In 1977 the punk movement was a flush across the face of every leather-and-studs kid from London to New York and everywhere else. The Sex Pistols had not yet imploded on stage, the Clash were still jumpstarting the minds of placid teens on an international tour and their tour mates, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, put out one of the most voracious singles ever released, “Blank Generation” from the LP of the same name.
The song takes a few moments to awaken. It unravels slowly at first with a tight guitar lick, then punctuating bass and then percussive snaps. A drum roll later, and you have auditory revolution.
When I was in the seventh grade, I came across the track, and Hell’s prowess, both with his songwriting and his distinctive vocal disintegration, warped my previous conceptions about music into a detritus about to drift away with the tides of a personal punk awakening. For the next few years I ate up any and all music I could find, but I was waiting for something comparable to what had happened in the late seventies. A movement. A revolution.
I have to this day been left disappointed, but I am still hopeful. I have abandoned any childish expectations of cliché revolutionary happenings. Our generation will not be storming any Bastilles, and we will not be dropping acid tabs with the president’s likeness on them and declaring an era of free love. If any sort of extreme socio-political change will occur, it’ll probably be the result of a high-speed Internet connection and a group of anti-social, culture jamming hack-nerds. But who knows.
Music has proven itself to be a particularly well-suited conductor for the movement of ideas and strong emotional reactions. I can hardly explain the sort of fizzling that washed over my brain the first time I heard Loveless by My Bloody Valentine (by the way, look for the first new music in 13 years from MBV founder, Kevin Shields on the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation”) or Jeff Buckley’s 1994 debut, Grace.
It’s at these sorts of moments that emotion, lyrical poignancy and a few powerchords become the most efficient means to create a modern form of revolution. Try, for example, to not get all huffy-puffy revolutionary while listening to Karen O’s muttering, “I may be dead, honey / But I was left with my eyes,” on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Our Time.” The song’s forcefulness rivals that of its 1977 Richard Hell counterpart when Hell scampers and crawls across “Blank Generation’s” opening lines, “I was screaming let me outta here before I was even born.”
Lyrically, Hell argued that his songs were overtly positive, that the “blank generation” was a symbol for endless possibilities and the destruction of social confinement. And today when we are sending our troops to fight a country that did not attack us first and 2002’s Rave (Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy) Act is dangerously infringing on the freedom of speech, we need positive forms of radical expression. Spray-painting “Screw the Gov’t” on a Walgreens seems sterile when compared to a student-radio current-events discourse, writing to Congress or forming a band and addressing issues with your own form of audio revolution.
It is obvious that there will be no cleansing mass destruction of born-again slacker saviors like in Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” or “Choke.” Reality will be subtle in comparison.
In “Our Time,” Karen O’s pleading sexual appeals to a might-be lover drip molten revolution from any set of speakers with an almost swallowed verse of “So glad that we made it / Cuz all the kids in the street / Whisper sounds that sweet / The stars under their feet.” Then the frail slide guitar that has been mimicking Karen O’s sweat-stained drawl dissolves into an insatiable bombast of distortion and snare and a sneering, sing-along chorus of “It’s our time! It’s our time!”
This is the sort of revolution that is possible, the kind that exists in a pocket of infinitesimal pops and sputters in the sinews of your jaw and the tensing of a fist. The type that makes you revaluate and substantiate your existence, your time.
