Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [173]
I knew women who said the song “Bodies” was somehow refreshing after all the feminist cant and masculine hypocrisy they’d been subjected to the last few years, but when you get right down to it all he was really saying was “Yeah I fucked you you fucking worthless bitch, and now you’re pregnant with a baby that quite probably is mine, but I couldn’t care less because you’re just a trashy slut anyway.” Mick Jagger would have to go some to top that one, not to mention sluggards of Bad Company ilk. Jeez, and I thought all this cock rock was something we were going to wipe away.
Oh, sorry, I forgot—punk rock was antisexual if anything, okay let's take what I believe was the very next song on that album, wherein Jonathan went on about how he had no feelings for anyone except his precious preening self. Well, all that ever said to me was “You can’t hurt me.” Another closed system. More solipsism too, and what I believe is that whatever musical, cultural, or social rubric you file it under, solipsism is the disease of this age, in America certainly. It is the currency, we have to deal with it and aside from the Clash I can think of few punk rockers who have offered anything but appeasement which makes them no different and possibly worse than the discoids. “Cause the world a person lives in is his brain/Well mine just gives in,” or how about “I got no emotions for anybody else/You better understand I’m in love with myself.” To which the obvious logical response is “So what?” “Thanks a lot, assholes” is giving them too much credit, the credit that they even made a gesture in the first place.
But oh what gestures they made! In other departments. Like putting nude almost pubescent boys with half-hardons on their T-shirts. Wonderful. I lay in there with my old girlfriend watching for Sid in the news the other night, and recalling that T-shirt she said, “I’ve gotta say that I just don’t care what happens to any of those assholes. What I’d like to know is where is that kid they put on that T-shirt today and how does he feel?”
Oh but we can overlook little things like that, I mean so what if a few fingers or maybe genitals get burned in service of the great media scam/rock ‘n’ roll swindle? Fuck ‘em. They were suckers for buying it in the first place. Johnny Rotten onstage at Winterland in San Francisco: “Ha ha haaa—ever get the feeling you’ve been taken?” Photographer Bob Gruen told me that on that tour he couldn’t make Rotten out at all: “The guy would sit on the bus all day smoking dope and talking about a society based on love, then walk out and when a kid hands him a copy of his album to autograph he coughs up phlegm and spits on it. And then the kid says, ‘Thanks!’ ”
I’ve had it up to here with bullies. School was bad enough, where you were a fag if you read books or some asshole might just decide to beat the shit out of you if he even imagined you took a sidelong glance at his girlfriend—at 30 years old OR ANY AGE do I need this? I think the one thing that might have impressed me most when I was in England covering the Clash tour in ‘77 was the unspoken but manifest gentleness and decency of everyone in the band and almost all their friends and fans. I’d gone expecting nigh-cannibalism, having been suitably brainwashed by American NBC reports which I’m sure Malcolm himself had no small hand in, and what I ended up concluding