Cruella's Devilishly Remarkable Costume Design

June 9, 2021

Disney live-action remakes of animation films have come under the scrutiny of a vocal number of fans of the originals. Either from their uncreative approach at almost precisely copying the source material while adding nothing more than a little sprinkle of overcooked CGI and a pinch of Uncanny Valley to many more abstract or object-based characters like the Genie from Aladdin and Lumiere and Cogsworth from Beauty and the Beast, or from the movie’s blind faith towards recreating the magic of the animation instead of what makes the original films great, these motion pictures have received a lot of hate regardless.

This criticism is not particularly part of my experience. (I appreciate a lot of aspects of 2019’s Aladdin, including the Bollywood-inspired dance sequences and Jasmine’s new song and her portrayal as a princess who cares about politics, Agrabah, and its citizens, earning the position of Sultana, and 2019’s Lion King is a visual and technological marvel regardless of the “emotionless” character facial expressions.) Moreover, even if such opinions thrive in places like Metacritic, Twitter, and sometimes YouTube, box office numbers provide a whole new worldview to the vocally unbeloved motion pictures. As two examples, Beauty and the Beast made $1.26 billion globally, while The Lion King made $1.56 billion worldwide.

This more optimistic perspective to the live-action remakes where, in the majority of times, people keep on coming back for more, not unlike the MCU movies with the amount of money both franchises make with their hits and misses, partially proves that not everybody who watches a movie and enjoys it goes on social media to defend it, so the unilateral view presented about them on social media is not the only reality of the situation (even film reviewers have disparate opinions). That is a factor, amongst many others, people should consider when reviewing a movie’s performance above only believing in the words of the vocal majority. If someone does not like how Disney treats their live-action remakes and finds a community of people who agree, they can and should have their opinions, and Disney can learn from some critiques, but to believe that their views are the truth of the matter and that everyone else stands with them is misguided. Still, if you have either liked or disliked the movies, you are very much entitled to do so.

Controversy (and a touch of audience alienation) aside, the most recent episode of this “love it or hate it” franchise, rather a quasi-installment to the list of Disney live-action remakes, is Cruella. Actually, in my opinion, my little rant above was totally unnecessary for this post because simply put, Cruella falls considerably far away from the wardrobe of remakes, both in content and tone, so I may have just borrowed your time a tiny bit more than I should have. Oopsie. Either way, this The Devil Wears Prada-esque feature-length is more akin to a prequel than a remake (especially if you consider the 1996’s 101 Dalmation to be one of the first Disney live-action spins and that Emma Stone’s character is a past version of Glenn Close’s) and more closely resembles Maleficent in its focus on making a villain the protagonist.

The only manner in which Cruella could be called a pure live-action remake would be if, for example, 2019’s The Lion King was about how Mufasa and Scar’s father was a segregationist and dictatorial king against the Hienas, and Mufasa was congruent to such policies while Scar was a rebellious opponent of the marginalization of the species. Or maybe if 2015’s Cinderella featured an intricate Regency or Victorian-era love triangle between Lady Tremaine and Cinderella’s Mother and Father and how Tremaine poisoned Mother because the antagonist got impregnated by a husband she did not want to have due to an arranged marriage (Father was going to be her original match) and began to be increasingly afraid that the horrible husband would send Drizella and Anastasia away due to certain congenital conditions that made them look different. Hence, the only way for her to conquer Father back was to poison her miserable husband, inherit his fortune, and then kill Mother to get her out of the picture. But none of the situations described above are true, and I am rather having fun stalling the audience from the post’s actual content. Yet, it appears that with Cruella, a movie that is being compared with DC’s Joker in its depiction of a protagonist’s downfall into badness/madness, her appeal comes from seeing what made Estella become Cruella, a wholly original interpretation of such a character. Are we supposed to morally like the villains they come to become? Of course not, but at least Disney is adding a little more PG-13 spice into what makes their iconic villains both likable and “bad” with this film, which does precisely that with literal style.

Cruella seems to have appeased some critics that are calling it “the best live-action Disney update yet,” update being the keyword here since “remake” entails the unquantified modification of a plot in structure, characterization, context, and production, while “update” has a more varied tone to the number of narratives one can tell inside an already existing story (the end of the movie creates a direct reference to the original). Nonetheless, for those who still believe Cruella is a remake, the fact that it exists as very much its own thing years apart from the story in 101 Dalmations without many special effects has offset most, if not all, the criticism the remake-haters have about this Disney franchise. If somebody is to criticize the movie, they will now focus on its inherited flaws (if or when they find it) rather than the fact that it is trying too hard and failing at reproducing the magic of the original. Now, I have my own opinions about Cruella, but I will keep them separate so I can divert my attention to breaking down the undeniably gorgeous and highly stylish costume designing of the movie, one of its undoubtful highlights. This may sound inconsiderate and rude, but if a person left the film thinking that its costume designs are “average” compared to other movies in general, I am astounded at that person’s blind moxie.

The Undertaking

Two-time Oscar-winner costume designer Jenny Beavan is a master in her craft, and Cruella solidified her status as such even more. Previously working on Mad Max: Furry Road, The King’s Speech, A Room with a View, and on both installments of Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law’s Sherlock Holmes series, Beavan was contacted by Disney producer Kristin Burr to helm the project after helping her with 2018’s Christopher Robin, a movie that is in itself a unique spin on Winnie-the-Pooh. In an interview with Popsugar, Beavan mentions that after reading the script for the first time, the designer was doubtful is she would be able to take the movie on and that she started “everything — with complete terror, obviously, because it was so enormous.” Enormous such a creative undertaking was.

The main character and the antagonist had 80 costumes weaved for them combined: 47 for Estella/Cruella, played by Emma Stone, and 33 for the Baroness, played by Emma Thompson. For the rest of the principal cast, 197 garments were constructed. Even if these numbers don’t feel very magnificent, especially when you compare Daphne’s 104 dresses alone in Bridgerton (granted, it is a Netflix series with eight episodes in its first season), making almost 80 Haute-couture garments that are supposed to depict different levels of creative fashion designing, with varied shapes, colors, fabrics, cuts, and sewing skills, be unique in their own ways is sincerely astounding. The amount of variation found in the sketches sprinkled throughout Cruella alone is enough for a whole fashion show. But then, every time the Baroness appeared in it, she wore something different, highly fashionable, and sometimes even timeless, a result of her being, first, an aristocrat, and second, the head of her fashion label. To design 33 unique premium-looking garbs for one movie is to create and weave for a small portion of the celebrities from the Met Gala or an award show at once, and that is impressive. But then, the movie depicts around six major fashion events, and they all feature Haute-couture for both Cruella and the gala guests, perplexing me even more about how a group of fashionistas and seamstresses were able to come up with all the costumes for it.

I am going to skip over Estella’s garments (more subtle than her counterpart’s but still complex and fashion-forward) to highlight only Cruella’s and the Baroness’ in the following paragraphs, but I need first to stop and say that the work Jenny Beavan and her team put into crafting all of Cruella’s looks alone should be recorded in film history, preferably in a museum displaying all the original costumes. Now that I said it, let's talk about inspirations.

Rock & Vogue

Cruella’s story transpires in the British ‘70s, a time of rebellious countercultural movements marked by underground musical genres like hardcore and punk rock (Sex Pistols and The Clash come to mind) and alternative designers such as Dame Vivienne Westwood, who brought modern punk and new wave fashion into the spotlight. In an interview with Vogue UK, Beavan explains that the designer was one of the inspirations for the rebellious personality Cruella imbues into her work, together with BodyMap, an early 80s fashion label marked by their peculiar fashion shows and clothing with lots of prints and layered shapes, and Nina Hagen, an internationally renowned German punk and new wave singer known for her subversive sense of style (a combo between Madonna, Kiss, and David Bowie). In a virtual press conference for the movie, she further mentions Galliano and Alexander McQueen as part of her “mood board” inspirations, and the latter’s aesthetic, which Cruella’s director Craig Gillespie praised while talking to the LA Times for the “shock value of his shows and the creative outrageousness of some of his work,” heavily influenced how Cruella was visually portrayed and the way she planned her pop-up shows, even if McQueen found his label in 1992.

Moreover, the ‘70s were a time when what was in vogue expanded the expressive freedom of ‘60’s clothing, now featuring nipped, tight waists, exaggerated flared shapes, and more. Talking to Collider, Beavan spotlights Dior, Balenciaga, and other great ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s fashion designers (like Elsa Schiaparelli) as primary inspirations for the Baroness’ evolving aesthetic, after she “looked at the really high fashion of the period, particularly [on] Vogue,” a resource that is “very available online.” In the movie, the Baroness appears as a character with a style that I would call chrono-fluid, meaning that her sense of fashion does not belong to only one decade but rather exists in a fluid state between years. For instance, her closet pulls from the ‘50s and ‘60s aesthetics while staying fashionable 5 or 15 years later. Basically, throughout the movie, the Baroness wears both past and present designs from her label, and as mentioned before, Beavan looked into previous years to build the antagonist’s look, and because she has been in the fashion business for a long time, the character’s sense of style both exists inside and transcends the borders of time.

The ‘70s were the stylistic soul of Cruella’s fashion, primarily due to the visual aesthetic of the time as explored above, but Beavan also imbued the decade into the process of preliminary dressing and fitting of Cruella’s movie costumes. In the Vogue UK interview, writer Radhika Seth asked her if her team had sourced vintage clothes from London and New York. The costume designer explained that, like she used to do in her past — getting her clothes on vintage shops, especially on Portobello Road because she could not afford more popular brands like Westwood or Biba — Beavan and her team found different garments from London’s Portobello Road Market and A Current Affair fair on Brooklyn, New York City, to build the preliminary fitting outfits for Emma Stone by combining different garbs in a myriad of combinations until they felt suitable for her and the portrayal of Estella and Cruella. One of Braven’s main goals was to not overdue the already excessive ‘70s style because then the movie’s clothing could look more like a party costume than actual garments. Moreover, she did not intend to be entirely faithful to the ‘70s, so Cruella could still feel like a contemporary piece based on the past. In the end, even though none of the garments in the film were part of this vintage mish-mash of elements, rather being remade following the overall shape and image created by the preliminary costumes, the whole idea of taking vintage clothing and reshaping them reverberated into the narrative in Estella’s approach to creating Cruella’s outfits, especially Baroness’ red dress she wears for the Black and White Gala.

Cruella- Red Ravage

Now that the inspirations segment is done, onto the designs themselves. Approaching Cruella’s overall palette, Jenny Beavan mentions that the eponymous protagonist’s colors “were clear: black and white with some grey, plus the red for the signature moments” (and her lipstick). Such a scarlet moment arrives in the Baroness’ above-mentioned Black and White Gala, where the character of Cruella first steals both the movie and the fashion scene. Draped in a white silk robe (maybe charmeuse) with a black eye masquerade mask and her iconic black and white hair, Cruella makes her first fashion statement by setting it on fire (all special effects) to uncover her interpretation of the Baroness label vintage red dress in an event where people cannot wear color.

In the Collider interview, Beavan explains that she found a cheap red dress in a shop in Beverly Hills, and upon seeing it on Emma Stone’s body, she thought, “This could almost work, she looks so good.” However, because the fashion moments were dictated by the script, it already mentioned that the Baroness’s luxury fashion label once sold such a dress, so it could not look like an inexpensive gown. Thus, taking inspiration from Charles James 1955 Tree dress, an iconic 20th-century designer known for his fascination with exploring and conforming to body shapes and a highly structured aesthetic, the costume designer and her team decided to remake the gown they purchased before to match the story, where Estella would have deconstructed and reconstructed it with her imbued rebellious persona. In Beavan’s words, “The idea was that there was enough fabric in this dress, (...) that you could just about believe that she made it from this original work that she found.” The idea came from fashion artisan Ian Wallace, who also finalized its look.

Cruella-Unruly Highlights

Throughout the film, Cruella also appears briefly with highly creative and majorly fashionable gowns in what Beavan calls photobomb moments since they feature the protagonist stealing the entrance buzz from the Baroness in front of a big fashion event. For a fan of fashion, these consecutive scenes that display Cruella in her high-collar leather biker jacket, orange sequin pants, and black makeup spelling “The Future;” in her British General uniform-inspired blue and red coat with adorned epaulets with golden miniature horses and carriages, black and white crown, and large frilly pink and black train skirt; and in her newspaper bodice and garbage-patterned skirt, are quick snippets of inspiring splendor. Those photobomb moments, coupled with the rock runaway show in the moth dress scene where the protagonist dons a fake Dalmatian coat and skirt outfit, were thought of by Beavan as the antithesis of an average fashion display. Therefore, their revolutionary, energetic, punk essence, the opposite of Baroness’ ordinary and stagnant approach to fashion shows representative of tradition, inspired how the costume designs would look like, be reused, and shift, from leaning towards a more defiant look (motorcycle outfit) to moving into a more militaristic side as satire (British army coat) to going into a more fantastical side (the newspaper/garbage dress).

Kirsten Fletcher, a designer who sculpts fashion into art, was the fashionista Beavan’s team worked with to construct the three photobomb designs and many other costumes. Working at Shepperton Studios in the U.K., where most of Cruella’s garments were weaved and put together, Fletcher had to undertake the challenge of, in Beavan’s words, making “a skirt that you can A) climb onto a car in and, and B) you can swish around to cover up [the car]” in regards to the military/skirt getup. The skirt had to be the perfect weight for it to be light enough for Stone to wear but heavy enough to be swished around the Baroness’ vehicle and stay there. Beavan also mentions that they “did an original version with a more frilly [look], which looked fabulous, but it was too heavy,” so Fletcher and Beavan’s team had to improvise, and after some trial and error, they came up with an idea of layering the skirt with petals. Around 5,060 petals were hand-sewn into the costume by the group, which made it an optimum weight. Fletcher also gave a lot of input into crafting the garbage truck dress, one-of-a-kind, which Beavan states loving making, and Stone mentions as her favorite.

I could continue writing about the ludicrous and beautiful garments Cruella wears in the rest of the movie, but the Baroness will be left out of this post for too long if I do so. However, if you would like to know, my favorite outfit is the Cruella DeVil look Stone wears with the half-black (latex?) jacket, half-white (satin?) shirt after (spoiler alert) the Baroness is arrested. It is peculiarly empowering (should I say this?), simple in execution yet succinctly creative with the coat/shirt knitted design, and the perfect balance of white tints and black shades where Cruella’s darker persona overshadows Estella’s brighter side. Moreover, I appreciate that Cruella’s attire when moving into the “Hell Hall” has similar pointed shoulder structures to the ones seen worn by Glen Close’s Cruella de Vil, a subtle reference to a past film and a possible future. So, let us not waste more time and onto Baroness Von Hellman.

The Baroness-The Splendor of the Callous

While Cruella lives in the duality of black and white (splashed with red and grey), the Baroness dwells mostly on browns, golds, and some shades of black. As previously mentioned, she is slightly old-fashioned, having a taste that conforms to the 1950s and ‘60s fashion scene while simultaneously updating them to the ‘70s style, and many times with her, the difference between the concept of a gala dress and a day-to-day garment relies on subtle, yet apparent nuances in color, shape, and texture. She is so fashionable that the clothing she wears to go out often looks as close to Haute-couture as the outfits she wears in her events and galas. The Baroness is the definition of dress to impress. Partnering with costume maker Jane Law, who had previously worked on 1996’s 101 Dalmations and Mad Max: Fury Road with Jenny Beavan, the costume designer took a different approach to creating the prototypes for Emma Thompson’s fitting.

Because Beavan already knew Thompson from Sense and Sensibility and other previous events, she understood the actress’s shape, framing, style, and general behavior towards wearing the clothes Beavan designed for her. In the Collider interview, she explains that “Emma Thompson has a stunningly good figure and loves wearing clothes like this (...), which also brings something to the whole costume. Some people just stand in it, but she embodies it.” From this previous knowledge, the costume designer bought various fabrics that could work well with both Thompson’s poise and body and the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s fashion aesthetic, giving preference to more sculptural textiles, “fabrics with a good stiffness and body to it.” Then, Beavan and Law would drape the fabrics directly in a mannequin to build the prototype. They would then decide if the prototypes were proper and which scene they would belong in and then call in Thompson to try it all. They aimed to achieve an “obviously asymmetric and very fitted, very snobbish” overall look, as Beavan mentioned in the movie’s virtual press conference.

At the same virtual event, Nadia Stacey, the film’s makeup and hairstylist who did a spectacular job with, in particular, Cruella’s different hairstyles and makeup touch-ups in every single new costume, explained that to conform to the sculpted look of the Baroness, Stacey ran with the idea “that she perfected her look, and everything is kind of variation on a theme.” That is why, throughout the film, the Baroness remains with the same general giant top knot bun hair (sometimes covered with a turban, other times loose, curled, or braided), and her makeup drives focus from her eyelids to her lipstick colors. While Cruella’s makeup and hairstyle constantly change to fit her costumes, where the audience sometimes sees her doing a Harley Quinn and painting her face white or playing with eye shapes and different lipstick colors and glossiness (my true lack of understanding of makeup artistry is showing here), the Baroness’ makeup and hairstyle are modeled to be constant to her personality; fashionable, yet rigid.

Finally, at the beginning of Cruella, the Baroness is hosting a ball for her 18th century inspired collection, a highly produced scene that feels more like a “blink and you miss it” moment more than anything. Such a mission to dress a whole room and the movie’s antagonist in highly tailored and fabric-heavy period clothing, especially ones influenced by Marie Antoinette’s outfits, should appear to be a massive undertaking. But it feels like, with today’s enormous interest in period pieces (Bridgerton, The Tudors, Outlander, Elizabeth, Marie Antoinette, The Other Boleyn Girl, Mary Queen of Scotts, The Favorite, Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, anything related to royalty or Jane Austen, really), so many costume houses are specialized in period clothing from almost any century, especially those with the most amount of artistic evidence pointing to their fashion realities. Beavan mentions in the Collider interview that she was quickly able to find the right places that sell the period-accurate textiles and patterns and decided to combine them with “1960’s jewelry, hair, and makeup because people don’t normally do full 18th century [costumes].” Therefore, the costume designer felt it was both possible and doable to recreate the past and blend it with the present’s fashion aesthetic to form an opulent scene that, though brief, was still able to present to the audience that the Baroness was both a creative force and a highly wealthy woman.

Fashion is Art

Altogether, Jenny Beavan’s costume designs in Cruella are artfully conceived of, to say the least. Her masterful job in bringing a second life to the 1970s aesthetic in tandem with a more contemporary approach to conceptualization, visual impact, and the crafting process is what the designer excels at in the movie, creating time-appropriate garments that feel timely in Cruella and the Baroness’ bodies. If the movie’s costumes are not given an iconic status in the future — being nominated and receiving several awards, being featured in a fashion exhibition, stirring up some creative trends on the internet based on its looks — I would be shocked and a little disappointed. (Update: Between many accolades, Cruella won Best Costume Design at the 94th Academy Awards and Excellence in Period Film at the 24th Costume Designers Guild Awards). The level of creative input and fashion knowledge applied in coming up with Haute-couture designs that would fit Cruella’s chic and fashionable, yet insanely whimsical rebellious nature was sky high, and adding onto it the Baroness’ luxury label outfits may have set the bar up and opened up new possibilities for future designers to apply their grasp of fashion history, industry, and techniques and combine them with the forever growing creative power of artists in a world where art and design are highly accessible through the internet.

Accordingly, I am not surprised a Cruella sequel got greenlit by Disney. Executives seemed satisfied, audiences flabbergasted by the costumes, and the numbers spoke for themselves (not necessarily the box office ones since the movie is also watchable on Disney + Premier Access). Even though Beavan may not work on this sequel (this is not confirmed, only my own speculation) due to her not been very thrilled with Disney licensing clothing lines from brands like Her Universe and Rag & Bone based on her designs without her direct knowledge nor input of some kind, something that, interestingly enough has happened many times in movies before like Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey, Clueless, and Enchanted, her impact has been felt with vigor. I hope that, if Cruella II actually happens, the costume design is as unique as what Beavan created and that Disney justly treats designers by letting them know beforehand about marketing opportunities and working with them to craft the marketable items. In the same virtual press conference I referenced so many times before, Beavan said, “In fact, in my real life, I have no interest in clothes. I just love telling stories with them. So for me, that was just brilliant,” so I hope she continues telling more stories and inspiring future costume designers to do so. I, for one, am inspired.

Cover Image Via

Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/disney-cruell...

Before There Was Punk, There Was Death

February 4, 2021

Punk subculture is a coalescence of countless radical aesthetics and convictions. Irrepressibility. A do-it-yourself spirit. Anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian mindsets. Rebellious attire.

Notorious whiteness.

With the rise of bands and artists from the likes of the Ramones, Patti Smith, and the Sex Pistols in the mid-70’s, three black brothers from Detroit, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, had already laid out the foundation.

The story of the brothers was recalled in a 2012 documentary film titled A Band Called Death, directed by Mark Christopher Covino and Jeff Howlett, and follows two of the brothers as they tell the tale of Death and its new found glory decades after their disbandment.

The film begins, after a compilation of confessions from musicians like Kid Rock and Questlove, by giving us tracking shots of worn down houses, caved-in rooftops, and dilapidated arches that read

MO OR CITY IN U T R L PARK

in Detroit, Michigan. “Welcome to my neighborhood,” Bobby Hackney Sr. boasts, “2240 Lillibridge. This is where Death was born.”

The band was composed of Bobby Hackney Sr. on vocals and bass, Dannis Hackney on drums, and David Hackney as guitarist, songwriter, and leader.

The Death brothers grew up during Motown time in Detroit, preacher’s sons with spirituality rooted deep within them. It’s when their father sat them down to watch The Beatles play that they knew music is what they wanted to do. It was David that rallied them together to form the band. The brothers, unsure whether they wanted to be a rock or a funk band, were first called Rock Fire Funk Express. When David went down one day to see The Who, he knew rock and roll was the music they had to play. And when Dennis saw Alice Cooper, all bets were off.

After the death of their father, in Spring of 1974 David came up with the name that changed it all: Death. Their name would always have shock value, because “death is real,” David claimed. The goal was to put a positive spin on death, the ultimate trip. The circles on the band’s logo, the Death triangle, represent the three elements of life: the spiritual, the mental, the physical. The latter circle is the guiding spirit of the universe. It’s God, really.

Dannis and Bobby still ooze musician cool decades later, the brothers bringing the crew throughout their home while pointing out corners of memories and the ghosts of their instruments. This is where Dannis’ drums would be. This is where David would stand.

Film stills of the Hackney brothers from A Band Called Death

The name was a roadblock, but wouldn’t change under any circumstances. “If we give him the title of our band,” David said on record producer Clive Davis, “we might as well give him everything else.”

And what’s more punk than resistance? Than persistent blackness?

They don't care who they step on
As long as they get along
Politicians in my eyes
They could care less about you
They could care less about me
As long as they are to end
The place that they want to be
Politicians in My Eyes (1974/2009)

It’s in this discomfort that Death crafted itself as a band ahead of its time, proto-punk among an age of angsty whiteness.

But is it really all in the name? I don’t bite.

Black folks time after time are forced to deal with their invisibility and hypervisibility in popular culture. In the 70’s, the association with black musicians to the Motown sound, especially in its birthplace of Detroit, left artists like the Hackney brothers in the dust of a seemingly whitewashed sound: a sound that they pioneered.

“We were ridiculed because at the time everybody in our community was listening to the Philadelphia sound, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers,” Bobby said to Red Bull Music Academy, “People thought we were doing some weird stuff. We were pretty aggressive about playing rock ’n’ roll because there were so many voices around us trying to get us to abandon it.”

Their inability to get radio play caused them to sell most of their equipment, and in 1977 Death disbanded. Dannis and Bobby closed the book on that chapter in their lives and formed reggae band Lambsbread in the 80’s. Before David’s eventual death in 2000, he told his brothers, “The world’s gonna come looking for the Death stuff.” And he was right.

In the early 2000’s the resurrection began. The newfound discovery of Death was an anagmalation of things: Bobby Hackney’s sons’ interest in the punk rock scene, the influence of musician Don “Das” Schwenk, and the mysterious ways in which the universe can only discover a band of visionaries lying in wait decades later. Schwenk, a longtime friend of the Hackneys, was commissioned to create the album art for what would have been the Politicians In My Eyes LP back in the day: unable to pay him, the brothers gave him copies of the LP instead. Years later after Death’s demise, Schwenk began to hand them out to collectors. “It’s never too late,” he said.

Bobby and Dannis Hackney for The New York Times

The track list to Death’s original master tape from the 70’s

As the record began to circulate among collectors circles, niche popularity grew. It made its way to Chunklet magazine and eventually began to spin at underground rock ‘n roll parties. It’s how Julian Hackney, son of Bobby, discovered that his father and two uncles were punk before punk was punk—since the brothers never felt the need to tell the kids about all the rejection they went through as rock stars. After a friend of Julian recommended him to listen to the band Death, his father’s voice on the record was unmistakable. The discovery led to Bobby’s sons forming their own band, Rough Francis, to cover Death’s music.

And there is something quite beautiful about that. About the legacy of music passed down almost hereditarily, though unconsciously. It’s Bobby’s sons who made it their mission to get the music out, to let the world know that their father and uncles were the predecessors of what punk became. In 2009, Death was able to officially release their 1970s demos as the studio album …For the Whole World to See: it was named decades before by their late brother, David.

In the opening of the film, the camera follows Dannis and Bobby haphazardly, panning back and forth between their conversation with old neighborhood friends. When Bobby tells one of them, “They’re telling the story about death,” the woman shrugs, “I’m still here!”

Sounds familiar. Sounds like a legacy. Sounds immortal.

Bobby and Dannis Hackney showing off their official 2009 studio album, …For the Whole World to See — Bobby and Dannis Hackney showing off their official 2009 studio album, *…For the Whole World to See*

A Band Called Death (2012) can be streamed on Prime Video, or Youtube.com

…For the Whole World to See can be found directly on Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming platforms

Unlinked pictures, including the featured image, were stills taken directly from A Band Called Death (2012)

Blackness and Authenticity in Punk

November 11, 2020

It’s incredibly telling that rock critic and historian Greil Marcus was able to pronounce what punk rock was in 1979 – just two years after Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was released, the only album by the band he calls the “formal (though not historical) conclusion” of punk. Punk was a brief flash of brilliance, an explosion whose shrapnel we are still feeling today as the genres that splintered off: post-punk, hardcore, new wave, noise rock, pop-punk, whatever term the editors of No Depression finally settled on, and ultimately all of “alternative” rock. One way or another, punk is the year zero for all rock music that came after; its effects are hard to overstate, and go far beyond the music.

Marcus argues the Sex Pistols took punk’s first-wave to a vitriolic conclusion by redefining it in their image, away from the avant-garde punks of New York. Self-appointed dean of rock critics Robert Chistgau describes the work of “avant-punk” as:

harness[ing] late industrial capitalism in a love-hate relationship whose difficulties are acknowledged, and sometimes disarmed, by means of ironic aesthetic strategies: formal rigidity, role-playing, humor. In fact, ironies will pervade and, in a way, define this project: the lock-step drumming will make liberation compulsive, pain-threshold feedback will stimulate the body while it deadens the ears…

The Pistols dropped the “avant-” and with it the irony and self-conscious artistry of Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, Lou Reed, and other seminal avant-punks. In its place they put – or at least Rotten and Vicious put – unadulterated, ugly nihilism. This is why Marcus places Sex Pistols at the formal conclusion of punk: they were committed to the destruction of everything, including (paradoxically) rock itself. Unlike the Clash, who were careful to be on the right side politically, the politics of the Pistols was pure negation in its most gleefully manic form. This is what makes listening to Nevermind the Bollocks exhilarating, to this day: the guitars assault the senses while the drums clamor away oppressively, and Rotten – what hasn’t been said about him already? His snarls, his rolled-R’s, half-sung half-growled, that devious cackle; he’s the most convincingly nasty singer rock’s ever seen. When Rotten says he is the Antichrist, you almost believe him.

Rotten’s lyrics are loathing-filled tirades, the product of unfocused dissatisfaction channeled into hate and aimed at anything in sight. Listening to the Pistols is less an experience of having your dissatisfactions reflected back to you than magnified, made metaphysical in scope, and as Christgau writes, aimed at – for the time in rock – those in power. He is a lightning rod for the inchoate rage and dissatisfaction in the listener. He gives the intoxicating feeling of having the freedom to take things too far, of hearing your worst impulses acted out, of glimpsing something beyond the claustrophobia of ordinary life, of, as Elvis Costello sang, biting the hand that feeds you. It can be childish, but also often brilliant and beautiful. The Pistols showed the pure joy of hate.

Still, the Sex Pistols were doomed to fail from the beginning, in both their broader goal of tearing down the institutions they railed against, and in merely surviving as a band. Denial of everything can never make a coherent philosophical position – much less a viable political one. They tried to destroy rock by making it; to deny the past and the future alike while drawing on the former and influencing the latter; to remove themselves from the game of images while astutely managing theirs; to be outcasts signed to a major label. Working under the thought that what we’re offended can show us our true beliefs and expose our hypocrisies, the Pistols railed against the tyranny they saw in English society. But by the same logic they also gave voice to, and thereby legitimized the pointlessly cruel behavior of Sid Vicious. Their contradictions vitalized their music while destroying them as individuals and a band. Marcus is right that the noblest thing Rotten could have done was to leave, to become as anonymous as he could.

In contrast to the high-minded vitriol (and below-the-belt punches) of the Pistols, there is my favorite of the first-wave English punks, the Buzzcocks. Their EP Spiral Scratch was the first independently released punk album in the UK, beginning the proudly independent trend in punk rock. Rightly grouped among the progenitors of pop-punk, Buzzcocks used the discordance and cacophony of punk on their masterpiece, Singles Going Steady, to give musical expression to the anguish, excitement, humor, and longing of love, infusing the bombast with an ear for pop craftsmanship.

Buzzcocks proved to their peers and the masses alike that the musical language of punk could be used to express something other than hate and boredom; punk, to them, was personal. Their best songs refused to participate in the lyrical refrains of prior punk, from the avant-punk Christgau described to Rotten’s nihilism. “Orgasm Addict,” a charming song about masturbation, would go on to help inspire future generations of self-love themed punk songs (a natural development, perhaps, of punk’s DIY attitude). Pete Shelley sounds exasperated in “What Do I Get” from a lack of love, while on “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” the band sounds like a cynical reflection of the Beach Boys. They expressed classic punk themes on the bratty “Oh Shit” and “Autonomy.” These were no one chord wonders.

Their most effective statement of purpose is found on the single “Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve).” Guitars rip and clash, then momentarily hold back, before repeating the cycle in the neverending game of exhaustion and ecstasy, heartbreak and rapture of doomed love. While the guitars give sonic articulation to the tsunami of emotion which threatens to crush Shelley under its weight, the drums start and stop in turn; rarely has a drum mimicked a nervously flitting heartbeat so well. Shelley’s pointed use of gender neutral pronouns – he was the first openly bisexual musician in English punk – makes the song welcoming of love of all types, a rarity in many punk songs. His boyish yelp is more pained than angry, contrasted all the more by Howard Devoto’s sneering affect on Spiral Scratch. Shelley asks more questions than punk’s usual list of demands, voices a rare vulnerability in a genre seemingly dominated by machismo visions of male invulnerability.

They were decried by many in the punk community as phonies. They weren’t political enough; they were too poppy; they didn’t sound tough. Punk wasn’t always overtly political, of course: the first UK punk single, the Damned’s “New Rose,” was dismissed by Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols as just being about a bird. Nonetheless, in a world where his mere existence as a queer man was made political, Shelley weaponized his vulnerability against the heteronormative culture around him. As he said, expressing a theme Riot Grrrls would later pick up: “Well, I never knew there was a law against sounding vulnerable. And anyway, personal politics are part of the human condition, so what could be more political than human relationships?”

As for the accusation of appealing to pop: Who cares? Punk isn’t, and never could have been, a total break from the past. The Buzzcocks, though influenced by the Pistols, owe far more to the faux-dumbness of the Ramones, who never had the political pretensions of the English punks nor their unironic straightforwardness. The Ramones flaunted their bubblegum pop influences from the famous first words of their debut: “Hey ho, let’s go!” Their punk wasn’t about denying the past but transforming it: democratizing it to anyone who can manage three cords and reinvigorating it from the bloatedness and naked commercialism of the ‘70s. But where the Ramones interrogation of the past was often ironic, masked by a studied naïvete, Buzzcocks played it straight. They openly revel in Beatlesque melodies, while Shelley admitted to admiring the music of the Supremes and Kinks (a cardinal sin in punk at the time). Punk wasn’t a break with the past or a denial of it; it was a method of interpreting it, a way of making music and of living. They distorted their influences through the lens of punk, and in so doing made pop, but made it more immediate than anyone before them. They may have just been talking about birds (and blokes), but that didn’t make their music any less affecting or radical, nor did it make them inauthentic.

*****

In an analysis of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, Chuck Klosterman reflects on the media cycle surrounding the follow-up to the incredibly popular Nevermind. In Utero was purported, prior to release, to be “unlistenable,” and Cobain himself claimed it was going to sell “a quarter as much” as Nevermind. Legendary, and legendarily acerbic, producer and Big Black frontman Steve Albini was producing. Newsweek reported their label, Geffen, wouldn’t release the record as is. To Cobain, though, this was intentional. The album had to be bad – that is, bad in the eyes of the general listening public – to be good in Cobain’s eyes. He was unable to reconcile the sales figures of Nevermind with his own credibility as an artist; the caustic elements of In Utero were atonement for his sins on Nevermind. The feeling Klosterman ascribes to Cobain is guilt: for success, artistic and commercial, for “selling out,” for not being punk enough.

Cobain was struggling with what will be the focus of the remainder of this essay: punk’s fraught notion of authenticity and its implications. Punks rejected the (what they saw as) white middle-class values of respectability and conformity for a “realer,” more “authentic” lifestyle, and to achieve the autonomy they felt had been denied them by those values. Thus, in order to subvert the dominant culture, punk fetishized the ugly over the beautiful, the depressed over the happy, the detestable over the morally sanctioned, and the urban over the suburban. Punks created their counterculture through what Daniel Traber in Cultural Critique terms self-marginalization: they repudiated the privileges afforded them by their race (mostly white), and class (mostly middle-class) and rejected that culture’s values. This reasoning is what led, for example, The Clash to implore “respectable” whites to riot: “Black man got lotta problems/ But they don’t mind throwin’ a brick… While we walk the streets/ Too chicken to even try it.” This rejection of their inherited privileges was in some sense done out of a feeling of moral imperative, which Joel Olston would later elegize in Profane Existence as constituting a rejection of “the white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist world order.” But it was also a means of acting out the alienation many punks felt and creating a culture for themselves – whoever “them” was defined as.

Differentiating real from fake was crucial to the project of punk. But since punk was defined by the negation of dominant cultural values, the continued hegemony of those values was necessary to sustain its uniqueness and authenticity. Subversion, that is, requires a dominant culture to undermine in order to have meaning. (The power of subversion is therefore limited, as it is defined equally as much by the dominant culture as mainstream forms of expression are – its meaning is always parasitic upon the mainstream.) Thus despite the acute need individual punks felt to distinguish themselves, punk came to be defined by a certain look (think: Richard Hell, lean and hungry, torn clothes manicured to look ragged) and set of behaviors (think: self-destruction). The notion of “authenticity” operating during the first-wave of punk is memorably summarized by one scenester in the L.A. punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization: "Everyone got called a poseur, but you could tell the difference: Did you live in a rat-hole and dye your hair pink and wreck every towel you owned and live hand-to-mouth on Olde English 800 and potato chips? Or did you live at home and do everything your mom told you and then sneak out?"

Of course, notions of authenticity varied across and even within scenes; the L.A. punk scene, for example, was criticized as not being political enough by British punks and Greil Marcus, just as the Singles Going Steady era Buzzcocks had been. But the general trends – poverty, rejection of authority, etc. – are enough to see the problematic implications of the notion. Their self-marginalization was based on a constructed vision of the marginalized other inherited from their – typically – white, suburban middle-class upbringing. Thus in attempting to duplicate the experiences and position of the marginalized, they implicitly acknowledged their conception of the other.

Punk’s articulation of marginalization can be likened to that espoused in Norman Mailer’s essay The White Negro, in which he wrote that free from the restraints of white morality, the black underclass lives a more creative, spontaneous, sexual, and hip life. “The Negro,” Mailer wrote, “kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present… relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body.” In a world marred by the twin horrors of concentration camps and the atom bomb, we [white Americans] must all face the same choice African-Americans did, which is to repress oneself, or to “encourage the psychopath in oneself”: “to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present… the life where a man must go until he is beat… where he must be with it or doomed not to swing.” Punk adopted this dichotomy with a desperate zeal.

The suburbs, seen as the home of the white middle-class, was a slow death-by-boredom, oppression through conformity, and above all, mundane. Only by rejecting that life could authentically be found. (The source of Mailer and punk’s shared notion that the marginalized are more “authentic” can be traced back to a Romantic line of thought where the peasant, “untouched” by civilization, is closer to natural man, and thus more “authentic.” Punk inverted the formula – the urban was romanticized, not the rural, and the life of the underclass was exciting, not simple – but kept the essence the same.)

Like Mailer, punk found the authenticity lacking in white culture in Black culture. Patti Smith succinctly restates Mailer’s themes in “Rock N Roll N•••••”: “Jimi Hendrix was a n••••• / Jesus Christ and Grandma, too / Jackson Pollock was a n•••••.” Blackness is identified with coolness and art. Smith also identifies, as a punk, with the Black outsider: “Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me / Outside of society, that’s where I want to be.”

Through her identification as a punk in the song, Smith recasts her whiteness by aligning herself with a racial other. As Dick Hebdige famously argued, first-wave punk was an attempt to forge a new racial identity, what Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay call an “oppositional whiteness” – a whiteness which understands that it cannot be the assumed universal, a raceless race, and which sometimes attempts to stand in solidarity with minorities. Punk’s project of self-marginalization and their creation of this oppositional whiteness was deliberately modeled on their identification with Black culture, particularly the modes of resistance established by reggae. Punks such as Rotten, The Clash, Slits and Ruts worked reggae and its rhetoric directly into their music and fashion, sometimes as literally as The Clash’s cover of “Police and Thieves'' (at punk shows reggae was the only other music allowed to be played between sets). But reggae was more than just musical inspiration: it provided the structure of punk’s rebellion. Its image as “rebel music,” its countercultural hero stars, its lyrical themes and its DIY approach were all directly appropriated by punk. The events of the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival riots in particular, which showed how the cultural expression of reggae could be interwoven with an effective politics, would become an important source of inspiration for punk.

But if in reggae, punk found a language with which to express its outsider status and a model for how to create an oppositional politics through music, fundamental asymmetries remained, and the boundaries between the two were firmly maintained. Punk was, despite its best efforts, rock music, and was therefore given massive exposure by rock critics and scandalized reporting from the newspapers. The biggest first-wave punk acts were also signed to major labels, granting them far greater monetary resources than even the biggest reggae acts had access to. Most importantly, though, punk was, by and large, a white genre, sung in the standard English of England and America; reggae was a Black art form, often sung in Jamaican patois. Both were, of course, deliberately exclusionary, often in similar ways, but the crucial differences between them meant that punk could capture the attention of the powerful in ways reggae never could. The self-marginalization of punks could never eliminate their privileges entirely; a white punk can shave off a mohawk, but a Black reggae listener cannot change their skin color. Punk’s appropriation of reggae tropes and assumption of outsider status can thus begin to look much more sinister.

The scholarship on the punk-reggae connection traces out many important results of the asymmetries spelled out here, but most important here is that punk derived its authenticity by pilfering the form and tropes of reggae. This led to the essentialization of the racial make-up of the two forms, to the subsequent exclusion of reggae artists and those who looked like them in punk. Punk came to think of itself as a white response to reggae, a “White Riot” in The Clash’s famous formulation. This both erased the history of minority punk and proto-punk artists and dissuaded future generations of minorities from participating in post first-wave punk scenes. Their appropriation of outsider status also led to some ugly false equivalences between the oppression faced by punks and minorities, which cross the line from solidarity into talking over and a lack of understanding (as in Smith’s song and The Avengers’ “White N•••••”), and pointing anger at oppression in the wrong direction (as in Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White” and the NF-aligned Oi! bands). Their self-marginalization comes to look less like solidarity or a moral stance than poverty tourism, wherein punks sought excitement and an exoticized notion of “authenticity” in the hardships shouldered out of necessity by the oppressed.

The inevitable short-comings of self-marginalization led to punk recreating the blindspots and biases of the dominant culture, to its political detriment. Daniel Traber argues, for example, that punk’s denial of society’s values aimed first at individual autonomy over creating an inclusive counterculture, in effect recreating the individualism of the late-capitalist culture they despised:

The late capitalist alienation these subjects feel is due to their investment in a version of autonomy that perpetuates that sense of isolation by privileging an insular individuation over a collectivity that will allow the inclusion of non-punks.

This precluded larger political change by making the focus iconoclasm, not collective action. Rather than challenging the dominant culture, it merely created an alternative, one which was incapable of threatening its hegemony and in fact relied on that hegemony for its meaning. (And by the ‘80s this was understood – a loss, but a noble one, which is, according to Michael Azzerad, very punk indeed.) The individualist system remained the same because of their focus on atomized autonomy. Richard Rorty sums up the sentiment in assessing Nietzsche’s reverence of Becoming over Being: the inversion was “fruitless – fruitless because it retained the overall form of ontotheological systems, merely changing God’s name to that of the Devil.” Punk, at best, merely flipped the system on its head. At worst, it recreated it in all its ugliness.

*****

Punk authenticity continues to capture our attention, from the torrent of insider histories lionizing punks’ lifestyles to 40 year anniversary reviews proclaiming this album to be the verified real thing. Even those claiming to be above it can’t help themselves from appealing to it, as Pitchfork did in a review of Nick Lowe’s Jesus of Cool when they remark that, rather than scrap it in the “all-too-familiar dialogue of authenticity and reactionism, Lowe cut the crap and made a clever, fierce, and far-reaching record.” And part of the appeal of indie rock (which owes its existence to punk) remains the “authenticity” of its stars, who – unlike all those other, very relevant rock stars – are just like you. Authenticity thus seems impossible to escape, despite the seemingly massive changes that took place in punk since its first wave: the emergence of Riot Grrrl, Queercore and the explosion of zine writing critiquing punk for its racism, sexism and homophobia. They pointed to the flaws in the search for authenticity which they were also liable to, yet again exposing the limits of self-marginalization.

For at the heart of the discussion of authenticity there lies yet another contradiction that punk has wrestled with from its inception. It is exemplified on the one hand by the play of groups like the New York Dolls and the desire for an oppositional whiteness Tremblay and Duncombe identified. It is also reflected in the destruction of meaning intended in the widespread experimentation with Nazi imagery at the time. On the other hand there is the need to “be yourself” by regaining the autonomy denied you by society, to allow for “real” individual expression à la Mailer. Drew Daniels analogizes the latter notion to Russel’s correspondence theory of truth: a performer is being authentic when their private identity matches their performance. But punk has been fighting such straightforward epistemologies from the beginning, playing around the concept of fixed and essential identities. The contradictions of punk’s notion of authenticity carried into the project of self-marginalization, which posits that, to some extent at least, identities are fluid and can be remade at will, but was almost always conceived in terms of finding some hidden authentic self denied actualization by the rigid demands of society.

This is why punks sought to separate themselves from society, and to create new systems of meaning where they could express their true inner selves. This is the great irony and failure of punk – it was only through critical engagement with, not detachment from, their native culture that they could have avoided the failures detailed above. What is needed is a new form of authenticity, one which is not vulnerable to the mistakes of the atomistic individuality and cultural pillaging of punk. What that might look like is the subject for another time, but one can see hints of it in the work of philosophers like Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel, cultural theorists like Daniel Traber, and, I believe, in the music of the Buzzcocks.

In “Oh, What Avails” Alice Munro writes of Joan, a woman who is in the first generation freed from their husbands and able to pursue their desires. “Not self-denial, the exaltation of balked desires, no kind of high-down helplessness. She is not to be so satisfied.” She leaves her husband for a lover, then another, her kids grow up and she stays skinny. But her foundation is slipping, a menace bubbles up which she tries to keep away:

Rubble. You can look down the street, and you can see the shadows, the light, the brick walls, the truck parked under a tree, the dog lying on the sidewalk, the dark summer awning, or the grayed snowdrift – you can see all these things in their temporary separateness, all connected underneath in such a troubling, satisfying, necessary, indescribable way. Or you can see rubble. Passing states, a useless variety of passing states. Rubble.

Joan misses something, however. Rubble is both ruin and promise; all that’s left is to clear it away. If only we could.

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