The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit Read Free Book Online Page B

beast.”
    Punk rock could, and the beast was rock-and-roll itself. I was fifteen in 1977, the year punk hit California. When it arrived, most rock-and-roll sounded as though it was made to be listened to in a hot tub; the music had slowed down and sprawled out. The operative word was mellow . In Invasion of the Body Snatchers , the aliens clone you when you’re sleeping and then turn you into ashes; relaxation is perilous. Punk came along as a fierce corrective to the excesses and errors of the 1960s, at least in the United States. British punks were perhaps more farseeing; their protest was against a mainstream that would grow more grotesque in the Thatcherist 1980s, while songs like the Dead Kennedys’s “California Über Alles” (1979/80) seemed to imagine progressive and occasionally loopy Governor Jerry Brown as an enduringoppression—insidious, like those tendrils and pods. By the time that song was released in June of 1979, former California governor Ronald Reagan was on his way to the presidency, and decades of Republican governors were on their way to Sacramento. (California wouldn’t have a strong Democratic governor again until 2011, when a seventy-something Brown was reelected.)
    “California Über Alles” seems to imagine that the counterculture won. Few foresaw that the right—which seemed in abeyance since Nixon had slithered back to San Clemente—was on the brink of resurgence. Nevertheless, punk rock would have plenty to say about Reagan and the right when the time came: San Francisco’s MDC (Millions of Dead Cops, an important, less-remembered political punk band that eventually changed its name to Multi-Death Corporations) would release “John Wayne Was a Nazi” in 1981, and a host of hardcore bands like L.A.’s Wasted Youth would launch more vitriolic attacks. Even the generally apolitical Ramones would record “Bonzo Goes to Bitberg” in 1985, about Reagan’s infamous laying of a wreath in a cemetery full of Nazi graves. It was possible to hate both possibilities—and dystopic punk was never very good at envisioning solutions and alternatives. It arose from an adolescent’s sensibility of outrage and dissent—the antithesis of visionary —hostile to the Emperor and his embroidered new clothes.
    The 1970s is a decade people would apparently rather not talk about and hardly seem to remember. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the 1970s is that its experiments—the failed ones that people learned from and the successful that continued—laid the groundwork for movements to come during the 1980s and after. But in 1978, mostly the mistakes and excesses were on display.
    1978: THE YEAR OF FORENSIC EVIDENCE
    For San Francisco in particular and for California in general, 1978 was a terrible year in which the fiddler had to be paid for all the tunes to which the counterculture had danced. The sexual revolution had deteriorated into a sort of free-market, free-trade ideology, in which all should have access to sex and none should deny access. I grew up north of San Francisco inan atmosphere where, once you were twelve or so, hippie dudes in their thirties started to offer you drugs and neck rubs that were clearly only the beginning—and it was immensely hard to refuse them. There were no grounds. Sex was good; everyone should have it all the time; anything could be construed as consent; and almost nothing meant no, including “no.” Those who remember feminists as being angrily anti-sex during the 1980s don’t recall the huge task they undertook—and undertook successfully—of pointing out that, like everything else, sex involves power; power is distributed unequally; and unequal power not uncommonly deteriorates into exploitation.
    It was the culture. Rock stars were open about their liaisons with underage groupies, and forty-something Woody Allen had cast underage Mariel Hemingway as his love interest in his film Manhattan (1977). In 1978, Louis Malle released Pretty Baby ,