You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Reactionary Modernism here.

1,328 words

Part 5 of 7

Edited by Greg Johnson and Peter Jacobi

In 1995, Jonathan Bowden self-published his Collected Works in 6 volumes (London: Avant-Garde, 1995), edited by Jürgen Schwartz, one of Bowden’s pen names. The six volumes comprise 27 distinct books, 12 of which had been previously published. Altogether, the Collected Works contain more than 2,600 pages of rare early Bowden.

Suck is the second book in volume 2. It was first published as a distinct book under Bowden’s pen name John Michael McCloughlin (London: Avant-Garde, 1994). We will publish it online in 7 installments. The titles are editorial.

Suck covers a wide range of political and cultural topics, interspersed with fictional narratives that may be loosely based on real people and events.

Eventually, a fully annotated version of Suck will appear at the Jonathan Bowden Archive. It will then be followed by similar editions of the rest of the Collected Works, plus a couple more early volumes that were not included. — Greg Johnson

Just as the Emperor Nero is alleged to have fiddled while Rome burned, Punk rock was a sneer at the fact that it was produced by a completely useless generation. This was a generation that was born to inhabit an adult play-pen—something which was emblematic of an absence of masculinity and force. Hence we see the rodeo effects, the plangent touches of Punk as a cultural discourse (as the Polytechnic lecturers say), the fact that it went in for torn clothes, dyed hair (usually the dye was very cheap—mere colour—and the hair fell out if over-applied), together with the faces of clowns, broken Glocks, spittle on the mug of humanity. These faces always remained grey and lacking in meaning. In a sense they were sub-texts to matter rather than matter itself, and the faces were round, ovalesque, lacking in force, dexterous, and inadequate. They were the faces of trolls, but not demons, mountebanks with safety pins through their ear lobes and nostrils. These were men and women with broken identities—who consisted of hostile moments—together with the black eye shadow around their eyes which remained startled and distended, the eyes of trollops, slags, and vagabonds, or more pertinently, the eyes of a rabbit which remains transfixed in the beams of an oncoming car. All of which is illustrated in Julian Temple’s film The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle where Punk is depicted as an energetic moment of futility; a hymn to anarchy; a facile movement of forms—what we might call the courage of a group of drop-out adolescents, anarchic zombies, who had the courage to declare that popular culture is a form of manure.

In such circumstances, Punk rock was the rebellion of a failed generation against itself. It was an amphitheatre of perversion, a deliberate attempt at sticking up two fingers in the direction of society. It was a mixture of Joe 90, The Rocky Horror Show, and a form of cultural transvestism—but it did have the courage to make two declarations, firstly, that popular culture was dross, and secondly, that their generation was bankrupt in everything but name. Although the Bill Grundy show at 6 o’clock on Thames television made them famous with the ‘F’-word and all. It was doubtless true, at least in part, that the whole thing was a stunt; a manoeuvre, a ‘sting’ (if you will), an attempt to make as much money as possible from the record industry, from firms like EMI and Polydor, without being able to play, sing, give out promotional literature, act truculent and yet unthreatening on various videos, and play the part of the pop star et cetera . . . in other words, do all the usual. Before you melted into the background—into a premature middle-age—with a large fat cheque in your pocket for a couple of years “work.” The main dilemma was then what to do with the rest of your life, and Malcolm McClaren’s prognosis for the Sex Pistols very much resembled this, with the sole exception that his band, the band for which he was the manager and promoter, would be the “worst band in the world.” Indeed, the Sex Pistols were meant to be an inversion of all the norms of the record industry. In that they were noisy—they were the world’s worst rock group—they couldn’t play, they couldn’t sing, they looked awful, and as a consequence they were bound to go far in the record industry. The irony is that McClaren and through him Julian Temple, in his film The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle, would have us believe that this was all intentional, and the Sex Pistols’ rise to stardom was part of a carefully orchestrated campaign. It was a campaign that was planned with almost military precision; and which involved a succession of interconnected moments. The first stage of the plan (or the conspiracy, if you prefer) was to develop a demand for this ridiculous band, a demand from various bored and frustrated teenagers across the land, particularly in the provinces—that this was the band which you had to see, that this was the show or the movement, the Punk carousel, which was going places, that was a ‘happening event’! Once this demand had been established, by not allowing the band to play live, and by touring out of the way venues, well off the beaten track of the established rock circus, you could attract the attention of an appalled, shocked, and titillated media. This is particularly true of the tabloid newspapers, who were beginning to see in popular music an endless source of gossip and salacious tittle-tattle. Indeed, a number of journalists, such as Julie Burchill and Gary Bushell, who we will have occasion to comment on in the future, all cut their teeth in this particular area. They all began on the radical left (Burchill’s father was a communist and Bushell was in the SWP) but they soon ended up on the other end of the agenda, on the radical right, thereby compromising their politics enough to ensure their careers in journalism, but also remaining in opposition to society, albeit on the other wing of political life, in the way that outré popular culture pretends to be oppositional and subversive. Although certain people on the journalistic fringe of Punk, such as the ex-Public School boy Jon Savage, all believed that Punk was a radical and pure manifestation, within the realm of popular culture, of the revolutionary implications of working-class youth. When, in actual fact, ordinary working-class people despised the ‘Punks’ more than any other group. While ‘straight’ proles often used to assault them, hence the marginalization of this phenomenon by the parties of the extreme left, and the fact that Anarchism moved in to fill the gap. Whereas class based anarchist groups, like Class War, regarded Punk as anti-working class, as a form of social deviancy. When, in actual fact, Punk rock was essentially a decadent form of working-class counter-culture. It was, in other words, a recrudescence of the nineteen sixties in a different form, in a belated and somewhat tremulous form, violent and yet unpredictable. It was a strange mixture of the decadence of Cabaret (starring Liza Minnelli) and the Sturmabteilung (SA)—who could bring the show to an end—and ultimately, despite the superficial show of rebellion, the angst, the meaningless violence of the emotions it aroused (the feeling that there was going to be a revolution, a “youth revolution, man”), Punk was essentially conformist; it wanted to take the money and run. Hence the fact that despite the rebelliousness, the Witches’ sabbath or Halloween element, when children dress up in a role reversal with their parents, the element of superficial bisexuality in dress and conduct, Punk tended towards the “Right.” This was in relation to a hidden conformity, a stereotypical gesture of rebellion—and the deep primal forces, the irrationalism which it released, definitely tended towards the ‘right’, as evidenced by Screwdriver, Sham 69, and Siouxie & the Banshees.