Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus Read Free Book Online

protest against the modern world and all its works, blending passion, mystery, and the primeval.” “This explosion,” said President Charles de Gaulle in the June speech with which he recaptured power, “was provoked by a few groups in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West—groups, moreover, which do not know what they would put in its place, but which delight in negation.” “The Beginning of an Epoch,” proclaimed the lead article in the twelfth and last number of the journal
Internationale situationniste
in 1969. “The death rattle of the historical irrelevants,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski.
    In 1978, when Brzezinski was national security adviser to the president of the United States and “The Beginning of an Epoch” was, in English, abadly translated, smudgy pamphlet long out of print,
Slash
readers were expected to recall the unscheduled holiday of May ’68 approximately as dimly as they might recall Gary “U.S.” Bonds’s small 1965 hit “Seven Day Weekend.” The reader was to look casually at the blind reference of the Atelier populaire poster, and then to superimpose the best-known Sex Pistols graphic, Jamie Reid’s photo-collage for “God Save the Queen,” which featured H.R.H. Elizabeth II with a safety pin through her lips; out of the ether of unmade history, connections were supposed to tumble like counters in a slot machine. “The revolutionary hopes of the 1960s, which culminated in 1968,” John Berger wrote in 1975,
     
    are now blocked or abandoned. One day they will break out again, transformed, and be lived again with different results. I mean only that; I am not prophesying the difference. When that happens, the Situationist programme (or anti-programme) will probably be recognized as one of the most lucid and pure political formulations of that earlier, historic decade, reflecting, in an extreme way, its desperate force and privileged weakness.
    As manager of the Dils, Peter Urban would not have been interested in such sentimental meanderings. There was a world to win, he told McLaren, tactics to be formulated, ideology to be fixed, and anyway . . . McLaren cut him off. “So, Peter, how come you’re managing a band with a name like a pickle? Or a dildo, what’s the controversy there?”
    The Sex Pistols had sparked the Dils; when I saw them play in 1979, they were a helpless imitation, nothing more. By the time Nancy Spungen was stabbed to death, the Sex Pistols had sparked new bands all over the world, and more of them than anyone could count were doing things no one in rock ’n’ roll had done before. But as an above-ground group—a commercial possibility, an international scandal—the Sex Pistols lasted little longer than nine months: they saw the release of their first record on 4 November 1976, and ceased to exist as much more than an asset in a lawsuit on 14 January 1978, when, immediately following the last show of their single American tour, Johnny Rotten quit the band, claiming that McLaren, in his lust for fame and money, had betrayed everything the Sex Pistols ever stood for. And what was that? For guitarist Steve Jones, an illiterate petty criminal, and drummer Paul Cook, a sometime electrician’s helper, it was girls and good times. For original bassist Glen Matlock, former art student andSex shop clerk, it was pop music. For Sid Vicious, the junkie who replaced him, it was pop stardom. As for Johnny Rotten, he would say many different things (including, after the fall: “Steve can go off and become Peter Frampton”—he didn’t; “Sid can go off and kill himself”—he did; “Paul can go back to being an electrician”—he may still), and, one suspected, had yet to say what he meant.
    Atelier populaire poster, May 1968
    Sex Pistols flyer by Jamie Reid, 1977
THE SEX PISTOLS
    The Sex Pistols called their final performance the worst of their career,