Bod Dylan from 1965’s Don’t Look Back
Part III: Bob, Cool versus Punk
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein explores themes on cool in his article in Philosophy Now: What Does It Mean to Be Cool?
He describes how early American blacks had learned to protect themselves with Stoicism.
That for a young black male to survive in early American society he learned to ‘play it cool.’ Certainly, if there is anything we have learned from Ferguson it is that Peace Officers dislike “loud” citizens.
This is different from say the derogatory term “Uncle Tom,” the notion that for a black male to survive he must shuck and jive to the white man and please him with his overt friendliness.
No, ‘Cool’ is much more to the core of identity. You must have the facility for cool.
You must have it in your heart.
Yet how disquieting to the white man is Muhammad Ali as angry punk?
How much more comfortable was Miles Davis as reserved cool?
(I’m not sure any pose, not the Uncle Tom, nor the smiling n***er is actually acceptable to the white man. And as Paul Mooney said “Don’t smile too much.”)
As Botz says “The cool person lives in a constant state of alienation,” whereas, the punk lives in a constant state of flagellation.
My step-father James Lederer was lead singer for the Womack Brothers in the 70’s and notably the Jackson 5 once opened for him in Texas. We often sit and talk about Hendrix and what might have been. Far from a spent musician we both felt that Hendrix (perhaps like Malcolm X) was just hitting his stride before his death. He had ditched his cock rocking and his power chords in his last year of life with his new group the Band of Gypsies, and was often quiet and stoic on stage, just silently playing his guitar. He had finally just become a pure musician.
He had abandoned punk for cool.
“Fuck it,” said Rich, “So what?” - - In spoken word - that most rabid and vulnerable of art forms - a lone being on stage with a mike in his hand, Richard Pryor expressed all that is cool.
Miles Davis ‘D to Eb.’ - (the chords to “So What”)
Miles will be ‘no grinning ni**er’ for the audience.
Something Louis Armstrong looked out at with dismay and fear and chagrin.
What are these kids up to?
Miles turns his back on the audience. It is about the music. It’s modal.
Armstrong and his regulated harmonic progressions can go to hell.
As Ike Llunis says:
“Modal Jazz can therefore be regarded as a rebellion against regulation due to a longing for artistic freedom.”
During the Newport jazz festival on July 25th of 1965 Bob Dylan accomplished a very similar thing. Not to be constrained by folk regulations of what was ‘allowed’ Bob plugged in his amp and hissing at Alan Lomax’s condescension said, “I’m not gonna play on Maggie’s farm anymore.”
He wore leather, turned his back on the audience as the majority of viewers cat called and whistled.
It was about the music.
It was a punk move by a punk kid.
But, it was also cool.
Why wear hats?
My cousin Kingsley teaches music and all twenty instruments at a middle school in the mid-west. For his graduating Masters performance he went through each of the instruments and settled for a finale on the saxophone. Of course, for this, he wore his derby.
He wore his pimp hat… So he could look cool.
My graduate advisor William T. Williams at Brooklyn College had a lot to say to me about Jazz and Work. His painting, Batman, which is a coolly understated AbEx painting of light blue and gold streaks on wood is a masterpiece, and the first painting by an African American in Jansen’s Art History.
I think Romare Beardon was next and then Basquiat.
William T. Williams Batman 1979
At this point in my career I was pretty violently against Academic Art. Just after 10 years of art school I was intimately familiar with the kind of Academia that Art Schools propagated: The Shock of the New.
It is difficult, I can tell you, to find something profane enough to stimulate the jaded.
At Brooklyn College there was a standing ovation for an artist who urinated on the floor during his thesis. I had a friend in Chicago who shat in different colors. This is Academic now.
Prof. Williams walked into my studio one day with a young artist in tow. He wanted to show him a studio of a graduate student who worked all the time, and all day, and how much work it was. The kid was black, and wore a hat.
This kid, as Prof. Williams explained to me, could paint any way you wanted, any way you suggested. Oozing with talent. Politely, the kid walked around my studio, observing.
Finally, Prof. Williams said to him “Well, this is what it is like… It’s all day. By yourself. And, if you want to work with these people you have to take off your hat.”
For about the first time in my life an adult black man was explaining to a young African American Male in front of me how he was going to have to get along with these “honkeys.”
I was surprised, deeply surprised by the generosity and the window into their world.
“Take off your hat.”
In this context, the hat was the ‘pimp object.’ It represents a salient threat to the ‘white man.’ Within the paranoid mind of the white man it is the hat that pimps out the white women to her own craven and libidinous nature. The hat sells her to the big black cock she has been missing, so thinks the white man. And, then the white man says, (noose in his hand) that she will just be a whore like all the other whores in the stable.
This is the fear. This is the hat. This is what gives it the cache of cool.
Like the Beat poet Frank O’Hara said:
“We wear our jeans tight so people will want to have sex with us.”
Cool has the generative quality of libidinous sexuality.
It is the act of surviving with flare. Like the cool man driving the pimp mobile. It is his relaxed attitude within the car, or while driving the car that makes the act sexy. Not the car itself.
It is the laconic “beats walking.”
The act of taking off the hat is compliance with “Square.”
“Crackers,” we’re called -- Saltines.
White, square, and salty… But tasteless.
So what?
What how do we define punk oblivious to race?
I asked my anarcho-punk Welsch born London music producer mystic impresario friend Nicholas Evans for the definitive word:
“Punk is creative freedom. It is ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you’. It is resistance to tyranny and inequality.
Crass (the grandparents of anarcho punk)’ final abiding statement was ‘there is no authority but yourself.’ From anarcho-punk bands I discovered, vegetarianism, veganism, feminism, syndicalism, and anti-racism; as well as a very potent vision for an environmentally sustainable self-governing society based on selflessness and collectivism. High minded self-governing autonomy.”
Within this definition of punk we have a few intriguing semantic contradictions.
“Punk is creative freedom.”
Freedom from what?
Freedom from tyranny.
However, total and absolute freedom is boundless, and yet, the word “Punk” itself implies a category and set… these things are “punk” and everything else is “non-punk.”
Thus, there is an inherent constraint to every definition.
The Post-Structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida suggests there is No Absolute Form. This is “tree” and everything else is “non-tree” which helps to define what a Tree actually is.
Subsequently there is no absolute “white man” - Not without “the other” to define him.
This is “diffirence” says Derrida -- Oppositional Post Structuralism.
Stanley Murashige, Chair of Art History and Prof. of Eastern Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago posits a similar view from the Asian point of view: one informed by Kongzi or Cong Ja Nim or Confucious in Latin: The self is understood by its context.
K’ong fu Tzi says we are defined by our relationships, as negative space creates form. The forest defines the trees. (Huh… perhaps King Kong is the “Hollywood African” Basquiat is referring to).
Deviancy from the norm is the value of Punk, but deviating from “punk” is counter to it’s own essential orthodoxy. The contradiction of Punk is that contains within it its own brand of Orthodoxy.
So, this hew to orthodoxy (to be “square punk”) is rife within the punk community…
i.e. “your punk isn’t punk enough.”
As Renton’s last act in the film Trainspotting is to square up and go straight. It’s a subversive gesture. It is his last act of raw punk.
Tom Wolfe wrote about the spiraling orthodoxy within the sphere of architecture in his catalog of essays From Bauhaus to Our House. The problem with a people’s architecture that is clean of indulgent bourgeoisie curves is that nice lower middle-class people (the petit bourgeois) are forced to live in white boxes.
(As the child of a single mother in low income housing and having gone to work in the Art School’s white cube for 10 years, I can assure you—these rooms resemble an insane asylum).
Holding to this, is the normative anti-materialism of the German Socialist movement. It is how we get to the white square paintings of Robert Ryman, and grey rectangles of Gerhard Richter, the quivering lines of Agnes Martin, and Sol Lewitt’s perfect cubes.
Subtle to be sure.
Robert Ryman Untitled 1965
But completely inaccessible to the working classes they were made for.
Agnes Martin Untitled 1977
Just ask any of my uncles.
What is the correct response to 9th degree formalism?
Punk.
And yet punk doesn’t mean ‘not Ryman’ or ‘not Richter.’
That would be hypocritical because Punk is inherently inclusive. Just as the Christian Ethos is inclusive to all humankind… (although a Christian might say “mankind” - but whatever).
Good Lord, how much better did Lewitt feel with an orgiastic and Latin convulsive color explosion in his late career work?
He probably felt like a punk – right?!
And just like Phillip Guston, he was crucified by the academy of Purists (we are talking about art remember. It is just art).
Sol Lewitt “Devolving” 1966-2000
Reza Aslan’s book, a historical profile of Jesus of Nazareth, Zealot (2013) suggests an intriguing definition of punk.
He describes Jesus as an iconoclast adherent of an ideal form of worship for his people, who orates an anti-authority message of love and union. This is a punk.
Aslan by no means uses this kind of language. It’s just that in his historically sourced primary data he finds that in no uncertain terms “Jesus the Nazarene is a terrorist of the state,” to the Roman Empire to be sure, not the Judeo people.
During the first 33 years of the Common Era, the cross was the tool used exclusively by the Government for punishing any violent revolutionary actor. Jesus may well have been a mystic, and for sure an Orthodox Jew, but he damn well was also a Punk.
Nick’s definition of punk, however, conforms to Christ Consciousness: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” However, this is a command, not a freedom, and commandments quickly translate into burdens, rules, and restrictions.
To paraphrase Post-Structuralist Michel Foucault from his History of Sexuality (1984) ‘sexual freedom is a command and a further burden on women, not a liberation.’
(Please see Will Ferrell’s Anchorman for a true understanding of the sexual liberation and its impact on female morale)
Based on a message of love and empathy for our fellow beings, punk is seeing the forest for the trees. Punk is understanding that the gears of normative ethics and systems crush the needs of the subjective individual.
To sum up Part III of this essay on Basquiat and Punk, when breaking away from normative control becomes a dogma, it becomes the very thing it is fighting against.
It creates an essential contradiction.
Basquiat, as black artist, alien to the commercial hierarchy, but nonetheless commenting on that alienation for pay, is an essential contradiction.
Being the Messiah who violently overthrows the philistines with a message of Love is a contradiction.
It may in fact be the case, that to be truly punk is an impossibility.
Truth is truth, but Absolute Truth, well, that is something else entirely, and also, likely, an impossibility.