https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJjLUPBXAm4
In my Joni Mitchell write-up, I noted how the history of pop/rock music through the early 1970s had been, overwhelmingly, one in which only men had felt free to innovate. Punk rock arrived in the late 1970s, and in the usual histories, it too was a tale of white men -- or teenage boys, spiritually if not always calendrically -- blasting fresh hot air into stale, stultifying arenas (note to self: steal better cliches next time). In Britain, for example, we read that it was led by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Stranglers, Gang of Four, the Jam, the Buzzcocks.
I don't have a very punk personality, so I apologize in advance for the fact that most of these bands won't be showing up my favorite songs countdown. Most weren't close. It's not an insult; I like them fine, and I'm glad they took the time and energy to make their records, they just aren't important to me. Gang of Four would get a write-up, if only "Anthrax" did a less muddled job integrating Jon King's nervous student essay about the psychology of love songs into the feedback-laced anti-love punk song, so that I could get as much of the effect via listening as I can by reading Greil Marcus's essay about it in Ranters and Crowd Pleasers. The Clash would get one for "Straight to Hell" or "Lost in the Supermarket" if they'd finished writing them, instead of letting great openings drift into limp repetition, but then again those songs are midtempo and pretty. The Sex Pistols *will* be on my list, and high-ranking too, as Never Mind the Bollocks still strikes me as brilliant; but I'm latching onto the band on that list with by far the most developed sense of theatre, as well as the one whose melody writer (Glen Matlock) was an unabashed lover of the Beatles, and whose producer Chris Thomas layered Steve Jones's guitar lines into genuinely impressive, not-at-all-amateurish arrays of sound. I endorse punk rock's premise that one can make expressive, worthwhile music with little practice and the quickest of editing; but when I'm writing about my *favorite* music, I'm forced to notice that I'm not a teacher by accident, as I damn well think practice and editing are, all else being equal, *better*.
Having said all that, though, there's a counter-history of punk in which women write and sing the words, and sometimes play the music -- in which Britain's initial wave, for example, consisted of the Au Pairs, Delta 5, Essential Logic, Penetration, the Raincoats, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Slits, X-Ray Spex. While not all of those will be in the countdown either, they strike me as far more appealing and impressive and inventive set of bands. Since I'd never noticed that before I sat down to write this piece, I'm only beginning to think about what, if anything, it means. Possible theories, starting with the most dismissive:
* As a dude, maybe I'm just heterosexually attracted to female singing. This doesn't feel true or correct to me, but the whole point of the subconscious is that I don't have the objective distance to evaluate this theory. *If* it were true, though, I'd find it a lot more plausible as regards Tori Amos's singing, or Chrissie Hynde's, or Camille Dalmais's, than for Siouxsie's ominous gloom, Poly Styrene's whoops and shrieks, or Pauline Murray (of Penetration's) strident howls and firmly sung declarations.
* As someone raised to prefer accurate pitch, maybe I prefer women on the grounds that untrained female singers tend to be better at hitting notes than untrained men. This may or then again may not be a truthful gender stereotype, though. Given that my favorite female singers-qua-singers include such erratic forces of nature as Alanis Morissette and Amanda Palmer, I'm not sure my experience supports it.
* Maybe I have an easier time sympathizing with angry young women than angry young men, as I assume they have more to be pissed off about. While this makes sense, the bulk of the female punk rock I've endorsed above isn't specifically feminist in content.
* Maybe women in punk rock, as in so many other cases, had to work twice as hard to get half the acclaim -- and female leaders caused even male bandmates to work harder. This theory, I think I might believe. I've taken a course, maybe two, in 3rd-world development; nothing giving me anything like expertise, but enough to have learned that one of the best things a development agency can do for a country/ city/ village/ extended family is put political and economic power in the hands of women. Across a wide variety of cultures and religions and terrain, female leaders promote better work productivity; make better long-term investments; are less corrupt; and waste dramatically less money on alcohol. I make zero claims about genetic causes, but even assuming it's 100% cultural, it's too widely shared among otherwise-different societies to ignore. "Stop letting men run things" has been, for the benefit of men and women alike, about the smartest step any society can take.
******
The World Bank doesn't study punk rock bands, but I do. It's my clear impression that the (all-female) Slits learned dub more convincingly than the Clash did; that the (half-female) Au Pairs were better impostors at funk than the Clash at reggae; that the Delta 5, Essential Logic, and X-Ray Spex were far braver than the male punk bands about extending the tonal range of instruments worth playing poorly beyond guitar, bass, and drums. And what about *not* playing badly? In America, the early punk band best at their instruments, X, were three men co-led by female lyricist Exene Cervenka; in England, I'd nominate Penetration, four men led by Pauline Murray, for the same role.
"Lovers of Outrage" is unmistakably a punk rock song. Its prechorus and chorus are fierce, pushed along by banging quarter-note kick drums and cymbals like a tantruming Energizer Bunny. Murray's commanding and electrifying chorus voice -- articulated, hammering home a narrow range of notes, skidding abruptly into a higher note like a triumphant flourish of a chalk signature -- is the audio hallucination Baby Boomers watching Fox News debate coverage have when they call Hillary Clinton "shrill".
But on the verses, her singing is calmer, educated and at moments almost playful. The resonant guitar tones and carefully thumped kick drum from the first verse could have waited to appear on a John Mellencamp or Soul Asylum single; the second and third verses are busy with gentle syncopation; between them is Fred Purser's fiery but thoroughly musical guitar solo.
The lyrics are interesting, too, in that they seem addressed in part as a plea to people -- the "lovers of outrage", that is, people who get high off of moral indignation and lambasting the world's decline -- who would in reality be extremely unlikely to hear it. She suggests to the moral-majority types that they may, like so many of us, hate most the projections of their own selves, and be attacking punks for dressing and acting how they wish they themselves could. "What do you see when you look in the mirror?/ Hidden identity"... "It's all a fascination/ All your imagination" ... "Is it them or is it you? Let them go! Set them free! Let them be who they want to be!"
In practice, one assumes the censors of the world see, in their mirrors, their makeup and their haircuts and their slightly-blurred-by-memory facial features; and the mere fact that Murray labels the "lovers of outrage" in the 3rd person suggests she knows her song can't reach them. But it was brave and unusual of her to try. Perhaps it too was a female impulse -- the socialized habit of trying to start a genuine dialogue. Being in a punk rock band is one way to release the tensions that come from a world that doesn't *want* to dialogue with your damn opinions. And playing in fact quite decently, but writing songs a little beyond those abilities in a way that unleashes fraying energy, is a fine way to be in a punk rock band.
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