That Seventies Struggle: Jefferson Cowie's Stayin Alive

With the benefit of hindsight, the 1970s have come to be seen as a pivotal time in the transformation of American society. In Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive, the 1970s were “the last days of the working class” because the social compact that had brought unprecedented affluence to American workers since World War II was demolished to clear a path for more cutthroat forms of neo-liberal capitalism. Cowie also presents a superb class analysis of the music, movies, and popular culture of the 1970s, and thus Stayin’ Alive stands among the most innovative books to have developed from the intersection of cultural studies and labor history, exemplified by the scholarship of Stanley Aronowitz, Lizabeth Cohen, Robin D.G. Kelley, and George Lipsitz.

The early 1970s was a time of great promise for the American labor movement, particularly as younger workers had been influenced by the counterculture and the movements for peace and racial justice. Cowie discusses a series of strikes and upsurges of the rank and file led by younger, more anti-authoritarian workers, like the Lordstown autoworkers strike of 1972 that was called an “industrial Woodstock.” The movements for racial and sexual equality presented an especially significant opportunity to connect identity politics with social class, and Cowie identifies several moments when these possibilities could be glimpsed in the insurgencies of farm workers, textile workers, and office workers.

However, these political alliances based on the interrelations of class, race, and gender would not endure. As chronicled in the second chapter, their failure was encapsulated in the McGovern campaign of 1972, which never received the full support of organized labor, with many union leaders taking umbrage at the delegation’s racial and sexual diversity and countercultural spirit. Meanwhile, Richard Nixon had been courting white working class voters by emphasizing cultural values in place of economic interests, employing the “new southern strategy” to attract George Wallace supporters along with those besieged by anti-war protests and social deviance. Nixon further exploited working class populism by representing himself in opposition to the stereotypical image of Northeastern liberal elites, as the champion of hard-working taxpayers who are victimized by a coalition of parasitic underclasses and privileged know-it-alls.   

            A key strength of Stayin’ Alive is Cowie’s discussion of how popular music and Hollywood films did not simply reflect the social changes of the 1970s but became objects of struggle in their own right. Country music, for example, moved to the center of political struggle as forces from both the Left and the Right sought to be aligned with the authenticity conferred by the white working class. Countercultural musicians including Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and the Grateful Dead had begun recording country-themed albums in the late 1960s, and the hybrid of “country rock” was a key component of the record industry’s expansion during the 1970s.  Just as some New Left radicals had been trying to infiltrate factories and proletarian neighborhoods, musicians like Jackson Browne and The Band romanticized the historical struggles of working class America in song.

            Nonetheless, these progressive, countercultural sentiments did not stick as signifiers of working class authenticity, which would be more effectively pulled in the rightward direction of nationalism and patriarchy. Cowie begins his fourth chapter with the story of Merle Haggard’s performance at the White House for Pat Nixon’s birthday in 1973, a somewhat awkward cultural collision between the administration and an ex-felon turned country star, but one where Haggard performed his reactionary anti-hippie anthem “Okie from Muskogee” to the great enthusiasm of the Republican elite. In turn, if some progressives did symbolically align themselves with white working class culture, many others on the Left have accepted these reactionary images of intolerant hardhats and ignorant Joe Six-packs, whose ideological development is traced by Cowie from the anti-hippie killing spree in the 1970 film Joe to the definitive symbol of working class bigotry in the character of Archie Bunker.    

            Scholars of public policy often remark that the Nixon Administration now looks surprisingly liberal, as new legislation and federal agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were created for the protection of workers, consumers, and the environment. In the later years of the 1970s, however, labor would be knocked into a defensive position with the beginning of a protracted campaign to undo the economic democracy established during the New Deal and after World War II. This reversal of fortunes in the class struggle is covered in the fifth and sixth chapters in great, if sometimes tedious, detail.

            Cowie is at his best in the seventh chapter, which returns to the analysis of music and popular culture. Here we find Bruce Springsteen singing about racing in the rustbelt’s de-industrializing streets at the same time that emerging punk bands like the Ramones and Devo were personifying delinquency and social decline from the blue-collar environs of Queens and Akron. Meanwhile, on screen we see a disgruntled cabdriver scowling at the signs of social decay surrounding him in Times Square, an Italian-American boxer who miraculously arises from the mean streets of Philadelphia to stand toe-to-toe with the cocky African-American champion, and a disco dancer who flees the confines of his ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge for the glamorous Saturday nights of Manhattan. In the last of these, whose signature soundtrack gives Cowie’s book its title, the lead character’s escape was a prophetic microcosm of the direction that American society would take as factories closed, finance capitalism grew, and working-class urban neighborhoods were remade into post-industrial playgrounds of commercial leisure.

The History of Punk in Los Angeles: Dewar MacLeod's Kids of the Black Hole

Future historians are quite likely to look back at the period from the late 1970s through the early 1980s as a pivotal time in the transformation of Southern California, along with the transformation of American society and global capitalism at large. In Kids of the Black Hole, Dewar MacLeod illuminates this time and place by reconstructing the history of California punk rock in an age of “postsuburbia.” MacLeod refers to postsuburbia in several different contexts, but in broad terms it is used to denote the consequences of spatial de-centering and the fragmentation of social life within the Southern California suburbs as they were being transformed by emergent modes of post-Fordist capitalism in the 1970s. MacLeod examines the punk scene not only as a symptomatic reflection of the social conditions of postsuburbia but also as a collective response to those conditions; he describes the local punk scene’s DIY institutions as a “modernist response to postmodern consumerism and fragmentation” (100).

MacLeod provides a comprehensive and balanced history of a punk scene that has not received as much attention as its New York or British counterparts but still represents an important and influential moment for this music and subculture. His methodology includes interviews with some of the key participants in this scene and a seemingly exhaustive collection of local punk fanzines. MacLeod’s writing style is accessible and lively, and it should satisfy fans who are looking for a book that captures the energy and fun of the scene instead of just another academic treatise. In the first chapter MacLeod discusses his own experience with punk as a kid who grew up in the L.A. suburbs, drove to Hollywood’s Sunset Strip to see the Ramones in 1977 and yet was initially confused by punk; only later did he become fully immersed in the punk scene as a college student in the Bay Area. MacLeod was also in attendance at the Elk’s Lodge on Saint Patrick’s Day 1979, an infamous event where the LAPD arrived at a punk show (headlined by the Go-Go’s) in full riot gear and proceeded to administer a vicious and indiscriminate beating on the punks; one of Kids of the Black Hole’s highlights is MacLeod’s vivid description of these events at the beginning of chapter 5. 

 

As MacLeod traces the history of punk in Southern California, the first few chapters of Kids of the Black Hole portray some key individuals and bands that were crucial in shaping the music and subculture but have not received much attention in other books about punk. Among those who MacLeod’s history touches on: Greg Shaw, the rock writer who created Bomp! Magazine and Bomp Records; Claude Bessy, aka Kickboy Face, who edited the zine Slash, sang for the band Catholic Discipline, and helped create the record label that released the music of the Germs, X, and other L.A. punk bands; Iggy Pop, the singer who helped shape, and literally embodied with his self-mutilating antics, the style of punk performance after he moved to L.A. in 1977; Richard Meltzer, the rock critic, songwriter, radio host, and “musician” who formed the joke band Vom (short for Vomit); the Runaways, the all-female rock band, managed and promoted by Kim Fowley, that anticipated punk and the postsuburban aesthetic. Perhaps the most important figure in all was Rodney Bingenheimer, whose English Disco on Sunset Boulevard had become a central spot for the L.A. music world during the 1970s, and who brought the latest trends in British music to L.A. via the English Disco as well as his radio show on KROQ.           

 

The key contribution of MacLeod’s book is that it follows the migration of punk from its regional origins in Hollywood and bohemian Los Angeles out to the suburbs, where a “hardcore” subculture that was more violent and macho, and less artsy, compared to the original punk scene took root in Huntington Beach, Fullerton, and other beach towns and suburbs across Southern California. In Huntington Beach, for example, swarms of young men who called themselves HBs would come to hardcore shows with the intent of starting fights and intimidating everyone around them. The music of the hardcore scene was faster and more aggressive, and MacLeod’s lyrical analysis also reveals the recurring themes of boredom and alienation in the social context of postsuburbia, consumerism, and the disintegration of the family. While Ronald Reagan was the most frequently vilified and parodied figure in hardcore lyrics and visual art, in MacLeod’s reading he “was more like the absent patriarchal father, one who supposedly ruled with an iron fist in a velvet glove, but who in fact did not rule at all.”    

 

In this sense, MacLeod is able to describe hardcore punk as both a form of resistance and a reflection of the social conditions of postsuburban Southern California during the Reagan years.  One of MacLeod’s sharpest theoretical insights is to situate the spatial practices and tactics of punk—from skating to surfing to squatting—within the geographic environment of postsuburban fragmentation, fetishism, and hyperreality.  Developing in the context of an atomized form of everyday life organized by a triangular route between the tract home, the office park, and the shopping mall, Southern California’s hardcore punks created a subculture that fashioned itself as rebellious but in reality was simply anti-social; comparing it to Northern California’s more politicized punk scene, MacLeod writes that “in postsuburban Southern California, the politics were diffuse, inconsistent, cohering only vaguely around such words as ‘anarchy,’ ‘destroy,’ and ‘my rules.’” Above all, the hardcore scene was characterized by a search for authenticity within an inauthentic social environment, which put the subculture in stark contrast to something like the glam metal scene that was celebrating artifice, materialism, and hedonism on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip at roughly the same time. It in this sense that MacLeod’s history of Southern California punk illuminates the postsuburban social conditions that spawned it, at least insofar as this environment provided the negative point of departure for punk’s symbolic practices and politics.

Cat Power: A Good Woman

When I’m depressed and for reasons I still don’t quite understand I absolutely must listen to something even more depressing, only the music of Chan Marshall’s Cat Power seems to do the trick these days. She replaced Nick Drake in this regard many months ago and has been in heavy rotation around my house ever since. So when one of my graduate students (thanks Alexis!) informed me that Marshall was the subject of a new biography (*Cat Power: A Good Woman*, by Elizabeth Goodman, published by Random House), I moved it past all the other books to the top of my reading list (and yes, I am geeky enough to maintain an actual reading list).

Marshall grew up around Atlanta with parents who were immersed in the music scene that emerged as the hippie counterculture morphed into Southern rock during the 1970s. Her father was an aspiring musician, and their household was awash with alcohol, drugs, and rock music. Her parents divorced when Chan and her sister were young, and their mother was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and became an alcoholic. The tumultuous relations with their insane mother caused the Marshall girls to move in with their father, which lasted until they were in high school, when he kicked them out of the house so he could live with his new girlfriend. Chan then dropped out of school and moved to the Atlanta hipster neighborhood known as Cabbagetown, where a local music scene had developed in the late 1980s and early 90s.

There is some intrigue surrounding *Cat Power: A Good Woman* in the fact that Chan Marshall refused to be interviewed or cooperate in any way with the making of this biography and even went so far as to ask her friends and family to do the same. The author, Elizabeth Goodman, begins the book with a story about the day that Chan’s mother called from her tobacco shack in rural North Carolina demanding to know Goodman’s credentials and to speak with her “superiors.” And yet despite all this resistance Goodman did a fine job of reconstructing Marshall’s life and career by drawing on previous interviews and painstakingly tracking down all the people who surrounded her in Atlanta and New York’s Lowest East Side, where Chan eventually moved and developed her musical career in the 1990s. I will admit I was initially afraid this biography might read something like a glorified zine article penned by what I imagined to be an English major fresh out of an elite liberal arts college, but the journalism is outstanding given the circumstances and Goodman’s writing style is incisive and witty while steering clear of the flowery prose that Cat Power’s melancholy music or Marshall’s melodramatic personality could have provoked from a more indulgent author.

Many people feel that to hear Cat Power’s music is to feel Chan Marshall’s pain. There’s just something so vulnerable and intimate about *that voice* which seems to channel not only her own experience but all the other Southern women whose suffering and longing for redemption have been expressed for generations by singing in church in the way Chan learned to do as a child. Some of this has become part of the Cat Power spectacle itself, like in an infamous concert at the Bowery Ballroom where Marshall broke down in the middle of the set and then walked out into the audience, laid on the floor, and curled up in the fetal position. More routinely, Marshall has been known to suddenly stop mid-song and constantly apologize to her audience or to perform in the dark or with her back turned. Goodman doesn’t hesitate to expose this behavior as passive-aggressive manipulation or admit to being a little grossed out by a certain type of Cat Power fan for whom this is a voyeuristic form of entertainment. But it’s clear this isn’t all just for show, either. By early 2006 Marshall had become the kind of alcoholic who drinks around the clock, and she cocooned herself in her Miami Beach condo with the intention of committing suicide. Delusional to the point where she was chasing evil spirits away with sticks of incense, Chan was eventually rescued by a friend who tricked her into being hospitalized for detox treatment, where she again hallucinated that she was sharing a room with a vampire and a growling lion.

So, yeah, Chan Marshall is “crazy as a shithouse rat,” an inexplicable phrase that my dad would use to describe me when I was a kid. One song that always gets to me is “Metal Heart,” from her breakthrough album of 1998, Moon Pix. “It’s damned if you don’t and it’s damned if you do/Be true ‘cause they’ll lock you up in a sad, sad zoo.” To have a metal heart is to be alienated from your own emotions, to experience your heart as if it were a thing, not an organ but a cold machine with a life of its own that you can’t control. When you have a metal heart you end up in a lot of no-win situations and it’s not even a question of being misunderstood by others because you don’t understand yourself. As the music builds, Marshall sings “Metal heart you’re not hiding/Metal heart you’re not worth a thing” as if to say that the best one can hope for is the ability to disguise those insane emotions, and if you can’t do that then you should just tear that worthless fucking thing out of the center of your chest and throw it away.

Another track on Moon Pix is the classic ode to the alcoholic life, “Moonshiner,” a traditional folk song that Bob Dylan covered in 1963 and has subsequently been performed by Uncle Tupelo, Elliot Smith, and Bob Forrest among others. Cat Power regularly records other artists’ material and has issued two full albums of nothing but cover songs, with Marshall putting her distinctive stamp on each one (the gorgeous “Sea of Love” and nearly unrecognizable “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” immediately come to mind). With “Moonshiner” she steps into some enormous shoes, as Dylan’s version is one of the best recordings of his folk period, and the cover by Uncle Tupelo is supremely haunting to boot. And yet Marshall not only steps up to play with the big boys, she spins the song into something of her own, putting an exclamation point onto the alcoholic’s desperation in yelling out “You’re already in hell/You’re already in hell/I wish we could go to hell.” When Dylan and others sing “Moonshiner,” they finish with the line, “When the bottle gets empty/ It sure ain’t worth a damn.” When Cat Power does it, Chan more bleakly concludes “When the bottle gets empty/Life ain’t worth a damn.”

These are two songs that make the hairs on my arms stand up, but my favorite track of all on Moon Pix is “The Colors and the Kids.” The song begins “Must be the colors/And the kids/That keep me alive/’Cause the music is boring me to death.” I don’t know what she meant, but I catch myself singing those lines a lot lately because I’m an aging guy who is constantly surrounded by young people who never fail to inspire and disappoint me at the same time. They’re in my class or at a show or in a meeting, so fresh-faced and full of life in this dead world of ours, and then the next thing you know they’re saying something so dumb about how Conor Oberst is a genius. I’m drawn to their brightness and vitality like a moth to light, but I just wish they would do something more…I dunno, interesting or whatever…but then again I’m not even sure what that would be, I just know when it’s boring me to death.

The beauty of “The Colors and the Kids” in enveloped by Chan’s voice and a piano, because there’s nothing else in the song. Don’t take it from me, listen to what my identical twin Dave Grohl has to say: “That song is so heart wrenchingly beautiful and romantic--it makes me want to kidnap her and run away and hide forever.” When the song hits its most dramatic moment, Chan sings the futile cries of a lover who swears that he or she can change if you’d just give them another chance: “I could stay here/Become someone different/I could stay here/Become someone better.” The sense of loss continues into the next verse as she mourns: “It’s so hard to go in the city/’Cause you want to say hello to everybody/It’s so hard to go into the city/’Cause you wanna say, ‘Hey, I love you’ to everybody.” Yeah, it *is* hard when you live the rootless lives that so many of us do (and musicians on tour are only the most extreme example) because people keep passing in and out of your world, and then you run into each other again and you can’t believe how much time has passed, and it turns out Dave Grohl is right because you want to kidnap that person and run away or at least freeze that moment in time, but the next thing you know you’re saying goodbye and you have no idea when, or if, you’ll see each other again. Modern life is just sad like that.

Moon Pix has my most beloved songs, but on the whole my favorite Cat Power album is You Are Free (2003). I’m sure she intended something more optimistic but sometimes I think the album’s title is taunting me, like if I need to reminded that I’m free then I’m not really free after all. On the ghastly ballad “Baby Doll,” Chan poses a question that I swear has been asked by everyone who ever had the misfortune of caring about me and became distressed by my periodic states of despair: “Baby/Black, black, black is all you see/Don’t you want/To be free?” The first track on You Are Free is called “I Don’t Blame You” and it concerns a musician who is just going through the motions, faking it onstage and not wanting to play the music their audience wants to hear. Many people believe the song is about Kurt Cobain, and they’re probably right, but I think that sort of diminishes the point because it’s a predicament that any of us could find ourselves in when called upon to perform according to someone else’s expectations. Any of us could be massively popular and successful yet fundamentally un-free if other people’s image of us became an alien thing separated from our “true” selves or held against us with a demand to perform like a trained seal. “Just because they knew your name/Doesn’t mean they know from where you came/What a sad trick you thought you had to play.” Chan apparently knows what it’s like, and she’s right there to console us: “They never owned it/And you never owed it to them anyway.”

Freedom is a cruel joke for the kids profiled in “Names,” the gold medal winner in the fiercely competitive battle for the title of Most Depressing Cat Power Song Ever. One by one Chan introduces us to her childhood friends who ended up as casualties of American abuse and neglect. First, there’s Perry, a boy with a learning disability whose father burned his skin and sent him to his death when he was 10 years old. Next we meet Naomi, the 11 year-old girl who taught Chan “how to please a man” after school in the back of the bus. Chan begins telling us about Sheryl, her BFF at age 12, whose “father would come to her in the night,” and then stops singing as if to emphasize that what came next was so horribly unspeakable. Donovan was also a very good friend who started selling cocaine, and Chan hasn’t seen him since he was 13 years old. Finally there’s Charles, who told Chan he was in love with her when they were 14, but then he began to smoke crack, and then he had to “sell ass.” She says she doesn’t know where he is, just like she doesn’t know where any of the rest of them are. Yeah, I know, Chan. I knew a few kids like these growing up, and I don’t know where they are either. These days I find them at the homeless teen center where I volunteer or alternating between recovery and addiction in south Florida’s massive and growing drug treatment industry. They’re like a little nation of disposable youth unto themselves.

I have two personal memories of Cat Power performances. The first was at the now defunct Studio A in Miami. It was one of Chan’s first shows after her alcoholic breakdown, and the crowd was abuzz with rumors and speculation about what kind of crazy shit she might pull this time. Instead she delivered an absolutely riveting performance that was capped off by the most beautiful a cappella I’ve ever heard. The crowd was annoyingly restless, however, and the moment she stopped singing the club put on some dance music, forcing all the sheepish indie rockers to shuffle away to make room for those who were there to bust a move. That’s Miami for you. They must have heard that Chan was friends with Karl Lagerfeld and had started modeling for Chanel, otherwise I can’t explain why they were there. The second memory is of Cat Power’s show at the Langerado Music Festival in 2007, where the set ended with a cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” I laughed when she started playing, because it took on a whole new meaning when Chan sang it. I think I’ve heard that song about a thousand times, and I do believe it’s one of the best songs of our short century, but I’ve only heard Cat Power do it that one time (she’s never recorded a cover in the studio) and yet for some reason it’s still burned in my memory and I’ve never heard that song the same way since.

Righteous, bro!

What's with these kids today getting all pierced and tatted up for Jesus? I tried to ignore this movement and hope it would go away but of course it wouldn't, and so I turned to Lauen Sandler's Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement. It turns out these kids "found" Jesus while they were looking for something that all the alienated youth of America have been looking for since at least the 1960s--authenticity above all else, but also community and a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. I get that part. They're converting to Evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity (I know there's a difference, and multiple people have tried to explain it to me, but I still don't understand) but they're using an anti-establishment/hipster style and rhetoric doing it, you know turning their trucker hats sideways and skating a half-pipe for Jesus and moshing to hardcore and all that. I sorta get that too, because there is a long history of Christians in America (especially the poor and working-class ones) challenging the official dotrine of The Church, usually in the name of more authentic purity to The Word and in the process of challenging the hypocricy of the established authorities in the older generation. But it seriously baffles me that alienated kids who want to rage against the machine are then drawn to doctrines that call on them to submit to a higher power, live in complete denial and repression of their sexuality and their bodies, and renounce drugs and alcohol. I can't understand kids who aren't into sex and drugs, or maybe it's the case that they're actually REALLY INTO sex and/or drugs and they're at war with their desires and their bodies (that's sad, isn't it?) On an intellectual level, I do understand the submission to a higher power, because it recalls Erich Fromm's idea that freedom and individuality is actually terrifying for many (most?) people, and so they turn to the state and/or religion, or, in Fromm's day, the Nazis, because they desire a set of rules and a surrogate father, and they are terrified of being an individual stranded alone on the desert island of (post-)modernity. I understand it intellectually, but I just don't get it personally, I don't "feel it." Yes, the "Secular" culture does leave us stranded and alone, turns us all into numbers not names, leaves us with little cultural meaning besides celebrity trivia and absolutely devoid of any higher purpose beyond career and money. But why does this make people want to vote for George W. Bush, or caucus for Mike Huckabee, or put their bodies in front of abortion clinics with those gigantic pictures of aborted fetuses? But maybe there is hope. First of all, I just can't imagine that kids today are going to put up with that authority/patriarchy/Father bullshit for long, to me it seems like a retro-pose or an ironic fashion statement--like a "wife beater." Maybe the unintended consequence of our consumer culture will be that people are less inclined to "buy into" that top-down patriarchy nostalgia and more insistent on ideas that preserve and uphold their individuality and their rebelliousness, even if they are just imagined identities. I can see that these Jesus freaks have co-opted the 60s, but the 60s have also co-opted them, if you want to use that language (I prefer the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci's phrase that culture wars amount to a "war of position"--All co-optation presupposes some degree of infiltration). But if the kids want authenticity, individuality, creativity, and community, don't you think they'd more naturally be drawn to anarchism, communism, socialism, or any other -ism you might be to find at Ned Flanders' "Left-Orium" of political identities/ideologies/commodities? (and let's face it Lefties, there's a new equation in our society and it's identity=ideology=commodity and on that count our stock has been massively devalued)