Punk Class

My God, this is turning into a punk blog, ^waka waka^. No but seriously, my senior seminar for my English degree at UT fucking rules. It's simultaneously the coolest/easiest English class I've ever taken in my life. It's called "Poets and Punks" and is all about counterculture lit. and music in England from '58 to the late '70s. We've read so far Osborne's "Look Back in Anger," a silly, mysogynistic play about a proto-Johnny Rotten figure who misses the Edwardian era and takes it out on his wife by burning and beating her. We saw some good clips of Kenneth Branauagh (sic) and some lady acting it out in the '80s. I think my professor, Neil Nehring, was a bit harsh on it. He basically says it's garbage and boring, but I think it was just 1/2 bad.

Next we read "Absolute Beginners" by Colin MacInnes. Written in '58 as well, this novel was part of an unconnected trilogy on chaotic, urban, London life, and was later adapted for the screen in 1986 by Julien Temple of "Flith and the Fury" fame. Temple made the film into a musical (?) and it starred David Bowie who sang this one song for the movie called "That's Motivation" which is probably one of the worst Bowie songs I've ever heard. Accordingly, I am a bit wary of the film, but Ray Davies makes a cameo in the film as somebody's Dad!

All in all, my teacher thought that book sucked too. See, both MacInnes and Osborne were writing about edgey countercultures but at the same time, in their novels, implicitly took on the prescribed but very incorrect mental outlook of the so-called "UK class conflict disappearing." It's a long story, but kids in the 50s (right after the "teenager" was invented in the US) in the UK had cash (especially the working class ones, who still could live at home but could also work). The government added this all up and decided class had disappeared. Because a few leather clad biker kids could buy records. And everyone was "rich." Whatever. Anyways, it was popular to in think this way, this hippie, idealist sort of way, about class "disappearing," but it was total bullshit. And you can see this in both of the novels we read, the novelists prescribing still to old ideas of class in which in their eyes the lower class is dirty and stupid, and law and order and stability are a penultimate social desire. THESE are the guys you want writing about your countercultures? No. But, thing is, well, no one else was writing about them. At-least Osborne hated women and MacInnes was a fag. That's pretty punk rock, right?

Stilltoe's "Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" (which I am pretty sure Fugazi nixed for that one song Red Medicene) is the first work we are reading in which the author is pro-class war/reality in which he fully acknowledges that life is unfair and that their is still a large class hierarchy in the UK. Thing is, though, is that even though he was playing the anti-social card in terms of his view on "class war," Stilltoe became a best-selling author with almost all of his books (even though he gave up on the working class in the early '60s), where as tepid, conservatives Osborne and MacInnes, who were technically writing in a highly status quo manner of ethos, sold muchhhh less. Funny.

Anyways, I've learned a lot of neat specific music things of interest I shall now list in a bulleted fashion for your enjoyment:

-Teddyboys were a really lame gang in the late 1950s and dressed like gamblers in 1950s American westerns. They had early rockabilly hair though.
-Teddyboys, and by extension a complementary form of them in the late 1960s, Skinheads, were never really racist to begin with. In fact, early Skinheads listened to a lot of ska and black music, as they were sick of what was happening in music in England at the time (cough, cough, The Beatles)
-Mods turned into "hard mods" which then turned into Skinheads which then turned into the racist pricks of the 1980s. That's why they all wear Fred Perry shirts!

My mouth tastes like metal. Time to listen to AIDS Wolf'.