Entrevista a Greil Marcus (Junho 1997)
PSF: As the '60s progressed and the bands and political movements around it got more radical, did you think that their politics were sincere or meaningful at all?
When the bands became 'political,' they never did become political. Instead, individuals in certain groups began acting as whole people. Whole people have political dimensions. They can get outraged at things and they're moved by other things. They talk with their friends about these things and if they have a public forum, they speak publicly about these things. That doesn't make that the whole of their lives but any real person who's living in the real world is going to be energized by a political situation or disgusted with those same things. They're going to react with a sense of confirmation or exclusion at that political event.
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PSF: How do you see that the radical movement, along with the music, changing once the Nixon administration came into power?
The Nixon administrations saw as one of its missions to wipe out and destroy dissent in whatever form it occured. It affected music in two ways. First, it made some people more combative (i.e. the Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds, David Crosby). Ultimately, the world of pop music responded like the rest of the world, which is to say that after Jackson State and Kent State, people got really scared. They found out that you could really get killed by doing this stuff at any time. They began to back off and they began to shut up. What broke the anti-war movement was that. That was a self-betrayal analagous (in my mind) to teenagers waking up one day and saying 'we really do like 'Tammy' better than Arlene Smith (the Chantels).' When people found out that you could die from this, they backed off. It was a lack of a sense of history, intellegence and nerve for people to go into a battle against their own government with the illusion that nobody was going to get hurt.
PSF: A few years after this disillusion, the punk movement came along. What do you see as its legacy and how it also became a unique youth movement?
I don't know how to put it or position it. I don't know if punk started out as a rejection of pop music or life in the UK at that time. Certainly, as soon as it started, as soon as the Sex Pistols began to perform as a public outrage and even before they released their first record, a whole conflict of symbolism immediately gathered and was drawn to what they were doing. None of this was accidental because Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid, who were the real college-educated Col. Parkers of this movement, had a Situationist background and were schooled in a haphazard way in nihilist European art politics going all the way back to the 19th century. They knew that architecture could be as repressive as a law (that would) put people in jail for criticizing the government. They believed that the music that people heard every day had as much of an effect on how people thought of themselves as anything people learned in school. They saw records as a way to disrupt the assumptions that people didn't question, that people used to hold themselves together. This is to say that these were the assumptions that held society together. I don't think they saw records, performances and songs as a way to change the world as such. It was more of a theft- 'let's set off a bomb and see what happens.'
Within that perspective, everything was a target. Pink Floyd are no more or no less the enemy than the government. That's the mindset here. This was utterly true for Johnny Rotten as someone who really schooled himself on James Joyce and Graham Greene and his sense of being an outsider because he was Irish and being just astonishingly smart and vehement and impatient. For the other people in the band, I don't think it was ever anything more than a chance to be in a band in the beginning and later what an absolute thrill it was to tell society to go fuck itself. By the time the band was really making records, they were all understanding (except maybe Sid Vicious) what it's about and what it's for. It was a chance, if not to change society, to live a life that you would never expect to live within society. That's not a life of money and fame and girls. That's a life of feeling free and complete and alive. From that, anything can flow.
From that, you get the Clash, an ideological band which really did have political positions. They went out and named the villians and wore political slogans on their clothes (which I think is hilarious in a way but they were great looking costumes). The funny thing about the Clash is that they turned lines that Johnny Rotten threw out in interviews into songs. They worked with received ideas and they were authentically changed by those second-hand ideas. Joe Strummer might have started out mouthing ideological slogans because it seemed like a good idea. But he began to think about the things he was singing and I think he actually decided they were true and they actually got him thinking.
Then of course by the time you get to the mid '70s in England, the Beats are really a pervasive influence, William Burroughs and Kerouac in particular. That sense of autonomy and nihilist rebellion, saying 'the dominant society is a bunch of boring old shits and we are true and verile,' is really strong. The angelization of the heroin addict is very strong. There's a lot of parallel with that scene.
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PSF: After the first wave of punk died out, did you find that were other political movements building up around music or rock in particular?
I don't see a literal connections between bands and youth movements or songs and political activity. Both are forms of discourse, both are different forms of conversation. They inform each other but in ways that are not obvious and in ways that can only be teased out or imagined or churned into stories. I don't have anything say to about, for instance, the connection between the Gang of Four or the Mekons and what they were doing and their effect on what people might be doing politically. If anything, the effect is the other way around because these bands came out of a tremendously politicized milieu where feminism, gay rights, skinheads beating up and killing non-whites was their frame of reference, their everyday life. To make music that in some way didn't incorporate that would be to deny your own experience and knowledge and the things that got you excited, angry or happy or allowed you to make friends. The lines between what you could say in a song and what you said to people you cared about had long since been smashed by Bob Dylan. If you look at the most politicized music that the Mekons made, like Fear And Whiskey or Edge of the World, the music is a lament for a battle that's been lost. This is not rallying troops or defining good. This is the kind of art that's often been made after the defeat of a revolt or a rebellion. This is music made as the Mekons understood it in the shadow of fascism. The same with Elvis Costello's music.
Now if that music goes out into the world and hits peoples' heart or makes people think the political situation that they perceive isn't as locked in as it appears to be, or if it just makes them think more deeply, the consequences of that can lead in any direction. The Weathermen actually used pop songs as part of their metaphors (they named themselves after a Dylan song). They went underground and set off bombs in strategic places to make sure people wouldn't get killed and they got publicity and made people see that the government is really not in control. Then a few of them got killed making bombs and they thought that maybe their strategy wasn't good after all because 'gosh, you can get hurt making bombs.' This is the same with 'Tammy' and Kent State- this is the naivete that beggars all understanding. It had nothing to do with the validity of the strategy- it was 'golly, we can get hurt. Better change our strategy.' Their manifesto announcing their new strategy was called NEW MORNING, after a Dylan album. One of the songs in their songbook was an adaptation of 'Bad Moon Rising'- the only change was 'better get your shit together' instead of 'better get your things together.' You can say that there's a connection between the Weathermen and pop music but I don't think there's a connection at all. I think the connection is utterly meaningless, trivial and exploitive on the part of the Weathermen. It was just a way to look 'with it.' It's a direct connection but, I think, a meaningless one. The connections between Elvis Presley, Jim Jones and David Koresh are much more interesting.
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PSF: Do you find that songs with implicit or explicit political statements make a stronger case or point? For instance, how would you compare Elvis Costello's music with Woody Guthrie's in this context?
Woody Guthrie had a sign on his guitar that said 'this machine kills fascists.' That's just the kind of connection between music and politics that I'm arguing against. It wasn't a machine and it didn't kill fascists. It made Woody Guthrie and the people who listened to him feel noble. I'm not saying that he wasn't against fascism but to say that you could defeat it by singing songs is not helpful in the war against fascism.
The original title of Armed Forces was Emotional Fascism. Elvis Costello was making a very, very complex and sophisticated argument with that record in the words that he wrote and in the way that he sang them. He was saying fascism is the dominant mode of political behavior in the West today and it has seeped down to our everyday lives. If fascism now pervades our everday lives and our interactions with each other, our whole understanding of social intercourse supports and ultimately affirms fascism. This makes it a more interesting and less fixed statement.
Woody Guthrie says 'sing my songs and defeat fascism.' Elvis Costello says 'fascism exists- look around you.' Is that a stronger political statement? I don't know. It doesn't tell you what to do or promise any results. It's a stronger STATEMENT.
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