_______________________________________________________________________________ _ _ _ _ ((___)) ((___)) [ x x ] cDc communications [ x x ] \ / presents... \ / (' ') (' ') (U) (U) Impresario: Malcom McLaren and the British New Wave by The Pusher >>> A CULT Publication......1988 <<< -cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc- _______________________________________________________________________________ Introduction: The New Museum in New York City had an exhibit on Malcom McLaren (manager of Sex Pistols, Adam and the Ants, and Bow Wow Wow) that I recently saw. They gave out a pamphlet about him which I typed up in this file. Thanks to my sister Leslie for taking me, and paying the cover charge at CBGB's later that night. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "He is best known for his role as manager of the infamous punk band, the Sex Pistols. Yet from his early art school days in the 1960's to his role as fashion designer, band manager and ultimately as a recording artist in his own right, Malcom McLaren has had a remarkably varied career as an orchestrator of public entertainments and spectacles, entrepreneur, style-maker and rabble rouser. The exhibition is about McLaren's participation in fifteen years of music, fashion, and graphic design, shown through record albums, t-shirts, magazines, music videos, memorabilia and other objects-many mass produced; and many the result of McLaren's collaborations with others- in other words, not the sort of thing usually found in art museums. The intention of this exhibition is not to push these objects into the rarified atmosphere of "fine art," but to explore their functions within popular culture, to see how ideas are spoken through fashion, style, and large-scale cultural phenomena. McLaren's arena is popular culture, but his concerns are linked to a series of movements in 20th-century art that runs from the Dadaists and Surrealists of the 1920's and 30's, to the Lettrists and Situationists of the 50's and 60's, through Pop Art, Happenings, and into the media-orientated art of our own time. These movements confounded traditional definitions of art by challenging the academic separation of "art" from "life." Politically engaged to greater or lesser degrees, they were concerned with the content of modern life and the ability of art to affect social experience. From his study of art history and his training as an art student, McLaren became interested in the way social dramas are played out in public spaces. He and his collaborators learned how to subvert authority through the manipulation of its symbols, especially its symbols of power. Consider, for instance, Jamie Reid's famous image of Queen Elizabeth with a safety pin through her nose. McLaren discovered that creating situations can be more effective than creating objects alone. In the 1970's and 80's this meant media manipulation, as well as live performance and the announcement of attitudes through dress and behavior. Malcom McLaren was born in London in 1946. He was raised by his grand- mother and educated at home until the age of nine. From 1963 to 1971 he studied art at various schools including Croydon College of Art where he met fellow students, Jamie Reid and Helen Wellington-Lloyd, who were later to design most of the Sex Pistols' graphics. In 1972, McLaren left art school to open a boutique at 430 King's Road with Vivienne Westwood. The boutique first sold retro clothes that revived the Teddy Boy look of the 50's. But McLaren and Westwood soon felt that another look was needed for the 70's. Throughout the decade McLaren would redesign the shop five times, change the inventory and devise a new name- LET IT ROCK (1972), TOO FAST TO LIVE TOO YOUNG TO DIE (1973), SEX (1974), SEDITIONARIES (1977), and World's End (1980). In each carnation the shop carried clothes that had more than style. The clothes embodied attitude. Of all the shops, SEX stands out in strongest profile because of its links with punk music and culture. (It is there that Johnny Rotten is purported to have auditioned for the role of the lead singer of the Sex Pistols.) SEX sold the look of punk-poverty wear, such as ripped t-shirts with slogans scrawled across them, boots, studded jackets, and bondage clothing made of leather, chains, and rubber. SEX became a gathering place for punk's growing ranks. The clothes, along with accessories like safety pins through the ear, lip, or cheek suggested self-mutilation and instilled fear by evoking violence and destruction. Danger and criminality were also suggested by the ransom-note graphics used on punk concert posters and record jackets. It was the mid-70's, a period of racial tension, economic instability and England's highest unemployment rate since the 1930's (33% among recent high school graduates in 1976). British youths gave up their futile demand for the right to work. Instead, they demanded the right not to work and to collect government support anyway. In 1977, absurdly conflicting images clashed in the newspapers- the dejection of unemployment and the pomp of the Queen's Silver Jubilee. In this atmosphere, punk and its most notorious band, the Sex Pistols, flourished. The band didn't play well, but it didn't matter. In fact, virtuosity was the anathema to the punk sensibility. An article in the punk fanzine "Sniffin' Glue" showed a diagram of the three finger positions on a guitar and advised: "Here's one chord, here's two more; now form your own band." Punk not only subverted traditional British values, ethics, and codes of respectability; it threw into confusion standards of quality across the board. Its messages were contradictory and deliberately confusing. "All 'God Save the Queen' means is that we hate the Queen 'cause everyone is lookin' up to her." - Sid Vicious, Sex Pistols bassist "We hate President Carter, too. Where'd he get them teeth?" - Paul Cook, Sex Pistols drummer In managing the Sex Pistols, McLaren rejected the decorum of conventional entrepreneurs. The Sex Pistols were good theater and McLaren knew how to make, as he said, "Cash from Chaos." Beating the capitalist system at its own game, McLaren collected hundreds of thousands of dollars by signing various recording contracts which were subsequently broken when reports of the band's unsavory behavior appeared in the press. For this, in 1977, the Sex Pistols were named "Young Businessmen of the Year" by England's "Investors Review". "The greatest technique involved in managing the Sex Pistols was always to create the right explosion and then know that it was going to happen, and as manager, run into the toilet and come out after the explosion and say, 'God, what's happened?" - Malcom McLaren When the Sex Pistols disbanded in 1978, McLaren was invited to revamp the image of Adam and the Ants. His first move was to separate Adam from the group, rename it Bow Wow Wow and enlist 14-year old Annabella Lwin as its lead singer. As the era of conservative Thatcherism began, McLaren initiated the look of "punk gone high seas." The theme was piracy and the performers adopted the theatrical look of swashbuckling outlaws. The concept of the outlaw was adapted and romanticized in the guise of such legendary figures as Geronimo and Blackbeard. Whereas punk fashion has recreated the look of poverty, the new romantic style was a costume of great riches with gold dust, glitter, and flamboyant color overdone to the point of caricature. Developing the piracy theme, Bow Wow Wow's song "C30 C60 C90 GO!" encouraged listeners to tape music directly from the radio instead of buying records. This was modern-day high-tech appropriation. Exploitation was at the heart of its sensibility. McLaren capitalized on lead singer Annabella's youth and her "exotic" Burmese background by developing the exploitation theme through images of blatant sexism, soft core pornography, and racial stereotyping. McLaren's association with Bow Wow Wow ended in 1982 and in 1983 he released his first solo album, Duck Rock. With this step he inserted himself into a youth culture that had been gaining momentum in New York City since the late 1970's. That culture was hip-hop, a movement originating in the South Bronx which encompassed rap and scratch music, break dancing, graffiti, and its own forms of clothes and speech. McLaren adopted the techniques of hip hop music by mixing previous recordings in new combinations, a procedure conceptually similar to his earlier method of creating new fashions by juxtaposing unlike styles and forms. To achieve an authentic South Bronx sound McLaren collaborated with the New York City DJ duo, the World Famous Supreme Team. Together they intermixed African, Cuban, and American recordings which McLaren had collected while traveling around the world. Among the results was "Buffalo Gals" which attracted a crossover audience of both black and white listeners. McLaren's project owed much to hip hop, but also differed from it in a substantial way. While most hip hop conveys young DJ's attitudes and experience of urban life, McLaren kept one foot in the realm of fantasy. To accompany the record, McLaren and collaborator Vivienne Westwood developed a line of "Buffalo Gal" clothes based on styles from old rural America. Look muddy, they said, expounding on the pleasures of square dance as a pagan courting ritual. In 1984, McLaren released another album, Fans, which brought him much acclaim. The record's most intriguing song, "Madam Butterfly", mixed rap music with Puccini opera. It combined extreme genres in a glossy and sophisticated package that appealed to yuppies and B-Boys alike. The interpenetration of high and low culture is not a new idea. But in his music, McLaren not only combined contrasting styles, he found convincing connections between the content of operatic libretto and contemporary culture, such as "Cho Cho San's" woeful tale of unwanted pregnancy in "Madam Butterfly." In McLaren's upcoming project, a Broadway production based on the album, contemporary teenagers go opera-mad, living life as if it were a libretto. They reinvent themselves as Carmens, Toscas, and little "Cho Chos." Like punk in the 1970's, this and McLaren's other projects continue to test the flexibility of art forms and institutions. His primary techniques, misuse and modification of pre-existing elements, are methods with a long history in the 20th century from Marcel Duchamp's rectified readymades to today's "appropriation art." In the 1960's, McLaren was influenced by the Situationist idea that iconoclasm is a liberating force and an agent of social change. Is such a strategy viable in today's media-saturated consumer culture, a culture which seems ever able to absorb outrage and atrocity, as long as there's a profit to be made? McLaren's accomplishments are perched precisely on the dialectic between the shocking and new, and its consumption and popularization. Is there a critique implied in his work or is he just in it for the sport? I leave it to you to decide." "I think the only rule I ever had was... that if it didn't annoy someone it wasn't worth doing. If it didn't create problems, too, it wasn't worth doing. If it didn't have any politics, it was suspect. And from that it then had to have a lot of style and be sexy, to sell." - Malcom McLaren _______________________________________________________________________________ Behavior Modification.....806/793-9462 The Dead Zone.............214/522-5321 Demon Roach Underground...806/794-4362 Dragonfire Private........609/424-2606 Question Authority........715/341-6516 Pure Nihilism.............517/337-7319 Tequila Willy's...........209/526-3194 The Metal AE..............201/879-6668 =============================================================================== (c)1988 cDc communications by The Pusher 12/30/88-95 All Rights Worth Shit