MIKEROSCOPIC | punk rock saved my life

28Jul08

Two T-Shirts and a Smashed Bass
by Michael Lindgren

The molecules bounce off one another in curious ways. Consumerism, the DIY ethic, the commodification of the underground, punk, hip-hop, and memory get mixed into a peppery post-20th century stew.

How exactly this mysterious process happens, at a molecular level, is under the Mikeroscope today.

LAB WORK: In his essay “Culture and Subjectivity,” the French philosopher Pierre-Félix Guattari proposed that the true function of the “mighty capitalistic machine” that is mass culture is the “production of social subjectivity that can be found on all levels of production and consumption.” Against this hegemonic machine Guattari posits a “singular subjectivity” that rejects mass culture in favor of “modes of creativity… and production that produce a singular subjectivity… that coincides with a desire, a taste for living, a will to construct the world in which we find ourselves.” DIY culture and its value-transfer exists in the space between these two modes: aiming for the latter, constrained by the former.

ZOOM IN: On a whim, I bought a T-shirt from my friends out in Olympia, Washington, who run a pretty cool little indie outfit. My new T-shirt says: PUNK ROCK SAVED MY LIFE. It’s not, I think, literally true that punk rock saved my life. But in my high school yearbook, there’s a picture of me holding my violin: I was an accomplished classical musician at the time. I’m seventeen, and I’m wearing a LONDON CALLING T-shirt, with the iconic photo of Paul Simonon smashing his bass onstage at the Palladium. I knew it was yearbook-photo-day ahead of time, and wore that shirt on purpose.

ZOOM OUT: I recently found a photo of the same electric bass, a Fender Precision with PRESSURE emblazoned across it in crude letters. The neck is splintered, broken nearly in half at the seventh fret. The photo is on the wall of my kitchen. The bass is now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, admission to which costs $22.00. This physical artifact – a broken electric bass – has completed the journey from a facet of “singular subjectivity,” in Guattari’s phrase, to one of “social subjectivity.”

MEANWHILE, IN ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST: Simonon’s bass met its demise on September 21, 1979. Sometime in the next month, according to Jeff Chang’s definitive book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, New Jersey impresario Sylvia Robinson released a record on her Sugar Hill label of three young unknowns rhyming over the rhythm section of Chic’s “Good Times.” By the end of 1979, “Rapper’s Delight” had sold half a million copies. Hip-hop was on its way into the mainstream.

ZOOM IN: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, legitimate Bronx heroes whom Robinson had been trying to sign, were booed off the stage when they opened for the Clash in Times Square in 1981. (Chang notes dryly, “In 1981, the American punks clearly wanted the riot to remain exclusively their own.”) Guattari: “To base a micropolitics of molecular transformation on other foundations (than mass culture) involves a radical questioning of notions of the individual as a general reference for processes of subjectivation.”

All of these things — the two T-shirts, purchased decades apart, the smashed bass on the museum wall, the Sugar Hill Gang’s gold 12” record — are manifestations of the “micropolitcs of molecular transformation.” Meanwhile, we read in the New York Times how Flash now does corporate gigs exclusively, minimum fee $10,000.

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