punk

Punk Country

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Johnny Cash and the Tennessee TwoTennessee Two, that’s like a punk band. –Elvis Costello

Ken Burns’s Country Music documentary wrapped its PBS broadcast last week, and now you can binge it. I didn’t expect the punk strains that broke through the film’s mashup of blues, bluegrass, gospel, rockabilly, honky tonk, Bakersfield and Nashville sounds. The resistance through style that Dick Hebdige attributes to British punk and its formative subcultures forms a powerful subtext.

Elvis Costello in Ken Burns's Country Music film* What’s the punk Elvis doing in a documentary about Country music? Episode 4 brings Johnny Cash to Memphis, where his Tennessee Two practiced with a borrowed guitar and a bass that Marshall Grant was just learning how to play. Elvis Costello lays claim to the band’s stripped-down sound: The bass is so percussive and Luther Perkins just playing, like the 4 notes…I literally think they sound like punk rock records. The band is a prototype of punk’s DIY aesthetic. Episode 5 gives a shout-out to Costello’s recent collaboration with Loretta Lynn, “Everything It Takes.” (hear it here)

Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison 1968*Did Johnny Cash traffic in Teddy Boy style? Episode 5 also features Cash’s breakthrough performance at Folsom Prison in 1968. The live album reinfused  Country music with grit. But what about that classic three-piece suit Cash wore for the photo shoot? Might the black jacket’s red lining and the double-breasted vest constitute a sartorial exotica akin to the previous decade’s London Teds–and anticipate its revival in the 1970s? Cash’s pose here accentuates his streamlined dandyism.

*Is that Ziggy Stardust hair on Rosanne Cash’s 1985 album cover? That spiky burst of red on Rhythm & Romance traffics in Bowie’s Glam Rock dandyism. In Episode 8 Rosanne talks about how her LA style clashed with Nashville’s when she moved there in 1981: I had purple hair. I was a little bit streetwise, urban girl . . . you know, brazen. If the Carters were the First Family of Country music, Johnny and Rosanne Cash are the First Family of Punk Country.

* Is the Queen of Rockabilly the grandmother of Punk? Episode 4 features Wanda Jackson’s riotous performance on Town Hall Party in 1958. Jackson smashed the era’s expectations of women musicians–she fronted her band. Introducing “Hard Headed Woman” as one of the most beautiful love songs that’s ever been written, she lays down her hard driving guitar licks and vocals. Jackson entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009. Would we have front women Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde and Joan Jett without Wanda Jackson and her punkabilly style? Would we have the fierceness of k.d. Lang, whom the documentary dubs a punk reincarnation of Patsy Cline? Insurgent Country plots its roots through a line-up of male musicians. Any history of Punk Country must account for its long line of radical women. – MB

SOURCES:
Country Music, A Film by Ken Burns.
Liza Corsillo, “TBT: When Johnny Cash Suited-Up for His Legendary Folsom Prison Concert.” GQ 1.14.16
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style. 1979.

 

How to Talk to Punks at Parties

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movie poster for How to Talk to Girls at PartiesMy favorite movie so far this summer? How to Talk to Girls at Parties, released in the U.S. in late May. I teach a “PostPunk Cultures” course on the British 1980s, so of course I had to see a film set on the fringes of punk culture in 1977 (the year of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee). Directed by John Cameron Mitchell, my favorite summer movie generated from Neil Gaiman’s short story and graphic novel of the same name. Extraterrestrial aliens launch a stealth invasion of suburban London, hiding out in a house and donning Union Jack rain slickers to blend in with the public. Reviewing the film, Anthony Lane notes its nods to Stanley Kubrick’s pre-punk A Clockwork Orange (1971). I find a fitting predecessor in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978), widely considered the first punk film.

Jarman features alienated English punks who emerge from their London house to make mayhem in public. In both films the emerging generation walks through derelict spaces of decaying buildings and Britishness. How to Talk to Girls at Parties imports beings from a technological future beyond London’s reach. Jarman’s menacing punk characters cry “No Future!” as they firebomb a house.

Without giving too much away, I’ll quickly note some punk parallels:

  • Historical sense. In How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Nicole Kidman plays the punk maven Queen Boadicea. In Jubilee, Jenny Runacre plays Bod, the punk tribe’s queen (she also plays a time-traveling Queen Elizabeth I). Kidman fashions armor in her workshop and rules her nightclub. In Jubilee, Jordan dons a helmet and wields a trident to punk up Rule, Britannia!
  • Fetishistic scenes. In HtTtGaP, aliens lure unsuspecting local teens behind closed doors for disturbingly perverse pleasures. In Jubilee, punk girls lure a lad to their house for more sadistic pursuits. Garish plastic covers bodies for both occasions.
  • Remediation. In self-reflexive fashion, HtTtGaP acknowledges its prior forms by flash-forwarding its comic-drawing protagonist to a bookstore. Jarman incorporates his Super-8 short “Jordan’s Dance” into Jubilee, flashing back to the film’s beginnings before Jordan became Amyl Nitrate.
  • Consuming the young. In the alien elder’s vision of No Future in HtTtGaP, the young go first. In Jubilee, music mogul Borgia Ginz squeezes profits from young punk singers like Adam Ant and The Slits: I don’t create it. I own it. I suck and suck and suck.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties looks back at punk, so nostalgia and the comic romance plot put a safety cap on its edginess. Still, it’s satisfying to see cosmic punk encounters begetting a multicultural future for this reimagined 1977. The film is now available online, and will be released to DVD next month. –MB

From Siouxsie Sioux to Suzie Bonebreaker: Femininity on the Edge

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Last night I got to Talk-Back with other edgy women at the Hippodrome Theatre in downtown Gainesville. The event: a post-screening panel discussion on Gender, Feminism & Pop Culture: Riot Grrrl & Beyond. The film: The Punk Singer, a documentary about Kathleen Hanna and her high-energy bands (Bikini Kill and Le Tigre). PunkTalkBack at The HippHere I am with my co-panelists Trysh Travis and Hazel Levy. Riffing on my recent courses, I kicked off with these talking points about subcultures, punk women, and poetry:

  • Dick Hebdige parses punk as “resistance through style,” reminding us that subcultures inhabit subterranean spaces, an Underworld. We pit punk expression against the mainstream. Underground is an edgier space than alternative.
  • But what happens when punk and other subcultures gain followers and publicity? Hebdige calls it media recuperation: mainstreaming subcultures by making them look “both more and less exotic than they actually are…dangerous aliens and boisterous kids” (Subculture 97).
  • Siouxsie Sioux later complained that the media had “distorted” punk, turning it into “cartoons.” Kathleen Hanna’s power lyrics and girlish sexuality got her noticed, but also got her labeled as wayward girl/girl victim. Bratmobile rocked the riot grrrls, but Bratz dolls followed in their wake.
    Siouxsie Sioux
    Siouxsie Sioux
  • Must the mainstream domesticate punk expression? Does the safety pin always return to the nursery? Did Kathleen Hanna poach-proof her punk?
  • Where do we find the inheritors of punk women and riot grrrls now? I located two sites: poetry on the page/stage, and poetry-in-motion.
  • Poetry has always been part of punk. Baudelaire was a male Muse for the young Patti Smith. After all, he wrote the book on lust, disgust, piss, vomit, and urban edginess. Kathleen Hanna credits Kathy Acker as the Muse who beckoned her to exit the spoken word scene and be in a band.
  • I find punk expression in the “new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics” that poet Arielle Greenberg named the Gurlesque. (She came of age in riot grrrl culture.) Case in point: Brenda Shaughnessy’s slap-down of romantic love poems, “I’m Over the Moon.” Hey diddle diddle, Shaughnessy is not moon-struck because “It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.” This poem appears in the Gurlesque anthology.
  • Finally, I see the poetics of punk femininity in roller derby–and here is where Gainesville Roller Rebels jammer Suzie Bonebreaker comes in. Talk about resistance through style: derby girls can have push-up bras & elbow pads, fishnets & tats, ruffled panties and roughhousing. Suzie Bonebreaker’s fave color is Sparkles!, and one of her signature moves is The Johnny Crash. I doubt that this derby girl can be Bratzed. After all, she’s already taken down Suzy Homemaker.  –MB
    SuzieBonebreaker
    Suzie Bonebreaker