-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Infoshop News] PRETTY VACANT Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2002 22:23:56 -0400 From: "Tom Wheeler" <twbounds at pop.mail.rcn.net> To: "Infoshop" <infoshop-news at infoshop.org>
http://www.chumba.org/filmdone.asp?id=15
PRETTY VACANT by ALEX COX
Exclusive to Chumbawamba.org (until some one passes it along) film director Alex Cox ("Repo Man," "Sid and Nancy," "The Winner," "Revenger's Tragedy" etc.) writes about Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee in Britain.
(This article was commissioned by Sunday newspaper The Observer in the UK but they chose not to publish it!)
How far we haven't come in 25 years!
In 1977 there was something in the air. The populace of Britain was being instructed to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the coronation of our Anglo-German monarch. The servile media were going along with the bullshit, producing colour supplements for us to treasure and keep. Films had zero to say about anything; television bowed and scraped along.
Could nothing save us from the awful prospect of forelock tugging and "spontaneous" street parties, from this grisly vision of a red, white and blue-painted land? Was there to be no respite from this reactionary, infantile nonsense?
Happily, there was a respite, a riposte, a loud retort. Music, in the clashing, clanging, clanking form of Punk, marched in and put its muddy boots up on the royal dining table, burped, said a loud "fuck you!" and threw up on the carpet.
The Sex Pistols, with their anarchic lyrics and their noise, McClaren, with his cunning plans, and Jamie Reid - jamming his safety pin into the royal nose, provided us with a focus for our discontent. The Clash, already bored with the USA, advised us to get ready for the English Civil War.
Punk hijacked that Jubilee. Of course, the newspapers continued to grovel. The pathetic street parties still occurred. But the Pistols' God Save The Queen gave us non-grovellers something to unite around. And we weren't just uniting around the notion of saying "fuck off" to some rich aristocrats. It was a larger movement than that, a "fuck off" to the press and to the music industry and to the government.
Ironically, the "fascist regime" that Lydon/Rotten sang about was a Labour one. Then, as now, it seemed that Labour had lost its way and was simply doing the bidding of its moneyed masters. In retrospect, we'd never had it so good, and never would again: we, the taxpayers (or tax-evaders), owned the railways, the telephones, the water, the electricity, and even the aeroplanes. When we travelled, we were passengers, not customers. We'd never heard of "stakeholders" or PPPs, or Steven Byers.
The Punk rebellion of 1977 was followed by dark days indeed: the years of Thatcher, Reagan, and Duran Duran. The music industry, shocked and terrified by the proliferation of garage bands making their own music, fought back. It came up with two weapons: MTV and the CD. MTV dumbed everything down, with its emphasis on visual images of the beautiful and the vapid, excluding Punk (and Black music, and everything else that was interesting). The CD, we were told, was "better" than vinyl - it wouldn't scratch, it wouldn't skip, it would last for ever, blah blah blah, lie lie, lie. All the CD really did was take the means of production away from the creatives. Musicians cutting their own vinyl disks and selling them without recourse to the corporations? Impossible. Had to be stopped. And it was.
It was twenty years before CDs became cheap to master. At which point witness the appearance of "copy protection" technology, and the draconian enforcement of copyright laws.
Between them, MTV and CDs not only moved the goal posts, they bulldozed the playing field. Punk was defeated. The Royals and the fat cats got richer, as did the upper ranks of the MTV-approved. The multinational juggernaut chewed up what was left of Britain, and rolled on.
And so! Jump cut 25 years to today!
Bombs fall in our name in Afghanistan and Northern Iraq. Tomorrow they may be falling on Somalia or on Baghdad. Our patrimony is gone, sold to the cheapest chisellers on the planet.
And what do you know? It's Brenda's jubilee again, and a band of cleaned-up junkies and multi-millionaires is set to play a pop concert at Buckingham Palace! Eric Clapton, Macca, Phil Collins and other MTV-ites will serenade the old girl. It's more or less the same crew that teamed up to show our solidarity with the Americans in the wake of Sept 11. How can Sting have been excluded from such a prestigious grovellathon?
For the record, this old rocker is not in solidarity with the Americans. He loathes their reactionary, violent, government with its brand-new torture camp, provocatively based on Cuban soil. He's not bored with the USA, He's furious with it, for wasting its opportunity to make peace with the world. Said rocker's not bored with the Royals, either: I am as passionately opposed to them as I was in 1977. I want to see them gone.
Who to turn to at this troubled hour? Not our "new" Labour government. Not the telly. Certainly not films. Is all hope of anarchic justice lost?
But wait. What's that distant sound? Could it be music, and the tramp of muddy boots?
Two weeks ago I went to Leeds for quite a different jubilee - Chumbawamba's 20th anniversary show. They have a song deemed so offensive by their record company that they've had to leave it off their new album. But rumour hath it that it's floating around the internet. It's called PASSENGER LIST. It's a simple song. Just an alphabetical list of names. "Berlusconi, Richard Branson, Tony Blair," punctuated by the word "Goodbye."
Brenda is on that passenger list, as I recall. And so are Macca, and Phil Collins, and many other august dignitaries and notables. Like all the best anthems, the banned Chumba song is infinitely customisable: "S Club 7, Atomic Kitten, Eric Clapton, goodbye."
One rock and roll anthem doesn't make a revolution.
But we have to start somewhere.
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