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it was during this period of growing disaffection and joblessness, at a time when conflict between black youths and the police was being openly acknowledged in the press, that imported reggae music began to deal directly with problems of race and class, and to resurrect the African heritage. Reggae, and the forms which had preceded it, had always alluded to these problems obliquely. Oppositional values had been mediated through a range of rebel archetypes: the ‘rude boy’, the gunfighter, the trickster, etc. – which remained firmly tied to the particular and tended to celebrate the individual status of revolt. With dub and heavy reggae, this rebellion was given a much wider currency: it was generalized and theorized. Thus, the rude boy hero immortalized in ska and rocksteady – the lone delinquent pitched hopelessly against an implacable authority – was supplanted as the central focus of identity by the Rastafarian who broke the Law in more profound and subtle ways. …. On the deviant margins of West Indian society, at least, there were significant changes in appearance. … This soul brother moved on the cool lines of jazz, ska and American r & b. He reproduced the timbre and the scansion of these forms in his walk and argot. He sought refuge in their dark interiors from the world of ‘straights’ and whites. In these ways, he reassessed the stigmata and turned Caribbean flashiness into a declaration of alien intent, a sign of his Otherness. It was largely under his auspices that blackness was recuperated and made symbolically available to young West Indian men. … All these developments were mediated to those members of the white working class who lived in the same areas, worked in the same factories and schools and drank in adjacent pubs. In particular, the trajectory ‘back to Africa’ within second-generation immigrant youth culture was closely monitored by those neighbouring white youths interested in forming their own subcultural options. …. both Paul Goodman (1968) and Jock Young (1971) have characterized the Negro as the quintessential subterranean, embodying all those values (the search for adventure and excitement) which coexist with and undercut the sober positives of mainstream society (routinization, security, etc.). In these terms, the positions ‘youth’ and ‘Negro’ are often aligned in the dominant mythology. As Jock Young (1971) writes: They are ‘viewed with the same ambivalence: happy-go-lucky and lazy, hedonistic and dangerous’. Of course, at different times and in different circumstances, this congruence can be more or less apparent, more or less actively perceived and experienced. Put in general terms, identification between the two groups can be either open or closed, direct or indirect, acknowledged or unacknowledged. It can be recognized and extended into actual links (the mods, skinheads and punks) or repressed and inverted into an antagonism (teds, greasers). In either case, the relationship represents a crucial determining factor in the evolution of each youth cultural form and in the ideology both signified in that form and ‘acted out’ by its members. At another level, patterns of rejection and assimilation between host and immigrant communities can be mapped along the spectacular lines laid down by white working class youth cultures. The succession of white subcultural forms can be read as a series of deep-structural adaptations which symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence from the host community. It is on the plane of aesthetics: in dress, dance, music; in the whole rhetoric of style, that we find the dialogue between black and white most subtly and comprehensively recorded, albeit in code.
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punks are niggers.’ (Richard Hell, punk musician interviewed in New Musical Express, 29 October 1977)
It is an excerpt1 from Rude Boy, a movie that relates2 the life of a young man, Ray Gange, who wants to get a job with the Clash and follows the band everywhere while they are touring3. The film was directed by Jack Hazan and David Mingay and filmed in 1978 and early 1979. It is partly a fiction, and partly a documentary. As such4, it features numerous public performances of the Clash, including a “Rock against Racism” festival where the band plays “White Riot”. In it, there is also a scene where Joe Strummer, the singer of the band, performs a song on the piano, backstage, before the show begins. Here is the transcript of the song’s lyrics: The Clash “No Reason” I ain’t got5 no reason to drag around6 I’m the right kind of colour in the white part of town but all the people down in Brixton7 town say “hey white boy, won’t you lend me a pound” I ain’t got no pound nor any dollar or a quid I’d pick my own pocket8, well if I did I got the same chances that any black man do well they say “white boy, your new job is through” well a black man got a rhythm an a white man got the law an’ I know which one I’d be lookin’ for don’t care about the country, goin’ to wreck9 and ruin the whole world will follow an’ they’ll be singin’ this tune “ Do you remember [what] Sam Phillips said about if he could find a white bloke who could sing like a nigger, he’d be a millionaire? And then he found Elvis and the silly cunt sold him for thirty five thousand dollars.” Joe Strummer plays “Let the Good Times Roll”, a Rhythm’n’Blues song written in 1956 by Shirley Goodman and Leonard Lee.
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A fragment, a small part taken from the film, and used as an illustration or an example Tells the story 3 While they are on tour, for the duration of their tour. 4 As a documentary 5 I have 6 To wander, to go about without any objective in view 7 A part of London where riots erupted in April 1981. Throughout the seventies, it had remained a poor district, plagued with severe problems of unemployment, high crime rates, poor housing. Its population was predominantly African-Caribbean. 8 I would steal money from my own pocket 9 In a state of dilapidation, in the process of crumbling, becoming a ruin 2
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it is a joke—and yet the voice that carries it remains something new in rock ’n’ roll, which is to say something new in postwar popular culture: a voice that denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible… The Sex Pistols made a breach in the pop milieu, in the screen of received cultural assumptions10 governing what one expected11 to hear and how one expected to respond. Because received cultural assumptions are hegemonic12 propositions about the way the world is supposed to work—ideological constructs13 perceived and experienced as natural facts—the breach in the pop milieu opened into the realm of everyday life: the milieu where, commuting14 to work, doing one’s job in the home or the factory or the office or the mall, going to the movies, buying groceries, buying records, watching television, making love, having conversations, not having conversations, or making lists of what to do next, people actually15 lived. Judged according to its demands on the world, a Sex Pistols record had to change the way a given person performed his or her commute16 - which is to say that the record had to connect that act to every other, and then call the enterprise into question. (Marcus 1989:3) (Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces)
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What remains irreducible about this music is its desire to change the world. The desire is patent17 and simple, but it inscribes a story that is infinitely complex—as complex as the interplay of the everyday gestures that describe the way the world already works. The desire begins with the demand to live not as an object but as a subject of history—to live as if something actually depended18 on one’s actions—and that demand opens onto19 a free street. Damning God and the state, work and leisure, home and family, sex and play, the audience and itself, the music briefly made it possible to experience 20all those things as if they were not natural facts but ideological constructs: things that had been made and therefore could be altered, or done away with altogether. It became possible to see those things as bad jokes, and for the music to come forth as a better joke. The music came forth as a no that became a yes, then a no again, then again a yes: nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false. If nothing was true, everything was possible. In the pop milieu, an arena maintained by society at large both to generate symbols and to defuse them, in the only milieu where a nobody like Johnny Rotten had a chance to be heard, all rules fell away. In tones that pop music had never produced, demands were heard that pop music had never made. (Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces)
Assumptions= présupposés. Verbe correspondant : to assume. I assume that you have a car: je tiens pour acquis que tu as une voiture. Do not assume to much: ne préjuge pas trop. 11 To expect something: attendre quelque chose, s’attendre à 12 effecting an ideological domination. In a position of power and authority 13 A construction= an elaboration, a construct, an invention. 14 Prendre les transports entre son domicile et son travail 15 En fait, en vérité 16 A commute : a travel between one's home and place of work performed on a regular basis 17 Evident, palpable 18 Expression d’une hypothèse : marque du passé 19 Déboucher sur 20 It made this experience possible. It was possible to experience all those things
