Summer Session
Summer Session – Punk Thing
For this month’s Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and today we bring you an article by Brandon Brown from our sister publication Art Practical on perhaps one of the most iconic and enduring cultural genres: punk. Simultaneously existing as both an infamously commercialized stylization and a sincere, perennial style, punk remains an inexhaustible testament to the inextricability of power and aesthetics. This article was originally published on September 10, 2015.
Still from the X-Ray Spex performing “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” circa 1977. From the documentary Punk in London (Metrodome, 1977).
in memoriam Peter Culley
“Punk was not a musical genre; it was a moment in time that took shape as a language anticipating its own destruction.” —Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces
“I’m mad, but I ain’t stressin’.” —Kendrick Lamar
Do you know that great Sappho poem about all the things some people say are so great? “Some say marching cavalry, some say foot soldiers / others call a bunch of ships the most beautiful of sights / offered by the dark earth / but I say it’s whatever you love best.”1 The rhetorical device Sappho uses to open this poem—“some say…but I say”—is called a priamel, a list of possibilities that the speaker ultimately disdains in favor of her true feeling.
This literary device been used by countless poets since Sappho. Poly Styrene makes use of it for one of my favorite songs, “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” by X-Ray Spex: “Some people say that little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think…oh bondage, up yours!!” Part of the genius of this particular priamel is the transformation of Poly Styrene’s voice, which begins subdued, even resigned, but rapidly becomes a loud, feral “fuck you.” The scream is one of both affirmation and refusal, deftly iterating the way the phrase “Oh Bondage” both celebrates and utterly rejects the quotidian masochism of life under dominion.
What happens right after this vocal leap can only be described in terms of utopian time travel. A sixteen-year-old white Brit who calls herself Lora Logic blows one long note into a saxophone, a note that stubbornly drones before distorting into a crude statement of the melody. Then Poly Styrene’s voice returns: swinging, furious, perfect. Her sense of timing is extraordinary, stretching out the o of oh just slightly, but long enough that up yours suffers a soft elision. When she screams “up yours!” she has to squeeze the two syllables into one and a half. It’s a little out of step, but so is Poly.
