Blank Regeneration

When Elastica lifted the organ melody from the Stranglers' No More Heroes for the central guitar riff of Waking Up, they reopened the debate that has been going on in black music - above all Rap - for years: in sourcing the past, what is the difference between legitimate inspiration and sheer plagiarism? Can the present escape the shadow of the past? Isn't all art plagiarism anyway?

Never mind that Waking Up might be just that, a typically sarcastic call to arms; any power that it might have is immediately called into question by the undeniable fact that it sounds like an 18 year-old song. This view was endorsed last February, when, facing a lawsuit, Elastica undertook to pay 40% of songwriting royalties to the Stranglers' publishing company. That's what you might call legitimate.

A whole world of dismissal is enshrined in the sound-alike argument: implicit is the idea that pop no longer has any vigour, that it all has been done before, that it and we are adrift in a post-modernist squall of emotion-free irony, referencing and pastiche. In this mindset, pop is strangled by the weight of its 40-year tradition: all that remains is a series of parlour games for a disempowered generation, doomed to repeat history as farce.

Well, no. Like all the best records Waking Up contains its own everlasting present. Put it on repeat and you're lost in the moment; then put it next to No More Heroes and you get many more questions than answers: how is it Elastica have made something so hopeful from something so cynical? How is it they've made a triumphal female statement out of such machismo? (The Stranglers were notorious for their misogyny, even in the late 70s.) Have they not, in fact, used a record, popular when they were pre-school, to make something new and contemporary?

It's like Tricky's curse on Maxinquaye: 'brand new, you're retro'. This is not nostalgia, more a perception that the past cannot be beaten: rather, why not take all this stuff and engage with it physically and emotionally, moulding and pummelling it into something that works for you?

This is a problem for the babyboomers and thirtysomethings, brought up on a linear cultural model, who populate the mainstream discourse around pop. Faced with their constant dismissals, isn't it more interesting to tease out the complexities, ambiguities, lacunae inherent in this past-in-present? And, if this is not your perception, can't you abandon the weight of your amazing experience, and, like, use your imagination?

As it happens, Elastica slot into a multi-media matrix that encompasses phenomena as diverse as Beavis and Butt-Head; the American resurgence of Punk with Green Day, Offspring and Rancid; the fashion world's canonisation of Vivienne Westwood and the serial revivals of the look that she helped to originate - Punk; a return to the typographic brutalities of the black and white late 70s; the sheer retro consciousness of Brit rock groups like Blur, Oasis and Suede; the continued marketing of Punk itself - Virgin's Best Punk Album in the World...Ever.

Beneath the cyclical demands of marketing and fashion lies another common thread, which has to do with a willed stupidity. Like the original Punks, many of these cultural workers choose to present a blank, sarcastic facade: the impenetrable eyebrows of the Oasis siblings; the shock of vegetable dye that is Green Day's hair; the vomiting sounds of disgust that punctuate Elastica's break-through single, Line Up. And then there's Beavis and Butt-Head; one media cycle on from Bart Simpson, the purest distillation of Punk.

'You know me, I'm acting dumb dumb

You know the scene: very humdrum

Boredom

Boredom'

The Buzzcocks: Boredom (1976)

'D-U-M-B: everyone's accusing me'

The Ramones: Pinhead (1977)

'I think I'm dumb

Or maybe just happy

Think I'm just happy'

Nirvana: Dumb (1993)

'Maybe it's just jealousy

Mixing up with a violent mind

A circumstance that doesn't make much sense

Or maybe I'm just dumb'

Green Day: Chump (1994)

So why is it that the best and brightest should present a moronic surface to the world? Why is it that obvious over-achievers like Elastica should toy with ideas of failure and laziness: not for nothing is Waking Up a slacker manifesto on a par with Beck's Loser - 'I'd work very hard but I'm lazy/l can't take the pressure and it's starting to show'. Beck himself is not the LA streetkid of popular provenance but the grandson of Fluxus artist Al Hansen, and, as Beavis and Butt-Head point out in one of their withering commentaries, a kid straight out of gifted class.

Naturally, most media commentary sticks on this surface: 'I turned on Beavis and Butt-Head the other night, and it was so much worse, so much more stupid than anything that I had imagined that l just sat staring in astonishment,' wrote Bob Herbert in the New York Times, February 1995. Wow. There's a real inversion here. In fact, as anyone who dares to enter their world knows, Beavis and Butt-Head are first an entertainment, then a theatre of simultaneous identification and revulsion, and further if you will, a satire on male adolescence and its culture.

The intention of creator Mike Judge, a sophisticated 30-something, comes out in a sequence of devastating one-liners. Who can forget the perfectly timed dismissal of arrogant video band Wang Chung: 'Why do these guys look so...tired?' Stupidity is a constant theme:

Teacher: 'I want you to work with Daria Morgendorffer, our straight A student who won the science award last year.'

Daria: 'But Mrs. Dickie, Beavis and Butt-Head are complete imbe-ciles!'

Beavis: 'Yeah! She's right!'.

Place this next to Bob Herbert and the question is begged: so, like, who is really being stupid here?

The ascribing of intelligence and stupidity is an explicit tool of social and political control: you only have to look at the relationship of Charles Murray's theories (The Underclass, The Bell Curve) with the 'whitewash' Republican sweep of American Congress and Senate and the subsequent tightening of the social in the US. If you're not part of the elite, then you're stupid or might as well be, because you're not going to get any resources, or arenas - jobs, communications etc. - within which you might legitimately exercise your innate intelligence.

The history of Punk (and pop, and much 20th century art) is the return of the repressed, not the least of whom are the people whose intelligence is surplus to requirements: as John Lydon put it, 'the flowers in your dustbin'. To break through this social engineering, it is first necessary to define how you are disadvantaged, embrace it, then throw it in the face of those who would oppress you: whether you're Hippies, Punks, Niggas, Queers, whoever. As Jefferson Airplane chanted on their rabble-rousing We Can Be Together: 'Everything they say we are, we are, and we are very proud of ourselves.'

One of these magical inversions is the assumption of stupidity by the very intelligent: 'right: you treat us as stupid - well, we're going to be really stupid'. Like most 20th century art stuff, this goes back at least as far as dada: 'To carry simple-mindedness and childishness to excess is, after all, still the best defence' (Hugo Ball). This impulse goes beyond simple reflexivity into other areas: stupidity as a put-on, a baffle, a process of unlearning, a willingness to traffic in the most degraded cultural products. Anything to get away from the dead hand of the bourgeois canon.

We see the inauthenticity and smart/dumb loop-de-loop in the first foundations of Punk, with Richard Hell's justly famous 1975 manifesto, Blank Generation. Like a blank canvas - as was the author's intention - the song has come to have many meanings, the most famous in its direct refraction by the Sex Pistols into Pretty Vacant: 'We're so pretty, oh so pretty vacant/And we don't care'. Hell later complained that his intention had been hijacked, that his 'blank' meant unlimited possibility rather than vacancy, but then stupidity was encoded in the song itself, directly stolen from Rod McKuen's 1959 beatnik exploitation single The Beat Generation by Bob McFadden and Dor.

For all his literary aspirations, Hell's influence on Punk was the look: the baby-bird spiked up hairdo, the chopped up T-shirts, and the electric shock expression - bug eyes, open mouth. In the bad drug ambience of the mid-70s New York underground, dumbness and numbness were celebrated in a reaction against hippie pretension, in a new kind of cool. Not for nothing were the Ramones following a certain natural talent in this area - packaged as the most minimal, cartoon-like human beings possible. The four identikit surnames were only capable of forming a whole together: if you could prise them apart, all you'd get was a quarter of a person.

As the single most influential record of 1976, the Ramones' first album injected this Tom'n'Jerry dumbdumb straight into the blood-stream of British Punk: once you got past its monolithic production and casual brutalities, however, it was possible to detect formal manipulations of great wit - the Beavis and Butt-Head syndrome, in fact. Take Judy is a Punk's numb loser lyrics, squeaked out by Joey Ramone, then suddenly illuminated by this: 'Second verse, same as the first'. You listened, and it was. Then it came again: 'Third verse, different from the first.' Well, so it was too. What were these guys doing - were they being deliberately stupid, or what?

This element of put-on went directly into British Punk: the most celebrated instance was the Sex Pistols' appearance on Thames Television's Today programme - a classic of the 'you think we're stupid, right, we will be' dynamic. By the spring of 1977, the time when the international media were beginning to broadcast images of this peculiar new mutation, there was a favourite Punk look: we all used to do it, in photo booths. Tilt the head back on the neck, open the eyes into a glassy, amphetamined stare, and relax the mouth wide in a slack drool. Duh.

It was fun to do because it threw people off. It was a gestural translation of the Punk aesthetic; the celebration, say by an avant-garde, art school group like Wire, of the simplest pop trash - the Troggs Wild Thing, and the Mysterians' 96 Tears. Check out their splenetic Mr. Suit for the funniest punk protest ever - the '1-2-3-4,' countdown into a dumb riff, sarcastic hooligan vocals, an accelerated time scale; 'You can take your fucking money, and shove it up your arse, 'cos you think you understand, well it's a fucking farce, I'm tired of fucking phonies, that's right I'm tired of you. No, no, no, no, no, no, Mr. Suit.'

When these clustered negatives hit what was then Fleet Street, the result was predictable, if entertaining. Punk was tailor-made for the tabloids; it talked the same urchin language (of social realism, the urban underclass) and was stimulated by the same shock principle, even physically encoding tabloid headlines into handbill and fanzine graphics. It's hardly surprising that Punk's arrival on the national - and international - stage was announced by a series of screaming headlines: 'The Filth and the Fury', 'The Foul Mouthed Yobs', 'The Punks - Rotten and Proud of it!'

For the mass media the surface was (and is) all; never mind the aesthetics of minimalism, the surface was stupid. This definition then fed back into Punk itself looped dumbdumb. Take the packed front page of the Sunday Mirror, June 12, 1977, 'Punk Rock Jubilee Shocker: They call themselves names designed to alienate society; Rat Scabies, Dee Generation, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious. They swear and spit on stage. They wear stinking sneakers. Their songs cause violence. Fans are injured in riots. They don't give a damn what anyone thinks of them.'

The standfirst is fabulous; 'What's burning up the kids? A disturbing report on the amazing new cult.' Cut out, this made a Siouxsie and the Banshees handbill, while the photo of a 'girl fan watching the Stranglers in Manchester', all slackjawed, wide-eyed rapture - not so dissimilar to Man Ray's famous Larmes - was clipped for the cover of a single by the Snivelling Shits, a deliberately dumb concept formed by a group of music press writers. One side charted the disastrous effects of amphetamines on male sexual performance - I Can't Come - while the other laid out the tabloid transaction for all to see: Terminal Stupid.

It was this mass media interaction which defined Punk as it hit the West Coast of America. Lacking the New York tradition, would-be Punks, particularly in Los Angeles, were stimulated first by the April 1977 appearances of that most cartoony of all Brit Punk groups, the Damned, and secondly, by the media reports broadcast from the summer onwards by the networks. This West Coast punk subculture remains a lost pop moment - charted at the time with wit, smart/dumb paradoxes and perfect visuals by the magazines Search and Destroy (San Francisco) and Slash (Los Angeles).

Learning their moves from the media - whether first hand or refracted back into Punk style - early West Coast Punks show all the signs of dumbdumb in full effect. Take Kamera Zie's picture of the Avengers' singer Penelope Houston: her beautifully posed, model girl looks offset by a slack jaw, hooded eyes, and carefully ripped stripy T (that beatnik perennial). Below the picture, her art: Car Crash, a perfect restatement of the 'too fast to live, too young to die' syndrome: 'Oh no! Car crash! Your leg's over here and your head's over there/But fuck it, baby, what do l care...'

Or there's the photo of synth-punks the Screamers: intelligent boys all - performance artists, computer experts, trained musicians, at least two of them were gay - acting braindead in a graffiti-strewn landscape. Here they display, with perfect elegance, the phantasmagoria of punk posture; spiky hair and psychotic stare (singer Tomata Du Plenty), the Sid Vicious uniform of padlock, leather jacket and sneer (synthist Tommy Gear), and, eerily prescient of Beavis, the dumbdumb gesture in excelsis (drummer KK).

The archetypal Punk group from this period were the Weirdos; a perfect mixture of goofy absurdity, alienation and sheer rock/pop glee. Singer John Denney matched severe thriftstore skills (the 50s and early 60s were coming onstream) with a sharp line on his native Hollywood - which, was and is, far more vacant than anyone in Europe (or even the East Coast) could ever realise - in fabulous songs like Happy People, Idle Life, If it Means Nothing.

Nobody heard them. The West Coast Punks were good; they were ambitious - 'Think of it Ellen...a World Full of Weirdos', ran a cartoon calendar made by the band - but what Brit Punks took for granted, access to record companies, press, prime time TV, was denied to the Weirdos, the Avengers, the Screamers, all the others. The only group from this time to make waves, X, wrote about it on their LP Los Angeles: 'We're locked out of the public eye/Some smooth chords/On the car radio/No hard chords/On the radio/We set the trash on fire'.

In America, Punk failed. In Britain, it succeeded, to the point that it has dominated music and a particular section of the (youth/style/music) media ever since. Much of this is malign, punk negation long curdling into the programmatic cynicism which is now a major media mode. It's noticeable that the Brit musicians who hark back to this period are either positive (Oasis) or gleeful (Elastica): anything but cynical, because that's what the previous generation did and, sadly, still do.

A forgotten side of 70s Punk was its visionary quality. In a Search and Destroy spread on Bay Area group UXA, singer Dee Dee Semrau has the look of now - a near ringer for Donna Elastica - while the caption explicitly projects into the future, in a song called 1995: 'The day is right for invention/ Rays of sunlight, break the prisons.' At the time, this might have been the routine Burroughs dystopia; today, it is a record of ideas waiting to be activated at the right moment.

This activation, during the last five years, has either provided a fantastic, creative extrapolation from the primal Punk impulse (The Simpsons, Beavis and Butt-Head) or has been a surprisingly straight replay of 1977/8 complexities: as it happens, there is very little difference between Green Day and the Weirdos. There was no more fitting metaphor for Punk's autumn 1991 return in the US than the simultaneous, narcoleptic arrival of Kurt Cobain (Nevermind) and River Phoenix (My Own Private Idaho): dumbdumb boy passivity taken to its logical, comatose, helpless extreme.

In 'The Aesthetics of Disappearance', Paul Virilio describes the everyday condition which he calls 'picnolepsy'; a frequent but often infinitesimal loss of consciousness - a kind of unconscious tuning out which he relates to the physiological totality constructed by the 20th century mass media. The importance of these gaps is shown by the very efforts made by media workers to create a seamless flow, to obliterate any lacunae - but they remain, if only in the popularity of 'blooper' shows like It'll be Alright on The Night. Here is the hint of a strategy for survival within the mass media; a withdrawal from their panoptic glare.

In this covert struggle, stupidity is an important site. In the UK, Beavis and Butt-Head follows The Word, a magazine commissioned by the Channel 4 'youth programmes' department. Overseen by Oxbridge graduates, The Word delivers youth up to the market like veal calves to France, catering to its audience with a couple of good bands, then boring them witless with a farrago of organised humiliation, Page 3 sexism and charmless ineptitude. Gaps appear, but will the producers ever relax their control? Never! They're always full on, in this nightmare of overlit, desperate mediation.

Here is another, more pernicious form of stupidity: populism. There are few things less attractive than the sight of overeducated media producers talking down to the public because they fantasise that this is 'what it wants'. The underlying assumption is that the public is stupid and that, if it is not, it is to be rendered so. This is the drive behind the tyranny of market forces. In this light, large sections of the media are the agents of social control, which would be an obvious enough point if it wasn't deliberately masked by falsehoods like market research, freedom of speech and the reaction against political correctness.

Scene: Beavis and Butt-Head, on the couch, watching an unnamed mid-80s video: post Duran Duran synth pomp style.

Butt-Head: 'This guy thinks he's like, smart...'

Beavis: 'College music sucks.'

Butt-Head: 'I think it's only cool if you, like, go to college...this video's, like, complicated...

Beavis: Yeah. It's stupid...'

Within this context, it's tempting to see Beavis and Butt-Head as a Janus-faced Candide, wandering unscathed through this polluted landscape. As transmitted on Channel 4, the link between their surface stupidity and the picnoleptic approach to media is reinforced by an accident of editing: black fades where the US ad breaks fall which, like jump-cuts, propel you out of TV's seamless flow. The result, together with the channel hops and video commentary contained within the cartoon, is a kind of interactive, meta-television, where you no longer have to accept the dominance and submission encouraged by The Word and its ilk.

Like the original Punks, Beavis and Butt-Head are ambiguous phenomenon - as shown by the for and against debate raging on the internet. In the glare of the mass media, assumed stupidity can easily become real stupidity; irony is flattened out and you become the very thing you are trying to satirise or transcend - viz. the 1993 US moral panic about a pre-teen who, allegedly inspired by B&B, torched his family home. This resulted in the censorship of Beavis and Butt-Head - a cartoon, remember - which now arrives here in a decidedly peculiar state.

This may well be an index of their success. Like the Punks, Beavis and Butt-Head have penetrated the collective subconscious. Holding a mirror to a society in denial is never a popular activity. Despite their sniggering, pre-sexual misogyny, despite their love for retarded American rock like Primus and Pantera, they remain a complex, contradictory phenomenon, if the fantasies and histories projected onto them is any index. Within an increasingly simplistic, monolithic right-wing media, which imposes stupidity from above, they show us that we don't have to take this shit.