directed

towards the lower depths of experience, what the poet and punk rock progenitor Arthur

Rimbaud described as the “long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.”

236

Punk rock was originally referred to as “street music,” and it seems as though the bands

and their backers appreciated this term. The Ramones’ self-titled debut album contains at

least two “street” or walking songs—“53

and 3

” and “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around

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234

Eric Darton, “The Janus Face of Architectural Terrorism: Minoru Yamasaki,

Mohammed Atta, and Our World Trade Center” in After the World Trade Center:

Rethinking New York City, edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (NY: Routledge,

2002), 89.

235

Ibid.

236

Arthur Rimbaud, “Letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871” in Rimbaud: Complete

Works, Selected Letters, translated by Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1966), 307.

131!

with You.” “53

and 3

” is a chronicle of Dee Dee Ramone’s days as a queer hustler

in midtown Manhattan. The title of the song quite explicitly does the rhetorical work of

re-imagining urban space that the French theorist Michel de Certeau embraced in every

act of urban walking in his book The Practice of Everyday Life.

237

It takes a blind alley,

an address, an instance of strategic mapping on the part of the corporate elite—53

and

is now the address of the Citibank building—and makes it into a remembered place, a

sacred place, no matter how bleak Dee Dee’s experience of it might have been. The song

even commemorates this spatial imaginary in a sort of blood ritual during the song’s

disturbing bridge. The bridge is the only section of the song that Dee Dee sings. In his

famous falsetto voice, he laments, “Then I took my razor blade / Then I did what God

forbade / Now the cops are after me / But I proved that I’m no sissy.”

“I Don’t Wanna Walk Around with You,” part of a cycle of “I Don’t Wanna”

songs on the Ramones’ first two albums, represents the constructive disavowal of Dee

Dee’s traumatic experience of the city in lieu of a commitment to a new kind of walking.

According to Ramones’ biographer Everett True, the first Ramones sets were comprised

almost totally of “I Don’t Wanna” songs, most of which ended up on future albums: “I

Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement,” “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You,” “I

Don’t Wanna Be Learned, I Don’t Wanna Be Tamed,” and “I Don’t Wanna Get Involved

With You.”

238

When the band was asked to issue a more affirmative song—“I Wanna”

instead of “I Don’t Wanna”—they responded with the even more affectively negative,

“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” Through a simple system of affirmation and negation,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

237

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Randall

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

238

True, 27.

132!

these songs set out a certain set of rules for punk, which could be strict or repressive

if they were not so ridiculous: good—sniffing glue; bad—walking around with you and

going down to the basement. As the Ramones’ music developed, they addressed a wider

yet nevertheless tragic set of affirmative concerns: “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” “Now

I Wanna Be a Good Boy,” and “I Wanna Be Well.” As de Certeau has explained, walking

around the city, evolving a map of space out of the darkness of urbanity, replaces the

dungeon and the castle keep for the modern hero—the ordinary man; hence, the play of

light and dark, of space remembered and space created in Ramones lyrics.

239

The Ramones sing “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement,” but only because

they know the abject horror of self-recognition that resides there, the natal truth of

dreams that panoptic phantasmagoria like Mayazaki’s World Trade Center or Pruitt-Igoe

homes, or Robert Moses’s Cross-Bronx Expressway blot out. The Ramones’ are holding

up to the audience a mirror, but it is a broken mirror, a cracked mirror, shattered by the

sound material that channels their audience’s frustrated self-identity back to them in

jagged shards and imaginary glimpses. There is a violence to this operation redolent of

the ritualized mirror that Jacques Attali theorizes as characteristic of every act of music-

making:

A noise is a resonance that interferes with the audition of a message in the process

of emission. A resonance is a set of simultaneous, pure sounds of determined

frequency and differing intensity. Noise, then, does not exist in itself, but only in

relation to the system within which it is inscribed: emitter, transmitter, receiver. . .

. In its biological reality, noise is a source of pain . . . a weapon of death. . . . The

game of music thus resembles the game of power: monopolize the right to

violence; provoke anxiety and then provide a feeling of security . . . Music, then,

rebounds in the field of sound like an echo of the sacrificial channelization of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

239

de Certeau, 106-107.

133!

violence. . . . Music has been, from its origin, a simulacrum of the

monopolization of the power to kill, a simulacrum of ritual murder.

240

For Attali, this simulacral aspect of music was nowhere more pronounced than the 70s,

around the time that he was writing, in 1977, the same year as the first record industry

crash. In the early part of the decade, the music industry, and the rock recording industry

in particular, reached a saturation point, after which is sales began to plummet, only to

stabilize in the 80s with the introduction of compact disc technology. Such a point of

saturation doubles as a point of domination—cultural and political—of music listeners by

music marketers, by the forces of capital accumulation in what Attali refers to as the

stockpiling of surplus creativity.

241

The music industry’s monopoly over sound squelches

dissent; hence the movement from rock counterculture to rock hegemony, the motive

force of cultural reaction to which punk was supposed to have responded.

The Ramones’ sound did not just respond to the social chaos happening around it

content-wise, it also established a sort of meta-discourse through which to have a larger

conversation within the rock community about what rock music meant or could mean. To

return to the aesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière, what the Ramones did is roughly

equivalent to the aesthetic writing of a joiner for a working-class newspaper in

revolutionary France in the 18

-century, The Workers Tocsin.

242

Like the joiner, the

Ramones re-imagined a set of prescribed social behaviors, a social role, as a self-

consciously theatrical performance. In this way, the Ramones’ performances at CBGB

summoned the aesthetic attitude of what Rancière describes as the “as-if” in the minds of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

240

Attali, 26-28.

241

Ibid., 145.

242

Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension,” 7-8.

134!

their listeners, the same attitude that the joiner summoned in the minds of his Workers

Tocsin readers: “They disassociate the gaze from the hand and transform the worker into

an aesthete.”

243

Somewhat paradoxically, the social role that the Ramones occupied was

that of the rock n’ roll performer, a wholly manufactured social role on the part of the

youth culture industry—the masturbatory figure of narcissistic, consumerist youth

completely dedicated to self-mastery through self-fashioning. The Ramones occupied this

social role as the only possible mode of authentic social being in a postmodern society

devoid of existential meaning, but their distracted gaze askance at the assumed self-

seriousness of rock performance encouraged the eyes of their spectators to look

elsewhere in another way.

244

They do not prove a point or demonstrate a principle, like

most pedagogical, political art. Instead, they imagine the spectator’s apprehension of

something about him or herself and communicate that apprehension affectively through

the formal construction of their work.

The Ramones’ music is notable for what Dan Graham might have described as its

“in-formality.” Graham identifies the aesthetic principle of in-formality at work in a

performance by his friend, the performance artist Bruce Nauman. In his essay, “Subject

Matter,” Graham suggests that “the body in-formation [in Nauman’s piece] is the

medium; the body in-formation is the message for the present of…Nauman himself.”

245

The hyphen in this neo-logism keys the reader on its double or triple meaning. The art is

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

243

Ibid., 8.

244

As Attali puts it, quoting the Rolling Stones, “What can a poor boy do, except play for

a rock n’ roll band” (147)? The cryogenic freezing of creativity in the mode of musical

production that Attali describes as repetition ironically demands that the subject-citizen

becomes the thing that she most despises—herself.

245

Graham, “Subject Matter,” in Rock My Religion, 42.

135!

“informal” in the sense of not conforming to the aesthetic norms of official art world

culture. It is vernacular. But it is always also “in formation.” That is, always in a state of

becoming and thus resistant to any static prescription of artistic meaning. And finally, the

work is “information” in the sense of conveying a message. No less so than a television

news broadcast or magazine ad (both the material bases for other artworks by Graham),

the artworks of Nauman participate in a larger media system or public sphere in which

diverse artistic voices compete for airtime, visual space, or sonic presence. These

artworks gesture towards an ambient world in which subjects are formed and positions

are taken independent of one’s positivistic acceptance of the terms of identitarian

discourse. The Ramones’ music re-signifies this gesture through the material of pure

sound, a sense modality that is the privileged medium through which trash consciousness

may emerge.

If we are to focus our attention more concertedly on matters of form and “in-

formality” in conceptual artworks, like the Ramones’ early recordings, we can link the

conceptual tradition back to a wider modernist tradition that can be broadly categorized

under the subheading “surrealism,” however, surrealism in its most anti-authoritarian,

transgressive mode, that of George Bataille and his circle. In Bataille’s Encyclopedia

Acephalica, he defines the term “the formless” as follows:

A dictionary should begin from the point when it is no longer concerned with the

meaning but only with the use of words. Thus, formless is not only an adjective

with a certain meaning, but a term serving to deprecate, implying the general

demand that everything should have a form. That which it designates has no rights

to any sense, and is everywhere crushed under foot like a spider or a worm. For

the satisfaction of academics, the universe must take shape. The entirety of

philosophy has no other end in view: it puts a frock-coat on that which is, a frock-

coat of mathematics. To affirm on the other hand that the universe does not

136!

resemble anything and is nothing but formless amounts to the claim that the

universe is something like a spider or a gob of spittle.

246

The struggle for formlessness takes place in the face of the scientific and mathematical

will to form that is also a will to power through knowledge. Through the chaotic

juxtaposition of dream images in the everyday world it seeks to bring about a new sur-

reality that competes toe-to-toe with the drab, mind-numbing, and soul-crushing reality of

late modernism and postmodernization. The world is made more like a spider or a glob of

spittle because there needs to and must be some regions of contemporary being not

wholly given over to the symbolic logic of language, math, and science. As a preferred

philosophical spokesperson of the conceptualists, Ludwig Wittgenstein, put it in a very

different context (though perhaps not in a very different spirit), “Whereof one cannot

speak, thereof one must be silent.”

247

Logic can diagrammatically display most of the

world, but there remain regions of being beyond the grasp of its symbolization that can

only be comprehended through direct experience and the intermediation of aesthetic

judgments. The Ramones’ music pointed in the most surreptitious and thus the most

poignant ways towards these undiscovered regions of being, an act that was downright

revolutionary at the moment of its cultural conception, a social moment that was marked

by its retrogression and narcissism.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

246

George Bataille, “George Bataille (1892-1962) from ‘Critical Dictionary,’” in Charles

Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing

Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 475.

247

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999),

108.

137!

Coda: Coping with the End of History, Counting on the End of the Century

Post-punk band Sonic Youth’s documentary of their 1991 European tour, 1991: The Year

Punk Broke, climaxes with a speech by the band’s lead singer Thurston Moore. Over

coffee, Moore rattles off the following,

’91 is the year punk finally breaks…through…to the mass-consciousness of

global society. Modern punk, as featured in Elle magazine, Motley Crue singing

“Anarchy in the U.K.” in a European arena in front of 100,000 screaming

people—one of the most sickeningly candy-assed versions you’ll ever hear of it,

but it is the song itself. And you read an interview with John Lydon—to him, it’s

a lark.

248

Afterwards, we see a rousing performance of the signature tune, “Smells Like Teen

Spirit,” of another rock band, Nirvana, who opened for Sonic Youth during their

European tour. During the tour, Nirvana’s second album Nevermind and the “Smells Like

Teen Spirit” single became global hits, unseating Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album at

the top of the pop charts. As the two bands toured Europe, the opener, Nirvana, gradually

eclipsed Sonic Youth in terms of popularity and significance. Moore’s comments, and the

subtitle of the documentary itself, “the year punk broke,” take on an ironic, double-edged

significance in this light. 1991 was not just the year that punk “broke through”—Moore

cleverly hesitates before the word “through” as he completes his sentence—it was also

the year that punk broke down, the year that it lost steam as a mode of politically

resistant, immanent critique.

At least that’s Moore’s opinion. More likely, I think, is that in 1991, at the end of

the Cold War, the Ramones’ punk sound was finally absorbed into the fabric of American

music in an almost imperceptible way. It is the year that the Ramones’ critique of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

248

Thurston Moore, 1991: The Year Punk Broke, directed by Dave Markey (Los

Angeles: Geffen, 1992).

138!

American century was realized historically, when their sound took over the airwaves

like some muddled, yet troubling, return of the repressed. Right after Nirvana’s

performance, The Year Punk Broke presents us with a performance by none other than

the Ramones themselves. Moore relates that his band had played with Iggy Pop, and now

they were playing with the Ramones. The punk rock circle remains unbroken.

In his recent book of pop music criticism, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to

Sing About, Joshua Clover suggestively writes that the “political belle époque” initiated

by the “annus mutationis” of his title “seemed to reverse the [United States’] decline as

global hegemon—a descent that starts around 1973 with the end of the postwar economic

boom and the great image-defeat of the Vietnam War.”

249

Elsewhere in his book, Clover

mourns that “the grand narrative of 1973 will have to be told elsewhere; only bits and

pieces are rifted through [his book].”

250

I have attempted to tell part of that story here.

The story of the Ramones is an important first chapter in the sonic history of this dark

period. Leaving progressive political affiliations aside, if we can follow Francis

Fukuyama in dubbing 1989 the end of history, we may describe 1973 as the “beginning

of the end of history.” Thus, if we listen to the Ramones’ 70s music in concert with the

“sound” of conceptual art—its “voice”—it may help us to map out what it felt like to be a

subject to the end of that history, not as a passive consumer but as an existentially and

politically resistant gestalt, possessing a certain mentality or trash consciousness that

would allow one not only to survive this ending, spiritually, but to begin again,

materially, as a new type of person. Behind this investigation there lies the suspicion that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

249

Joshua Clover, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 2009), 5-6.

250

Ibid., 9.

139!

the sonic energy that propelled much of the music that Clover celebrates, especially

that of the rock band Nirvana, can be traced back to the Ramones initial intervention in

New York in the 70s.

During the scenes in their documentary in which Sonic Youth prepares for their

performance with the Ramones, they almost seem cynical about it, but there can be no

doubt about the debt that these musicians owed to the Ramones sonically and

conceptually. The Ramones set the template—because there is nothing else to do at the

end of history but play for a rock n’ roll band, put four bodies in motion and enjoy the

chance effects their swaying creates, in front of microphones or as their nervous hands

rush back and forth across steel, over pickups. The four original Ramones found an

opening in sound when they dangled themselves like pendulums over the abyss of

informality and let it rip. They discovered something about themselves, the music that

they loved, and its audience. Their sound subsequently winnowed its way into our

consciousness so completely that it seemed almost imperceptible. Yet it is still heard all

around us in the sound of revolutionary rock bands taking up the mantle of punk.

Nowadays the counterculture tends to disavow this legacy. It would prefer 60s nostalgism

or the embrace of some technophilic notion of utopia. Yet the argument of this chapter

has been that the Ramones’ sound, re-interpolated throughout the 70s and 80s by bands

like the Sex Pistols, Sonic Youth, and Nirvana, and even later by punk bands as diverse

as My Bloody Valentine and Sleater-Kinney, possesses a progressive, utopian potential

that is both radically democratic and populist, easy to intuit yet conceptually complex. It

blares at us every time we hear sounds so aggressively smart we can feel them. It is a

promise of equivalence between audience and performer that can only be denied once it

140!

is broached. The Ramones’ sound embodies trash consciousness. It is the sound of

barriers falling, and it is positively conceptual.

141!

CHAPTER FOUR: Dan Graham’s Conceptual Reflections

In June 1977, post-Minimalist artist-critic Dan Graham premiered a new performance

piece titled “Performer/Audience/Mirror” at the contemporary arts center De Appel in

Amsterdam.

251

“Performer/Audience/Mirror” marked a turning point in Graham’s artistic

career. It was the culmination of a series of performances that he had begun in 1969 with

“Like” and “Lax/Relax.” In these and other performances that Graham staged throughout

the 70s, and in the video works that accompanied them—such as “Roll,” “Body Press,”

“Two Consciousness Projections”—the artist thematically explored his mutual

cooperation with his audience in the making of artistic meaning, and sought to explore

alternative modes of art-making designed to heighten consciousness in a way that was

very much in keeping with the 60s’ psychedelic spirit.

As Graham describes “Performer/Artist/Mirror” (in a 1993 script for the piece

that he published in a collection of his writings, Rock My Religion), it consists of four

“stages.”

252

During the first stage, the performer enters a room in which an audience is

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251

The second performance was at the P.S. 1 Institute for Contemporary Art in Long

Island City, New York in December 1977. Another notable performance occurred at

Riverside Studios in London on February 24, 1979. At this performance, Branca was

accompanied by the noise rock band, The Static, featuring Glenn Branca, a prominent

member of New York City’s post-punk “No Wave” scene. Graham and Branca later

collaborated on a musical performance that included rudiments of the

“Performer/Audience/Mirror” idea, “Musical Performance and Stage-Set Utilizing Two-

Way Mirror and Time Delay” (1983). This performance, which also took place in a room

with a mirrored wall, involved the performance of music by Branca and two other

musicians, which was played back on time-delayed video on a monitor in the back of the

room. The monitor was visible to the audience and musicians via the mirror. A video

recording of a performance of “Performer/Audience/Mirror” at Video Free America in

1977 can be viewed on-line at <http://www.ubu.com/film/graham_performer.html>. I

will refer to this videotaped performance later in this chapter.

252

Different versions of the script had appeared in New Art 3/4 (Fall 1980), 30-31, and

Theatre 1981 (Graham, Works, 177). The latter volume also contained a transcription of

142!

seated facing a wall covered by a mirror. Facing the audience, he describes out loud

“the external movements and the attitudes that he believes are signified by this behavior

for about five minutes” (114). Almost imperceptibly, then, for the audience, he moves

into the second stage of the performance, during which he “continues facing the

audience. Looking directly at them, he continuously describes their external behavior for

about five minutes” (114). During the third and final stages of the performance, Graham

repeats the two previous stages, although this time facing the mirror. The script stipulates

that “he is free to move about, to change his relative distance to the mirror, in order to

better see aspects of his body’s movements” (114). According to Graham, during the

fourth stage, “His changes of position produce a changing visual perspective that is

correspondingly reflected in the description,” although in keeping with the overall

ambiguity of the piece, it is difficult to say whose “perspective” is changing according to

Graham’s prose. Certainly, both the audience’s and Graham’s perspectives can both be

said to be changing at any given moment. Thus, Graham’s script establishes a feedback

loop of sorts in which a gestalt mind/body system made up of many individuals in a given

situation is transformed into an artwork that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The script for “Performer/Audience/Mirror” describes a site at which the artist

investigates his relationship with the audience on both a social and phenemonological

level, resulting in an act of aesthetic creation. The script and the resulting performance

are deceptively simple, but they in fact represent a systematic condensation not only of

all of Graham’s performance practices throughout the 70s, but also his critical ideas about

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the performance at P.S. 1, which is reprinted in Dan Graham: Beyond. I have reproduced

the script for “Performer/Audience/Mirror” as an Appendix to this chapter.

143!

the role of artworks in a larger mass culture that is both alienating and forgetful. After

he premiered “Performer/Audience/Mirror,” Graham more or less abandoned the

performance practices that had characterized most of his career to that point. He began

publishing more critical essays; at first focusing his attention on a musical form, punk

rock, the influence of which already seems present in “Performer/Audience/Mirror.” In at

least one performance of the piece, Graham compares his poses to those of a rock n’

roller, and the piece does reflect the same basic structural relationship between performer

and audience as a rock performance.

253

It is no wonder, then, that later video artworks by

Graham, most notably Rock My Religion (1982-1984) and Minor Threat (1983), contain

large amounts of footage that Graham shot himself of sweaty young men slamdancing at

hardcore punk shows by bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag, or of the lead singers of

these bands, throwing themselves into their performances with the utmost physical

commitment, bordering on violence. These video pieces seem to explore the same self-

reflexive thinking about performer and audience as the earlier video art. Graham’s later

studio art, too, architectural pavilions that incorporate elements of sculpture and design,

reflect the critical turn in his work that “Performer/Audience/Mirror” represented. Almost

all of these works utilize mirrors and other types of glass intended to create optical

illusions. In Graham’s later essays about theater, sculpture, architecture, and design, he

focuses on the ability of these mirrored surfaces to inspire critical reflection on the part of

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253

The rock star comment occurs in the videotaped version of the performance. This

moment is described in more detail below.

144!

their users, and help them recover their memories of public space during a

postmodern-era in which most public space is designed to cover over or distort those

memories.

254

“Performer/Audience/Mirror” was preceded by another, similarly titled

performance in 1975, “Performer/Audience Sequence” (Graham, Works, 168). All that

was added in the later performance was the mirror, both in the title of the piece and in its

performance space, described in Graham’s script as an “installation.” The only other

components in this installation are, more or less, the performer and the audience. Other

detritus found in the space of the installation may be disregarded; hence, the piece’s

simplistic, reductive title. The room in which the performance occurs, whether it be an art

gallery, a studio, or any other sort of box equipped to fit people, serves as the support or

frame for a work that will ultimately explore the most basic situation of any artwork

through a kind of staged phenomenological reduction—an encounter between artist and

audience that is mediated via a mirror, the most attenuated of what Michael Fried might

call “supports” for an artwork.

255

As Graham stipulates in his “Thoughts” on the performance, which accompanied

the publication of its script, the mirror’s inclusion is crucial to the piece’s meaning and

function. As Graham writes, only “through the use of a mirror” is “the audience able to

instantaneously perceive itself as a public mass (as a unity), offsetting its definition by

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254

Graham is straightforward in these essays about the influence of the German

philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin on this mode of critical thinking.

255

Explorations of medium specificity and the capacity for media forms to create their

own meaning were key motifs in 60s art critical discourse, especially in the writing of

Michael Fried. See his “Art and Objecthood” (1967), collected in Wood and Harrison.

Rhea Anastas points out that Dan Graham very specifically saw his early curatorial work,

criticism, and art-making as opposing Fried’s aesthetic doctrine (in Beyond, 110-129).

145!

the performer(‘s discourse)” (115). The mirror in this performance is a metaphor for

all forms of technological mediation. In a series of essays and artworks that he had

produced in the 60s and 70s, Graham had identified this same capacity to “offset” or

destabilize the art audience’s relationship towards themselves and towards the artist or

performer in other, more technologically sophisticated media or media systems—

magazines and the periodical publishing industry (the series of artworks and essays

collected in the volume, For Publication (1975)); painting (“Eisenhower and the

Hippies” (1968)), television (“Dean Martin/Entertainment as Theater” (1969)), and rock

music (“Dean Martin” and other essays).

256

For Graham, certain artistic techniques

common to these media might be capable of achieving what Brecht described as the

Enfremdung or distancing effect, which Brecht claimed was the ultimate, politicized

tactic of his epic theater (Rock My Religion, 60). Without fully spelling out the distancing

effect’s place in a Brechtian theatrical poetics, Graham explains in his essay on Dean

Martin that when Martin appeared on-stage during his TV variety show as a charming

drunk character, he was “playing himself” (my terms). In Graham’s terms, he “displayed

the self-mechanism of [television’s] structure,” and made the audience “aware of the

literal machinery of the ropes, flues, and light apparatuses” that bolstered television’s

screen spectacle (60). Graham compares this exposure of “the device,” this “making

strange,” which was at the root of Dean Martin’s appeal (according to Graham), not only

with the films of Andy Warhol, but with those of Godard, as well as rock guitarist Pete

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256

A facsimile of For Publication is included in Dan Graham, Works and Collected

Writings (29-60). All other works mentioned are included in Rock My Religion.

146!

Townsend’s thoughts on rock performance,

257

and Graham’s own experience of an art

world “happening”/sex party in a Lower Manhattan “sort of nightclub” called

“Cerebrum” (60-64).

258

The mirror in Graham’s piece serves a structural role as the most basic form of

illusionistic “medium” through which to channel his creative energies as well as the

imagination of his audience. Through the mirror in Graham’s performance, the audience

has what might be called “a brush with the real.” As Graham puts it in an oddly repetitive

turn of phrase included in his “Thoughts” on the performance, seeing itself reflected in

the mirror “effects cause-and-effect interpretation for the audience” (115). Put this way,

the verb “to effect” could have an ambiguous double meaning, either to “make happen,”

or “make appear to happen.” It throws off the symbolic coordinates of the audience’s

subjective experience of the artwork and thus of their subjectivity as a given psychic

gestalt. Like the mirror stage in our childhood development, Graham’s performance has

the potential to reorder the subjective coordinates through which the audience perceives

the world, admittedly a tall order for any artwork, but the drama of which is reflected in

the script’s reference to each segment of the work as a “stage.”

In this attempt to reorder his audience’s subjective coordinates, Graham is both

replicating and parodying the goals of rock music performance as they existed during the

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257

Pete Townsend is the guitarist for the rock band, the Who.

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“Exposing the device” was a key aesthetic tactic, which Graham claims influenced

Brecht’s Enfremdung, in the revolutionary poetics of the Russian formalists, and

especially Viktor Schklovsky. Graham mentions Schlovsky and his specific influence of

Brecht, as well as “making strange,”in his 1983 essay “Theater, Cinema, Power”(in Rock

My Religion, 178). In his later essays, Graham veers away from a Brechtian explanation

of this poetics towards a more Benjaminian conception based on the creation of

“dialectical images.”

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psychedelic era. He occupies the same relationship with the gallery audience as rock

performers do with theirs. In the videotaped performance of

“Performer/Audience/Mirror,” Graham’s last sentence during stage 3 of the performance,

when he stops describing himself and begins describing the audience, is: “I seem to be

losing balance, but I’m shaking very hard as I’m doing this as if it’s some kind of

[aborted?] rock n’ roll-type gesture.”

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Although Graham as actor aspires to what

Derrida describes as a phallogocentric mastery over language in his piece, his authority is

undermined by what the artist in another context describes as his “pathetic

physicality.”

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Graham’s body-image functions as nothing more than a statue for the

audience to fix their gaze upon at this stage in the performance, as the perspectival

punctum of the piece that commands the audience’s vision; in Lacanian terms, it is the

imago or imaginary of the piece, holding in place the audience’s visual field and papering

over their unattainable mastery of the piece’s unfolding through space and time.

With this transitional comment about his rock star pose, Graham begins to indicate the

influence that his experience of rock music performance might have had on his

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259

The word or phrase that I have written in brackets is barely audible in the video. It

could also be “bored” or “bawdy.”

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This term appears in Graham’s essay “Rock My Religion,” he writes,

By ‘exposing himself’ on stage (showing his penis to the audience during a

concert in Miami in April 1969) and thereby exposing the basis of the rock

spectacle, Morrison wanted to expose the audience’s corrupt desires. In this ritual,

intended to question the mystique of rock as spectacle, Morrison chose to reenact

the castration complex. Through his own emasculation, Morrison expressed his

desire to see rock bring about the destruction of the Oedipal order. And, in fact,

when his penis was revealed to the public, Jim’s potency as a rock figure was

immediately destroyed. His gesture of showing ‘it’ destroyed his former aura of

phallic mastery; the phallus had become—Morrison had become—pathetically

physical (93).

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conception of this piece. Graham was a long time rock fan who avowed his love for

the form in his critical writing, and was one of the first members of the official art world

elite in the U.S. to take rock music seriously as an art form.

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In his piece, his voice, like

the voice of a rock star, directs the audience’s gaze, and demands their attention in an

almost authoritarian manner that relies upon his possession of the phallus, a locus of

symbolic power, via his social coding as masculine subject. Graham’s self-positioning in

the piece is not unlike the self-positioning that Graham would elsewhere identity as the

rock star’s relationship with his audience. In his video and essay Rock My Religion,

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for

instance, Graham describes rock music performance as the interaction between a

narcissistic performer and a sexually infantile spectatorial public. He writes,

The rock star appeals to both sexes equally, encouraging their

identification with his narcissistic sanctioning of self-sexuality.

Even though the male rock star has absorbed the “female” seductive

techniques of narcissism and coquettishness, his powers rest ultimately on his

phallic presence (Rock My Religion 92).

In his performance, Graham is the only speaking subject, and this arrangement is

forcefully maintained by his positioning in the front of the room, behind the fourth wall.

The piece has no content per se. Rather, its formal structure is only provided by

Graham’s written description of the piece (published later) and his phonic enumeration of

sense impressions and mental states during the course of the piece’s temporal unfolding.

If the piece can be said to have any formal content whatsoever, it is mutually constituted

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261

In a recently published interview, Graham identifies Leslie Fiedler as an important

inspiration for his attempts to talk about high art and rock music in the same breath

(Beyond, 94).

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The multiple uses of this title in Graham’s corpus can be confusing. It is the name of

both a video work and an essay, the latter of which is more or less the script for the video,

although there are several important deviations. Rock My Religion is also the title of a

collection of Graham’s writing, published in 1993.

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by both the performer and the audience at any given time. He recites his reactions to

their reactions, and attempts to interpret their reactions in a fashion that verges on the

obnoxious as it invades their private space of bodily integrity and individual

consciousness. To some extent, this obnoxiousness is written into the piece. In stage 1 of

his performance, Graham writes that “the audience hears the performer and sees a mirror

view (reverse) of what the performer sees,” and in stage 3, “the audience cannot see the

performer’s eyes.” Graham not only scripts his own movements, he also scripts and

stipulates the audience’s reactions to his movements. Nevertheless, this scripting of the

audience’s behavior is rendered ironic within the context of the piece. It abuts Graham’s

utopian “Thoughts” on the piece, and leaves the audience room for critical distance after

the performance has ended. Indeed, his disidentificatory reference to his own eyes imbues

the entire drama with practically Oedipal overtones. He preemptively defends the site on

his body that would be the site of Oedipus’s castration.

However, if the piece is somehow undemocratic in this way, if it banks on the

powerlessness of the audience in relation to the mastery of the performer, it is at least

honest about this power dynamic. It exposes the device that fuels its own meaning

production so that that meaning may be counteracted or negated by the audience. Key to

this negation is the ephemerality of the performance, how it almost doesn’t exist, except

as a script or conceptual idea. Exposing this device in this context, while not inherently

radical, is an emotional experience, not just a medium for delivering a political or social

message. The work creates a khora or clearing in the space of the gallery similar to the

one the Ramones created on the CBGB stage. In this clearing, Graham establishes a new

“in-formal” sincerity with his audience. As discussed in the previous chapter, around the

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time of this performance, 1977, the apotheosis of this formal in-formality was the

Ramones, a band which Dan Graham greatly admired. Graham published essays on punk

as early as 1979. In his earliest essay on punk, “Punk as Propaganda,” Graham writes that

“the Ramones from New York City and Devo from Akron, Ohio model their

aesthetic/political strategies after those Pop artists of the 1960s: they prefer to package

themselves rather than be packaged by the media or the record industry” (Graham, Rock

My Religion, 96). Although Graham is not often associated with the CBGB scene, his

reflections on it are a testament to the reach and profundity of that scene’s intervention.

***

In a London performance of “Performance/Audience/Mirror” in 1979, the punk rock

band Static “opened” for Dan Graham. Static was led by avant-garde noise guitarist

Glenn Branca, and both men would go on to collaborate with post-punk band Sonic

Youth. A flyer distributed to promote the performance has the same look as the

handmade, xeroxed flyers produced by punk bands. But the visual style of this flyer is not

just an expression of subcultural solidarity with punk musicians and their audience on the

part of Dan Graham, it also captures this sort of performance’s reliance on an angry

ideological posture and self-reflexiveness about the mass-mediated public relations

system on which such performances might be said to “hang” like a picture in a frame. In

his magazine work, Graham stipulated that the whole periodical publishing system was

his medium. In “Performance/Audience/Mirror” and the artwork of the Ramones, the

medium was that singular relationship between rock musicians and their public, a

sublimated byproduct of technological reproducibility, and a relationship that until that

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point had been united in a state of glorious in-formality, always becoming something

new to challenge the terms of its own destiny.

By the time punk bands like the Ramones had begun appearing at downtown New

York clubs, Dan Graham was already a well-established artist-critic in his own right. A

disciple of Sol LeWitt, Graham’s art, like the music of the Ramones, followed closely

LeWitt’s aesthetic program set out in his essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”

(originally published in Artforum in 1967, rpt. in Harrison and Wood, 834-837).

According to LeWitt, conceptual art “is not illustrative of theories…[It] is not necessarily

logical…The philosophy of the work is implicit in the work and is not an illustration of

any system of philosophy;” however, “it is the objective of the artist who is concerned

with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator” (LeWitt in

Harrison and Wood, 834-5). The artist accomplishes this latter task, according to LeWitt,

by forming “concepts” and then “implementing” them through “ideas,” which are like

plans. The phenomenological details of a conceptual artwork—how it looks, sounds,

feels, smells, etc.; how it presents itself to an individual consciousness, a “one”—isn’t so

important as what it makes the spectator think, although an artwork that does not

immediately capture the spectator’s attention on some aesthetic level must also be

ultimately deemed unsuccessful. Such an artwork is mathematics—a purely

philosophical, not aesthetic, matter.

Graham’s late-60s essays on conceptual art, such as “Subject Matter,” “Schema,”

and “Information,” had a tremendous impact on extending and popularizing the ideas of

LeWitt and other conceptualist artist-critics like John Cage. These essays also functioned

as collage-like artworks in their own right, an attribute they share with Graham’s later

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essays, which increasingly come to focus not only on the world of “high” gallery art

but on popular cultural topics, rock music and punk in particular. The essays occupy

several different discursive registers, and don’t really make straightforward art-critical

arguments of any kind. Instead, they leave the reader with the general impression that

something is afoot in the art world, that something is changing, and that they are a part of

it. The essays are still widely read, cited, and commented upon, and Graham’s artworks

still frequently appear in gallery exhibitions or as stand-alone installations.

Even in his early essays, Graham avowed an aesthetic interest in or kinship with

the artistic production of rock n’ rollers. For instance, in the footnotes to “Subject

Matter,” the most critically incisive of his early essays, Graham mentions John Lennon

and Yoko Ono’s Bed Piece, one of the earliest and most explicit crossovers between rock

music and conceptual art, and he notes that Lennon’s status as a well-known public figure

endowed the “piece” with a certain irony appropriate to its status as conceptual art. That

is, Lennon’s involvement with the piece, as rock n’ roll celebrity, was an important

element in the piece’s artistic conception. Another footnote to “Subject Matter” reads,

Don Judd, at a panel discussion at the Cooper Union in New York, 1969, ‘Soul is

the bottom of the barrel.’ Tina Turner: ‘Soul is grease.’ A recent videotape by

Nauman shows him covering his body with grease (Rock My Religion, 51).

This footnote, which could easily be read as an inconsequential aside in Graham’s essay,

actually provides the reader with a good deal of insight into this critical essay’s

ideological project. Donald Judd, a minimalist artist famous for his fiberglass sculptures

of hard-edged geometric forms, comes under attack as the arbiter of the “official” art

world and all its snobbish, authoritarian trappings. Tina Turner, a rock singer, and Bruce

Nauman, one of the most prominent of the new conceptual artists that Graham was

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proclaiming in his essay, are aligned with one another as representatives of a cultural

insurgency both in the staid confines of high art and in the realm of popular culture.

Nauman and Turner wage a rebellion against the official art culture of Cold War

America.

For Graham, the constitutive relationship between rock music and conceptual or

post-minimal art is a two-way street. Conceptual art does its part to alert its audience of

the ironies and aporias inherent in different modes of artistic appreciation, which have

been shaped not only by art world practices but leisure industries like rock music, but

many of conceptual art’s ideas about the world are actually anticipated by rock music

itself. For Graham, there is no sense in which his artworks “say” anything about the

media systems they participate in any more than those systems already exist as criticisms

of themselves, and this is very much in keeping with the theories of art and media of his

two masters, Marshall McLuhan and Sol LeWitt. Like McLuhan, Graham not only

analyzes media but lives alongside them as though they are living, breathing things, very

much in keeping with systems theory’s way of understanding the human organism’s

social and biological place in the word. As Eric de Bruyn explains, like LeWitt, Graham

takes seriously the notion that “the illustration of mathematics or philosophy was not the

goal of conceptual art” (de Bruyn, 49).

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Conceptual art must have some value added in

the sense that besides simply demonstrating a principle, it must also stimulate the

imagination.

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263

Or, as LeWitt put it, “ Conceptual art doesn’t really have much to do with

mathematics, philosophy, or any mental discipline…. [I]t is not an illustration of any

system of philosophy.” LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” qtd. in de Bruyn, 62.

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Graham’s conceptual art was meant to reflect the facts of the world (as

Wittgenstein would have them) back to his audience in a way that was slightly askew

from the way in which the media world around them was already presenting those facts—

re-representation. Thus, Graham’s early critical writings on conceptual art are

accompanied by publications on the painting of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Dean Martin,

public figures that Graham believed allowed their audiences to view the social world

askance, not by design but through the shear force of their own idiosyncratic

personalities. This parallax view of the world available via their artworks took place

alongside similar, perhaps more self-conscious, acts of misapprehension by rock stars. In

the Dean Martin essay, Graham writes,

Pete Townsend, of the rock group Who [sic], would split the screen into

horizontal and vertical motions in an analysis of the audience/performer relation:

“The audience is schizoid…They’re sensitive in that they’re open to media…open

to media distorters like grass, like booze, like all these things.” So when the play

catches them, they are in this flux and in order to hit them “you’ve got to move

with them on the same plane…This isn’t to say you’re going down to

anything…up and down—it’s a question of a vertical things, and when you’re

making a performance, it’s not vertical” (Rock My Religion, 60).

In this quote from Townsend, Graham finds the kernel of an idea that he also detects in

the work of Dean Martin, of Andy Warhol, of Jean-Luc Godard, and most of all of

Bertolt Brecht—a principle of radical equality between performer, audience, and

medium. By unveiling the means of production that leads to the creation of the spectacle,

these artists expose the illusoriness of the media in which they work, the selfsame

illusoriness that separates audience from performer. There is nothing inherently radical

about demolishing this barrier, but it is a necessary first step towards a felt sense of

equivalence amongst audience and performer as subjects, and the establishment of

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something approaching a democracy worthy of the name in what Guy de Bord

pessimistically described in a similar context as “the society of the spectacle.” Such a

conceptual practice is at least one way to bring about the reordering of phenomenological

experience desired by Bataille in his definition of “the formless.”

***

Dan Graham ends his essay “Subject Matter,” a manifesto of sorts for his generation of

concept artists (Bruce Nauman, Meredith Monk, Yvonne Ranier, Simone Forti, Steve

Reich), by focusing on sound. First, he discusses Steve Reich’s composition, “Pendulum

Music.”

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Reich’s handwritten score for “Pendulum Music” reads,

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PENDULUM MUSIC

For Microphones, Amplifiers, Speakers, and Performers

2, 3, 4 or more microphones are suspended from the ceiling by their cables so that

they all hang the same distance from the floor and are all free to swing with a

pendular motion. Each microphone’s cable is plugged into an amplifier which is

connected to a speaker. Each microphone hangs a few inches directly above or

next to its speaker.

The performance begins with performer taking each mike, pulling it back like a

swing, and then in unison releasing all of them together. Performers then carefully

turn up each amplifier just to the point where feedback occurs when a mike

swings directly over or next to it’s speaker. Thus, a series of feedback pulses are

heard which will either be all in unison or not depending on the gradually

changing phase relations of the different mike pendulums.

Performers then sit down to watch and listen to the process along with the

audience.

The piece is ended sometime after all mikes have come to rest and are feeding

back a continuous tone by performers pulling out the power cords of the

amplifiers.

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264

I hesitate to call it a “musical composition.” Musicality isn’t really at stake in this

piece.

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Steve Reich, Writings on Music, 1965-2000, edited by Paul Hiller (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2002), 32.

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Steve Reich 8/68

According to Graham, this piece alerts its audience to the difference between “art time”

and “non art time,” and the specific phenomenological qualities of “art time.” He writes,

“Art time (nonentropic) or out-of-the-ordinary existence (machine identity of the machine

environment) is activated by the performance only to run down and back from work

expressed as entropy to reach its prior non art time coexistent with the machine as

object’s actual place—use—in the world (Graham’s italics, Rock My Religion, 47). “Art

time,” typically, is thought of as “nonentropic.” Recalling Bataille’s definition of “the

formless,” even the most beautiful artworks “put a frock-coat on that which is, a frock-

coat of mathematics.” Reich’s handwritten procedure removes this frockcoat and lays

bare the device. When performed, it exposes a specific phenomenological quality of

sound—its temporal boundedness and the way in which this temporal unfolding can work

against the composition of the piece. Graham continues,

Generally, music as perceived might be distinguished from a visual event in that it

is directly (literally) present in the same time continuum as the perceiver; both

sender and receiver share the same space of—for—its generation. And second,

although light is a combination of particles and wave-forms, we don’t respond to

it in this mode of ‘structure,’ but as a reflection of some other material; sound

‘hits’ the ear as a continuous stream of particles and oscillations inseparably at

one time (47).

“Pendulum Music”’s specific phenomenological quality as an artwork conceived in

sound contributes to its status as an event, its impact, how it “hits” the ear in a way that is

otherwise distorted by visual media.

Graham’s ultimate point in “Subject Matter,” which he gets at only in the most

roundabout of ways, is that if contemporary artworks expect to be heard, to have a voice,

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to have an impact, to be a “hit” (in the same way as a pop song), they must sound

now; they must be sonic. This point may seem obvious, if not circular. But however

much we may desire artworks to “speak to us,” they only very rarely do. The history of

Western art, even its musical history, until the late 19

-century, is a history of silence. It

consists of nothing more than an archive of scores, traces of sonic presence dressed up in

a “frockcoat of mathematics.” The invention of recorded music ends this silence and

popular music, of the kind produced by the Ramones, represents one way in which this

transition is voiced.

The Ramones were the first rock group to conceive of themselves as participating

in this new history. Early Ramones performances were like Steve Reich’s “Pendulum

Music” arranged for rock band. Put four bodies in motion and enjoy the chance effects

their swaying creates, in front of microphones or as their nervous hands rush back and

forth across steel, over pickups. In the music of the contemporary Irish band My Bloody

Valentine, this principle is taken to a teleological end of sorts. In an interview with Ian

Svenonius, another inheritor of the Ramones’ tradition, Shields describes the Ramones as

“his favorite band:”

SVENONIOUS: Um…I wanted to…because your music doesn’t feel like it is

really, y’ know, directly part of the tradition of rock n’ roll, but it’s obviously,

obviously you’re a huge fan of rock n’roll, is there something kind of anti-

hierarchical about the way My Bloody Valentine sounds? It’s like, uh, the way

that you produce the music, kind of everything’s, kind of brought up to one, y’

know, it’s kind of, uh, it’s dynamic, but there’s, sort of everything’s present,

almost on equal terms. People thought cubism sort of demolished hierarchy

because it brought the background forward, and of course punk rock and rave

made the same claim to destroy hierarchy. I mean, is that something that you’re

concerned with, and…?

SHIELDS: I didn’t really think about it like that, y’ know, but just from the point

of view of, y’ know, I didn’t, I never really liked rock n’ roll bands in that way, y’

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know what I mean? That’s why I liked…my favorite band being the Ramones,

y’ know, when they first came, when I first heard ‘em. What I liked about it was

just the, just the ffft, the full-on-ness of it, do y’ know what I mean? There was no

kind of, well, “This is the heavy bit, and this is the quiet bit,” or, y’ know, and all

that kind of stuff. It was just like, aaaaiuray. Stop. URRRRRRR. Stop. Like that.

And I saw them live and it was just like that, but, y’ know, insanely loud. And it

was just like, that’s, that’s good, y’ know, and so there’s this kind of, y’ know, all

the, the widdley-widdley, kind of standing in poses rock n’ roll guy. Like, “I’m

the lead guitarist, and I do what I do,” and y’ know what I mean? Everyone’s kind

of…

SVENONIOUS: Uh huh, it’s more egalitarian, like…the look, the way they play.

Everything’s functional.

SHIELDS: Yeah, but on the other hand, y’ know, when you see, like, a band like

the Who, doing their kind of, y’ know, each one of ‘em, y’ know, or, like, the

Keith Moon, John Entwistle, and Pete Townshend, all kind of doing their own

version of going completely crazy, that’s, to me, that’s the same as well. Do y’

know what I mean? So it’s kind of like, if you take the Who and the Ramones

mentality, y’ know?

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Shields can only do justice to the Ramones’s sound and the impact it had on him by

resorting to onomatopoeic speech and gesture, because what the Ramones did to him

exceeds linguistic description and can only be caught in the phenomenological space

between feeling and consciousness, can only be captured in the body.

While making his first Ramones noise, ffft, Shields gestures with his hands,

raising them, palms up, quickly off the table towards his face; abruptly; blinking; neck

agog. During his second emulation of the Ramones’s sound, “aaaaiuray. Stop.

URRRRRRR. Stop,” Shields reverses his earlier hand gesture. He moves his hands, palms

down, from near his face in a motion that closely resembles a laying of hands or the

casting of a magic spell. His hands hesitate as though he’s pressing down on something,

channeling the charisma of the Ramones’s performance. Continuing his description of the

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Ian Svenonious, “Kevin Shields.” Soft Focus. http://www.vice.com/soft-focus/kevin-

shields (accessed October 27, 2013).

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experience of seeing the Ramones live, he reverts to the original gesture, as though

capturing once again, with the motion, his embodied experience of spectatorship. This

feeling is different from the one that he got from “widdley-widdley” rock stars. During

this section of his interview, Shields emulates the standard pose of a right-handed rock n’

roll guitar player, and wiggles his whole body. He pretends as if he’s about to fall of the

chair, kind of like the moment in Dan Graham’s performance when he loses his balance

in the pose of a “bored rock star,” or the way Jim Morrison would stalk around the stages

of Hollywood with one knee bent and the other slightly kicked out in a shamanic dance.

Svenonius picks up on what Shields is signifying through his bodily attitudes. During his

response to Shields, he repeats the laying of hands motion, and quickly recapitulates the

rock star pose when praising the Ramones, but without the wiggle. His body goes rigid

for a moment. He adopts an “emptyheaded” sort of zombie or robot look.

This gestural play continues as Shields and Svenonius discuss the Who. Before

enumerating the members of the Who that played instruments, Shields taps on the table

as though he’s laying out a map or setting the table, then he strikes the pose each Who

member would have taken on stage as he mentions their names. At stake in all this

gestural play is a certain emplacement of affect or feeling that Shields and Svenonius

experienced in the presence of the Ramones and the Who. What the laying of hands

gesture signifies is the religious, communitarian “vibe” of this experience.

My Bloody Valentine’s concerts would end with a religious ceremony as well, the

song “You Made Me Realise,” which contained an extended noise rave-up that they

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described as the “Holocaust” section of the performance.

267

An endurance test of

sorts, during this section of the performance, My Bloody Valentine would sustain one-

note feedback drones on their guitars for 40 minutes or more. These performances could

reach decibel levels of 120 or above, well beyond what is considered a healthy level for

the functioning of human ears. As he discusses in his interview with Svenonius (and as

I’ve experienced myself at a My Bloody Valentine concert), at this level, the listener

begins to hear things sounds that don’t seem real—songs within songs. The sound is dry

but it encompasses your whole body. In his interview, Shields claims that the only sonic

effect besides amplification that My Bloody Valentine used in the production of their

music, the technique which produced the music’s famous phasing effects, was what he

describes as “reverse reverb.”

268

When Tommy Ramone suggested that you could “swim”

in the Ramones music, he probably only meant this in a metaphorical sense, but at a My

Bloody Valentine performance you can physically feel the sound in such a way that you

do feel underwater. Your knees buckle, your stomach contorts, and the waves of feedback

literally seem to create visual hallucinations not unlike the effect of heat waves rising

from a hot blacktop.

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267

“Rave-up” was a term originally used to describe improvisational instrumental

passages included in the middle of songs by the Yardbirds. During this section, the

Yardbirds would typically play double-time and include any number of psychedelic

electronic effects in the production of their music. The rave-ups were noisy and eclectic,

and complemented the psychedelic experience well. My Bloody Valentine’s choice of the

term “Holocaust” to describe their rave-up sections is interesting both from the point of

view of the terms originally ritualistic meaning, “burnt offering,” as well as the now

common view of the Jewish roots of punk expressed by Steven Lee Beeber and Jon

Stratton.

268

Presumably he is referring to a form of digital or analog delay that reverses the looped

signal.

161!

The sound of My Bloody Valentine represents one extension to the

community of sound in-formation that the Ramones originally conceived. They made

their breakthrough in 1991 with the release of their album Loveless.

269

In his book, 1989:

Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About, Joshua Clover suggests that even the crassest

commercial music of 1989 was expressive of an effusive, almost utopian structure of

feeling that accompanied and allowed for the end of Soviet communism and the

destruction of the Berlin Wall.

270

As I mentioned before, he looks backward to contend

that this 1989 moment was a culmination in cultural feeling of an economic process of

postmodernization that had begun much earlier in 1973, but he also cannot help but

glance forward a bit, too, and reel some music from two years later, in 1991, into the

purview of his structure of feeling. Raymond Williams described “structures of feeling”

as “social experiences in solution,” and thus it seems fair to suggest that these

experiences may link together disparately over time even if they can be held together

conceptually in the name of a year, an event, a number—1989. But there is an affective

lag between the utopian experience of 1989 and the pessimistic, dystopian spirit

expressed in the music of 1991, even the 1991 music that Clover fixates on, especially

that of Nirvana, who debuted in 1989 with their album Bleach, but became a household

name with the 1991 release of their album Nevermind.

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It seems that in the face of the

jubilant “end of history” that Clover claims so many 1989 bands were celebrating, there

was an immediate and violent backlash on the part of the 1991 bands in what Sonic

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269

My Bloody Valentine, Loveless (London: Creation, 1991).

270

Clover, 1989.

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Nirvana, Bleach (Seattle: Sub Pop, 1989), and Nevermind (Santa Monica, CA: DGC,

1991).

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Youth dubbed “the year punk broke.” The interval between capitalist crisis in 1973

and the Ramones’s aesthetic response in 1975 is recapitulated in the interval between

historical break in 1989 and aesthetic response in 1991.

The form of both responses is conceptual. Although Nevermind is the most

memorable and critically well regarded of the rock albums from that year, it was notably

beaten out in the Spin magazine critics poll for best album of the year by

Bandwagonesque by the band Teenage Fanclub.

272

At the time, Spin magazine was more

or less at the forefront of the second punk explosion taking place in American

underground music that would soon break through into the mainstream. In certain ways,

Bandwagonesque hews even closer to the conceptual aesthetic of the Ramones than even

Nirvana. Nirvana may have appeared alongside the Ramones in Sonic Youth’s concert

film 1991: The Year Punk Broke, and thus established themselves as the primary

inheritors of the Ramones’s and Sonic Youth’s legacies, but the sonic conception of

Teenage Fanclub’s album seems to assimilate the Ramones’s sound in-formation more

completely. The album begins, fittingly, with a track titled “The Concept,” which

nevertheless seems, at first listen, to lack very much aesthetic complexity. The song

begins with a noisy feedback intro banged out on an electric guitar played at a very high

volume. The guitarist strums a G chord and lets it ring as the singer begins to recite a

basic love lyric:

She wears denim

Wherever she goes

Says she’s gonna get some records by the Status Quo

Oh yeah

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272

Teenage Fanclub, Bandwagonesque (Santa Monica, CA: Geffen, 1991).

163!

Oh yeah

273

Each line is accompanied by a downstroke on the guitar, doubled by the bass, and

complemented harmonically by a barely perceptible synth line. (The keyboard almost

resembles more feedback.) The chord progression is circular. It cascades downwards

from G to F# over D to G minor, then doubles back as the band rises from C to D

underneath their Beach Boys-like harmonies as they sing, “Oh yeah.” The ringing chords

and stuttering development of the song accentuate an emotional sense of frustration and

longing, which is echoed in the song’s chorus:

I didn’t want to hurt you

Oh yeah

I didn’t want to hurt you

Oh yeah

The chord sequence during this chorus reverses the turnaround pattern in the verse.

Instead of starting with the cascading figure, it begins with the movement from C to D.

The band then begins the downward cadence underneath the chorus refrain of “Oh yeah.”

This pattern of reversal in the chorus establishes a chiastic harmonic structure that is

unmatched lyrically. After repeating the chorus lines twice, the band modulates to an A-

major chord in order to resolve the chorus and re-enter the verse, and the listener expects

during this blue-sy shuffle some sort of accompanying lyric resolution, but this is denied.

The listener is given no sense of why the singer hurt his lover in the first place, what he’s

going to do about it, or how everything ends up.

In fact, the song never provides the listener with this sort of lyric resolution.

Instead, after cycling through another verse/chorus permutation and a long guitar solo,

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273

Status Quo is the name of a popular British rock group.

164!

the song temporarily slows to a halt while repeating the A-major blues shuffle pattern.

The band then settles on an open-D chord and lets their instruments ring until the

drummer claps out a leading fill on his snare and tom-toms. The rest of the band re-enters

the fray but at half-time, and for the rest of the song’s approximately three minutes they

cycle through an even more repetitive cascading instrumental, recapitulating the G-F#-

Em sequence and then moving up a fifth to C-B-Am. This latter section is extraordinarily

pleasant in an almost clichéd manner. It is accompanied by an orchestral string

arrangement reminiscent of the sunniest AM radio pop. What the song leaves unresolved

lyrically—the singer’s love affair—it resolves musically through an indulgence in almost

excessively emotive music.

The listener isn’t primed to accept this emotional indulgence by the album’s

cover, however, which features a rough line drawing of a bright yellow bag of money

(labeled with a dollar sign) against a garish pink background. The contrast between the

pink and yellow is striking, but in an unpleasant way. The colors seem disharmonious,

and the image almost cynical, but this visual disharmony and cynicism is answered by the

most harmonically beautiful and enticing music. Or is it? The album’s leadoff track, “The

Concept,” is followed by a one minute and 22 second burst of pure guitar feedback noise

titled “Satan.”

274

The album quickly returns to its bittersweet pop feel over the next eight

tracks, but it then veers into uncharted territory again with the final track, a keyboard and

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274

For me, “Satan” is more or less the “proof of concept” track on Bandwagonesque.

After the swirling uplift of “The Concept,” it brings us harshly down to earth and exposes

the device in-forming the rest of the album. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless contains a

similar second track, “Loomer,” which echoes the original “Glider” track in sound and

construction. After the floating psychedelic onslaught of the first Loveless track, “Only

Shallow,” “Loomer”’s pure noise brings the listener back down to earth.

165!

drum machine fantasia titled “Is This Music?” that departs from the organic sonic

signature of the rest of the album. Where the rest of the songs on Bandwagonesque

(except “Satan”) are characterized by sweet melodies, breathy vocals, ringing guitars, and

loping drums, “Is This Music?” an instrumental, is comparably militaristic rhythmically,

and cold and robotic overall. The album ends with a question, “Is This Music?” but the

listener wonders what “this” is—the unrequited saccharine melodies on the rest of the

album, the uncharacteristic techno pop at the end, or both? What is the concept here?

What in-formation is being conveyed? Similarly, the title of the second track, “Satan,”

seems intended to parody rock music’s demonic aspirations, a stark contrast to the

beatific sentiments prevalent elsewhere on the album.

Sonically, Bandwagonesque is more immediately indebted to another ‘70s rock

group besides the Ramones, Big Star, who the band namechecks in the album’s liner

notes, but its conceptual ideas are more closely akin to the Ramones and other punk

bands.

275

The open-endedness of their compositions, both sonically and lyrically, as well

as their inclusion of self-reflexive tracks like “The Concept,” “Satan,” and “Is This

Music?” indicate that the band is thinking about composition in a more conceptual way.

The point of their music is not just to make the audience happy. That is part of the point

of the music. But within a wholly commercialized cultural system, like rock,

emblematized by the moneybag on the record’s cover and its witheringly cynical title,

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275

Admittedly, the namecheck is oblique. Teenage Fanclub reprints a line from a Big Star

song, “Thank you friends, wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.” Yet they also lift entire

chord progressions from the Big Star catalogue, and there are songs on the album called

“Star Sign” and “Guiding Star.” Big Star was named after supermarket chain in

Memphis, the band’s hometown, and a neon sign advertising that chain graces their debut

album cover. Other songs on Bandwagonesque, “December,” “What You Do To Me,” “I

Don’t Know, and “ Sidewinder,” are all reminiscent of Big Star song titles or lyrics.

166!

rock bands are forced to question the stakes of this happiness. At what Fukuyama

described as the end of history, a lot of formerly “independent” rock bands recording for

artisanal, craft labels like Creation or Sub Pop began signing to “major” labels, funded by

corporate capital, like Geffen, run by music business impresario and Dreamworks

founder, David Geffen. Both Teenage Fanclub and Nirvana recorded their second,

breakthrough albums, Bandwagonesque and Nevermind, on the Geffen label. The

commercial cooptation of punk rock by major labels like Geffen was a byproduct of the

cutthroat market dynamics and capitalist utopianism of the 1989 moment, but as early as

1991 it was being reflected on critically by bands like Teenage Fanclub not so much

through their lyrics alone, but through the production of conceptual artworks like

Bandwagonesque that through the dialectical assemblage of sonic, visual, and lyrical

elements spoke to their audience in a thoroughly premeditated, egalitarian tone that

accentuated the equality between subjects—performer and audience—reflected in an

optical medium—the CD.

276

Punk wouldn’t be punk without its rebel image. The music wouldn’t still be heard

if it didn’t seem to epitomize rebellion and transgression in sound and conception, and

admittedly this isn’t all a matter of conceptualist construction. Even in modern day punk

songs that still sound like punk songs, played by bands that look like punk bands, the

thrilling confrontation between sound in-formation, a type of sur-reality, and the

corrosive effects of social reality, which is also constructed, is what makes it all sound

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276

Unlike the record or the live musical performance, CD technology does not rely on

actual physical changes in air pressure or speed to produce its sonic effects. They are

stored digitally as a visual record on the surface of a CD to be “read” by a laser and

translated back into sound information.

167!

vital and relevant, what allows it to say something more than what the singer merely

says. This is true just as much for a straightforwardly political punk song as it is for one

that only seems tangentially so.

168!

EXCURSUS: “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone”

When the queer, feminist punk band Sleater-Kinney wants to dramatize their internal

conflict as female performers in a male dominated, chauvinistic, and misogynistic

industry, they sing “I wanna be your Joey Ramone,” because as lead guitarist Carrie

Brownstein explains in an interview (quoted above), Joey Ramone possessed a style and

vulnerability that could appeal to a feminist, lesbian rock star like herself in an openly

universal way.

277

The band’s performance of the song maintains the same openness to

contradiction as that which Joey embodied. Although it follows the “rules” of three

chord punk, clocking in at less than three minutes and maintaining the Ramones strict 8

notes to the bar rhythmic pattern, the song is sonically unique. The instruments slink

around the song’s rule-bound construction. The bass and guitar skip notes where they’re

not supposed to, and the drummer adds mini-fills on the tom-toms that sneak from one

stereo channel to the other under the bubbling sonic froth stirred up in the verses. During

the chorus, the band breaks through this seemingly constrained sonic construction with

their patented orgasmic, operatic yelps, delivered several octaves higher than most punk

rock vocals. In contrast, Joey sang in a comparatively low voice for a rock singer, which

accentuated his cuteness, not his monstrosity. The song’s lyrics compare the immediacy

of watching a performance by the Ramones with the alienating distance of a rock star

who is only a poster on the singer’s wall. The first verse begins,

It's fine,

when it's all mine.

It's on my wall,

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277

Sleater-Kinney, Call the Doctor.

169!

it's in my head,

memorize it till I'm dead.

It's yours.

Now I'm so bored.

This boredom is crushed by the appearance of Joey Ramone in the song’s chorus. After

proclaiming that she wants to be your Joey Ramone, the singer then explains why:

because she knows what it feels like to be caught in between the embodied experience of

dancing at a Ramones’s concert and being trapped in the performer’s gaze. After the

chorus, she continues,

I just don't care.

Are you that scared?

I swear they're looking right at me.

Push to the front so I can see.

It's what I thought.

It's rock 'n 'roll.

***

We go downtown.

Put on your best frown.

Give me a chance.

I know I can dance.

The song concludes with a very slight variation on the first two lines, “It’s fine/‘cause it’s

all mine.” The shift in preposition from “when” to “because” signals the singer’s

entrance into self-knowledge, from an historically conditioned alienation to a logically

deduced self-confidence, brought about by the egalitarian mutuality of a Ramones’s

performance. She knows she can dance, she thought this is what standing in the front row

would feel like, she doesn’t need Joey to tell her. She meets his gaze while making the

scene downtown in a pedagogical drama of mutual self-recognition.

170!

CHAPTER FIVE: “There Is No Way Out of the Valley:”

The Heterotopian Aesthetics of Television and William S. Burroughs

In February 1974, the writer William S. Burroughs returned to New York City after a

thirty-year long global sojourn that had taken him from Mexico City to Paris, Tangiers,

London, and many other points in between.

278

Born in St. Louis in 1914, Burroughs had

not lived in the city since the 1940s, when he first became acquainted with Jack Kerouac,

Allen Ginsberg, and other members of the Beat generation. Yet upon returning to the city

in the 1970s, Burroughs was hailed as a conquering hero, and became a mentor to another

group of young writers, musicians, filmmakers, and painters that were establishing a new

underground art scene at the downtown New York rock club CBGB.

279

In 1975,

Burroughs moved into a converted YMCA locker room at 222 Bowery, just two blocks

from the club, which he called “the Bunker,” and in the six intervening years, before

Burroughs left New York permanently, in 1981, the Bunker would become a literary and

artistic salon of sorts for members of the CBGB scene and other artists associated with

the downtown art world. In 1978, Burroughs was celebrated at the three-day Nova

Convention, which brought together punks, academics, writers, and critics to discuss his

work. At the Nova Convention, Burroughs read a short piece called “Bugger the Queen,”

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278

Throughout this chapter, I rely on Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times

of William S. Burroughs (New York: Bodley Head, 1991), and Barry Miles, El Hombre

Invisible (New York: Virgin Books, 2002) for biographical and historical information on

Burroughs’s career during the 1970s.

279

Burroughs’s relationship with the punks is discussed in detail in two books by Victor

Bockris, Beat Punks (New York: Da Capo, 1998) and With William Burroughs: A Report

from the Bunker (New York: Seaver Books, 1981).

171!

which praised the UK punk band, The Sex Pistols, for their recent single “God Save

the Queen,” and announced his allegiance with the punk movement.

280

Although Burroughs is often acknowledged as an influence on the CBGB scene

and the punk movement more generally, few critics have explained what specific impact

he might have had on the sound, lyrics, or visual imagery of punk, and no critics have

considered what reciprocal impact Burroughs’s association with punk might have had on

his own writing. Upon returning to New York City in 1974, Burroughs experienced a

burst of creativity that resulted in a trilogy of novels that he published from 1981 to

1987—Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands.

281

As I

explain in this chapter, these novels share common thematic and formal concerns with

punk music. In particular, Burroughs’s late writing and the lyrics and music of the early

CBGB punk band Television both focus specifically on the changing qualities of urban

space in New York City after its redevelopment by the city planner Robert Moses in the

1960s, and its debt crisis in 1975. They also comment upon the emergence of new queer

subcultures in the city during the same period. Burroughs, of course, was one of the first

writers to use the term “queer” in a positive way, having written a novel of that name

between 1951 and 1953, which was not actually published until 1985, only four years

after he had left New York City for good.

282

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280

William S. Burroughs, “Bugger the Queen,” in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays

(New York: Seaver Books, 1985).

281

Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981);

The Place of Dead Roads (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983); The Western

Lands (New York: Viking, 1987).

282

Burroughs, Queer (New York: Viking, 1985).

172!

Burroughs, in his late novels, and Television, in their music, articulate their

understanding of late modern space in formal terms, through their rejection of what the

critical theorist Jacques Rancière has called “the heteronomy of the sublime” in their

avant-garde cultural productions.

283

Like the supersensual, masochistic works of Lou

Reed or the Ramones (discussed earlier in this dissertation), neither Burroughs nor

Television demands obeisance to a transcendental aesthetic ideal. Instead, these artworks

are inspired by what Rancière calls “the heterotopy of the beautiful,” an embodied

aesthetic of experimentation and play that engages its consumer in a dialectical exchange

of judgments. Burroughs and Television’s orientation towards the heterotopy of the

beautiful, towards avant-garde art and popular culture, reconceptualizes the role of all

three within the space of the city. They blend avant-garde art with popular culture as a

political response to urban decay, and this blending serves as a remedy, for these artists,

to the political cynicism and defeatism of other late modern cultural production.

Heterotopy, Heteronomy, and the Avant-Garde

In his recent essay, “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, and Knowledge,”

Jacques Rancière draws a distinction between “the heterotopy of the beautiful” and “the

“heteronomy of the sublime.”

285

As explained in that essay and elsewhere in Rancière’s

recent writings on avant-garde aesthetics, much of the avant-garde during the twentieth

century preferred the heteronomy of the sublime over the heterotopy of the beautiful. For

Rancière, artworks are heteronomous in the sense that they attempt to establish their own

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283

Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge,”

Critical Inquiry 36:1 (2009), 1-19.

285

Ibid., 5-15.

173!

aesthetic rule and demand fealty to that rule on the part of the spectator. For Rancière,

however, such fealty is, predictably, anti-democratic. To prefer the heteronomy of the

sublime over the heterotopy of the beautiful is to assert art’s radical place outside

political affairs, which ends up cancelling out the political role of aesthetics in creating

democratic communities. According to his definitions, there really is no such thing as

apolitical art, just art with a different relationship to what he describes as “the distribution

of the sensible.” By asserting art’s radical alterity, critical theorists like Jean-François

Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, whom Rancière discusses in his essay, intend to articulate a

role for art that would help its audiences see past humdrum political concerns and

encourage a radical political commitment. However, for Rancière, aesthetic experience is

constitutive of our political participation in a democracy, and hence must be understood

as part of that democracy, not originating from some transcendental space beyond it.

Specifically, for Rancière, aesthetic production has the potential to create

heterotopian spaces. He does not cite Michel Foucault on the topic of heterotopias or

“other spaces,” but it is not hard to see how Rancière might have had Foucault in mind.

286

As in Foucault’s heterotopias, wherein alternative political realities are imaginable

because cultural values are reversed, the heterotopian, in beautiful artworks, for Rancière,

gestures towards an alternative political space apart from the humdrum concerns of

everyday life in a capitalist republic. He gives the example of a writer for the nineteenth-

century French working-class newspaper, The Worker’s Tocsin.

287

In an article for that

newspaper, the writer, who also works as a joiner, spends his day with a fellow joiner

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286

Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” translated by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16:1

(Spring 1986), 22-27.

287

Rancière, 7-9.

174!

laying floors, observing and admiring his work.

288

By seeing the joiner as an artist

and his work as a disinterested aesthetic production, the writer assumes an equality with

the joiner, and thus associates with him as if they were allies, united in the same aesthetic

project, which also has an ethical dimension, and implies a political attachment. These

“as-if” moments are constitutive of any democracy worthy of the name, according to

Rancière, which aligns him not just with the Kantian aesthetic tradition, as he invokes it

in his essay, but also the pragmatist aesthetics proposed by John Dewey in his book Art

as Experience (1934).

289

Heterotopian political art can specifically serve a transformative

role in making the spectator more aware of his or her own place within what Rancière

calls “the distribution of the sensible,” the distribution of aesthetic beauty throughout

society that is alternately shared with or held back from individual citizens based on their

social rank, a distribution which is homologous to society’s political arrangements.

290

Previous to William S. Burroughs’s association with the punk movement in New

York City during the 1970s, he strongly identified with the heteronomy of the sublime as

the primary goal for political art. This orientation is especially evident in his “cut-up”

experiments of the 1960s. In these experiments, Burroughs would randomly choose

snippets of film, audio, or text that he had either written himself or borrowed from other

authors. He would cut these snippets up into smaller fragments and randomly reassemble

them into collage-like works that he would then edit or revise to accentuate certain

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288

Rancière discusses this piece by the joined Louis Gabriel Gauny in more detail in The

Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, translated by John

Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

289

John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 2005).

290

See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated

by Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2000).

175!

narrative threads, images, forms of repetition, or other rhetorical figures. Burroughs

endowed these cut-up experiments with an almost mystical power to interfere with the

systems of social control in U.S. society associated with the mass media and government

propaganda. The trilogy of novels that Burroughs created after his association with the

punk movement exhibit an exhaustion or frustration with this method, and in fact seek to

reflect back on it critically in a way that looks forward to a more heterotopian avant-

garde aesthetic of the future. In this heterotopian space, a new aesthetic economy

flourishes as a place to re-imagine the current social space in which one dwells.

The Poetics of an Empty Gesture: Pointing towards Heterotopia

When Burroughs returned to New York City in 1974, it was a city on the brink. After

WWII, the city planner Robert Moses had ascended to an extraordinary level of political

power within New York City’s municipal government without ever having won elected

office.

291

During the post-WWII period, Moses embarked on a number of ambitious

public works projects, which included the construction of highways and housing projects,

such as the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the Triboro Bridge, which eviscerated many of

the city’s neighborhoods and exacerbated slum-like conditions in the parts of the city that

were majority African-American and Latino, including Harlem, the Bronx, and the Lower

East Side. In 1975, the inherent failures of Moses’s redevelopment policies would come

to a head when the city’s government was forced to default on their municipal debt, a

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291

For the classic account of Moses’s career and influence, see Robert Caro, The Power

Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). See

also Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random

House, 1961).

176!

financial catastrophe that led to the famous headline in the New York Daily News on

Thursday, October 30, 1975, “Ford to City Drop Dead,” when then President Gerald R.

Ford refused the city a bailout. During the summer of 1977, the Bronx burnt live on

national television during baseball’s World Series, David Berkowitz engaged in his reign

of terror as the “Son of Sam,” and on July 13, 1977, the entire city suffered a blackout.

292

In 1978, Gerard Malanga, an associate of Andy Warhol, took a photo of the writer

William S. Burroughs pointing a shotgun at the World Trade Center.

293

Burroughs stands

in the bottom left hand corner of the photo, taking aim at Manhattan’s skyline. The Twin

Towers rise up in the photo’s background, in the far-right hand corner of the frame,

directly opposite the barrel of Burroughs’s gun. Burroughs’s gesture is may seem

offensive after the events of September 11, 2001, but it nevertheless reminds the viewer

of the original status of these buildings, not as symbols of national pride, but rather the

dehumanizing power of finance capital, which had reshaped the urban landscape of New

York City in the years following WWII.

In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, the French sociologist Michel de

Certeau describes “seeing Manhattan from the 110

floor of the World Trade Center,”

which as he puts it, “transforms the bewitching world by which one was possessed into a

text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down

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292

See Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentleman, The Bronx Is Burning: Baseball,

Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (New York: Picador, 2005).

293

The photo is displayed online at Aeroplastics Contemporary,

http://previous.aeroplastics.net/ 2007_in_my_solitude/Malanga/Malanga_Burroughs.jpg

(accessed October 30, 2011).

177!

like a god.”

294

To see Manhattan from the 110

floor of the World Trade Center is to

play god, an awfully presumptuous position, according to de Certeau. Malanga’s photo

reverses this godlike perspective and reinscribes the space of the towers as playthings on

a human scale. Especially from our contemporary vantage point, the photo exudes the

threat of terroristic destruction, but it also invokes the promise of aesthetic creation, to

reverse political hierarchies in an act of heterotopian worldmaking, which establishes an

“as-if” in the mind of the viewer.!

When the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were first opened in 1971, the

Port Authority, which managed them, found it difficult to fill their space. Yet, all around

them, in the city over which they towered, space seemed to be running out. Burroughs

registers these crisis conditions in New York City in the first novel in his late trilogy, The

Cities of the Red Night, published in 1981. In a preface to that novel, titled “Fore!”

Burroughs writes,

…there is simply no room left for ‘freedom from the tyranny of government’

since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, and

welfare. Your right to live where you want, with companions of your choosing,

under laws to which you agree, died in the eighteenth century. . . Only a miracle

or a disaster could restore it.

295

Burroughs is reflecting, in this preface, on the political status of pirate communes during

the eighteenth century, the ostensible focus of his novel, which nevertheless manages to

cover a vast amount of spatial and temporal ground in its over 300 pages worth of

relatively plot-less text, including a murder mystery and contemporary government

conspiracies. Burroughs invokes pirate communes, in the preface, as an alternative mode

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

294

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 1984), 91-92.

295

Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night, xv.

178!

of political organization to what he believes is the falsely democratic utopianism of

finance capital. Earlier in the preface, he writes,

The liberal principles embodied in the French and American revolutions and later

in the liberal revolutions of 1848 had already been codified and put into practice

by pirate communes a hundred years earlier . . . but [these pirate communes] were

not able to maintain themselves since they were not sufficiently populous to

withstand attack. Had they been able to do so, the history of the world could have

been altered. . . . Imagine such a movement on a world-wide scale. Faced by the

actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced

to stand by their words.

296

When Burroughs writes that only “a miracle or disaster” could restore the rights of “city

dwellers” to “live where [they] want, with companions of [their] own choosing, under

laws to which [they] agree,” he may seem to exhibit bad faith in such a magical, political

change taking place. But his comments are rendered slightly ironic when one considers

that, in the next section of Cities, titled “Invocation,” he dedicates the book “to all the

scribes and artists and practitioners of magic through which these spirits have been

manifested.”

297

Elsewhere, in a 1975 interview with the British musician, Jimmy Page, lead

guitarist for the distinctively non-punk band Led Zeppelin, Burroughs specifically

addressed what he understood to be the political potential of magic. For Burroughs, the

belief in magic simply corresponds to “the deep conviction that nothing happens unless

someone wills it to happen.”

298

For Burroughs, the realm of magic is roughly equivalent

to the psychoanalytic realm of fantasy. It is unreal, but not experienced as such by the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

296

Ibid., xi-xiv.

297

Ibid., xviii.

298

William Burroughs, “Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, and a Search for the

Elusive Stairway to Heaven,” Crawdaddy! July 1975, 36.

179!

subject. The realm of fantasy is aesthetic, but it is also political, since aesthetic

perceptions comingle with our understandings of political affairs.

The political reality of the pirate commune, in the context of Burroughs’s preface

and The Cities of the Red Night trilogy more generally, functions as a heterotopian figure

of political organization, a beautiful mutation in the political and aesthetic organization of

society.

299

The spirit of the commune invokes a new sensus communis—a new common,

aesthetic sense for political organization. Similar figures occur throughout Burroughs’s

late trilogy, in the form also of Western cowboy gangs and nomadic tribes of magicians

and shamans. Burroughs had first delineated figures of this type in his 1969 novel The

Wild Boys, a direct reflection on Burroughs’s involvement in countercultural movements

during the 1960s, but they occur with increasing frequency and intensity in his late

trilogy.

300

This change occurs because of his association with the New York punk scene,

a rebel band of urban avant-gardists that shared Burroughs’s political concern with the

corporate takeover of the city, the media, and national space.

Burroughs never discusses the punk movement directly in his fiction, and he only

addresses it in the most oblique ways in his critical writing, essays, and interviews (for

instance, “Bugger the Queen,” mentioned above), but heterotopian figures of punk

fantasy nonetheless turn up in his late fiction, in particular in a scene from the final novel

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

299

In medical discourse, “heterotopy” refers to “the occurrence of a tumor in a part where

the elements of which it is composed do not normally exist. "heterotopy, n.". OED

Online. September 2011. Oxford University Press.

http://www.oed.com.libproxy.csun.edu/view/Entry/86526?redirectedFrom=heterotopy

(accessed October 30, 2011).

300

Burroughs, The Wild Boys (New York: Grove, 1971).

180!

of his trilogy The Western Lands called “The Valley.”

301

In “The Valley” section of

The Western Lands, Burroughs describes a tribal culture, somewhere south of the U.S.

border, cut off from civilization. This tribe lives in a valley, from which “there is no way

in or out.”

302

Within the valley, most of the inhabitants are starving, but they are only

“kept alive,” according to the native informant in whose voice this section is written, “by

music,” which is produced by a specific sub-sect of the valley dwellers, a group called

“the Corners or Corn-Eaters” because of their willingness to eat “a strain of radioactive

blue corn” native to the valley.

303

Most of the valley dwellers stay away from the blue

corn, because “it rots the gums…and attacks the palate…finally the tongue and gums and

lips are eaten away to the bone so that the Corn-Eaters resemble grinning skulls, their

contaminated flesh glowing in the dark.”

304

The Corners resemble, in however an oblique

way, the punk musicians that Burroughs was encountering on the Bowery during the

1970s. Besides the fact that the Corners are musicians, a skill that they share with the

punks, they also indulge in the consumption of blue corn, a destructive and addictive

substance not unlike the heroin preferred by Burroughs and the punks as their drug of

choice. Although the rural setting for the Corners episode is obviously distinct from the

urban landscape that Burroughs and the punks inhabited, there is a clear sense that both

groups played the same role in their respective societies, giving the other inhabitants

hope, at least suggesting a way out of the valley, even if that journey involved a mental

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

301

Burroughs, The Western Lands, 228-234.

302

Ibid., 228.

303

Ibid., 230-231.

304

Ibid., 230.

181!

excursion deeper into one’s own psyche, at the level of aesthetic form, rather than a

physical movement out of that space.

Instead of questing single-mindedly after a heteronomic aesthetic of

transcendence, as Burroughs did in his cut-up works, the strain of CBGB punk

represented by Burroughs and Television balances delicate aesthetic forms with heavily

expressive content. The need for a political miracle is translated, in this work, into a

series of aesthetic productions or magical incantations, which may at times seem far

removed from their political origins, but beckon to their reader or listener to join a

psychic struggle against the forces of corporate domination. The urban crisis of

distribution and accumulation in New York City in the 1970s occurs to these artists as a

violent incursion of the network society into the unconscious. The only way out is

through the development of a distinct artistic vision, “a distant vision,” the etymological

root of the term “tele-vision,” which removes one from the current social and political

situation and transports her into a different imaginary place and time, a different

distribution of the sensible.

The Sound of a Little Voice and the Touch of a Little Hand

The social and political emptiness of the distribution of the sensible in New York City at

the time when Burroughs was writing is described most straightforwardly in the middle

number of his late trilogy, The Place of Dead Roads, which was published in 1983. Much

of this novel takes place in and around Burroughs’s Bowery apartment and involves

characters that could serve as doubles for members of the CBGB scene, most especially,

the novel’s hero Kim Carsons, an Old West cowboy, but also a hustler and drug addict,

182!

like Burroughs’s punk friends. In a short passage from the novel, Burroughs relates

his fleeting impressions of the late-modern city from the point of view of Carsons, who is

also partially autobiographical, and his sidekick Boy Jones. The passage occurs as the

two characters, gay cowboys of uncertain spatial and temporal origin, travel through time

copulating repetitively, unable to escape the strictures of Burroughs’s aesthetic vision:

The Bunker is dusty, dust on the old office safe, on the pipe threaders and

sledgehammers, dust on his father’s picture. The West has only its short past and

no future, no light.

Kim feels that New York City has congealed into frozen stills in his

absence, awaiting the sound of a little voice and the touch of a little hand. . . . Boy

walks into an Italian social club on Bleecker Street. A moment of dead ominous

silence, dominoes frozen in the air.

305

For Burroughs, New York had become a cold, silent place, but this silence does not

signify peace or tranquility. Rather, silence in this passage signifies stasis, “frozen stills,”

not experienced (in the German sense of Ehfarung or passing through, counter to

alienation), but merely witnessed and described.

306

Redemption lies in “the sound of a

little voice and the touch of a little hand,” perhaps singing a song or writing a novel. Here

Burroughs evokes a dialectic between the hand and the voice, on one side, and the film

camera and media technology, what he mythopoetically describes as “the Reality

Studio,” on the other; that is, a dialectic between two media systems, one which ensnares

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

305

Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, 301.

306

On the difference in German between the two types of “experience” signified by the

words “Erlebnis” and “Ehfarung,” see Miriam Hansen, “Foreword,” to Oskar Negt and

Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois

and Proletarian Public Sphere, translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and

Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xvi-xx. As

Hansen notes, this distinction played an important role in the critical theory of the

Frankfurt School, especially the work of Ernst Block, Theodor Adorno, and Walter

Benjamin.

183!

and the other which liberates.

307

The Reality Studio, which is controlled by the forces

of reaction, is what strips everyday life and experience of its meaning. The hand and the

voice are what redeem it. They are the political miracle for which Burroughs longed in

the preface to Cities of the Red Night. An economically based critique of contemporary

urban politics is translated into the terms of an aesthetic transaction—transgression

against the frozen, staid film stills of the Reality Studio.

A similar form of transgression and transference occurs in the music and lyrics of

the band Television who first performed at CBGB on March 31, 1974, and as legend

would have it, built the original stage in the club. Throughout the 1970s, they would be

one of the bands most strongly associated with the CBGB scene. The band was formed

by two high school dropouts, Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, in 1973. Hell and Verlaine

were born Richard Meyers and Tom Miller, respectively, in 1949. Meyers changed his

name to Hell after the eighteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s famous poem A

Season in Hell, and Miller took the name of Rimbaud’s lover, the older poet Paul

Verlaine. This choice of names seems to invoke a homoerotic relationship between Hell

and Verlaine, which they always dangled teasingly before their audience but never

actually acknowledged. Hell moved to New York City in 1969, and Verlaine followed in

1971. Initially, both men moved to the city with the intention of becoming poets. Hell

started the small literary journal Genesis:Grasp in 1969, and Verlaine was a contributor.

In 1971, they also self-published a book of poetry collaboratively under the pseudonym

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

307

Burroughs first mentions the Reality Studio in The Soft Machine. See also Larry

McCaffery, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern

Science Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992).

184!

Theresa Stern called Wanna Go Out?

308

They created the artist’s photo for Theresa by

dressing in drag, photographing themselves, and superimposing the two photos over each

other.

309

Their first band, the Neon Boys, broke up before recording an official album,

although some demos have since shown up on bootlegs. In 1974, their new band

Television was one of the first punk bands to play CBGB once it started featuring live

music. It was one of the few clubs in New York City to feature original music at the time.

In a journal entry dated May 25-28, 1970, Hell wrote, “After having read The Job [a

book-length interview between Burroughs and Daniel Odier, published in 1969] I’m

certain Burroughs’ thought will have an impact on the next century comparable to Marx’s

and Nietzche’s on this. Absolutely brilliant great man.”

310

At the time he was writing,

Hell was a nobody who had recently moved to New York City from Lexington,

Kentucky, by way of a reform school in Pennsylvania, but during the next decade, Hell

would come to lead the New York punk scene and embody its anarchic spirit. Years later,

after Burroughs’s death, in a 1997 essay called “My Burroughs,” Hell wrote, “I consider

Burroughs the real Rimbaud.” That is, Burroughs is a hero to Hell’s avant-garde in the

same way Rimbaud was to the European avant-garde of the earlier twentieth century.!

Hell would leave Television before they recorded their first album, in 1977, but

what he realized after reading Burroughs would influence the aesthetic program of the

band he helped found. For Burroughs, Hell, and Verlaine, transgression of late modern

systems of media technology, including the rarefied precincts of the art world, was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

308

Theresa Stern, Wanna Go Out? (New York: Dot, 1973).

309

Hell documents their exploits on his website, www.richardhell.com (accessed October

30, 2011).

310

Richard Hell, “Journal,” 2 October 1969-2 October 1970, The Richard Hell Papers,

MSS 144, I, 1, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries, 46.

185!

tantamount to transgression of the technocratic structures of the network society

itself. There is no way out of this system, but there is a way to work through it. As a

band, Television foregrounds the concern with media technology and the problems it

poses in a technocratic society. One needs to look no further than the band’s name. But

this concern with mediation in fact runs much deeper, influencing every level of the

band’s visual and musical presentation. Their first album, Marquee Moon—nature (the

moon) made theatrical, reminiscent of Burroughs—featured a cover photo by a young

Robert Mapplethorpe, reproduced not from the original negative, but from a Xerox

photocopy. The band appears to the listener through a doubled lens, which does not bring

them into tighter focus, enhancing their visual appeal, but obscures it and renders them

ghostly, almost saint-like. This obsession with the obscure, mediated quality of

contemporary experience extends to the album’s lyrics. Besides the title track “Marquee

Moon”—“There I stand ‘neath the Marquee Moon/Just waiting/Hesitating . . .”—there’s

the even more apt “Venus:”

Tight toy night, streets were so bright,

The world looked so thin between my bones and skin

there stood another person who was a little surprised

to be face to face with a world so alive.

I fell.

DIDJA FEEL LOW? NO, Not at all. HUH???

I fell right into the Arms of Venus de Milo.

I stood up, walked out of the Arms of Venus de Milo.

You know it’s all like some new kind of drug.

My senses are sharp and my hands are like gloves.

Broadway looked so medieval—

it seemed to flap like little pages:

I fell sideways laughing with a friend from many stages.

How I felt.

311

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

311

These lyrics, by Tom Verlaine, are copied directly from the liner notes to the 2003

Elektra reissue of Marquee Moon.

186!

The electrical power of the streetlights permeates Tom Verlaine’s (the lyricist and

singer’s) body, and this illumination in turn transmogrifies Verlaine’s experience of the

city. It doesn’t enhance it. “Broadway looks so medieval,” like a book, an illuminated

manuscript in neon, a film still rather than three-dimensional space. The experience of a

city is more like a hallucination, “some new kind of drug,” than an extension of the

speaker’s subjective experience, and this confusion about the singer’s experience of the

city is registered in the world's “thinness” between his bones and skin.!

For Television, as for Burroughs (at least in his later work), this synaesthetic,

hallucinatory experience of the city has less to do with “tuning in, and dropping out” or

“better living through chemistry” than it does with the changing quality of urban space

itself, its privatization and commodification. In the late novels of Burroughs and in punk

lyrics we have come a long way from the first Beat generation’s romanticization of urban

experience, as in Ginsberg’s Howl or Kerouac’s Subterraneans; also, the flat, haunted

New York of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, inspired by the affectless,

conspicuous consumption of loft living, is not very far in the future.

312

Even Burroughs’s

image of the city as an “interzone,” a space between the regulatory regimes of national

governments, which he invokes in his second novel Naked Lunch, seems too optimistic in

this context. When punk rock first started to be played at CBGB, and Burroughs returned

to town, the battle over urban space being fought in a text like Howl was over, and

Moloch had won. Burroughs and early punk bands like Television dwelled in the spaces

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

312

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (New York: Vintage, 1991); Allen Ginsberg,

Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956); Jack Kerouac, The

Subterraneans (New York: Grove Press, 1958).

187!

ruined by this social reorganization, but they find a way out not through a

heteronomous surrender to the sublime, but through the sophisticated, self-reflexive

production of aesthetic heterotopy.

The solution to the problems associated with the urban crisis in Burroughs’s late

fiction and Television’s music and lyrics is the heterotopian creation of as-ifs in the mind

of the spectator. The same Burroughsian hands and voice, repulsed by contemporary

urban experience, but simultaneously recognizing its potential, are at play in Television’s

“Venus.” The song ends with a memory of Tom Verlaine’s youthful exploits with his

childhood friend Richard Hell. Verlaine sings,

Then Richie, Richie said:

“Hey man, let's dress up like cops

Think of what we could do!”

Something, something said “you better not.”

Hell was the individual singularly most responsible for moving Verlaine away from the

Greenwich Village folk scene, with its emphasis on confessional songwriting and the

artist-as-genius model, towards the more self-reflexive style of rock performance often

associated with punk rock. As expressed in the lyrics to “Venus,” living the punk rock

lifestyle, falling into “the arms of Venus de Milo,” is not a matter of getting high or

getting laid, it has to do with masquerade—dressing like cops in order to see what you

can do, how far you can go, naming yourself after a French poet, or combining your

image with your best friend’s in order to create a new person, a new poetic voice. Such

masquerade may involve dressing like cops, but it does not entail the establishment of a

new regulatory ideal; instead, the aesthetic invoked in “Venus” is loosening, free, like

falling through the air.

188!

Before Television, Hell and Verlaine were poets, but writing could only go so

far as a means of bringing about “miracles or disasters” in a society dominated by the

spectacle and engendering ever more rapid forms of media proliferation and

convergence—the record player, audio tape, film and still cameras, Xerox machines,

typewriters, computers. Television’s revolutionary project had to be articulated not only

at the level of lyrics, but also sound, the strumming of guitars and the beating of drums, a

blissful performance of the collision between embodiment and externality. Contrary to

most critics’ stereotypes of the CBGB scene as angry and abrasive, Television’s music is

almost fragile, characterized by long, interweaving guitar solos, and the abandonment of

the blues scale, which was the dominant harmonic mode in most 1970s rock music.

Television instead favored extended modal jamming inspired by their listening to free

jazz. The space of a Television song is a heterotopian space of beautiful formal

experimentation and sonic irregularity that is almost trancelike in its magical power to

transport the listener out of her everyday experience. Such formal experimentation by a

band like Television was part and parcel of CBGB punk's early focus on form and

technique, which was largely abandoned by later, more aggressive punk bands in the late

1970s and 1980s in London, L.A., and other punk hotspots. Perhaps this is why New

York punk has so often been overlooked in academic accounts of the punk movement

that have sought to relate it to other twentieth-century avant-garde movements.

313

The lyrics of “Venus” indulge in the extended conceit of falling into the arms of a

statue famous for having no arms, while the music propels the listener forward into a

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313

See Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979),

and Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth-Century

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990).

189!

mental space of blissful ambiguity and uplift. “Venus,” a short, four-minute pop song

is remarkable for its twin guitars playing complicated melody lines in harmony with each

other, which often run counter to the poetic line of the vocal. The verses are delivered in

what comes off sounding an awful lot like a march rhythm, with heavy accents being

applied by the drummer on each alternating beat. The lyrics say that the singer has fallen,

but as the song ends, the guitarists reach higher and higher up the neck of the guitar for a

perfect note to resolve their long solos and melody lines that extend much longer than

rock music’s typical four or five note hooks. There are hooks here, but they are shaped

like arabesques and they transport the listener to a place within the coordinates of bodily

experience, the arms of Venus de Milo, which are nevertheless products, in this context,

of the singer’s imagination.

So Elegant, So Intelligent

In his late trilogy, Burroughs reflects on his association with punk bands like Television

and the other artists that congregated at CBGB in order to systematize the insights he

discovered in New York City in the 1970s. His goal is to create a distant vision of a

countercultural future that seemed lost at the time of his writing, a cool avant-garde

vision to compete with what Marshall McLuhan called the hot medium of television.

314

Such systematization does not just involve the description of revolutionary characters.

Burroughs’s distant vision also involves a rethinking of literary form that may at times

seem far removed from matters of political expediency, and actually look like a self-

reflexive, formal step backwards, but which can also be understood within the larger

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

314

See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1964).

190!

context of Burroughs’s aesthetic production as a necessary, diagonal move away from

the heteronomy of his cut-up works. Although the final novel in the trilogy, The Western

Lands, contains cut-up material, most of it leftover from the sixties, it is not a cut-up

novel. Rather, the novel’s various plots and subplots are obviously scrambled, but overall

syntactic unity and a basic plot structure, the partially autobiographical memoir of a

dying writer, is maintained. Whenever cut-up material is involved, it is clearly labeled as

such. For instance, near the end of the novel, Burroughs writes,

Then Ba, the Heart. “Feeling’s dull decay.” Nothing remains to him but his

feeling for cats. Human feelings are withering away to lifeless fragments

abandoned in a distant drawer. “Held a little boy photo in his withered hand . . .

dim jerky far away someone has shut a bureau drawer.”—(cut up, circa 1962-

63).

315

Ellipses as film cuts and syntactically notated asides are self-consciously employed by

Burroughs as meta-textual gestures designed to encourage reflection within the reader on

the novel’s formal construction. They demystify Burroughs’s use of cut-up material and

complement the novel’s loose narrative structure. Burroughs originally endowed the cut-

ups with mystical transformative powers; here he admits their limitations and strives to

reestablish communication with his audience at an emotional level.

The title of Burroughs’s final novel The Western Lands is a partial allusion to T.S.

Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot’s Waste Land had figured prominently in Burroughs’s cut-

up experiments of the 1970s. So it comes as no surprise when Burroughs decides to end

what he understood as the whole of his literary enterprise with an offhanded, jibing line

only half-cribbed from it, “Hurry up, please. It’s time,” the British barman’s equivalent to

the U.S.’s “last call.” With this allusion, Burroughs may mark the futility of the literary

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

315

Burroughs, The Western Lands, 255-266.

191!

enterprise, but in a most tantalizing way, as an indulgence in the futile artificiality of

the literary enterprise holding the stolid importance of the natural world at bay in a brief

creation of a heterotopian as-if.

316

Here, Burroughs encounters Eliot, a fellow St.

Louisian, whose literary trajectory through Harvard and Europe was a model for his own,

as a master whose Waste Land helped establish the modernist avant-garde paradigm.

Burroughs and the punks were ostracized from the avant-garde across space and time; at

the end of The Western Lands, Burroughs reestablishes a flimsy yet poignant link. The

work of punk’s poetic enterprise is completed, at least for Burroughs, by integrating a

melancholy trace, from Eliot, to be picked up and extended.

By the time readers get to this point in The Western Lands, they may feel as

though they are awfully far away from New York City and the punk rock milieu that I am

claiming informed Burroughs’s composition of the novel—in London, St. Louis, or

perhaps even the Egyptian Land of the Dead that Burroughs also evokes in the novel’s

title. But this distance is exactly what I claim Burroughs and at least some punk bands at

CBGB wanted to establish between their art and social reality. Unlike the homologies

that other writers on punk have argued the genre establishes between the form of the

music and the listener’s class position, this punk poetics, the punk poetics of Burroughs,

Verlaine, and Hell, creates a heterotopian space in the imagination, in which resistance

against the forced strictures of urban development are once again possible, if only

momentarily, through an escape into aesthetic form. But in an urban space in which

opportunities to escape are ever more fleeting, these glimpses of heterotopia appear like

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

316

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), line 141.

192!

open windows onto another world at which to sit and marvel—at a more democratic

vista to come.

193!

CHAPTER SIX: Cyberspace as Any-Space-Whatsoever:

The Post-Punk Soundscapes of William Gibson

In 1991, Duke University Press published a re-edited version of a 1988 issue of The

Mississippi Review titled Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and

Postmodern Science Fiction.

317

The title of the collection comes from a line in William

S. Burroughs’s cut-up novel The Soft Machine (1961) (later repurposed in Nova Express

(1964)), “Storm the Reality Studio and retake the universe.”

318

For Burroughs, the

Reality Studio described all of the institutions and technologies that contribute to our

day-to-day, common sense understanding of the world. They are what dissuade us from

the wisdom of the proverb that Burroughs claimed to have inherited from the medieval

Islamic mystic Hassan i Sabbah, perhaps via Friedrich Nietzsche, who was also known to

quote it, “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”

319

Because of the Reality Studio,

which may include Hollywood films, drug laws, or the police, we “permit” the authorities

to impose their version of reality upon us. According to Burroughs, via his cut-up

technique, this process may be reversed.

Since Storming the Reality Studio was published, another William, and a disciple

of Burroughs, William Gibson has, along with his sometimes co-author Bruce Sterling,

become the author most synonymous with the so-called “cyberpunk” genre that volume

was meant to represent. Far from a punk, Gibson himself is a sort of unreformed hippie

who fled to Vancouver during the Vietnam War in order to dodge the draft. Although

influenced by punk ideologies and iconographies, his novels are actually nostalgic for a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

317

McCaffery, ed. Storming the Reality Studio. See also, Mississippi Review 16:2-3

(1988).

318

Burroughs, The Soft Machine, 151, and Nova Express (NY: Grove, 1992), 59.

319

Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night, 158, and Nietzsche, 287.

194!

period before punk happened, which the new genre was actually thought to disrupt,

the 1960s counterculture in its classical form, as it was described, for instance, by

Theodore Roszak in his influential 1969 book The Making of a Counter Culture.

320

This

is not to say, however, that Gibson is not “punk” in the sense that all the texts in “A

School for Singing” are punk. Rather, analyzing three novels by Gibson, Neuromancer

(1984), Pattern Recognition (2003), and Spook Country (2007) within the frame for

understanding punk configurations and performances explored in “School” suggests just

how expansive that frame can be, shifting our focus, as cultural historians and critics,

away from commodification or reification and towards utopia in the postmodern era.

321

As with all of the texts described in this dissertation, these novels may be read as

heterotopian mappings of “any-space-whatsoever,” a space which functions as what

Jacques Derrida, following Plato, called a khora or Martin Heidegger Lichtung, that is, a

clearing in space and time that illuminates the interval between being and non-being, or

what Heidegger calls “being-in as such.”

322

Such a space is what artists crave when space

has run out or been rendered meaningless by financialization. Gibson and Burroughs

attempt to occupy this space, in the spirit of the punks that came before them.

Gibson’s nostalgia for a space beyond punk, before punk, but within punk are

strewn throughout his corpus, nowhere more so than in the novel that many would say

founded and popularized the cyberpunk genre, Neuromancer. Neuromancer tells the story

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

320

Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic

Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).

321

William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984); Pattern Recognition

(New York: Berkley, 2003); and Spook Country (New York: Berkley, 2007).

322

On “being-in as such,” see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 169-172. See also

Jacques Derrida, “As If It Were Possible, ‘Within Such Limits…’” 343-370.

195!

of a hacker named Henry Dorsett Case, whose last name may have been inspired by

the spiritualist Edgar Cayce, despite the difference in pronunciation (“case” vs. “kay-

cee”). The later protagonist of Pattern Recognition, who is clearly connected to Case

within Gibson’s fictional universe, is Cayce Pollard, soldering the link to the spiritualist.

Pollard is a style hunter with an almost supernatural ability to predict the success of a

brand or logo. She is searching for her father, Win, who the reader finds out died during

the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, as well as the creators of a film, being

distributed online, called “The Footage.” Reminiscing about her father, Pollard recalls

that “her friends had mistaken him for the younger William S. Burroughs,” in the one

photo she could produce of him for the purposes of location after 9/11.

323

Cayce Pollard

and hence Henry Dorsett Case are spiritual incarnations of Edgar Cayce with William S.

Burroughs as their father. Through this genealogy, which is aesthetic and biological,

Gibson is trying to figure himself, as author, within punk history, a son to the godfather

of punk who also has an almost supernatural ability to see through what Neuromancer

describes as the “consensual hallucination” that is “cyberspace,” a term Gibson coined, as

well as the highly complicated material world of brands and logos that cyberspace

complements.

324

Gibson’s ability to perform this penetrating gaze is contingent upon a

skill set that Case Dorsett, at least, as Gibson describes it in Neuromancer, was stripped

of in “a bed in a Memphis hotel,” referencing the deaths of both Martin Luther King, Jr.

and Elvis Presley, and by extension, the counterculture.

325

In that hotel room in Memphis,

a link to the past was broken and Case was set adrift from his community in what Gibson

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

323

Gibson, Pattern Recognition, 186.

324

Gibson, Neuromancer, 5.

325

Ibid., 6.

196!

calls “the Sprawl,” a euphemistic term for most of the Eastern seaboard of the United

States (at least from Boston to Atlanta) that is rundown and completely overdeveloped.

Like the counterculture dissidents described by Theodore Roszak, as well as Burroughs,

Dorsett, and the two Cayces, Gibson is alienated from this technocratic world even as he

is bemused and fascinated by it.

His nostalgia is for a world before this bemusement, this alienation, this

derangement, and it is expressed in all three novels as a nostalgia for a world before punk

rock, and alongside it, but also within it. In his writing on popular music, Gibson has

focused on decidedly non-punk artists, for instance, Steely Dan and U2, the latter of

which, at least, had an early connection to the punk cultural formation, but has drifted

away from that form’s do-it-yourself ethos over the last couple decades.

326

In fact,

Gibson views Steely Dan as being closer in spirit to his literary father William S.

Burroughs than the punks. Steely Dan, of course, were named after a dildo mentioned in

Naked Lunch, but Gibson also notes that they employ many of Burroughs’s

compositional methods in arranging their songs, especially when it came to their lyrics,

which were often Burroughs-style cut-ups (lyrics produced by combining two different,

unrelated lyrics in an aleatoric way).

327

Gibson, in fact, understands the whole

collaboration between Steely Dan’s principles, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, in these

terms, as two halves of the same cut-up producing what Burroughs’s called “the third

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

326

William Gibson, “Any ‘Mount of World,” in Distrust that Particular Flavor (NY:

Berkley, 2012), 27-34; and “U2’s City of Blinding Lights,” Wired, August 2005,

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/ u2_pr.html (accessed online October 24,

2013).

327

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, edited by James Grauerholz

and Barry Miles (NY: Grove, 2001), 77.

197!

mind,” also the name of a book by Burroughs and his closest collaborator Brion

Gysin.

328

What Gibson finds so subversive about Steely Dan, which obviously cannot be

said of most punk bands that were inspired by Burroughs, is that their music can be

played in a supermarket, so that you might be hearing a song about Watergate, adultery,

or cocaine without really knowing it, and it was just this kind of subliminal messaging

that Burroughs and by extension Gibson thought were necessary for unlocking the

ideological traps or fetters to human freedom that Deleuze, drawing from Burroughs,

described as the “societies of control,” embodied in the Reality Studio.

329

According to

Deleuze, the “society of control” embodies the cultural impetus towards coding,

surveillance, and abstraction as the sine qua non of the postmodern security state. These

are typically the forms of social control that the punks figured themselves as rebelling

against; hence, it is curious to read Gibson, the so-called cyberpunk writer, bar none,

discovering a more successful form of social protest being staged against them in the

music of Steely Dan, often thought of as middle-of-the-road rock artists.

Gibson’s enchantment with reggae dub makes a little more sense for a cyberpunk

author.

330

After all, Dick Hebdige notes in his book Subculture that dub was one of the

few types of non-punk music that British punks, at least, enjoyed.

331

Their own music

was, after all, a kind of anti-music, which was intended to match the righteous “dread”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

328

Gibson, “Any ‘Mount of World,” 29; William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The

Third Mind (New York: Grove, 1982).

329

Gibson, “Any ‘Mount of World,” 29; Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of

Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992), 3-7; and Burroughs, “The Limits of Control,” in The

Adding Machine, 117-121.

330

Gibson, “God’s Little Toys: Confessions of a Cut and Paste Artist,” Wired, July 2005,

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html (accessed October 24, 2013).

331

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 64-70.

198!

pose of dub reggae in spirit if not in form. If reggae dub was the lower frequencies of

Zion’s sufferers bubbling up from the fleshpots of Babylon, punk was the ravings of its

anarchic minstrels, the children of the parent culture, not its castaways, attempting to rip

holes in the sonic fabric of daily life. This figuration of punk and dub is reflected in

Neuromancer, although not in very glowing terms vis-à-vis the former.

Gibson’s Soundscapes

Gibson’s focus on sound begins as early as the first sentence in Neuromancer, even if it is

sound filtered through a visual image: “The sky above the port was the color of

television, tuned to a dead channel” (3). In other words, the sky looks like television

static, and the reader is made to imagine the familiar sound that usually accompanies

such an image—white noise. White noise is a scrambled signal, and to see the world

through its haze is to take a dim view of that world; it confuses and annoys. In this

sentence, the novel’s protagonist, Case, views the sky as white noise, and thus signifies

for the reader already the way in which modes of electronically mediated perception have

intervened on the most sacred regions of human experience in the dystopian setting of

this novel. Even gazing at the sky, daydreaming, has been corrupted. Romanticism, to

which the title alludes, is mocked. Neuromancer = “new romancer” (also the name of a

commercially-oriented punk subgenre in the 1980s).

Distortions of sound or its absence are disturbing to the protagonist, Case, and

they set the mood for the existentially fraught exploration of his own consciousness that

will provide the novel with most of its thematic material (however much that material

may be cloaked in a traditional heist or action plot). Like many detective or mystery

199!

novels, Neuromancer’s first set piece takes place in a bar. Case sits on a barstool

chatting with the bartender Ratz. Gibson writes,

As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of silence

descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously

arrived at the same pause. Then the whore’s giggle rang out, tinged with hysteria.

Ratz grunted, “An angel passed.” (4)

A momentary silence provides a temporary relief from the oppressive noise that sets the

tone for everyday life elsewhere in Gibson’s post-apocalyptic world. That this relief is

disrupted by a “whore’s giggle” betrays the fact that Case’s current problems are at least

partially romantic. The angel passing through the room seems likely to be Case’s former

lover, Linda Lee, who died as a result of Case’s former career as a cyber-“cowboy” or

hacker.

The name Linda Lee is likely an allusion to a lyric in a distinctively

“countercultural” 1960s song, “Cool It Down,” by the Velvet Underground, which

contains the lyrics,

I’m just around the corner

You know I’m looking for Miss Linda Lee

‘Cause she’s got the power to love me by the hour

Gives me double-u L-O-V-E

332

The authenticity of this allusion is supported by the fact that Gibson has acknowledged

his love for the Velvet Underground elsewhere in his work. He would later name an

entire novel after one of their songs, “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and in a 1986 interview

with Larry McCaffery, he claimed that he originally wanted to use another line from a

Velvet Underground song, “Sunday Morning,” as the epigraph to Neuromancer: “Watch

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

332

The Velvet Underground, Loaded (New York: Cotillion, 1970).

200!

out, the world’s behind you.”

333

Although the Velvet Underground are often named as

a proto-punk band and undoubtedly had a profound influence on the sound and thematic

content of later punk music, they had just as much in common with the 60s rock

counterculture as they did with the 70s punk subculture (despite their aforementioned

disidentification from the former). For instance, a contemporary listener could be

forgiven for mistaking a 1969 concert recording of the Velvet Underground made at the

San Francisco rock club The Matrix, and released as part of the Velvet Underground

Bootleg Series in 2001, for a Grateful Dead bootleg of the same era.

334

In concert, VU,

like the Dead, would stretch their recorded songs out into long instrumental jams. Both

bands experimented with noise and psychedelic lighting effects to bring about altered

states of consciousness in their audience, the Grateful Dead especially during their song-

suite “Dark Star.” The Bootleg Series recording was made by a young VU fan, Robert

Quine, who would later go on to play guitar in the punk band the Voidoids. It would have

been nearly impossible for Gibson to have known of this recording when he wrote

Neuromancer—it only surfaced in the early part of the 2000s—but the fact that “the

matrix” turns up as a key term in Neuromancer used interchangeably with Gibson’s

neologism “cyberspace,” and the fact that one of Case’s mentors was named Bobby

Quine are coincidences too enticing to ignore.

335

Robert Quine the guitarist had been

collaborating with Lou Reed at the time that Gibson was writing Neuromancer, a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

333

The Velvet Underground, The Velvet Underground and Nico (New York: Verve,

1967); Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with William Gibson,” in Storming the Reality

Studio, 265.

334

The Velvet Underground, Bootleg Series, vol. 1: The Quine Tapes (New York:

Polydor, 2001).

335

The last name Quine could also be a reference to the philosopher Willard Van Orman

Quine, who was actually the guitarist Robert Quine’s uncle.

201!

relationship described by Reed’s biographer Victor Bockris in terms very close to the

“third mind” ensembles of Becker and Fagen, Burroughs and Gysin.

336

When Gibson chose the term “matrix” as a synonym for “cyberspace,” the

alternate space of consciousness into which the hacker is plunged when interacting with

virtual technologies, he meant to invoke an alternative topology of space different than

the one that we are normally used to in the humdrum world of the five senses. This is the

same reason why the Matrix’s owners chose this term as the name of their club. Topology

was a hot topic in the swinging 60s. Geographical re-mappings of the mind and space, it

was hoped, would open up new vistas of consciousness and democratic belonging, for

instance, in the burgeoning field of cybernetics, Situationist psychogeography, or the

experiments in cognitive mapping described by Kevin Lynch in his book The Image of

the City and later taken up by Frederic Jameson as the postmodern ideal of politically-

committed art.

337

Popular ideas emerging from fields such as cybernetic and gestalt

psychology in the 1960s held that society was nothing but a field of information that

could be manipulated through social engineering and the use of psychedelic drugs. This

was the view, for instance, of Dan Graham, who also saw its logic at work in the

Happenings of Alan Kaprow and the conceptual art of his colleagues Bruce Nauman, Sol

Lewitt, Steve Reich, and choreographer Yvonne Rainier.

338

In Neuromancer, the matrix

is “a field of data” (16), but it is also a “consensual hallucination” (5), one to which Case

has lost access at the beginning of the novel. He desperately wants to return to the matrix

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

336

Bockris, Transformer, 327-342.

337

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960); and Frederic

Jameson, Postmodernism, 51-54.

338

Dan Graham, “Subject Matter,” in Rock My Religion, 38-51.

202!

where he was a “cowboy,” a hero, filled with the masculine self-confidence usually

associated with that most traditional of American cultural archetypes (6). At the

beginning of the novel, Case can be said to feel nostalgia for the matrix, for the

consensual hallucination, for his status as cowboy. If we construe this nostalgia within

the ontological boundaries of our actually existing world, it seems an awful lot like a

nostalgia for the psychedelic experience, an experience that was created every night at

60s rock clubs like the Matrix, the Family Dog, and the Filmore East and West. Gibson’s

depiction of the matrix, of cyberspace, as a receding lifeworld for which his protagonist is

nostalgic is symptomatic of Gibson’s own nostalgia for the purportedly cross-racial,

masculinist solidarity of the 60s rock counterculture. Gibson’s later novels will contain

carefully considered female protagonists such as Pattern Recognition’s Cayce Pollard. At

this point, Gibson’s central heroine is Molly Millions, equipped with retractable claws, a

grotesque caricature of the cat-like woman who tears men to shreds, a maneater.

The lifeworld that Neuromancer depicts, which Gibson intended as a perverse

analog of our own, makes Gibson’s protagonist Case and Gibson himself extraordinarily

uncomfortable. In his interview with McCaffery, Gibson claims that Neuromancer was

first inspired by his passing by a video arcade in Vancouver, BC, and feeling alienated

from the teenagers inside, from their culture, which was different from his own,

somehow linked to the 60s rock counterculture.

339

By the time of his 2007 novel Spook

Country, he describes the whole “world as video game.”

340

This new youth culture was

somehow linked to the 60s rock counterculture that sang about pinball wizards and other

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

339

McCaffery, “An Interview with William Gibson,” 272.

340

Gibson, Spook Country, 445.

203!

facets of teenage life, but it was also distinct from it in a way that Neuromancer and

later Spook Country figures as disturbing. The 60s dream of a retooled consciousness has

been achieved, but at what cost? Gibson’s primal scene at the Vancouver video arcade

reoccurs in Neuromancer. In fact, Case meets Linda Lee at a video arcade. She is a

redemptive force emerging from the cacophony of contemporary experience. Early in the

novel, after Linda Lee has been taken away from him, Case compulsively returns to the

scene of their first meeting and engages in self-destructive behavior intended as a sort of

contrition for his sins against Linda. Getting in this sort of trouble reminds Case of being

back in the matrix, with the Tokyo cityscape looking like a field of data that he can

understand. When he is sober, the city perplexes him; when high, it is easily understood,

and its confusing, synaesthetic experience is captured in terms of sound. Gibson describes

Case re-entering the arcade where he met Linda, “Then he was through the entrance, the

sound crashing over him like surf, subsonics throbbing in the pit of his stomach.

Someone scored a ten-megaton hit on Tank War Europa, a simulated airburst drowning

the arcade in white sound as a lurid hologram fireball mushroomed overhead” (17).

Case’s sound and vision of the arcade is obviously meant to accentuate its grotesquery,

the extraordinarily weird way in which it is divorced from the social reality outside its

doors. The fact that Neuromancer takes place in a future world in which Europe has

apparently been destroyed by nuclear war only makes this spectacular display of youth

culture creepier than it already is in our own lifeworld where war simulation video games

like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty prepare young people ideologically to sacrifice

themselves on global battlefields

204!

Case’s circumspection about the new youth culture, and his nostalgia for a

lifeworld resembling the psychedelic 60s is further exemplified by his attitudes towards

what the book actually describes as “subcultures.” “Subculture” is a term with a long

history reaching back to the Chicago School of sociology in the 1930s, when it was used

to describe immigrant groups whose lifeways departed from the American mainstream.

The term was later taken up by the sociologists and cultural historians associated with the

Birmingham School of cultural studies in England during the 1970s. Cultural studies

practitioners, such as Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, and Angela McRobbie, used the term

“subculture” to describe the “spectacular” youth cultures that emerged in Britain after

WWII, for instance, the mods, rockers, skinheads, teddy boys, Rastafarians, rude boys,

and punks.

341

In his book, Gibson uses the term in this latter sense, to describe a

spectacular youth subculture, although it is unwittingly conflated with its roots in race-

based sociology at certain key moments. When the term “subculture” first appears in

Neuromancer, it is used to describe the “Panther Moderns,” a terrorist group that assists

Case and Molly in retrieving an important computer file from the media corporation

Sense/Net. When Case learns that the Moderns will be helping him and Molly out, the

novel intones through free and indirect discourse that “it wasn’t a name he knew.

Something new, something that had come in since he’d been in Chiba. Fads swept the

youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive

for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly” (58). Although Case will find the Moderns

helpful in his mission, he is dismissive of their subcultural credentials. Learning from a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

341

See Hebdige, Subculture, and Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through

Rituals.

205!

computer program that contains information about the Moderns, Case is indulged in

the comments of “Dr. Virginia Rambali, Sociology, NYU” (58). In the program, Rambali

appears in a lecture-like setting. She is challenged by a disembodied voice, “Given [the

Moderns’] penchant for these random acts of surreal violence…it may be difficult for our

viewers to understand why you continue to insist that this phenomenon isn’t a form of

terrorism.” Dr. Rambali replies, “There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to

manipulate the media gestalt…The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely

in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media

divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent” (58). Immediately

after hearing this information, Case commands the computer to “skip” the rest. Rambali’s

employment as a sociology professor and her comments about the Moderns’ seem

intended as a parody of the sort of academic discourse surrounding the appearance of

youth subcultures, especially Dick Hebdige’s famous comments about the punk

subculture, which he singled out for very similar reasons to Rambali, in particular its

participants’ self-consciousness about the transgressive potential of subcultural style.

Case wants nothing to do with the Panther Moderns and neither does Gibson’s

novel. Yet this is not say that the novel has nothing to do with alternative modes of

cultural belonging designed to oppose the hegemony of the official culture of consumer

capitalism (e.g. Hollywood, advertising, fashion, high technology). For in order for Case

to assume full self-realization at the end of Neuromancer and re-experience some of the

existential plenitude that he lost in the matrix, he must seek assistance from the Zionites,

the Rastafarian inhabitants of the Zion space station orbiting earth. Case uses the

Zionites’ space “tug,” the Marcus Garvey, to travel to a neighboring space station, the

206!

Freeside, where he will have his final showdown with the evil forces of the Tessier-

Ashpool corporation.

The Zionites provide Case with technological and material support, but they also

serve as a sort of spiritual inspiration. When Case enters the Zionist compound, he hears

the strains of dub music. Gibson has written about dub elsewhere in an article for Wired

magazine on remix culture.

342

After explaining his artistic debt to William S. Burroughs’s

cut-up method of literary composition, Gibson notes that “meanwhile, in the early '70s in

Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, great visionaries, were deconstructing

recorded music. Using astonishingly primitive predigital hardware, they created what

they called versions. The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread

to DJs in New York and London.”

343

Versions were remixes of popular Jamaican reggae

songs that rearranged the instrumental and vocal tracks, and sometimes introduced new

sonic elements in order to create recordings that could be consumed as stand-alone songs.

The need for dub versions was commercially as well as artistically driven. It responded to

the dearth of quality recording materials in Jamaica as well as the sensual experience of

marijuana-smoking and dancing. Gibson describes Case’s entrance into the Zionite

compound, “As they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed

constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous music cooked from vast

libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community” (104).

As it did for Gibson writing in Wired 20 years later, dub represents, for Molly, an

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

342

Gibson, “God’s Little Toys.”

343

Ibid., n.p.

207!

alternative to Neuromancer’s soulless, alienating, dystopian soundscape, an

allegorical stand-in for contemporary soundscape in which the novel appeared.

If it seems unclear whether Case is as convinced as Molly at this point in the

novel of dub’s inspirational, communitarian qualities, it nevertheless serves as his

salvation from a computer program designed by corporate overlords that poses the

deepest threat to his surviving the novel. The program lures Case into what is described

as “a land of the dead,” a memory-scape in which Case is tempted by a virtual projection

of Linda Lee (243). Plunged into this scene of temptation after “jacking in” to a computer

console deep within Tessier-Ashpool’s corporate compound, Case is subject to a

massively dense hallucination in which he comes to live with Linda Lee again on a

secluded beach (255). Case seems to have discovered something like “the experience

machine” described by the philosopher Robert Nozick in his famous thought experiment

in Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

344

Case experiences a synthetic reality in which he can

once again enjoy romantic bliss with his former lover Linda Lee. He is returned to an

uncomplicated scene of plenitude, a metaphorical stand-in for the high psychedelic tide

of 1960s utopianism. Case is lured out of this hallucination, out of this dream, by the

sound of music, the sound of dub. The hallucination ends when Case walks away from

Linda Lee and the character in the novel called Neuromancer, “following the

music…Maelcum’s Zion dub” (244).

Case is able to make a bond with the Rastafarian subject that he cannot make with

the video game players in the Sprawl. Gibson figures these conflicts in terms of the

sounds Case hears. Dub, the salvific sound in Neuromancer, was a direct influence on

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

344

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 42–45.

208!

punk rock musicians, especially in the U.K., and Gibson seems to be offering an

argument here that it is more closely related to his own aesthetic production and

somehow more advanced than the sound of the punks, figured in the novel as the Panther

Moderns. But why is it better than the return to psychedelic plenitude in the scene of

Gibson’s hallucinatory temptation? The answer lies in dub’s appeal, for Gibson, to an

aesthetic principle shared with some punk groups, but not all, and practiced most

famously by Gibson’s hero William S. Burroughs—its dedication to the cut-up and the

remix, to the transgression of cultural propriety, in the service of achieving a higher

consciousness. The problem with the ideology of psychedelia, with the ideology of the

60s counterculture, is that you can only transcend real world concerns for so long before

being forced violently back down to earth. And as became clear at the end of the

psychedelic era, the concerns of the hippies could be read more in terms of

intergenerational strife between white fathers and sons than worldwide revolution for all.

In Neuromancer, counterculture ends and subculture begins when Case is violently

expelled from the matrix. This scene occurs before the novel begins in a hotel room in

Memphis where Case is pumped full of neurotoxins. The episode’s Memphis setting

seems more or less random, but it perhaps unconsciously alludes to two signal events in

the history of the 60s counterculture—on one hand, the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

on April 4, 1968, a date which can be understood as the symbolic if not the chronological

end of the 60s, and on the other, the death of Elvis Presley, certainly not a 60s icon, but a

sort of cowboy in his own right, who in spite of his pitiful end, will always symbolize the

first rebellious sparkle of the rock n’ roll generation and its final burning out. For Gibson,

a certain way of re-imagining human consciousness died with these men. In Case’s

209!

discovery of the communitarian potential of dub he finds something to replace it, a

certain something that Gibson can only imagine through recourse to sound. In his later

novels, Gibson will more completely realize this sound’s kinship to punk’s sonic

transgressions against neo-liberalism’s symbolic systems.

Punk Rock, Nostalgia, and the Desire for Any-Space-Whatsoever

There are at least two important references to punk in Gibson’s more recent novels

Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. In Pattern Recognition, the exercise in

postmodern archaelogy undertaken by Case’s colleague Damien is described as “punk”

(293). As Damien puts it, he has travelled to “the currently unfrozen swamps past

Stalingrad” to excavate the site of the WWII battle, which involves the removal not only

of “weapons of all kinds, watches [and] an unopened bottle of vodka,” but also “strata of

Germans, Russians, Germans,” that is, the remains of the men who fought in the battle

(72-73). That this scene should be called “punk” is telling. Gibson is suggesting, perhaps

in spite of himself, that the excavation is punk in the same way that a dream might be,

penetrating reconstituted layers of the cultural unconscious, particularly as it is concerned

with WWII and the massive amounts of bloodshed that occurred there. Such a position is

not unlike the one taken by Jon Stratton in his essay on Jews, punks, and the holocaust,

although Gibson is considerably less sympathetic with this excavation.

345

As Lauren

Berlant has suggested, the memory of trauma, in Pattern Recognition, will eventually be

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

345

Jon Stratton, “Jews, Punk, and the Holocaust,” 79-105.

210!

resolved sentimentally, via the family drama of Cayce and her father.

346

At the scene

of “punk archaelogy,” another, perhaps more morbid resolution is sought between

Damien and his fellow Russian diggers, with whom he must get drunk in order to stay

working (73). While Cayce achieves closure at the end of Pattern Recognition by coming

to grips with the fact that her father’s death was merely a coincidence of history, Damien

refuses to concede closure, digging unceasingly into the past, however ironically or

sentimentally detached he might be from that excavation.

The female protagonist of Spook Country Hollis Henry was a member of a

popular band in the 80s called The Curfew. As Gibson describes them, they might have

sounded a bit like the Cure, not punk exactly, but with roots in that scene. Throughout the

novel, Henry becomes tied up in the political-economic machinations of the Belgian

advertising mogul Hollis Bigend whose mother was a member of the Situationist

International who travelled to Switzerland to research what Bigend describes as “a minor

Dadaist” (100, 267). Another character in Spook Country, Milgrim, is observed reading

the book The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn.

347

Situationism, Dada, and

Cohn’s book have all played an important role in the history of punk at least since the

publication of Greil Marcus’s 1989 book Lipstick Traces, in which Marcus claims that

these political and artistic movements—Situationism, punk, millenarianism, and Dada—

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

346

Lauren Berlant, “Intuitionists: History and the Affective Event,” American Literary

History 20:4 (2008), 845-860.

347

The book is actually described as “a chunky 1961 paperback history of revolutionary

messianism in medieval Europe” (64), but Gibson has clarified the book’s identity on

Twitter. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and

Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Oxford UP, 1957); and “What Book

Is Milgrim Reading in William Gibson’s Spook Country?” Science Fiction and Fantasy

Stack Exchange, http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/28120/what-book-is-milgrim-

reading-in-william-gibsons-spook-country (accessed October 27, 2013).

211!

all constitute what he calls a “secret history of the twentieth century.”

348

By invoking

these four movements, Gibson attempts to place his book within that history, either as a

comment upon it or an instance of it. He is also leading the reader, clearly, to make a

connection between the novel’s climax and a Situationist prank, Dada collage, or punk

rock song. The novel concludes when a container full of laundered money, which was

supposed to go towards reconstruction efforts after the Iraq War, is diverted by Hollis, in

cahoots with a character only described as “the old man.” This political act is also like an

artwork in that it is achieved using the same satellite technology that allowed the

character Alberto Corrales to produce his locative art at the beginning of the novel.

Corrales, assisted by a computer hacker named Bobby Chombo, produces holographic

reproductions of famous celebrity deaths, such as River Phoenix and Helmet Newton.

Bigend’s mother is another one of Gibson’s punk parents too, but like Win Pollard, is a

missing person. Her son has absorbed her Situationist knack for art terrorism, but he lacks

the political commitment of that movement. This commitment is what Henry must restore

by participating in Bigend’s larger plot to prevent the shipment of the embezzled funds,

an act of civil disobedience that is also described in the novel as an act of art terrorism in

which the digital is used to manipulate solid objects in a non-commercial way.

Punk again, in these novels, as in Neuromancer, is a mark of authenticity, but not

exactly the right sort of authenticity. As Lauren Berlant has noted in her criticism of

Pattern Recognition, along with the Colson Whitehead novel The Intuitionist, these are

both ultimately sentimental novels, in the case of Pattern Recognition meant to paper

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

348

Greil Marcus. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

212!

over the trauma of the World Trade Center attacks. Intriguingly, Pattern Recognition

is widely considered to be the first major novel to deal with the events of 9/11, although it

does so in a way that almost seems to fly in the face of its larger political rhetoric.

Gibson, at least, was somewhat aware of this rupture, as he describes the writing of the

novel as having been interrupted by 9/11. He did not originally intend to include the 9/11

subplot in the book, but felt compelled to after the event. In a certain sense, he is saying

“goodbye” to all that, that being the consumerism for which Cayce Pollard so obviously

stands, even though she is made allergic by it. What 9/11 killed, Gibson seems to be

saying, was William S. Burroughs, who is then resurrected in the form of Cayce Pollard

and later Hollis Henry in Spook Country, daughters to Burroughs’s punk legacy.

In this way, Gibson’s later novels represent his coming to grips, so to speak, not

only with 9/11, but with the whole period of U.S. history that it might be seen to

bookend, the neo-conservative interregnum that stretched from the end of Vietnam and

Watergate in 1973 to 9/11 in 2001. What he seems to be saying is that in the face of the

9/11 attacks and the Bush ascendancy, what is needed is a return to politics in the form of

punk. This return occurs by, in Spook Country, getting the band back together in a

Situationist-styled act of art terrorism or prank. After the Cuban exile super-spy Tito

places the radiation pellets on the container at sea outside of Vancouver, which will make

the money inappropriable, he seeks cover by joining a suburban rock band to whom he

identifies himself as “Ramone,” clearly a reference to the band, and a play on the pseudo-

Hispanic resonances of their name (441). As Greil Marcus so eloquently documented in

Lipstick Traces (and Jon Savage in England’s Dreaming), it was the British punks who

really solidified the link between punk, Situationism, and dada, but Gibson properly

213!

returns this heritage to New York City, where Burroughs relocated after his

collaborations with Brion Gysin, an actual member of the original surrealist circle.

349

Burroughs also corresponded with the Situationist Alexander Trocchi.

350

There is just as

solid a throughline from dada to Surrealism to Situationism to New York punk as there is

to the Sex Pistols, whether or not Marcus and Savage noticed them, but they are perhaps

more subliminal. This is exactly what Gibson likes in his art, however. The spirit of

Burroughs is subliminally buried underneath the wreckage of the World Trade Center.

Cayce has to come to grips at the end of the novel with the fact that her father has died.

There is a photograph of Burroughs from 1973 pointing a shotgun at the newly

constructed World Trade Center towers. It was taken by Warhol Factory member Gerard

Malanga, who appeared onstage with the Velvet Underground early in their careers.

Burroughs’s photo was intended as a declaration of war against all that the WTC

represented, globalization and finance capital, especially. The memory of that rebellion,

like the memory of true freedom embodied in pirate colonies described at the beginning

of Cities of the Red Night, died with the collapse of the WTC. It was no longer possible to

rebel against social authority in the same way. U.S. patriotism and the national security

state were embodied in the uncanny space of the WTC towers in an impenetrable way.

Filmmakers had them digitally removed from future representations of New York City, a

weird tribute to their sudden lack.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

349

Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond

(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001).

350

Timothy S. Murphy, “Exposing the Reality Film: William S. Burroughs Among the

Situationists,” in Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of

Globalization, edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh (Sterling, VA: Pluto

Press, 2004), 29-57.

214!

The CBGB scene emerged at the same time the WTC was being built. They

were only two miles away. The night before 9/11 I attended a concert by the progressive

post-punk band Pullman at a downtown rock club called Tonic. I stood next to the lead

singer of the Magnetic Fields, Claudia Gonson, who sings a song called “Punk Rock

Love” on that band’s album 69 Love Songs.

351

Where are these spaces now? They died

too on 9/11. Both CBGB and Tonic are closed. The reality of this closure in history is

what Gibson commemorates in the shift from one act of terrorism in Pattern Recognition

to another in Spook Country. He is suggesting that one of the only things that kept us

going in the 1970s, during the Reagan years, and the neoliberal ascendancy was the spirit

of punk. It is what keeps us mindful that the shiny surfaces of our iPhones and other

personal computing devices are, as George Bataille would remind us, mere husks of the

more ideal forms of communication that art and aesthetics might promise us, and this is

how iPods are repurposed in Pattern Recognition, not as devices for playing music but as

massive storage devices that hackers use to download illicit code in Apple Stores. The

destruction of the World Trade Center, in the end, was a boon to New York’s re-

redevelopment as a paradise for the rich in the twenty-first century. Spaces like CBGB

were exactly the sorts of casualties that this re-redevelopment took. The Bowery is now a

completely gentrified space, under which is plowed the queer memory of a working class

heterotopia that was really just a desire for any-space-whatsoever. Even in the novels of

William Gibson, the cyberpunk author who actively disavows punk, the memory of this

space is reconfigured, again, and again, and again, and again.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

351

The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs (Durham, NC: Merge, 1999).

215!

CODA: Occupy the Bowery, Occupy the Blank

There is another postmodern novel that ends near the site of the former World Trade

Center, Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Good Squad.

352

In the

novel’s final scene, a rock star, who started off in punk bands, returns to the site of the

World Trade Center to deliver a concert for millions. He has discovered a new style of

performance that Egan describes as something akin to a punk rock Bob Dylan.

353

As in

Pattern Recognition, the site of the World Trade Center frames a sentimental ending,

although in Egan’s case this is not so jarring, since she has been dealing in sentimental

subtext all along. The novel’s sentimental ending forecloses on a kind of openness

represented by the novel’s earlier formal experiments, an invented language delivered in

text messages and a chapter delivered in Power Point slides, but it is also a weird

prognostication of the Occupy Movement that would begin two years after it was

published.

354

Unintentionally, Egan makes the connection for her readers between the

more serious, political side of Occupy and punk rock and its sentimental underbelly.

Throughout its existence, the Occupy movement has struggled to depict itself as

“serious” despite its refusal to issue any demands or form a platform or party. As Walter

Benn Michaels has suggested in an article for PMLA, this may be because the hearts of

the protestors are in the right place, they are drawing their own cognitive map of late

capitalist space, but it is difficult for them to really do anything about it since they are so

thoroughly implicated in that map, that matrix themselves, enjoying certain privileges

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

352

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (New York: Anchor, 2010).

353

Ibid., 310-340.

354

Ibid., 234 - 309

216!

over the “truly disadvantaged” that most Occupiers, at Wall Street, at least, would

have a hard time giving up.

355

Sacrificing this privilege was at least some of what the CBGB artists intended,

however much they might have failed, and however much they might have still enjoyed

certain privileges on the basis of their race, gender, sexuality, or physical ability. The

most thrilling moment in Richard Hell’s signature early tune, “Blank Generation,” occurs

during the chorus when he repeats the song’s titular line, “I belong to the blank

generation,” but drops the word “blank,” and along with the rest of his band, pauses,

passing over in silence a name that does not yet exist.

356

It is a clever, novel moment,

unifying form and content, and although it results in a momentary silence or ellipsis, it

does not interrupt the song’s forward motion or energy; it adds to it. It exists as a moment

of openness, not blockage; as a way into the song’s swirling juxtaposition of ragged

guitar chords, manic soloing, and swift, surreal images, not a passage out of them.

“Blank Generation” was Hell’s anthem for the generation of rock stars, artists,

and poets who created a new multimedia arts scene at CBGB on the Bowery starting in

1974, and it is often understood as the ultimate expression of punk nihilism, as a song

that petulantly insists on existential emptiness and autonomous self-destruction, but this

interpretation of the song only tells one side of the story. There is nihilism in Hell’s lyric,

for instance, in the final verse, which ends with the narrator shooting heroin, and

satisfying himself with the world “beneath his eyelids,” but there is also a sense of hard-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

355

Walter Benn Michaels, “Dude, Where’s My Job?” PMLA 127:4 (October 2012),

1006-1009; and William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The

Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

356

Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank Generation (New York: Sire, 1977).

217!

bitten optimism in the song’s chorus. Hell takes his blankness seriously. The song is a

semi-satirical reinvention of an earlier song, “The Beat Generation,” by the middlebrow

poet Rod McKuen and songwriter Bob McFadden, which itself parodies the Beat lifestyle

and lingo.

357

In Hell’s song, he erases the generational nametag with conviction, and

replaces it first with the word “blank” and later with an outright elision. Nevertheless, the

song’s energy and delivery suggest that this elision gives way to a newfound freedom.

The chorus of “Blank Generation” asserts Hell’s generation’s inalienable right to name

itself.

The term “generation” in this song does not just refer to a generational name, but

also to the process of aesthetic re-generation through performance. The title of Hell’s first

literary magazine, which he founded upon his arrival in New York in the late 1960s, was

Genesis:Grasp, a title that evokes both the Biblical creation story and a new beginning.

In the blankness of Hell’s generation, there is emptiness, but there is also potential.

Perhaps because the CBGB scene ended so tragically for so many of its participants, in

either drug abuse, obscurity, or mainstream complacency—even Hell doesn’t want to talk

about it anymore—the themes of regeneration and self-determination on display in Hell’s

lyric are often overlooked, but the sentiment is palpable. In the song, he declares himself

a member of the blank generation not because he is numb or uncommitted, but because

he and the other members of his generation have been rendered inscrutable—blank!—by

their upbringing in a society obsessed with media images and social status, exhausting

itself through foreign adventurism in Vietnam, and suddenly unable to grasp its own

sense of historical destiny at home. The world-historical events of the late 1960s—

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

357

Rod McKuen, Beatsville (New York: Stanyon, 1998).

218!

decolonization, the domination of television, psychedelic rock, conceptual art,

landing on the moon—had resulted in a sensory overload and a gripping numbness that

the narrator of Hell’s song and the members of his “blank generation” felt compelled to

reject.

But how to interpret this rejection of the social world that had so recently come

into being at the end of the 1960s? On one hand, it is tempting to interpret it as apolitical,

an empty aesthetic gesture, and indeed many historians and theorists of punk rock have

done just that. Hell’s song, however, points towards a set of political commitments

enacted in New York punk music that were not always spoken outright, but which often

seemed to lend the music its pulse. Like British punk, New York punk articulated its own

theory of everyday life, how to navigate it and how to survive it, and I have tried to

elucidate this theory in the preceding pages. When considered as a larger set of aesthetic

practices—not just the production of live and recorded music, but literature, visual art,

film, video, and performance—New York punk’s implicit theory of urban space, identity,

and social change comes into high relief, and has disruptive consequences for our

understanding of the aesthetic, economic, and political transition from a modern to a

postmodern cultural dominant in the period of “the long 1970s,” from the election of

Richard Nixon in 1968 to Reagan’s re-election in 1984. At CBGB, musicians, writers,

and other artists sought to instantiate what the philosopher Gaston Bachelard described as

an “oneiric” or dreamlike space in downtown New York, a space that defied the

dehumanizing social conditions developing outside its doors, or what Jacques Rancière

219!

and Foucault would call a heterotopia.

358

Richard Hell, a participant in the CBGB’s

scene as a writer and performer, was one of the primary theorists of this dreamscape.

Certain members of CBGB were truly disadvantaged. By imagining any-space-

whatsoever, the occupiers of CBGB and the Bowery extended Burroughs’s dream of the

pirate community beyond the page and into the larger space of the rock club, the

loudspeaker, the art gallery, and the fashion house.

Like communism, punk is a specter. It has no essence. It lingers. It functions like

the term “queer” in José Munoz’s figuration—“not yet here,” “an ideality.”

359

But it is

part of an aesthetic undercommons that encompasses several terms—queer, punk,

proletarian—and even its most highly reified examples attest to this shifting ground. “A

School for Singing” has not been intended to suggest that the CBGB scene was somehow

more authentic in this way than any other punk scene, or that it should somehow take

primacy over them as the “origin” of the punk aesthetic. As each of my chapters shows,

and as critics like Greil Marcus have suggested, the punk spirit can be read backwards in

time in any direction.

360

But it has been necessary, at least in some attenuated and

contingent way to pass back through the space of CBGB. As the women in Pussy Riot so

forcefully reminded us, when they occupied a cathedral, not a street or a stage,

performances like theirs are, in the words of Tavia Nyong’o, borrowed from Paolo Virno,

kairotic, that is, they belong to an ecstatic time and place that anticipates a better world to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

358

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon,

1969); Rancière, “The Aesthetic Dimension;” and Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.”

359

Muñoz, 1.

360

Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 82-83.

220!

come.

361

The fact that we are only now awakening to this kind of radical hope is not a

failure of the CBGB scene but of our own neoliberal imagination.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

361

Tavia Nyong’o, “The Scene of Occupation,” TDR: The Drama Review. 56(4): 136-

149.

221!

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