McLaren, et al

As should have been expected, I heartily enjoyed Simon Reynolds’ thorough Rip it Up and Start Again, which was written with a mix of clarity and insight that allowed me to breeze through it in a few days. For some reason, the chapter that stuck with me the most after the first pass was the one (”Sex Gang Children”) on Malcolm McLaren, the sleazy impresario who also happened to be a borderline savant capable of spotting subcultural trends half a decade before their tipping point. I’ve always been interested in McLaren, and Rip it Up helped me connect a lot of dots. It’s obvious to anyone who’s read Subculture, no matter how much of its been disproven/updated, that the original British “punk” style was bricolage—cribbed from London immigrants and filtered through a working-class mentality. McLaren turned it into high fashion, and was ready to do it again after the Pistols imploded, which they were, of course, supposed to do all along.

Adam and the Ants were McLaren’s first post-Pistols project. They’d previously released the guitar-driven, solid post-punk Dirk Wears White Sox in 1979, which went nowhere fast, although it did feature “Kick” (mp3) which showed some small signs of what was to come. After hiring McLaren, Adam was refigured as an Errol Flynn/Electric Warrior who also happened to be completely straight-edge. He also happened to completely dislike McLaren, who kicked him out of his own band. Adam came back a year later, though, with the wonderful Kings of the Wild Frontier, by which time he’d taken at least one cue from McLaren and internalized his own relationship with the media, resulting in “Press Darlings” (mp3), on which he (Ray Davies steez) refers to rock-crit Nick Kent as “the best-dressed man in town”.

McLaren, in the meantime, had taken the former Ants and put them behind his latest, as Reynolds writes, “truly pliable human material”, fourteen-year-old Annabella Lwin. Bow Wow Wow would serve as McLaren’s poster children for his latest musical fascination, all forms of highly rhythmic African musics, and his latest ideological/promotional one, against the record industry’s grip on music distribution. Thus, BWW’s first cassette, C30, C60, C90, Go! was released with one side blank, to encourage home taping—get it? Soon after was the Your Cassette Pet EP, which contained the great “Louis Quatorze” (mp3) and “Fools Rush In” (mp3), both of which mirror, primitively, the irresistable polyrhythms sound that Byrne and Eno were brewing up at the same time. Let us not forget, however, that McLaren was also a pedophiliac scumbag, as evidenced by this passage from Rip it Up:

McLaren threw himself into “training” the three male members of the group…with a nocturnal regime of whoring in Soho’s red-light district…Because the fourteen-year-old Annabella initially had problems fitting in with a bunch of men who were much older, McLaren even persuaded the guys that the problem was her virginity. To get her out from under her mother’s sway and make her commit to the group, one of them had to do the dirty and deflower the underage singer. Reluctantly, the band drew lots, and guitarist Matthew Ashman was dispatched to perform the task. He failed.

Rip it Up doesn’t cover it, but I’ve always had a soft spot for McLaren’s 1983 paean to New York hip-hop/DJ culture Duck Rock. Again, it’s only nominally McLaren’s—he only did what he did best and organized the talent. But when it works, it’s fantastic. Essentially organized as an extended all-request radio show, it features the great “Legba” (mp3) and “Double Dutch” (mp3) which charted as a single, got some early MTV videoplay and features some toasting by McLaren himself. It’s his last shot to fully indulge his clear affinity for African diasporic culture, and he wisely steps aside and lets the music speak for itself.