Lipstick Traces
(Rough Trade Records #R2902, 1993, Various Artists)
Lipstick Traces
(Rough Trade Records #R2902, 1993, Various Artists)
This is a soundtrack to "Lipstick Traces: A Secret History
of the 20th Century," (1989); by Greil Marcus, originally
published in the US by Harvard University Press.
It happens. You feel alien. You are other. Nothing in your culture, in your experience gets near to what you feel. You want to be elsewhere. If you can't be elsewhere, you want to see everything brought down. These thoughts explode in your head. You can't sleep, you grind your teeth. You get migraines. You shake.
Then you walk into a room. You see or hear four people making a noise, playing the limits of electricity and the room's ambient space: like a switch tripping, your life is changed forever. Out of nowhere, the terrain is cleared and the possibilities stretch before you.
This will only happen once, with that certainty. It may happen before and afterwards, in precognitions, aftershocks, conscious attempts to recapture that first shock of recognition: when you find the piper that calls your tune.
This collection exists for many reasons: for fun, to be played alongside a book with words and pictures, to rewrite Punk in terms of a still hidden female history. Most of all, it solves a perceptual problem: how to recapture that first hearing of the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK".
Nearly seventeen years after its first release, "Anarchy in the UK" sounds, well, tired. If not quite a generally recognised 'rock classic', then its familiarity, and indeed supersession by generations of Punk and Rap groups, has meant that the song, and the time which it heralded, have lost their immediate potency. How to hear them in a new way?
In this particular example, to hear and see the Sex Pistols/the Clash/the Saints (among others) in 1978 was to feel this: 'Everything that is normally taken for granted as the way God planned it, as the way human beings were meant to be, is suddenly refuted, loses its reality, loses its pull. An people glimpse two things: they glimpse that the world they've been raised to accept is a fraud and a sham, and that another world is possible.
This is a sensation at once galvanising and terrifying: you will hear it on most of the selections here. Just jump into the tunnel with the Slits, like Alice after the rabbit: by the end of this sixty minute journey, you'll have a composite picture that takes you right back to Punk's original, primal alienation.
I'd love to hear this collection condensed into a six minute rap tune, or a twelve minute techno mantra, but in the meantime we begin, with a giggle...Jon Savage, 1993
Track #1 : SLITS: "A Boring Life."
Track #2 : ORIOLES: "It's Too Soon To Know."
Track #3 : TRISTAN TZARA, MARCEL JANCO, RICHARD HUELSENBECK: "L
'Amiral cherche une maison a louer."
Track #4 : JONATHAN RICHMAN: "Road Runner."
Track #5 : GUY DEBORD: Excerpt from soundtrack to Hurlements
en faveur de Sade.
Track #6 : THE ROXY, LONDON: Ambience.
Track #7 : JEAN-LOUIS BRAU: "Instrumentation Verbale (Face
2)."
Track #8 : BUZZCOCKS: "Boredom."
Track #9 : ADVERTS: "One Chord Wonders."
Track #10: RAOUL HAUSMANN: "phoneme bbbb."
Track #11: GANG OF FOUR: "At Home He's A Tourist."
Track #12: ADVERTS: "Gary Gilmore's Eyes."
Track #13: KLEENEX: "U (angry side)."
Track #14: GUY DEBORD: Excerpt from soundtrack to Critique
de la separation (Dansk-Fransk Experimentalfilmskompagni,
1961).
Track #15: CLASH: Stage talke, Roundhouse, London, 23 September
1976.
Track #16: MEKONS: "Never Been In A Riot."
Track #17: LILIPUT: "Split."
Track #18: PETER BLEGVAD, et al: "rohrenhose-rokoko-neger-rhythmus."
Track #19: ESSENTIAL LOGIC: "Wake Up."
Track #20: KLEENEX: "You (friendly side)."
Track #21: GIL J. WOLMAN: "Megapneumies, 24 Mars 1963 (Face
1)."
Track #22: RAINCOATS: "In Love."
Track #23: GUY DEBORD: Excerpt from soundtrack to Hurlements
en faveur de Sade.
Track #24: MARIE OSMOND: "Karawane."
Track #25: BASCAM LAMAR LUNSFORD:
"I wish I was A mole In The Ground."
Track #26: MEKONS: "The Building."
Track #27: BENNY SPELLMAN: "Lipstick Traces (On a Cigarette)."
(Lipstick Traces CD is currently out of print)
Lipstick Traces, the musicial http://www.lipsticktraces.org.