Lucking Out - James Wolcott [77]
But it became a bit rich when Lester took to the pages of the Voice to pound horseshoes about the malignant racism he discovered behind the thin, sliced smirks of downtown hipsterdom and the punk scene. Called “The White Noise Supremacists,” a muckraking title that evoked swastikas, skinheads, and a raised fist clutching a thunderbolt, the article peeled back the black leather jacket of punk to bare the scrawny rib cage of hip fascism. “This scene and the punk stance in general are riddled with self-hate, which is always reflexive, and anytime you conclude that life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit, you’ve got the perfect breeding ground for fascism.” Although it scored some palpable hits with the scattering spray of its bird shot, the article won Lester few assenting allies in the punk scene and put off many more with its heavy icing of bad faith. In Let It Blurt, DeRogatis quotes some of the offending jokers cited by Lester, who felt he had taken something offhand and stupid they had said and hemstitched it into a damning exhibit, or mistook a mocking gesture for a genuine declaration. What truly riled people in the slag pits was Lester’s preachy fervor about racism after running his own mouth off the road so often. He was a muckraker who had done more than his own share of mucking. He used the n word and similar felicities more than once in my presence, and although he may not have been the worst offender, I never heard anything comparable out of, say, members of Talking Heads or from the other rock journalists on the beat, apart from one who was a close buddy of Lester’s. And although I heard the occasional anti-Jew comment at CBGB’s, it didn’t come from regulars but from boroughs kids trying to sound Scorsese-movie tough. As Steven Lee Beeber’s book The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s (a valuable, invigorating history and eye-opener, despite its Halloween title) documents, CBGB’s would have been inconceivable without the Jewish show-business tradition that traveled from Al Jolson to Tin Pan Alley to Lenny Bruce to Lou Reed to Hilly Kristal himself, the patriarchal founder. “Joey Ramone, a figure straight out of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Richard Hell, a Jewish mother’s worst nightmare, and Lenny Kaye, a kind of post-1960s Jewish mystic, rose up, ready to take over the world.” Even punk outfits everyone assumed were Italian, such as the Ramones and the Dictators, were Jewish creations—parodies of guido swagger. So “a breeding ground for fascism” CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City were not, despite a flaunting flirtation with transgressive Nazi chic by some, though not by punk’s originators.
It wasn’t that I disbelieved Lester’s mea culpa over his own use of the word, though you have to wonder if his conscience wouldn’t have been so stricken had he not been overheard. As he related in “The White Noise Supremacists”: “I was in Bleecker Bob’s the other night, drunk and stoned, when a black couple walked in. They asked for some disco record, Bob didn’t have it of course, a few minutes went by, and reverting in the haze to my Detroit days I said something about such and such band or music having to do with ‘niggers.’ A couple more minutes went by. Then Bob said, ‘You know what, Lester? When you said that, those two people were standing right behind you.’ ” But everyone knew he was given to passionate displays of big-heart declaration that he could reverse on a dime, blowing his horn in the other direction. He believed what he believed the moment he believed it, but his fluctuations were more jagged than those of most contrarians, depending on what was fueling him. And nobody appreciated the way he portrayed punk musicians and fans as a bunch of George Grosz grotesques whose defective anatomies flayed bare their twisted values. “So many of the people