The Steel Guitar Forum

Never mind the music, here's to 'Punk' marketing and design
 
By Jill Lawless, Associated Press

LONDON — To punks, image was as important as music. The Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious was a poor bassist but an excellent icon: He lived fast, died young and left a cool-looking corpse.

A new London exhibition devoted to the visual imagery of the Sex Pistols bristles with the aggressive, improvised spirit of the movement. What it reveals more than anything else is the movement's influence on marketing.
   
   
   
 The ransom-note lettering, provocative nudity and anarchic slogans pioneered by the Pistols during their brief 1970s career have all suffused modern advertising. It's hard to remember how shocking they once seemed.

"We live in a culture where we've assimilated this. We understand it now," said Paul Stolper, an art dealer who co-curated the show with editor Andrew Wilson, drawing on their extensive collection of Pistols posters, clothing and other memorabilia.

He gestured at one of the band's most arresting posters — a picture of a sullen, naked boy smoking a cigarette. "That was shocking," he said. So were images of naked cowboys, bare breasts, swastikas and inverted crucifixes, all used to create the band's image as musical and social rebels.

Early posters proclaimed the Pistols as "London's most notorious band." It was a deliberately self-fulfilling prophecy.

"The first phase of punk styling ... was probably the last time in social history that clothing would provoke hatred," noted art journalist Michael Bracewell in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition.

Nonetheless, punk quickly entered the mainstream. "As early as 1976 punk had been picked up on the radar of trend analysis," Bracewell wrote.

Running at the Hospital — a gallery, recording studio and members' club co-owned by former Eurythmics guitarist Dave Stewart — "Punk: A True and Dirty Tale" focuses on the work of designer Vivienne Westwood and graphic artist Jamie Reid. Westwood, co-owner of Sex,the King's Road shop where London's early punks gathered, outfitted the band in custom-made garments accessorized with rips, straps, clips and safety pins.

The influence of those early garments — tartan trousers, string jumpers, muslin shirts — can be seen in Westwood's later work for catwalks and boutiques around the world.

The fashions are arranged around the walls of the airy, whitewashed gallery alongside Reid's posters, leaflets and press releases. There are tartan bondage trousers, shirts mixing pornographic images and revolutionary slogans and a muslin shirt stenciled with the legend "only anarchists are pretty."

Punk, says Stolper, was more than a musical movement. It was "a phenomenal convergence of music, fashion and design."

Stolper, 39, concedes that he and Wilson are "not massive fans" of the Pistols' music but were drawn to their visual vocabulary.

"It turned graphic design upside down," he said. "You couldn't have had any of the style magazines that started in about 1980 without punk. It allowed you to get away with anything — the whole do-it-yourself ethic."

chas: What was it they once said: Once more, with feeling !!

Regards, Paul

"I mean who the #&ck really cares?!"
Iggy Pop, about Fashion Magazines

Which is probably why no-one besides old rock critics and 30-something obsessives recall that Iggy (& the Stooges) helped invent punk and the Sex Pistols idolised him.

The Sex Pistols were brilliant at marketing, thanks to Malcom McClaren, who later on went on to have larger commercial success with bands that weren't punk. And yet who lives on more in popular culture?, the Sex Pistols.
Interesting.

<SMALL>To punks, image was as important as music. </SMALL>

Actually, you could replace "punks" with any of the various styles of pop music.

<SMALL>outfitted the band in custom-made garments accessorized with_________</SMALL>

Baggy and saggy, or cowboy hats and boots, leather, or teen pop stuff, surfboards......

From my perspective, pop music is more about social phenomenon and identity, that has music as part of its medium. You could think of people as "walking theatres" with themselves as the main actor, who then buys the costume and the soundtrack to fit the identity they've chosen for themselves.

In that regard, the music and the "identities" are tailored and marketed to us, the consumers.

I believe it was Frank Zappa who once said: "No music ever became popular unless you could dress up to it." -MJ-

Well, yeah, image is always a big part of pop music. But it is a mistake to think it is "only" image. The top hits, the ones that make it to the oldies collections and elevator muzak, and that bring people onto the dance floor 30 or 40 years later, have something to please the ear and the heart. There were lots of those in the early years of rock'n'roll. Also there were lots in the hippie rock years, not many in the disco years, some from the New Wave years (but not many - any?- from punk during those same years). It's hard to imagine much being memorable from the current pop/hip-hop years (but who knows).

The first hits of Elvis, and the early rock'n'rollers came before anyone knew what they looked like. It was all strictly blind over the radio. It was the sound. They had an image, but nobody saw it until after they heard the music.

Maybe punk was the last rebellion. It's still the rebell look 30 years later. In the '50s we wouldn't be caught dead with last years look or sound, much less anything from 30 years ago. Since the '50s, there has always been room for some nostalgia (Shanana, Leon Redbone, etc.), but kids are still dressing punk like was the latest thing. What's up with that?