The Great Rock & Roll Swindle: A Collection Of Discussions

Liam Whear

All Under One Roof Raving

The vision of working-class people losing ‘the plot on the dancefloor’ is, in itself, a political notion. With people looking back and just seeing a sea of gurning faces and stupid dancing, it’s important not to forget how dangerous rave and acid house was seen to be. As early as 1990, the UK rave scene was under fire from the law, with the ‘Acid House Bill’ restricting clubs from hosting events. The authorities were scared of all these people gathering together, in an age that was pre-internet and pre-mobile. Things were getting serious. The culture was getting shut down. This lifestyle was gaining importance. As Jip from the film Human Traffic said, ‘ultimately, we just want to be happy’.

Human Traffic (1999)

Of course, Britain in the 80s was very much divided by class; just look at the garden parties in Buckingham Palace, the wedding of Charles and Diana, and then look at photos of northern miner towns at the time; most of which are still suffering. Working-class Britain was bare, broken, and longing. Something had to happen. Then in 1987/88, clubs like London’s Shoom and Trip noticed the Chicago house scene, played a few tracks, people danced until the early hours of the morning in warehouses, and the Second Summer Of Love started. It was going to happen. After a decade of power and a ‘death of culture’, Thatcher’s stronghold was waning. The working class needed to celebrate. They needed to let go.

Inspired by the Northern Soul scene, ravers took to the warehouses of Manchester and London and, as later celebrated by Primal Scream, would Come Together.

‘There was just this massive rush of, to me, happiness, because there was a genuine brilliant atmosphere in the club and everybody was basically feeding off

each other’. – Anonymous, quoted in Helen Evans’ Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind (1992)

Danny Rampling at Shoom, 1988, taken by Dave Swindells

By the summer of ‘88, acid house was a national youth movement, and the warehouses spilled out to fields and aircraft hangars. Rave kept to its guerrilla nature, with ravers having to call two different numbers at an allotted time to find out the location. The thrill involved in just getting to the place led to comparisons to Ibiza holidays and football matches; as Helen Evans says, ‘this period is often read as a reflection of the materialism of eighties enterprise culture’. Rave fashion even co-opted the ‘package holiday’ aesthetic, with awful Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts, as well as baggy clothes. It was indeed similar to the ’77 punk explosion, with the importance of the dress code; ‘politics with a small p’.

No one was expecting rave. It was about the feeling; the political action was buried deep in the feeling itself. ‘Egos and personal prejudices are left behind as people celebrate life and feed off of each other's positive energy’, says the website The Spirit Of Raving. If you were there and it took you to a higher plane of existence, that’s great. But the most important thing was young people were gathering, not fighting each other, and having a great time, maybe just to spite the economic and personal hell Thatcher had just dragged Britain through.

Ecstasy was indeed key to the rave experience. Raves were about ‘sensory overload’, and thus the drug ecstasy was prime for it. It involves leaving yourself behind, and at the same time becoming one with yourself; the beat, the people dancing around you, the lights, the sensations, all become one. Drugs had been important before, but here it was the cathartic experience that ecstasy and raves themselves together helped produce, that was vital.

‘It definitely took ecstasy to change things. People would take their first ecstasy and it was almost as if they were born again. They suddenly got it: 'Oh my God, this is amazing!' You could watch these people walk into the club as one person

and walk out as a different person at the end of the night.’ – Mark Moore, founder of dance pioneers S’Express (2008)

Ecstasy’s gift of togetherness was vital to rave’s political motivation: escapism. A lot of people had given up on change after a decade of Thatcherism, so this was a chance to escape all the negativity. Rival football supporters danced and hugged together. Punk’s

visibility was key to the aesthetics and meaning of that movement; rave’s lack of visibility was alternately key. (Tens of) thousands of young people gathering in dark basements, dancing to new beat-oriented anonymous music, while high on a new drug, and resuming their lives the next day. Passers-by in the street could tell if you were a punk in 1979; they couldn’t tell if you were a raver in 1989. That itself was an act of quiet transgression. It also elevated ravers above hierarchies and elitism:

Fac 51 The Haçienda, Manchester

‘This aspect of Acid House culture can be seen as breaking down even more barriers - this time that of Sex. In the Acid House club, thanks to the dance

inducing environment, everyone was truly equal. This affected all aspects of Acid House culture: fashion was no longer strictly divided between the sexes. Women

no longer had to wear high heels and skirts - comfort and durability were the order of the day so as not to restrict the body in its dancing. Sex was just another everyday constriction that could be escaped from, that could be merged into the

dancefloor crowd.’ – Simon Parkin, writing in Visual Energy (1999)

Britain’s political atmosphere in the middle of the 1980s was one of violence. Be it the riots against police in the midst of the miners’ strike, or the National Front. Then in 1990 Primal Scream summarised the change in attitude with one song. After all the violence, in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. A year later, after a decade running on individualist politics and forcing people to ‘do it themselves’, Thatcher resigned. A little-known Scottish indie band released a ten-minute dance song called Come Together, which opens with Jesse Jackson saying ‘because together we got power’, and ends with gospel singers demanding people come ‘as one’. It filled raves everywhere. And it was a damn good song.

Rave was a movement of aesthetics and symbolism. At rock shows, punters cheer and raise their hands towards the stage, to the performer. In raves, people cheered the music itself; the medium.

‘The crowd’s focus is turned in on itself… an audience that is creating its own performance… they were elevating themselves’. – John Higgs, writing in The KLF:

Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds (2013)

Watch 24 Hour Party People and see Steve Coogan’s Tony Wilson lament on how ‘they’re applauding the DJ. Not the music, not the musician, not the creator, but the medium’. This goes hand-in-hand with the transcendent state ecstasy offered. Working class life in the 80s was monotonous. So teenagers took the warehouses Thatcher had abandoned, built sound systems and blasted monotonous beat-driven music. It was symbolic.

‘Acid House pleasures came not from resistance but from surrender’ – Antonio Melechi, writing in The Ecstasy Of Disappearance (1993)

A brief surrender from ordinary life, then back to normal. A series of moments. Whereas punk, as said by Greil Marcus, ‘came together as a new set of verbal and visual signs… both opaque and revelatory, depending on who was looking… made ordinary social life seem like a trick, the result of sadomasochistic economics’. Punk was easy to scapegoat because it made itself a scapegoat. You had Johnny Rotten. You had Jimmy Pursey. They might say otherwise, but they did want to change the world. But rave wanted nothing to do with that, it just wanted to dance the night away. In these invisible spaces that rave created, heinous acts of having a good time and transcending hegemonic barriers placed upon us by the patriarchal hierarchies of society were committed. The media and the government had no choice but to scapegoat the invisibility. The classic case of ‘your kids are up to no good’. The government labelled it a ‘resistance movement’, and so it had no choice but to ironically become one. The Sun sold acid house t-shirts and labelled the movement as ‘cool and groovy’. Two weeks later they ran headlines such as ‘Evil of Ecstasy’

The Sun (1989)

June 24th 1989. Legendary promoters Sunrise hold a night at an airstrip in Berkshire. 11,000 attend. The morning after, The Sun runs the headline ‘SPACED OUT! 11,000 youngsters go drug crazy at Britain’s biggest-ever Acid party’. Undercover journalists that were there reported on ravers ripping the heads off pigeons and of leaving ecstasy wrappers on the floor. Neither of which were true. For many, the Summer was beginning to end. And it was only July.

As VICE reporter Michael Holden said, ‘The government, rather than the people actually involved, started to politicise it by having the police follow them and film them, and by asking questions about it in Parliament’. Police and promoters engaged in regular games

of cat and mouse. Locations for nights were broadcast on pirate radio stations. Back-up venues were set up.

This might seem drab, but for some, this was a success. Rave had broken through. By the end of 1989, the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses played Top Of The Pops on the same night. Two bands that came out of The Haçienda in Manchester, one of the biggest nightclubs in the country. Ride On Time by Black Box was the biggest-selling single of the year, all through being played at raves. The youngsters were having their good time. They could have even been winning.

But the highs of ecstasy don’t last. You have to come down. Rock and roll became corporate, and therefore punk arrived. Now Johnny Rotten sells butter and Iggy Pop sells car insurance and Dave Grohl is mates with Prince Harry.

The Entertainment (Increased Penalties) Act of 1990 made raves harder to take place. Licensed venues such as The Seven Aces in Hackney sent out regular newsletters for their raves. The institutionalising, the stabilising, the co-opting had begun. Ecstasy was still being consumed. Young people were still losing themselves in dance and beats. Underground raves were still being held. But there was a smell in the air. The smell of ‘official’ events being held in stadiums in every major city.

They wanna fight, we wanna dance

Come 1994, and Section 63 of the Criminal Justice Act allowed police to remove persons from open-air events consisting of music that included ‘sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’. 50,000 people partied in protest in Trafalgar Square. The Prodigy darkened and dirtied up their sound with Music For The Jilted Generation. ‘Fuck ‘em and their law’, Liam Howlett spat. But it was never going to be the same again. The Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses split up.

Five years after 1994, and the working class characters in Human Traffic take a load of ecstasy at a rave, and have a great time. John Simm’s character Jip applies symbolic meaning to every one of his and his friends’ actions. ‘Ultimately, we just want to be happy’. Afterwards, they agree to all do it again, and again, and again. The film ends with Come Together by Primal Scream. ‘Come together as one’.

Biggest Tunes1. 808 State – In Yer Face (1991)2. The Age Of Love – The Age Of Love (Jam & Spoon Watch Out For Stella Mix) (1991)3. Bedrock – For What You Dream Of (1993)4. Black Box – Ride On Time (1989)5. Frankie Knuckles – Your Love (1989)6. A Guy Called Gerald – Voodoo Ray (1988)7. Happy Mondays – Hallelujah (Club Mix) (1989)8. Inner City – Good Life (1988)9. The KLF – What Time Is Love? (1988)10. Orbital – Lush 3-1 (1993)11. Primal Scream – Come Together (1990)12. The Prodigy – No Good (Start The Dance) (1994)13. Soul II Soul – Back To Life (1989)14. The Source – You Got The Love (1991)15. Underground Resistance – The Final Frontier (1991)

Further ReadingE Is For Ecstasy. Prod. BBC Everyman. 1992. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oswILmuC06E>.

Evans, Helen. OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND: An Analysis of Rave culture. 1992. <http://hehe.org.free.fr/hehe/texte/rave/>.

Holden, Michael. Thatcher's War on Acid House. 9 4 2013. <http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/margaret-thatcher-war-on-rave-acid-house-boys-own>.

Melechi, Antonio. "The Ecstasy of Disappearance." Redhead, Steve. Rave Off. Avebury, 1993.

Mullin, Frankie. How UK Ravers Raged Against The Ban. Ed. Rocco Castoro. 15 July 2014. <http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/anti-rave-act-protests-20th-anniversary-204>.

Parkin, Simon. Visual Energy. 5 1999. <http://hyperreal.org/raves/database/visuale/ve1.htm>.

Rave's relationship to the Media. n.d. <http://www.fantazia.org.uk/Scene/press/magazines.htm>.

Summer of Love. Dir. BBC. 2006. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-XrlMpwEuM>.

Transformative Social Revolution Girl Style Now

Carol Hanisch has denied authorship regarding her 1969 phrase ‘The personal is political’. The ‘millions of women in public and private conversations’ have now been attributed ‘as the phrase's collective authors’. A small group of young women around the Seattle/Olympia Washington area in the late eighties felt disenfranchised by their local punk rock scenes, and took that mantra to heart.

Arriving in a flurry of guitars, scrawled manifestos and K Records albums, it felt like something was just happening. Punk women were finally, as Mary Kearney described, their own ‘cultural producers’. Riot grrrls were able to define themselves in an individual context and a scene context through their own means, using similar subversive DIY tactics pioneered by the Situationist International. They created zines, bands, and groups such as Queer Nation and Guerilla Girls.

'A revolutionary organisation must always remember that its objective is not getting people to listen to speeches by expert leaders, but getting them to

speak for themselves' – Guy Debord, founding member of the Situationist International

Riot grrrl has since been canonised within the context of third-wave feminism and has been championed within the context of alternative subculture. But not all women are happy with the march of Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl.

Kathleen Hanna (1996)

Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna’s documentary The Punk Singer was shown at film festivals worldwide in 2013, and sits on an 88% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. And as inspiring as the film may be, the double standards are abound and uncomfortable. In Hanna’s 90s peak she was getting called revolutionary while black female artists such as Lil Kim and TLC were getting trashed for openly rapping and singing about toxic beauty standards and expressing their sexual dominance. It’s this double-standard that has and will continue to plague not only riot grrl’s legacy, but all women of colour and their interactions with feminism; Annie Lennox recently came

for Beyoncé, saying ‘twerking is not feminism’, despite Beyoncé doing more to help young girls combat their inner struggles in the past year than Lennox has done for anything in the past ten.

bell hooks bought into discourse a theory that would become important for the riot grrl movement; that of feminist awakenings, the moment when young women realise the oppression they face is part of a much larger, global political issue. White feminists of the 1980s and 1990s tried to make up for the second wave’s lack of intersectionality with attempts at taking into consideration the experiences of women of colour. Emerging in 1991, riot grrrl tried to make amends for the second-wave’s past, creating a feeling of sisterhood, through creating their own culture through DIY production and music. Through the creation of zines, young women shared their ‘feminist awakenings’. Pocket-sized paper crafted handouts delivering raw expression and ideas, shared to the few but absorbed by the many. Through these small miracles, young women (often teenagers) articulated their feelings and experiences amongst a society that always silenced them.

100 Crushes by Elisha Lim, a collection of five years’ worth of queer comics and zines (2014)

One such experience is what Kristen Schilt called the ‘racial awakening’. Similar to ‘feminist awakenings’, these were the moments where young women would realise how their racial identity fits into the grand scheme of things. These usually happen a lot earlier to women of colour, due to obviously living through the experiences that become a talking point when discussing racial politics. As Richard Dryer said, ‘most of the time white people speak about nothing but white people, it’s just that we couch it in terms of “people” in general’. If young white zine writers approached (their) race, it was always from a personal angle, either expressing ‘white guilt’, or trying to avoid ‘white guilt’ in a way that actually expressed ‘white guilt’. While it is kind of a step forward, it could also easily be read as, indeed, what bell hooks called ‘lip service’.

The problem is people have this idealised notion that punk music is ‘above race, above gender, etc’. The infamous punk venue at 924 Gilman Street, Berkeley, painted the ‘No Racism, No Sexism, No Homophobia’ sign on its walls. As said before, white people tend to not see their race. They don’t equate their skin to a racial identity the same way they see people of other colour, etc. When you throw them into the punk scene, then suddenly everyone’s fair game; that sign, which has transcended its physical presence to become an overarching mantra for the global punk scene, implies something transformative. It implies no further discussion is needed; everyone in this club is

already above and beyond the effects of structuralised oppression and internalised prejudice and bigotry. ‘We’re punk, the logic goes, and that’s all that matters’.

‘the idea of transcendence is used to obscure oppression’ – Jenny Holzer, Truisms (1978-1983)

Riot grrrl did indeed seek to challenge the patriarchal hegemony that infested punk rock. It was critical of systematic power, and how that manifested itself within their subculture. Go to any show and count how many men are at the front.

‘I feel completely out of the realm of everything that is so important to me. And I know this is partly because punk rock is for and by boys mostly and partly

because punk rock of this generation is coming of age in a time of mindless career goals.’– Tobi Vail, founding member of Bikini Kill, writing in Jigsaw #2 (1990)

However, riot grrrl also, as Mimi Thi Nguyen said, ‘reproduced structures of racism, classism and… heterosexism in privileging a generalised “we” that… described… white, mostly middle-class women and girls’. Kathleen Hanna pioneered perhaps the two defining slogans of riot grrrl: ‘revolution girl style now’ and ‘girls to the front’. Both those slogans failed to address the different intertwining notions of what it means to be a woman of colour, a disabled woman, a poor woman, a transwoman, etc, which is where the main problem lay.

Aye Nako, taken by Ramsey Beyer (2011)

‘Where’s the riot, white girl? And yeah some of you say we are ‘out to kill white boy mentality’ but have you examined your own mentality? Your white upper-

middle-class girl mentality too? What would you say if I said I wanted to kill that mentality too?’ – Dr. Lauren Jade Martin, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Penn

State Berks, writing in You Might As Well Live (1997)

Every August, in Hart, Michigan, women gather to attend the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Iconic acts in the riot grrrl canon have performed there, including Team Dresch, The Butchies, Tribe 8, and Kathleen Hanna’s Le Tigre. Founded in 1976 by a 19-year old Lisa Vogel, Michfest is organised by women, and for women. But the festival’s idea of what a ‘woman’ is have led to boycotts and protest.

In 1991, a woman named Nancy Burkholder was asked to leave Michfest, after festivalgoers recognised her as a transwoman. She was told that the (unwritten) policy at Michfest was it was only open to ‘natural, women-born-women’, and that that was for the ‘benefit of the transsexuals’ safety and the ‘safety’ of the women attending the festival. Four transwomen were further evicted in 1993, and various Michfest press releases document the intentions of the festival, and to what Vogel believes: that she believes that transwomen aren’t women, and their experiences should be separate from the kind of feminism Vogel and Michfest stands for. So when Vogel published an apology in August 2014 regarding Burkholder and how ‘since that single incident, festival organisers have never asked a transwoman to leave the festival’, things start to look weird for her. When, as in what literally happened in 1999, you have a crowd of grown women surrounding a 16-year old transgirl, screaming and taunting her, hurling death threats and calling her a ‘rapist of the land’, you can’t exactly say with a straight face you’re standing up for the female experience, or providing a safe space for women.

Riot grrrl was about women speaking their experiences. Shouting their experiences. Their experiences as women. And transwomen and women of colour are, of course, women. So what’s the deal?

Marsha P. Johnson, taken by Randy Wicker

Many feminists deny transwomen entry into feminist spaces on account of them being ‘born and socialised as male’; which both delegitimises transwomen’s female identities, and places emphasis over their ‘male’ past. Many such feminists who hold up Michfest’s transmisogynistic stance are lesbian, and so should owe a great debt to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the two black transwomen activists who helped start the Stonewall riots and co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, which took in homeless LGBT youth. But of course that would also mean checking the extraordinary contributions black women have made to feminism over time, which is far too much to ask of most white feminists. Look at any riot grrrl mixtape and count all the white and cis faces. Almost every single interviewee in The Punk Singer is white.

‘I started inkling like a year into it, like started feeling funny about it just in terms of my whole position with punk rock and riot grrrl, because you know it was an odd position to be in...too many times be the only person of colour there, and feeling like no one gave a shit. This was an

empowering movement for them which was only relative to a white middle class punk girl...it just became depressing and really hurtful to see that it would only go so far and that there was a total crazy powerful feeling about the whole environment and it was exciting. But it was also really sad in a way that like this is only what it is and its only for certain people and it was extremely frustrating to start realising that and start being like these aren't my people.’ – Ramdasha Bikceem, zine writer, interviewed in Don’t Need You: The Herstory Of Riot Grrrl (2006)

The idea of ‘the personal is political’ has, over time, transformed feminist thinking, it was a revolutionary concept. With the last few years seeing a return of riot grrrl into punk DIY scenes, bands have a chance to not make the same mistakes again, with more bands and venues and spaces making efforts to operate on more inclusive means. Nguyen, for all her acknowledgement of its faults, did call riot grrrl ‘still the best thing that ever happened to punk’. Let’s make it even better. Let’s direct our attack inward as well as outward.

‘When all politics become only persona, they become removed from both history and immediate social realities so that ‘race’ is acknowledged only as this frozen thing ‘we’ have to be ‘more sensitive’ to. Meanwhile, social change on any other

level is out off and rarely addressed… getting down to brass tacks, I still think social justice is, you know, important.’ – Mimi Thi Nguyen, scholar and zine

author, writing in Punk Planet No. 28 (1998)

Mini-revolutions Against Me! – Black Me Out (2013) Aye Nako – Molasses (2013) The Bags – Survive (1978) The Brat – Atittude (1980) Chalk Circle – Scrambled (1984) Daskinsey4 – Broken Legs (2014) Fire Party – Bite (1988) G.L.O.S.S. – Outcast Stomp (2015) +HIRS+ – Generations of Vomit (2012) New Bloods – The Sea Is Alive In Me (2008) Peeple Watchin – Dezlina (2014) Shopping – In Other Words (2013) Tamar-Kali – Boot (2003) Trash Kit – Beach Babe (2014) X-Ray Spex – Identity (1978)

Further ReadingC, Fabiola. "How Riot Grrrl Did A Great Disservice To Feminism." zine, the coalition. The Music Issue.

ISSUU, 2014. 32-34. <http://issuu.com/blckgrlsbrwngrls/docs/music_issue>.

Downes, Julia. Riot Grrrl: The legacy and contemporary landscape of feminist cultural activism. 2007. <http://www.academia.edu/263110/Riot_Grrrl_The_legacy_and_contemporary_landscape_of_feminist_cultural_activism>.

Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. London: Routledge, 1984.

—. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Brooklyn: South End Press, 1989.

Nguyen, Mimi. "It's (Not) a White World: Looking for Race in Punk." Punk Planet. Chicago, 1998.

Sandeen, Autumn. Equivocation And Lies In Lisa Vogel’s August 18th Statement. 25 August 2014. <http://www.transadvocate.com/equivocation-and-lies-in-lisa-vogels-august-18th-statement_n_14444.htm>.

Schilt, Kristen. ""The Punk White Privilege Scene": Riot Grrrl, White Privilege and Zines." Movement, Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women's. Jo Reger. Social Science, 2014. 14.

Serano, Julia. Rethinking Sexism: How Trans Women Challenge Feminism. 4 August 2008. <http://www.alternet.org/story/93826/rethinking_sexism%3A_how_trans_women_challenge_feminism>.

The Punk Singer. Dir. Sini Anderson. Perf. Kathleen Hanna. Prods. Sini Anderson and Tamra Davis. 2013.

Williams, Cristan. Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. 9 April 2013. <http://www.transadvocate.com/michigan-womyns-music-festival_n_8943.htm>.

Play Like A White Boy

The Clash decorated their stage backdrops during their 1977 White Riot tour with a blown-up image of cops being attacked during the riots at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival. When they played the Rainbow Theatre at Finsbury Park, Joe Strummer introduced their cover of Junior Murvin’s reggae classic Police & Thieves by saying: ‘Last week 119,000 people voted National Front in London. Well, this next one’s by a wog. And if you don’t like wogs, you know where the bog is.’

Later in the year, Bob Marley’s Jamming single was released. On its b-side was an 8-minute ode to ‘The Damned, The Jam, The Clash – Maytals will be there, Dr. Feelgood too… The Wailers will be there.’ Punky Reggae Party was written soon after Marley heard The Clash’s Police & Thieves, saying, ‘It is different, but me like ‘ow ‘im feel it… Punks are outcasts from society. So are the Rastas. So they are bound to defend what we defend’.

Punky Reggae Party was an idealistic dream, an ‘ideal of solidarity across the sea by those rejected by society’, as Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Trembly said. If punk rock was total nihilism and anarchy, ‘reggae had an authenticity and a spirituality lacking in the dominant white culture’. Still, both thrived on independent labels and DIY production, Marley finding a kindred spirit in both. Whether it wanted to admit or not, reggae had a huge influence on punk rock, from The Clash borrowing their instrumental drop-out technique from West Indian music, to Stiff Little Fingers covering Marley’s Johnny Was, to The Slits and The Raincoats utilising the rhythm templates laid-out for them.

Bob Marley (1980)

So why is punk rock so goddamn whitewashed? Why do all the NME and Rolling Stone retrospectives neglect the massive influence black music had on punk?

That’s, of course, a rhetorical question.

In 1957, Norman Mailer published his essay The White Negro: ‘a new breed of… urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts… absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro’. An essay that was ‘an opening gesture of late-twentieth century counterculture’, an essay that talked about the white man finding solace in black

‘hip’ culture and thus rejecting his innate whiteness, that of ‘the conformity and inhumanity of postwar American culture’. Through an overly ambitious and misguided drive, in 1978 Patti Smith recorded the song Rock ‘N’ Roll N****, where she screamed ‘outside of society, that’s where I want to be’. Here, Smith tries to become the ‘white negro’, trying to align herself with the marginalised ‘others’ (black people), to reject oppressive white culture, and transcend, as she literally screams that very racial epithet repeatedly over crashing, deafening instrumentation. It is an attempt to articulate a white identity detached from the bloodshed and violence that the white race has enacted for centuries. She aligns herself ‘with the integrity and rebellion [she imagines] “n*****” to identify’, as Maureen Mahon said. However, is this any different to how Elvis Presley robbed rock and roll from its black creators in the ‘50s? In the liner notes for its respective album Easter, Smith writes that ‘any man who extends beyond the classic form is a n*****’, a badge of honour for anyone living their life, in following punk’s transgression and ‘othering’ nature. Yet, really, despite Smith’s noble intentions, the result is nothing but patronising and demeaning. Unfortunately, as Joe Tarr said, ‘many people who tried living in American society were murdered, enslaved, or otherwise destroyed because of the color of their skin’. It’s really not her place as a white woman to try to reclaim the very slur white slave drivers were screaming as they whipped their black slaves.

Bad Brains (1983)

Filmed throughout 1979 and 1980, Penelope Spheeris’ The Decline Of Western Civilization depicted the punk subculture in Los Angeles. Amongst the many white faces shown, one kid with a shaved head talks about how ‘some n******’ keep chasing him about town, while the others tell how they get into fights a lot. Pat Smear of The Germs says he’s hit girls in the face. Such is the picture of punk when it starts to lose its politics.

‘In 1977 Robert Christgau wrote that punk was the first of the U.K.’s many rock-based teenage subcultures to direct its rage where it belonged: against those in

power. L.A. punk, which is a U.K. punk spin-off that has chosen Sid Vicious (prophetic thug) over Johnny Rotten (thuggish prophet) as avatar, jumped that

track; perhaps because those who make L.A. punk are so often tracked to become those in power, to enjoy money and mobility without purpose, L.A. punk directs its rage against the other, the powerless - and that is a stance no less American than a happy barbarianism’ – Greil Marcus, writing in In The Fascist Bathroom:

Punk In Pop Music, 1977 – 1992 (1993)

The Clash lamented a ‘lack of roots rock rebel’; Washington D.C.’s Minor Threat sang ‘you blame me for slavery a hundred years before I was born’. Johnny Rotten preached for the complete

destruction of all previous ideals (and he meant it back then); L.A.’s X sang ‘she started to hate every n***** and Jew, every Mexican that gave her a lotta shit, every homosexual and the idle rich’. X’s Exene Cervenka even went on to sell, among other things, ‘Asian-style’ racist novelty glasses in a store in L.A.. This is the version of punk that was to ‘perform the decline’ and ‘bring to light ugliness as art’, the same version of punk we see in The Decline Of Western Civilization, the punk that holds up a mirror instead of outright smashing it and rebuilding, the punk that is, in all relativity, meaningless.

The simple fact is, these iconic American punk bands (Black Flag, Minor Threat) cut their teeth on early shows led by politicised non-white punk bands, and dumbed it down for their macho ‘straightwhiteboy’ audience. Through their fusion of pummelling hardcore and slowed-down reggae rhythms, the all-black Bad Brains even pioneered moshing, a form of aggressive dancing that has lasted throughout all punk subcultures since.

‘Well, it was at some point in either late 1979 or early 1980 that H.R. of the Bad Brains yelled a Rasta/reggae inspired ‘mash it – mash down Babylon!’ Add a little

Jamaican accent to the mix and the untrained ear hears ‘mosh it – mosh down Babylon.’… it was during this time that the pogo grew into slam dancing and slamming morphed into moshing… so the next time some tribal band tattoo-wearing knucklehead tells you Metallica or some other ass-biting hair band

invented mosh, you tell ‘em to go look up the Brains’ – Dary A. Jenyfer, writing in Rip It Up: The Black Experience In Rock ‘N’ Roll (2004)

Alice Bag (1978/9)

Hardcore in both L.A. and Washington, D.C., also owed a lot to Alice Bag, Chicana frontwoman of The Bags, one of the first bands of the L.A. scene. Bag, along with Teresa Covarrubias of The Brat, ‘transformed punk and New Wave aesthetics into sites of possibility for transnational conversations concerning violence against women and the effects of the growing corporatisation of public space’, as Michelle Habell-Pallán said. Bag later said that, ‘what happened later on people came up to me and said…., “I saw you on stage and because you were doing that, and because you were Latina, I was inspired to do something”’. Such is the importance of representation, such is the importance of non-white people breaking the narrative of the ‘whitestraightboy’ punk hegemony.

Let’s not forget that the MC5, who tore the world apart in 1969 with Kick Out The Jams, got their radical politics from the Black Panthers and Fred Hampton. Let’s not forget how much The Who owed to James Brown and beat music. Let’s not forget that it was Chuck Berry who ‘laid the groundwork for not only a rock and roll sound but a rock and roll stance’.

Why are The Beatles called the ‘greatest band of all time’ and ‘cultural pioneers’ when they nicked most of their ideas from buying into the Orientalism and fetishisation of Indian culture in a post-British Empire world, all while tripping on acid? Again, that’s a rhetorical question.

But one thing punk did was hit a reset button on all that. Jimmy Page pinched old blues riffs, Eric Clapton did the same and had the gall to endorse Enoch Powell in the same breath. Punk was the black hole that tried to swallow the mockery rock and roll had become.

‘This was music that refused its own name, which meant it also refused its history – from this moment, no one knew what rock ‘n’ roll was…. random noise was rock

‘n’ roll, and the Beatles were not… punk immediately discredited the music that preceded it; punk denied the legitimacy of anyone who’d ever had a hit…

destroying one tradition, punk revealed a new one’ – Greil Marcus, writing in Lipstick Traces: The Secret History Of The 20th Century (1991)

Poly Styrene

‘Anti-art was the start’, Poly Styrene sang on the 1978 X-Ray Spex song I Am A Poseur. If punk rock was about destroying and occasionally rebuilding, Styrene was its archetype: ‘singing about advertisements, deodorants, fake identities, supermarkets, an overweight [mixed race] teenager with braces on her teeth’, said Greil Marcus of her. When she screamed, ‘bind me, tie me, chain me to the wall’ on the iconic Oh Bondage, Up Yours! she wasn’t being inviting, she was taunting. She was reminding whoever was listening that she was there, a young black woman doing what she wanted, constructing her own identity and mythos. The irony of screaming this while white musicians played behind her was probably not lost.

The black experience of punk rock, as documented in the 2003 documentary Afro-Punk: The Rock, is one of integrity. In the film, many of the interviewees talk about Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix; the black folk that invented rock and roll, and through that extension punk rock. ‘Punk rock is black’. Many of them talk about being ostracised from their family, and from other people in

their ‘black community’, about how they’re told they’re becoming ‘white’ by embracing and living punk culture. In a separate interview, Skeeter Thompson of D.C.’s Scream mentioned a ‘certain pressure, there’s a block there, a wall’, all while bigging up the solidarity he felt seeing other black punks at shows. It reminded him of what punk rock was and should be about.

And that is the sad inevitability of the whitewashing of punk rock; people just forget. When Ian Stuart reformed his band Skrewdriver as an explicitly White Power band and claimed that punk rock was ‘for white people’, and when he spouted rhetoric rooted in victimisation (‘we find it difficult to find gigs… due to establishment and left wing pressure’), he was only sadly buying into all that punk rock had already built. This is the danger of letting punk’s true history go unchecked. There are too many stories of black folk going to punk shows, and being the only black face there, furthering the alienation in a culture that’s billed as ‘accepting’.

Don Letts facing police during the 1976 Notting Hill Carnval. This photo would be used for The Clash’s Black Market Clash album

In Afro-Punk, Maurice ‘Moe’ Mitchell, of the hardcore band Cipher, talks about his song Protoculture, a song about the horror the millions of slaves experienced during the Middle Passage where they were shipped to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave-trade, and how it feels to have white suburban kids screaming the heavy lyrics back at him. He talks about the next step, ‘processing them’, understanding them. He just hopes people ‘leave with something’, and that the experience of a Cipher show ‘progresses their politics’.

And that’s what punk rock should be: listening, sharing and building.

Marcus Garvey predicted ‘apocalyptic chaos’ on July 7, 1977. Culture and Prince Far I heard, and responded with their albums Two Sevens Clash and Under Heavy Manners, reggae albums that choose to dance amongst the oncoming apocalypse. Joe Strummer heard these euphoric records, and chose to blare them out of the PAs on tour. He heard the unique rhythms, and The Clash played along. The Clash chose to share what they were hearing, wishing to create a cross-racial bond. With the song (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais, Strummer laid out the band’s position, and his wishes. When he spat ‘they ain’t got no roots rebel rock’ above the bouncing bass, he was longing for the same coming of Zion that Bob Marley and Burning Spear were. When he spat ‘Punk rockers in the UK, they won’t notice anyway, they’re all too busy fighting, for a good place under the lighting’ he was staring down all the paperclip-faced thugs punching each other up at Pistols shows; the same ‘punks’ who probably spit on caretakers. When he spat ‘white youth, black youth, better find another solution’, he was reminding himself of what he saw in Notting Hill, 1976, ‘the one day of the

year when the blacks were going to get their own back against the really atrocious way that the police behaved’. When Strummer wrote White Riot, he wasn’t trying to dig into all the ‘dispossessed white folk’ shit that Jimmy Pursey was milking. He was trying to just tell them to either throw the same bricks he saw black folk throwing that day, or just back the fuck up and be inspired. For when white middle-class suburban men try to ‘other’ themselves, become a ‘rock & roll n*****’, despite being noble in acknowledging how everything’s a construct, you can’t help but smell a little piss. They can still come home for evening tea and biscuits.

So when Joe Strummer yelled ‘are you going backwards, or are you going forwards’, he was calling for a ‘radical whiteness’, a whiteness, with a lowercase w, that knew of its bullshit, fought consciously against its privilege. Nearly forty years on, and the punk scene is still waiting to throw that brick.

But Marley did hear Strummer, and grinned at the thought of this Punky Reggae Party.

Party songs Bad Brains – Banned in D.C. (1982) The Bags – Survive (1978) Blind Pigs – O Idiota (2002) Big Mama Thornton – Hound Dog (1953) Bob Marley & The Wailers – Punky Reggae Party (1977) The Brat – Attitudes (1980) Burning Spear – Marcus Garvey (1975) Chalk Circle – Uneasy Friend (19830 Chuck Berry – Johnny B. Goode (1958) Cipher – Protoculture (Sankofa) (2005) The Congos – Solid Foundation (1977) Culture – Two Sevens Clash (1977) Crucifix – Annihilation (1983) Death – Politicians In My Eyes (1975) Fire Party – Cake (1988) The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) (1968) Junior Murvin – Police and Thieves (1977) The Kominas – Sharia Law In The USA (2010) Little Richard – Tutti Frutti (1955) Los Crudos – We’re That Spic Band (1996) New Bloods – The Sea Is Alive In Me (2008) The Orioles – It’s Too Soon To Know (1948) Prince Far I – Heavy Manners (1976) Scream – Fight/American Justice (1983) Tamar-Kali – Boot (2003) Toots & The Maytals – 54-46 (That’s My Number) (1969) The Upsetters – Zion’s Blood (1976) X-Ray Spex – Oh Bondage Up Yours! (1977)

Further Reading

Afro-Punk: The Rock. Dir. James Spooner. Afro-Punk, 2003.

Burke, Callum. "Cultural Appropriation and Orientalism: Elvis Presley vs. The Beatles." Loughborough University, 2014. <http://www.researchgate.net/publication/263279790_Cultural_Appropriation_and_Orientalism_Elvis_Presley_vs._The_Beatles>.

Goldman, Vivien. Culture Clash: Bob Marley, Joe Strummer and the punky reggae party. 04 09 2014. <http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/sep/19/clash-bob-marley-joe-strummer-punky-reggae-party>.

Habell-Pallán, Michelle. Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture. New York City, New York: NYU Press, 2005.

Jenifer, Darryl A. "Play Like A White Boy: Hard Dancing in the City of Chocolate." Horse, Kandia Crazy. Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock N Roll. Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Mahon, Maureen. Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004.

Mailer, Norman. The White Negro (Fall, 1957). 20 June 2007. <http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-white-negro-fall-1957>.

Savage, Jon. England's Dreaming. London: Faber & Faber, 2011.

Tarr, Joe. "Patti Smith - Easter (1978)." Perone, James E. The Album: : A Guide to Pop Music's Most Provocative, Influential, and Important Creations. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2012.

The Decline of Western Civiliation. By Penelope Spheeris. Dir. Penelope Spheeris. Prod. Penelope Spheeris. Media Home Entertainment, 1981.

Widgery, David. Beating Time. London: Chatto & Windus, 1986.

BoredomMalcom McLaren knew what he was doing with the Sex Pistols; Johnny Rotten didn’t. Rotten was

his puppet. Rotten was a medium of a powerful message, he just didn’t know it. But he knew he meant it. When he screamed ‘I thought it was the UK, or just another country, another council tenancy’, he managed to boil down Marx-influenced Situationist critiques of capital into a couple of lines in a guitar pop song. McLaren probably knew this; he knew of the Situationists. But he was out to make a cynical profit out of his cynical, ironic pop project. Thank god he did.

The Situationist International was born out of your typical idea of post-war bohemians in turtlenecks sitting in Parisian coffee shops. They used art and theory to evolve Marxist critiques to mid-21st Century advanced capitalism, particularly alienation and that of the spectacle. When Jamie Reid took a photo of Queen Elizabeth II and added a safety pin and swastika for his God Save The Queen artwork, he was doing little different to what Guy Debord did when he took footage of Soviet films, footage of the Spanish Civil War, Paris 1968 riots and more, and read conflicting literature of Marx, Machiavelli, and others, over it for an hour and a half in the film The Society Of The Spectacle.

Guy Debord with Michèle Bernstein and Asger Jorn of the Situationist International (1957)

‘The pop magic in which the connection of certain social facts with certain sounds creates irresistible symbols of the transformation of social reality.’ – Greil

Marcus, writing in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The Twentieth Century (1991)

Pop music changes lives, changes the world, it always has done and it always will. Pop music is a spectacle, mass media being ‘the most glaring superficial manifestation’ of the spectacle. In the 80s, Stock Aitken Waterman created a string of frenetic, delirious, upbeat pop singles to mirror the capitalist boom of Thatcherism, while effectively sneering down at the bleak poverty-stricken landscape of the north of England created by Thatcherism. Meanwhile, The Specials sang about urban decay, unemployment and inner city violence, and The Jam spat at Eton kids and got to no. 3 on the charts.

Stock Aitken Waterman wasn’t just a brand, it was a spectacle. ‘Capital accumulated until it becomes an image’. Buy the Jason Donovan CD, watch him in Neighbours and read about him in

Number One magazine. ‘Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation’. Stock Aitken Waterman presented a culture of distraction. And from distraction comes alienation. Marx said alienation comes from the workplace, Debord evolved that idea into the 21 st Century by correlating it with pop culture. ‘All that is solid melts into air’; pop culture as capital, constantly having to reinvent itself, creating new markets, leaving nothing solid or grounded.

Anarchy In The UK reduced the grey architecture of suburban England to rubble. It aims to destroy the spectacle that is clouding the vision of whoever hears it; it made people pay attention.

‘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’ - Greil Marcus,

writing in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The Twentieth Century (1991)

The Situationists believed all critiques of capitalism and culture should be able to be compressed into single slogans: ‘abolish alienation’, ‘humanity won’t be happy ‘til the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist’. These slogans were painted all about Paris through the student riots of May 1968, as the student unions laid down their pencils and the factory workers laid down their tools, and together marched on the streets against the capitalist economy of France in solidarity.

Crass (1984)

The Sex Pistols’ music was full of such Situationist slogans: ‘I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist’, ‘no future, no future for you’, ‘all crimes are paid’, ‘we’re oh so pretty vacant’. And the kids heard and rioted. Rotten beckoned the destruction of all existing ideals, and McLaren was laughing.

The Sex Pistols would of course become the spectacle they were, consciously and unconsciously, trying to destroy. Johnny Rotten would immerse himself in popular culture and host television shows and incite the odd instance of racial hatred; he became a distraction. They went for their Holidays In The Sun. They became The Great Rock & Roll Swindle.

But it needn’t matter. If Rotten was a medium, he had served his purpose. The words of Guy Debord and the Situationist International are poetry, and poetry should be both grounded and timeless. The abstract elements of the SI helped raise their material to a pseudo-mythical level; allowed it to ‘float flee forever’. That’s the power of their slogans, they’re transcendent.

So when they landed in the hands of Gee Vaucher and anarcho-punk collective Crass, something was special. Repetitive, droning punk rock as an angry working-class man shouts at you behind a flag saying ‘THERE IS NO AUTHORITY BUT YOURSELF’.

One of the means of the Situationist attack on capitalism and commerce was the détournement. The détournement was defined by Greil Marcus as ‘the theft of aesthetic artefacts from their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one’s own devise’. Much like Jamie Reid would do with his artwork for the Sex Pistols (or Malcolm McLaren would do with their entire career), Situationist détournement pranks aimed to turn capital against itself. Instances like Michel Mourre dressing up as a Dominican monk and climbing the rostrum to proclaim the death of God during a mass in Notre-Dame that was aired on live television definitely influenced the Pistols’ decision to perform God Save The Queen on a boat on the Thames outside the Houses of Parliament during the Silver Jubilee.

Crass were a lot more grounded and serious than the Sex Pistols ever were. So when, in 1982, they released a hoax tape of a conversation between Margaret Thatcher seemingly confessing to Ronald Reagan that the sinking of the HMS Sheffield in the Falklands War was deliberate, it wasn’t just a tongue-in-cheek prank. It was an act of détournement that, like previous Situationist pranks, needed ‘a sense of loathing, a sense of humour, and the notion that to be against power was to be against the power of words’. The tape was constructed by editing various recordings of Thatcher and Reagan talking, thus removing the previous contexts (and therefore power) of the words (and what they conveyed) and constructing new truths and dynamics: ‘the false author works on the conditioned reader… playing on the reader’s vague recollection of the original meaning of the most distant element, so that the small becomes huge’. They genuinely hoped for a change with this stunt, they had something that could’ve topped Thatcher. It didn’t.

A KLF advert

Every Crass record was a response to political situations, with Vaucher’s cut-and-paste artwork adorning the sleeves to create an aesthetic piece of work that was not meant to be timeless, but timely. Every Crass record co-existed with the British political climate of fear and self-interest. Every Crass action, from slyly offering a staunchly feminist song to a teen girl magazine to operating in an open-house community in Essex, was motivated by a desire to see some kind of change and improvement in people’s lives, to spread messages and ideas; just like the Situationists they realised ‘culture [is] forced upon us, and that we [need] to take control of it’.

So when ‘stadium house’ duo The KLF announced their retirement in 1992 by performing with crust punks Extreme Noise Terror at the BRITS, where they fired blanks at the music-business audience and then later burnt their remaining million pounds in a boathouse on the isle of Jura, there were a whole load of possible explanations of their actions. But they all fall under ‘cultural anarchy’. And they weren’t pranks. All the Situationist slogans, guerrilla graffiti ‘ads’, the constant referencing of the Illuminatus!; they ‘really meant it’, everything was done on a ‘gut level instinct’. While they denied the connections, Bill Drummond and Jim Cauty of The KLF were definitely governed by the spirit of Situationism, through the use of graffiti over billboard ads (‘FUCK THE MILLENIUM’, ‘IT’S GRIM UP NORTH’), and their earlier records (released as The JAMS). Their debut album 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?) helped pioneer sampling as art, but that’s not what Cauty and Drummond were about. They nicked whole sections of Beatles and ABBA songs not for artistic purposes, but for what the original pieces represented. Their first single was All You Need Is Love, which nicked the same Beatles song and slowed it down until it collapsed to nothing, before Rob Tyner from the MC5 yelled out ‘kick out the jams motherfuckers’, before Drummond raps in a Glaswegian accent about media treatment towards the AIDS crisis. ‘The Beatles’ historic expression of the 1967 Summer of Love had been détourned and subverted into an opposite, more contemporarily relevant message’. Just like the Situationists ‘they celebrated a madman’s slashing of a famous painting as a symbolic revolt against a bureaucratically administered alienation in which the ideology of the masterpiece reduced whoever looked at it to nothing’.

The Situationist International revelled in the mystique carefully constructed through the mess of their détournement, which fit perfectly with The KLF and their ‘cultural anarchy’. From their imagery of sheep, pyramids, ceremonial fire and the Illuminatus!, to them literally burning away their money, few explanations were ever given for The KLF’s actions, because the lack of the explanation is part of Drummond and Cauty’s mythology: ‘the pop myth of The KLF can never be blown apart by anything they do, no matter how dumb or embarrassing’.

But while The KLF were an impenetrable myth unto themselves, that doesn’t mean they didn’t stand for nothing. You can see that when they announced their retirement with Drummond firing machine gun blanks to the music press on the night the BRIT Awards announced they were the best-selling singles act of 1991. John Higgs reckons ‘in a strange way, something about the music industry did die around that point’.

Death Grips’ No Love video (2014)

So when hip hop trio Death Grips announced their breaking up on July 2014, only to then later release more music and do more live shows, it was them messing up the narrative. The Sex Pistols

released an album, and split up when Rotten left the band, calling McLaren out for ‘betraying’ them. Crass agreed beforehand to split up in 1984. The KLF blew themselves up. Death Grips released a string of free records, antagonised their Epic Records deal by illegally leaking their own material, and broke the mould these other bands had set up. Their first mixtape, Exmilitary, had MC Ride screaming over cut up Pink Floyd and Black Flag riffs, screaming bleak, vague lyrics about political rage and paranoia in a voice hollowed and beaten, not unlike Johnny Rotten; ‘they used rock n roll as a weapon against itself’. Their “break-up” notice stated they ‘are now at [their] best’ and had always been ‘a conceptual art exhibition anchored by sound and vision… please stay legend’.

‘Please stay legend’ is what this is all about. The Situationist International wanted to uproot culture and capital through subversion. When their slogans found themselves about Parisian walls throughout May 1968, it was evident they, as Bernard E. Brown said, ‘were fragments of a consistent and seductive ideology… an immense force of protest against the modern world… blending passion, mystery and the primeval’. The Paris riots soon became a footnote, but these slogans, these ideas, will always find their way. The narrative that the Situationist International set out found a kindred spirit in the most subversive of pop music, and pop music is, of course, forever. Whispers in the corners that might change the world. ‘If one can stop looking at the past and start listening to it, one might hear echoes of a new conversation’.

Art Bascam Lamar Lunsford – I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground (1928) Buzzcocks – Boredom (1977) Chumbawamba – Liberation (1985) Crass – Do They Owe Us A Living? (1978) Death Grips – Beware (2011) The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu – All You Need Is Love (1987) The KLF – What Time Is Love (1988) Public Image, Ltd. – Public Image (1978) The Sex Pistols – Anarchy In The U.K. (1977) The Slits – A Boring Life (1980)

Further ReadingOn the Passage of a few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist

International 1956-1972. Dir. Branka Bogdanov. 1989.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994.

Higgs, John. The KLF: Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds. London: Phoenix, 2012.

Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The Twentieth Century. 3rd. London: Faber; Faber Ltd, 2011.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin Books, 2004.

Millard, Drew and Joe Zadeh. Were Death Grips Heroes or Horseshit? 16 10 2014. <http://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/blog/death-grips-debate-2014>.

The Society of the Spectacle. By Guy Debord. Dir. Guy Debord. Prod. Marcel Berbert. 1973.

There Is No Authority But Yourself. Dir. Alexander Oey. Prods. Bruno Felix and Femke Wolting. 2006.