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Dada Weer All Krazee Now

How Fear and Loathing Come to the Top Twenty or Is It A Fella

Watching Top of the Pops the other night, like all good little 26 year old teenyboppers, I was somewhat surprised to see The Sweet wearing heavy eye make-up and generally camping it up. Of course, it shouldn't have surprised me that much. At the moment it's virtually impossible to thumb through any music paper, weekly or monthly, without coming across an article on Alice Cooper, David Bowie or Lou Reed/The Velvets and an essential part of the music business has always been adoption by the more commercially aware practitioners of those aspects of the work their more imaginative brethren that can be isolated, simplified and then exploited as gimmicks to up their own sales. Gary Glitter has about as much to do with the serious aspects of sexual role confusion as I have to do with the C.I.A.

Luckily, Gary Glitter and The Sweet are about as relevant as the Flowerpot Men and Scott McKenzie were in the 1967. The gimmick-as-sales-technique idea has produced hordes of freak right back into rock's earliest days. Screaming Jay Hawkins, Wee Willie Harris, Dave Sutch, Arthur Brown and countless others through the past fifteen years have all scored heavily by the use of some sort of grotesque gimmickry. And the ones who had nothing to offer but a gimmick didn't usually last very long.

On the other hand, performers of real talent have usually managed to transcend the limitations of their own curious forms of advertisements for themselves. Nobody now thinks of Jimi Hendrix as the man who played guitar with his teeth, or of the Stones as the first band use used drag promo pictures (H.Y.S.Y.M.B.S.I.T.S.). These facts are merely details in our composite pictures of these people. Similarly, it would seem fatuous to try and dismiss Bowie and Alice as 'camp-rock' without coming to terms with the ideas with which they are concerning themselves.

Rock music has always reflected and expressed the fantasies and preoccupations of teenagers. Many of these preoccupations are morbid and grotesque. Love undergoes a mystification process which transforms it into 'true love' where the women (usually) is presented as Miss Right, a mysterious, pure and potentially unobtainable object, lurking just over the horizon like some sort of twentieth century Holy Grail. The desire for speed, mobility and new experience becomes glorified into the enormous death trip that produced necrophiliac goodies like 'Ebony Eyes', 'Tell Laura I Love Her', 'Leader Of The Pack' and the appalling 'Tribute To Buddy Holly', 'Johnny Remember Me' and 'Terry', amongst others.

These fantasies seem logical enough when we consider the degree to which young people's natural sexual and aggressive instincts are frustrated, both by their parents and by the repressive, authoritarian system within which we attempt to function. However, there is another factor which has to be considered, and that is the change in the social role played by rock music.

Right up until the early Sixties, Hollywood had a virtual monopoly on the production of Heroes and Heroines for pop culture. The stars of the silver screen were glamourous, mythic figures, ready made targets for the projected escapist fantasies of the unfulfilled and the frustrated. Since then, the Hollywood star system, along with the whole monolithic structure of the American film industry, has been collapsing. Hollywood still produces 'stars'.

Names like Steve Mcqueen, Jon Vorgt and Dustin Hoffman do a lot to help fill the cinemas but today's so-called 'stars' lack the mythic and charismatic potential of rock stars like Dylan and Jagger. Rock has largely assumed Hollywood's previous function and now provides myths that are a potent force in the shaping of the ambitions and values of many people in their teens and early twenties.

The increase in the influence and power of the rock medium had been paralleled by an increase in the scope of its concerns. Dylan made it possible for popular songs to comment seriously on all aspects of the political situation. Acid and dope have revitalised popular awareness of the nature of consciousness. But in the hiatus of the last three years, two subjects have emerged as major obsessions, violence and sexual role confusion.

There has always been an undercurrent of violence in rock and roll. The driving, aggressive music that gets that Dr. Martens stamping now is not that far away from the music that kept the studded black leather and the drape jackets weaving fifteen years ago. but since acid, the psychic brakes have been off and rock has accelerated past guitar smashing into a new era or ritual executions and crucifixions and Nazi/black magic excesses. Ever since Charlie Manson let it all hang out a lot of people have begun to realise that, as William Burroughs put it, after 'the breakthrough in the grey room' you have to accept that 'this is war... to Extermination'.

With violence rapidly developing into the chic new pornography of the Seventies, it's easy enough to understand the widespread concern at the antics of Alice and his imitators. Who needs torture, death and madness acted out on a stage when you can see it live, real blood, gore and guts, real suffering, in Africa, the Middle East, South-East Asia, Ulster or, if you live on the wrong side of the tracks, on your very own street corner? Who needs it? Curiously enough, I think many of us do.

Brutal actions provoke yet more brutal reactions and one way in which this escalating spiral of violence can be broken is by directing aggression, hatred and paranoia out into situations where they can be dispelled without causing further actual violence.

Hopefully, the antics of Alice Cooper and the others have some sort of cathartic effect on audiences. Hopefully, you are less likely to want to kill, torture or maim having experienced the dubious vicarious thrill of watching those actions performed ritualistically on a stage. Hopefully, people who get their rocks off good and proper at a show are drained to some extent of the pent-up short-circuited energy that produces violence. Certainly this is what Alice Cooper himself claims and when I talked to him at a particularly heavily-lushed press reception a few months ago he managed to appear both aware and genuinely concerned under circumstances that were guaranteed to blow most covers.

Events like the Altamont killing make any judgement provisional, to say the least, but Cooper's claims that his shows do defuse aggression and his deliberate attempts to lay the audiences' own faults right back on themselves, coupled with the high degree of seemingly responsible control that he exercises over the audiences, make him, for me at least, a less frightening figure than a description of his stage act might suggest him to be.

What I find far more disturbing is the self-consciously parodied transvestism/bi-sexuality/transexuality that makes up the other half of his stage persona. There's already far too much confusion. How about some relief? Who needs more guessing games? You may well ask. Yet Alice to some extent, and David Bowie to a far greater extent, both seem to be trying to re-mystify sexuality by emphasising the androgynous and the sexually ambivalent. Nobody in their right minds can claim that the straight male and female roles, as they are laid down in our society, have yet adapted sufficiently to the fact that women are also people. Not that the standard male trip (as laid down by the social powers-that-be) is particularly yummy either.

How many young males, particularly stoned young males, feel happy with a society that expects them to get into the whole hairy chest, big muscles, beer swilling, virility rubbish (what I heard described the other day very scathingly and very accurately as 'the Big Cock trip')? Given the present ground rules it seems hardly surprising that so many middle-aged smoothies with flash sports cars with big gear sticks end up with desperate drinking problems. The whole thing seems such an obvious sham in our society that it's inevitable going to end in either ludicrous self-deception or total pyschic disaster.

It's good to see the Women's Liberation Front slowly gathering momentum. But it would seem perverse to ignore the fact that the male desperately need liberating from his present social role, too. Wouldn't it make things a lot easier if we all started thinking about People's Liberation, rather than just trying to sort things out from one direction only?

When Jagger got dragged up and drugged up in Performance the film seemed to me to be attempting to say certain basic things about the human animal and its confusion and hypocrisies. But with David Bowie I find it difficult to match up his stated concern about the human animal and its possible evolution from Homo Sapiens into Homo Superior with the often trivial way he treats his homosexuality/bisexuality or whatever.

In Performance Jagger is putting a lot of people on by simultaneously playing Heavy Stud and Drag Queen. At the same time ideas can then be expressed about the human animal in terms that are not strictly limited by the playing of accepted sexual roles. It seems reasonable to assume that a few people, at least, found it a little more difficult to fall back into their respective male chauvinist sow routines after seeing that film.

I don't want to put David Bowie down. Generally, I think he's doing a fine job. But I think that there's a real danger that he may unwittingly provide fresh ammunition for the mad Pornfords of this world, the hideously fucked-up secret fascists waiting to leap out and drag the twentieth century back into the hothouse repression of Victorian days.

It's easy to over-estimate the dangers of a decadent permissiveness. Particularly if it happens to suit your purposes. As yet no imperial structure declining via decadence to obscurity has managed to destroy human life completely (as far as we know, that is). Unfortunately our civilisation is now equipped with tools that can do that particular job quite quickly and simply.

I can't claim to have any stunning solutions. Where it's all leading I don't know. I can only believe that it is totally necessary for people to attempt to be honest and face up to their confusions or the whole situation will inevitably deteriorate. Too many of the doors are now open for there to be much falling back on safe frames of reference.

As the man said:

'There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late.

And so, lipsticked, sequined and armed with plastic machine guns we thunder off towards the New Apocalypse. God help us all. Or not, as the case may be.