Malcolm McLaren died today at age 64. His impact on music and subculture was substantial, as was his influence on my own personal artistic tastes and philosophies.
When asked to list my favorite books, Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century always appears. It was via this book that I first made the connection between the music I loved, the rebellion I longed for and "the shock of the new," the work of the European avant-garde. Marcus's book plays rather loosely with both history and theory, perhaps, but it does make important links between the desire, subversion, politics, and punk rock. It was via Marcus's book that I was first introduced to the Situationists, whose theories become the foundation for much of the scholarship I did as a graduate student. "Boredom is counterrevolutionary," the Situationists pronounced, an attitude of revolt (revolution/revulsion) envisioned by McLaren and performed via the punk rock subculture via his most famous "creation," the Sex Pistols.
NPR's obituary calls McLaren "the most hated man in punk rock," and indeed his name invokes the stereotype of an manipulative and exploitative band manager. But there is no denying that McLaren's sensibilities -- although they might have encouraged Sid Vicious down a destructive path -- shaped the music industry profoundly. As Griel writes, "It may be that in the mind of their self-celebrated Svengali, King's Road boutique owner Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols were never meant to be more than a nine-month wonder, a cheap vehicle for fast money, a few laughs, a touch of the old épater la bourgeoisie. He had recruited them out of his store, found them a place to rehearse, given them a ridiculously offensive name, preached to them about the emptiness of pop music and the possibilities of ugliness and confrontation, told them they had as good a chance as anyone to make a noise, told them that they had the right."
When I lived in England -- I can't believe it's been twenty years now -- my friend Sara and I would go to London whenever possible and the King's Road, although far from the subcultural mecca that it was in the Seventies, still had some sort of mythic allure to us. As McLaren once said Rock and roll doesn't necessarily mean a band. It doesn't mean a singer, and it doesn't mean a lyric, really. It's that question of trying to be immortal. And it is, no doubt, this immortality, this mythic allure that McLaren hoped to inculcate --a world where, no matter the changes of time and tastes, one could believe that beneath the Kings Road's cobblestone, the beach.
"Live without dead time," the situationists exhorted, a call for freedom and refusal in the face of the old world. Arguably, the situationists, like the Sex Pistol,s benefit from the aggrandizement that promoters like McLaren (and storyteller-theorists like myself have created): a little bit of revolution and a whole lot of PR.