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Lipstick Traces
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Today, so many years later, the
shock of punk is that every good punk record can still sound like
the greatest thing you've ever heard. "A Boring Life," "One Chord Wonders," X-ray Spex's "Oh Bondage Up Yours!," the Sex Pistols' singles, the Clash's "Complete Control"—the power in these bits of plastic, the tension between the desire that fuels them and the fatalism waiting to block each beat, the laughter and surprise in the voices, the confidence of the music, all these things are shocking now because, in its two or three minutes, each is absolute. You can't place one record above the other, not while you're listening; each one is the end of the world, the creation of the world, complete in itself. Every good punk record made in London in 1976 or 1977 can convince you that it's the greatest thing you've ever heard because it can convince you that you never have to hear anything else as long as you live—each
record seems to say everything there is to say. For as long as
the sound lasts, no other sound, not even a memory of any other
music, can penetrate.
Lipstick Traces |
What remains irreducible about
this music is its desire to change the world. The desire is patent
and simple, but it inscribes a story that is infinitely complex—as complex as the interplay of the everyday gestures that describe the way the world already works. The desire begins with the demand to live not as an object but as a subject of history—to live as if something actually depended on one's actions—and
that demand opens onto a free street. Damning God and the state,
work and leisure, home and family, sex and play, the audience and
itself, the music briefly made it possible to experience all those
things as if they were not natural facts but ideological constructs:
things that had been made and therefore could be altered, or done
away with altogether. It became possible to see those things as
bad jokes, and for the music to come forth as a better joke. The
music came forth as a no that became a yes, then a no again, then
again a yes: nothing is true except our conviction that the world
we are asked to accept is false. If nothing was true, everything
was possible. In the pop milieu, an arena maintained by society
at large both to generate symbols and to defuse them, in the only
milieu where a nobody like Johnny Rotten had a chance to be heard,
all rules fell away. In tones that pop music had never produced,
demands were heard that pop music had never made.
Lipstick Traces |