70s Punk: An Ur-Alt-Right?
Many years ago – sufficiently long ago that it was
back when watching a VHS tape just happened to be the way a guy experienced
video content if he hadn’t bought a DVD player yet, rather than it being an
exercise in hipster consumerist nostalgia – I remember borrowing a cassette of a
1978 documentary, Blitzkrieg Bop, which profiles the “punk cult” that
emerged around the Ramones and the CBGB scene in New York during the
mid-to-late 70s. I’ve always remembered the corny tone of the narration and the
hilarity of Village Voice journalist Robert Christgau proclaiming punk
rock “very dangerous. It could lead to fascism. All of that is really true. No,
you laugh,” he addresses those
One of the first things that will strike the viewer –
particularly today – is the casual racism of several of those featured in the
film either as interviewees, performers, or attendees at concerts. The opening
credits montage of raucous punk crowds even freezes on a man wearing an arm
band that simply says “HATE”. What emerges from Spheeris’s interviews with
performers and fans from the scene is that it was largely energized by the same
factors – alienation, racial tension, and sexual frustration – that motivate
today’s Alt-Right. Boastfully violence-prone young interviewee “Michael”, for
example, confesses, “I don’t have girlfriends,” but says this is because “girls
are terrible.” Stronger misogyny emerges in the interview with Georg
Ruthenberg, a musician of mixed black, Native American, and Jewish background
who played guitar with the Germs and would go on to work with Nirvana and the
Foo Fighters under the name Pat Smear. “I probably hit lots of girls in the
face,” he tells Spheeris in footage not included in the final cut of the film.
“I don’t like girls very much. […] They were real snotty. They were callin’ me
bad things, they were callin’ me dirty words.”1 In addition, The
Decline of Western Civilization shows Fear frontman Lee Ving taunting his
audience of “fags” in a diatribe that today would be deemed “homophobic”.
 |
| A Fear fan displays his arm for the camera in Penelope Spheeris’s The Decline of Western Civilization. |
 |
| Young punk Eugene sports “the clean-cut American look”. |
Another young punk Spheeris interrogates is “Eugene”,
a skinhead loner who explains that “short hair is just the clean-cut American
look, man.” Asked about the source of
his anger, he says “it just comes from, like, livin’ in the city and just seein’
everything, seein’ all the ugly old people and just the fuckin’ buses and just
the dirt […] so when I go there I just, sometimes I can get out some
aggression, maybe, by beatin’ up some asshole, you know.” In another clip, he
reveals that “sometimes some niggers will come up to me and, like, you know […]
they’ll start chasin’ me, like, you know, most times around in L.A., yeah, I
get chased a lot.” One interviewee, “Kenny”, is a bizarre Asian wearing a
swastika T-shirt. “But it doesn’t really mean […] I’m gonna go kill a Jew,” he
says. “You know, I’m not gonna do that. Maybe a hippie, though,” he adds with a
smile.
Swastikas make multiple appearances in the film,
including on the torso of Germs lead slurrer Darby Crash, whose kitchen counter
is also shown decorated with a skull wearing a Nazi helmet. Crash’s friend
Michelle Baer tells Spheeris the story of finding a dead Mexican painter in the
backyard of her parents’ home and posing for pictures with the corpse. “It was
really funny, actually, and the paramedics came and they were joking with us,
and the coroner came,” she says. Crash inserts that “instead of ‘John Doe’ they
put down ‘José Doe’ because it was a wetback.” When Spheeris inquires whether
she felt bad that a human being had died, Baer replies, “No. Not at all.
Because I hate painters. I hate it when they paint our house.” Asked about the
dead man’s family, she says, “Yeah, his brother and his mom or something came
and they couldn’t speak English. They were speaking, like, broken English ‘cause
they were Mexican, and – and we’re just sitting there laughing and stuff and
they’re like, all, you know, when somebody dies in your family.”
 |
| Darby Crash of the Germs gets down and deplorable in The Decline of Western Civilization. |
Los Angeles was ground zero for the rapid demographic
transformation of the United States during the late twentieth century – a
situation that prompted one of the city’s most notable punk acts, Black Flag,
to create their song “White Minority”. Half of the immigrants who arrived in
the US during the 1970s and 1980s were bound for California2, so
that it quickly became “the Ellis Island of the 1980s” as The New York Times
profiled the metamorphosing metropolis in 1981:
In a tide of immigration
that is reshaping the social, economic and political life of the nation's most
populous state, California has become the port of entry for tens of thousands
of refugees from economic and political troubles abroad. […]
According to
demographers, not since the turn of the century, when millions of immigrants
from southern and eastern Europe flocked to America and settled in New York and
other cities along the East Coast, have so many alien immigrants from so many
countries gravitated to a single region of the country. […]
Because much of the
immigration is illegal, no one knows how many newcomers are arriving here from
abroad. Based on data from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, however,
the legal migration to California from abroad last year is believed to have
ranged from 150,000 to 200,000, including about 50,000 Southeast Asians. The
state’s total population growth was about 450,000. […]
From 1970 to 1980,
according to the bureau's figures, the proportion of California residents who
are “Anglos”, that is, those whose ethnic roots are predominately in Western
Europe, declined to 76 percent from 89 percent. The proportion of virtually
every other ethnic category increased substantially. […]
The immigration has had a
variety of effects on life in California. In places like Beverly Hills and
Marin County, north of San Francisco, money brought by immigrants from Korea
and Hong Kong has been cited as one reason for California's hyperinflated real
estate market over the last six years.
In other areas, those
that attract the far larger proportion of immigrants who come without much
money, officials say that tensions are rising between different ethnic groups
because of competition for jobs and housing. […]
Some officials expect the
tensions between people at the lowest rung of the economic ladder to increase
as the size of the minority population grows.
“It’s like a keg of
dynamite with a one-inch fuse,” said Fred Koch, a deputy superintendent of
schools in Los Angeles County, who sees tensions mounting, especially among
blacks, Hispanic Americans and Indochinese refugees.3
It makes sense that metropolitan areas like Los
Angeles or Detroit, which experienced localized demographic apocalypses, would
witness the emergence of something akin to the Alt-Right roughly thirty or
forty years ahead of the rest of the country. Proto-punk band Iggy and the
Stooges, who were from Michigan, but would make a memorable live impact in
California, were no strangers to racial provocation. Guitarist Ron Asheton was
a well-known Nazi aficionado, and leader Iggy Pop dedicates the song “Rich
Bitch” to the “Hebrew ladies in the audience” in the 1974 live recording
released as Metallic K.O.. Asheton, in an interview contained in the
book We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk, relates the
following anecdote from the mid-70s:
One day Iggy Said, “Hey,
you got any of those Nazi uniforms of yours with you in L.A.?” And I said,
“Yeah, I got a couple of things.” And he said, “Well, we’re doing this show at
Rodney’s and I want you to dress up in the Nazi uniform and whip me. We’ll get
you some beers and stuff.” So I took a couple of my buddies down there and
that’s what I did. I just showed up in my brown shirt. Iggy had a bass player
and drummer and they were just playing this weird rhythmic music and Iggy was
trying to incite people. Iggy got up in this black dude’s face and was really
trying to provoke him, and I thought, “God, if I was that guy, I would fucking
deck him.” Then he got out a rusty pocketknife and started cutting himself up.4
 |
| The Stooges’ Ron Asheton in character |
Jon Savage, in his book England’s Dreaming,
highlights the racial themes that were cropping up in the music and aesthetics
of punk bands across America, from New York to Detroit to a post-apocalyptic
urban Cleveland that was “totally deserted” and where “people fled when the sun
went down”5:
The Cleveland groups used
the same building blocks as New York or London, but their development in
isolation resulted in a Bohemianism that was proud to fail. “The most
nihilistic were the Electric Eels,” says [Cleveland native and Psychotronic
magazine founder Michael] Weldon. “John Morton was the leader: he and Dave E.,
the singer, wrote the songs, which had funny, clever lyrics. There was a lot of
violence attached to that group. John liked to call it Art Terrorism. Brian
McMahon, the guitarist, and John would go out to working-class bars where
people worked in steel mills, and dance with each other. That caused serious
fights.
“In 1974, they were
wearing safety pins and ripped-up shirts, T-shirts with insulting things on
them, White Power logos and swastikas: it was offensive and they meant to be
offensive. They meant to distract people, but I don’t think they were
exceptionally racist: they were being obnoxious and outrageous. Live they were
often too out of control. I don’t think they seriously thought anything was going
to happen except they were going to go out there and get arrested.” […]
Pere Ubu were the first
new Cleveland group to make it out of the city: in the winter of 1975 they
travelled to New York to play Max’s [Kansas City] and CBGBs. In March 1976,
they released “Final Solution”, a stripping down of Blue Cheer’s “Summertime
Blues” into a “dumb teen angst song” so nihilistic that the group, concerned by
the Nazi images in the new culture, refused to play it live. […]
“Lose his senses,” sang
Television in “Little Johnny Jewel”. This exploration of the subconscious began
to disinter the strange gods of the time. Lurking under nihilism’s cloak was a
slight but persistent trace of the right-wing backlash that was brewing in the
West from the mid-1970s on. “We don’t believe in love or any of that shit,”
says one of the editors of Punk in its first issue, as they state in the
Ramones interview: “Dee Dee likes comic books, anything with swastikas in it,
especially Enemy Ace.”6
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| Handbill for a 1974 Electric Eels show. |
“As premier teenage music, above all punk aims to
shock the established order and empower powerless youth,” writes Donna Gaines
in Why the Ramones Matter:
What better way to rile
‘em up than celebrating the Nazis, Satan, Charles Manson, gangsters, serial
killers, outlaws. Stick it! According to Mickey Leigh, Johnny especially
embraced these figures. For kids who want to slam it to the social order, these
are the go-to guys.
“Today Your Love,
Tomorrow the World”, the last track on Ramones, is a first-person
narrative of a small-town German kid who is tired of being pushed around,
treated like shit. The original lyrics were changed from a proud Nazi’s
first-person narrative to that of a disoriented shock trooper still hell-bent
on defending the Fatherland. According to Monte Melnick, Seymour Stein, the
founder and president of Sire Records (the Ramones’ first label), was horrified
by the first incarnation of the song. “You can’t do that,” he said. “You can’t
sing about Nazis! I’m Jewish and so are all the people at the record company.”
Monte, Joey [Ramone, born Jeffrey Hyman], and Tommy [Ramone, born Thomas
Erdelyi] were Jewish too. Reworking the lyrics, Tommy transformed them from a
glorification to a parody of Nazis. As Johnny explains in retrospect: “We never
thought anything of the original line. We were being naïve, though. If we had
been bigger, there would have been a bigger deal made of it by the press.”
Ironically, for Johnny, the lack of recognition for the band likely shielded
them from scandal.7
“Final solutions of various types were invoked to
hasten the death of the old culture, but Nazi images persisted,” Savage
continues:
The Ramones were
initially packaged by an artist called Arturo Vega, who lived in a loft next
door to CBGBs: “Everybody hung out there,” says [journalist] Legs McNeil:
“Arturo was a gay Mexican and a minimalist artist who made dayglo swastikas.”
The Ramones’ early material was spattered with references to militarism and
acronymic organisations like the CIA or the SLA, with more explicit references
in “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World”.
“What they want, I don’t
know,” sang the Ramones about their generation: the formal severity of
their music lent such slogans an absorbing ambiguity. “I would have arguments
about this stuff,” says Mary Harron. “Arturo had some really nasty ideas, but
Joey Ramone was a nice guy, he was no savage right-winger. The Ramones were
problematic. It was hard to work out what their politics were. It had this
difficult edge, but the most important thing was needling the older generation.
Hating hippies was a big thing.”
“The [also largely Jewish
band] Dictators came from Co-op City in Detroit, the Ramones came from Forest
Hills, we came from Cheshire [Connecticut],” says McNeil. “We all had the same
reference points: White Castle hamburgers, muzak, malls. And we were all white:
there were no black people involved with this. In the sixties hippies always
wanted to be black. We were going: “Fuck the Blues; fuck the black experience.”
We had nothing in common with black people at that time: we’d had ten years of
being politically correct and we were going to have fun, like kids are supposed
to do.
“It was funny: you’d see
guys going out to a Punk club, passing black people going into a disco, and
they’d be looking at each other, not with disgust, but ‘Isn’t it weird that
they want to go there.’ There were definite right-wing overtones, but we didn’t
feel like, ‘Let’s go out and start a youth movement about fascism’ or anything.
I don’t think anyone wanted to read too much depth into it: it was more
emotional. When the imagery was used, it was more like ‘Look at these guys,
isn’t it stupid?’”8
Raymond Patton, in his book Punk Crisis: The Global
Punk Rock Revolution, situates the advent of punk in Britain within a
context of national and racial angst:
The economic crisis was
compounded by a crisis in British identity. Great Britain was an empire by
definition, but it had been hemorrhaging its colonies since World War II. For
some white English citizens accustomed to holding a clear place at the top of a
global hierarchy, the whole world order seemed to be inverted. Instead of
enterprising Britons conquering the world, they fretted over the influx of
“colonials” from around the world – especially West Indians and South Asians –
who had returned [sic] to the metropol in search of new opportunities. Some
argued that English culture was threatened by these new residents, as Enoch
Powell notoriously envisioned in a 1968 speech predicting an inevitable
conflict between Britain’s ethnicities, flowing in “rivers of blood.” Powell
was no longer active in politics by the mid-1970s, but amid growing doubts
about national greatness, concern about immigrants posing a threat to law and
order (including a mugging scare in 1972 that was tinged with racist imagery),
and finally, the recession, radical right-wing nationalist groups like the
National Front and the British Movement rose in popularity polls. Finally, the
existential crisis facing the United Kingdom directed special attention toward
English youth, the future standard-bearers of the nation.
In the context of
ideological crisis, distress over declining greatness, and concern over youth,
punk had the potential to arouse more than casual concern, even among elites
who normally wouldn’t deign to address popular culture. In this context, the
scandal over the Sex Pistols’ release of “God Save the Queen” and performance
on the Thames during the queen’s Silver Jubilee brought punk to the floors of
Parliament in the summer of 1977. By taking on the monarchy, the Pistols
transcended the realm of political debate, striking at a symbol at the heart of
British pride, culture, and imperial potency.9
“The monarchy was a powerful symbol for many in the
working class – and they were willing to use the weapons of the workers’
movement to defend its image,” Patton further explains, differentiating between
the politically nebulous and iconoclastic Pistols and the patriotic,
working-class Teddy boys:
Teddy boys, the
working-class subculture of the previous generation, still revered God, queen,
and country and were willing to take up arms to defend those values from punks.
Punk-Ted violence was sometimes inflated and sensationalized by the press, but
punks also saw its serious side: John Lydon [aka Johnny Rotten] was injured by
Teds shouting, “We love our queen” as they attacked him with a knife.
As punk evoked panic,
scorn, and rage across political and class lines, punks reciprocated,
dispensing their vitriol without consideration of conventional boundaries. Even
the Clash, which established a reputation for sympathizing with the Left,
distanced itself from the Labour Party. In a January 1978 interview on the BBC2
youth program Something Else, [Joe] Strummer explained to MP Joan Lestor,
chairman of the Labour Party, “Most young people feel remote from the mechanics
of government, they don’t feel a part of it. It’s just so boring, it doesn’t
interest anyone. All the parties look the same and it looks a big mess.” Punk
band The Jam went even further to separate itself from a comfortable slot on
the Left, claiming it would vote conservative in the next election. For the
most part, though, mainstream politicians of all stripes had difficulty
adapting to punk. This left an opening for creative thinkers on the margins of
the political spectrum who showed greater flexibility in adapting punk to their
interests.10
Patton mocks a 1977 National Review article by
Edward Meadows that “characterized punk as the music of right-wing
working-class rage against the failed welfare state”, but concedes that Meadows
“was on target in one respect: punk did not seem to fit with the mainstream
left. Its anti-hippy ethos, lack of respect for working-class culture,
disregard for doctrinaire second-wave feminism, and willingness to use symbols
from all over the political spectrum separated it from the political left of
the previous decade,” he continues:
What Meadows missed was
that punk didn’t fit any better with the resurgent far right. It lacked the
reverence for nation and race that formed the core of radical right-wing
politics; the pomp and grandeur of the British Empire was part of the mythology
that punk deflated.
The far right made other
overtures as well – such as when the Young National Front newspaper, Bulldog,
added a Rock Against Communism supplement. But when Bulldog tried to
claim Johnny Rotten in 1978, Rotten made it clear that the feeling wasn’t
mutual – he told the Rock Against Racism fanzine Temporary Hoarding that
he “despised” the National Front on grounds of its inhumanity. Even more
forthright in rejecting the far right was the Clash, which explicitly declared
itself antifascist and antiracist. The members of the Clash might not be Labour
supporters, but neither were they willing to be co-opted for the National
Front. Within a few months, a core of punk groups including the Clash launched
a massive counteroffensive – a litmus test for punk’s potential for cooperation
with the far left.11
(Notwithstanding their high-profile participation in
the Rock Against Racism concert of April 1978, however, it is interesting to
note that black crime features prominently in “Safe European Home”, the opening
track of the Clash’s second album, Give ‘Em Enough Rope. The song memorializes
a November 1977 trip made by Joe Strummer and Mick Jones to Jamaica, “the place
where every white face is an invitation to robbery.” The songwriters “don’t
glamorize or idealize the trip but rather express that they felt endangered in
Jamaica, even ripe for the picking as white guys hanging around the harbor
buying weed,” writes Martin Popoff in The Clash: All the Albums, All the
Songs. “It didn’t help that Jamaica was essentially undergoing a civil war
at the time.”12)
However much Rotten might have “despised” the National
Front, the Sex Pistols’ multiple references to Nazism outraged many – which, of
course, was the point. Michael Croland, in Oy Oy Oy Gevalt: Jews and Punk,
observes that “two of the group’s four singles referred to fascism or the
Holocaust,” elaborating:
The vague Belsen mention
in “Holidays in the Sun” was controversial, but the song “Belsen Was a Gas”
went despicably too far. The Sex Pistols began performing “Belsen Was a Gas” in
late 1977, and it did not appear on the group’s only proper full-length record.
The song title referred to a pun suggesting that concentration camps’ gas
chambers were a good time. (The reference was not historically accurate, as
there were no gas chambers at Belsen.) The song’s narrator sang about Jews’
graves and “fun” in consecutive lines.13
The jokes about gas chambers and gays and the
disrespectful attitudes displayed toward women in vintage manifestations of
punk culture can hardly fail to evoke the Alt-Right for viewers in the Trump
era. The difference today is that the suicidal-homicidal race malaise is no
longer restricted to urban anxieties, but permeates an impendingly non-white
America, with Black Flag’s “White Minority” no longer sounding like merely another
instance of grim punk rock shock value, but rather an imminent prophecy for all
of us in the western world. Punk, to the limited extent that it was
identitarian in outlook or expression, was ultimately an escapist and
self-destructive avenue for racial angst instead of an outwardly directed
social or political movement. What seems fun and exciting in The Decline of
Western Civilization, however, is increasingly shadowed by a more
depressing, more dangerous sense of urgency today.
Rainer Chlodwig von K.
Rainer is the author of the books Drugs, Jungles,and Jingoism and Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological
Warfare and Filth at the Movies.
Endnotes
1. “Light
Bulb Kids” (special feature). Spheeris, Penelope, Dir. The Decline of
Western Civilization Collection [DVD] (1981-1998). Los Angeles, CA: Shout!
Factory, 2015.
2. Pastor,
Manuel. “California Used to Be as Anti-Immigrant as Trump. Don’t Repeat Our
Mistakes”. Los Angeles Times (March 15, 2018): https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-pastor-california-immigration-history-20180315-story.html
3. Lindsey,
Robert. “California Becomes Melting Pot of 1980’s”. The New York Times
(August 23, 1981): https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/23/us/california-becomes-melting-pot-of-1980-s.html
4. Spitz,
Marc; and Brendan Mullen. We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A.
Punk. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2001, p. 27.
5. Savage,
Jon. England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond.
New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001, p. 137.
6. Ibid.,
pp. 134-137.
7. Gaines,
Donna. Why the Ramones Matter. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
2018, pp. 90-91.
8. Savage,
Jon. England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond.
New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001, pp. 137-138.
9. Patton,
Raymond A. Punk Crisis: The Global Punk Rock Revolution. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 80.
10. Ibid.,
p. 83.
11. Ibid.,
pp. 83-84.
12. Popoff,
Martin. The Clash: All the Albums, All the Songs. Minneapolis, MN:
Quarto, 2018, p. 52.
13. Croland,
Michael. Oy Oy Oy Gevalt: Jews and Punk. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger,
2016, p. 33.
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