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| Malcolm McLaren, Stockholm 2001. © Carl A |
Late 2001, Malcom McLaren (1946-2010)
visited Stockholm to appear at the well-renowned annual Spoken Word
festival. This was only about a month after ”9/11”, so his performance was
focused on that traumatic incident and on his feelings of living in an enforced
”Karaoke Culture”.
Shortly before his appearance I had the
chance to ask him some questions. I had heard that he could be tricky and rude,
but I only experienced the sunny side. He liked to talk and talk he did. A lot
of what was said in this interview could be heard on stage later on. It was
almost like an ad verbatim scenario. I suspect that, in general, he gave his
preoccupations or themes a lot of thought and formulated things as well as he
could. Once formulated, these views and phrases would flow eloquently whenever
needed, over and over again.
His intelligence, wit and will to provoke
helped jolt conservative Britons out of their tea time comas so many times that
it’s almost hard to remember that he did actually try his hand at many
different things. He was well aware that people would always look upon him as
an agent provocateur (incidentally the name of his son’s underwear enterprise)
first and foremost and as an artist much, much later – if at all.
He often stated that to be an artist
means that you have to fail, but the challenge lies in failing magnificently.
If that’s the case, one could say that he actually failed at that. Because his
life was more adorned with triumphs and successes than failures. Whatever had
happened, there was always a residue of thought-provocation that lingered on. In
that sense, his mind lived on even when the concepts as such perhaps didn’t
grow as big or successful as intended. As an ideas man with a powerful and, at
times, even feared presence, McLaren has yet to be surpassed in his native Britain.
How do you look upon the recent terrorist
attacks? Can something good come from something bad?
I think it’s unquestionable that the war
that’s going on is not a war about who survives in Afghanistan. It's more about
a war about the New World Order. It’s a war that is now being subjected to a
debate about its genuine future and sense of culture. It’s a war in which we’ll
all debate about how useless or how important we are. How we actually look at
our culture and the future. We'll debate what's good and what's bad about it.
It's extraordinary that this idea of Islam has actually provoked it, provoked
us all into thinking that.
In bookstores in New York, since September
11th, I've seen people at the Middle East sections sitting on the floor
crosslegged reading about Islam. For the first time! They have now discovered
another part of the world and it intrigues them and confuses them. They
definitely want to find out more about it. That's interesting because people
have found another idea. There are other cultures out there that don't
necessarily want to belong to the idea that we call America. America is
confusing for Europeans because America is a concept. It's not really a
country. It's a concept based on a lot of people who escaped from Europe over
the past two centuries. They came and tried to create another idea. They're
still squabbling about what that idea is...
America is filled with a melting pot of
cultures. Within it are many disenfranchised people who are not directly in
sync with the nebulous, most complex organisation called Washington. If someone
were to say to me ”I don't understand Islam...”, I would say ”I have no idea
what Washington is... Why they do what they do and the reasons they have...”
It's a difficult thing because in essence it's a concept that isn't alien to
the rest of the world but it's very convoluted, full of immense contradictions.
It's very difficult to comprehend. If you live in the Islamic world I would say
it's even more difficult to understand. For instance, if you are, supposedly, a
superpower with all the things that go with a superpower, why would you need
anyone else to help you fight your battles? I wonder just that, as a question.
Does that mean that America is somewhat vulnerable? Does it necessarily believe
in its own self? Does it understand its own self? Its own concept? It's so full
of contradiction and yet we've all got to join in, rally round the flag without
even thinking twice... All under the word America seems to have coopted:
”freedom”...
This is the problem we all face now: Who
owns the language? Why is your interpretation of freedom better than ours?
That's the problem and that gets right down into the root of the culture
itself. I think that's what we're undergoing now. Although globalisation...
What is globalisation? In one word, people in America say globalisation means
fast food. That's globalisation right there. Coca-Cola, the hamburger,
Hollywood, fast film, fast art... All of this is in some sense a contradiction
or in direct opposition to the culture under the heading Islam. Islam does not
necessarily understand or has in its dictionary the word ”marketing”. This word
is alien to their culture. Maybe also ”entertainment”. If you went to France,
they would have a difficult time understanding the word ”marketing”. It's a
word equally alien to them in some sense. It's alien to their culture. They
can't see what entertainment is. It isn't showgirls, it isn't John Wayne... And
it isn't about fast food. Yet we're all supposed to rally round this culture...
This is the real debate that's going on in the 21st century and it will define
what we think in the next 25 years. That's why this war was probably inevitable
and probably a long time coming. It came in a welter of mad tragedies... But
life is an opera. It's full of love and it's full of death. It's a journey and
the journey is now reaching a point where there are serious obstacles that we
have to come to terms with.
Before, we were all under this immense
cloud created by globalisation. It was a false premise that was sold to us. It
can best be described with one word: Shopping. Shopping is the new cultural
ideal of the Western world. They've managed to incorporate in that word
”Entertainment”. A new word today is ”Shopatainment”. It's about the
satisfaction you get when you go shopping. Shopping for anything. Once the
entire culture comes under that umbrella, perhaps that has replaced what was
once the Church, where we aquired some form of salvation, some form of self
knowledge. When the conquests of that civilisation happened, we had the Museum
that we looked up to. There were ideas about society that we were supposed to
believe in and to ennoble us. It started with the renaissance which was, in
essence, a very Islamic idea. The renaissance owes it to Islam. To then take it
further we can say that the super-department store has replaced the museum like
the museum replaced the church. This is the culture we've built up. This
culture has enabled the commodification of the planet to be the noble pursuit.
Shopping is the way to enjoy it. The satisfaction you get.
But, invariably, when we get home after
having been shopping, we look at these things that are supposed to have
quenched our thirsts, fulfilled our desires, aquired some sort of
semi-salvation, we realise it all doesn't. So we go back to the department
store the next day and buy more. That has reduced us to people who are
constantly confused. It's the quest now to decide how to move forward. Do we
strip our culture bare, do we look for alternatives? Is the department store
physically going to become more like a church? Is it physically going to be
more like a museum? Can we incorporate all those things in it? Or is it just
going to crumble? Is America as a concept on its way out? Is the World Trade
Center disaster a kind of sign of a crumbling empire? This is the real debate.
The rational processing through media,
journalism etc is obviously very, very controlled. Do you think that maybe
non-rational processes like art could help in creating a clearer image?
I think you have to define what it is.
That word has changed so much now that you could say that fashion is art, as
art is fashion. Before, it was some sort of acquiring self knowledge, critique,
looking to, finding out some kind of salvation, some kind of knowledge that
will help you change life and to look at life in another way. Art today is a
fashionable commodity that can be purchased with relative ease. Perhaps just as
decoration or as keeping up with the Joneses. Part of one's attempt to look
fashionable. Looking fashionable means today having power. If you have the
look, you have the power of God and government both. Fashion seems to be the driving
force, the engine. Fifth Avenue in New York is the powerhouse. It's interesting
to note that Rudolph Giuliani literally came on TV a few hours after the World
Trade Center disaster and told all New Yorkers: ”Please, take a holiday... Go
shopping. Please support your local store. Please don't forget... I'm a
baseball fan but Broadway is the heart and soul of New York and we must buy a
ticket. Please go out, spend the money in the restaurants, fill them up, show
that you believe in freedom... Show you have no fear... Show them that you
continue to shop!” I was staggered, because all my polemic, all my thoughts
came startingly true. In this one simple statement three hours after this huge
disaster... Thousands of people have just died and all he's concerned about is
shopping... That said everything to me.
Speaking of politics and speaking of
mayors... How did your own mayoral campaign in London go?
My mayoral campaign was set up... I was,
to some extent, cajoled. When the mayoral elections came about in London, one
was absolutely furious... Looking at this supposed position given to us by this
Karaoke Prime Minister Tony Blair, saying that this was something that London
should have. London had the mayoral function taken away by Thatcher. This was
now given back for us in order to feel that London might have some autonomy.
Nevertheless it was going to be autonomy ruled by the government. In other
words, they were going to select who they thought should be our Mayor. My, and
many other people's, anger and frustration at such audacity decided that, as
Londoners, we wanted something else than Tony Blair Fleetwood Mac. He wasn't
even a "townie". He was a country boy. It all provoked us into thinking ”We
can't have that...” So I decided to write an article that I was asked to for
the New Statesman, which is a political magazine in London and services every
politician, writer and collegiate professor. It's an important current affairs
magazine. I wrote an article for them some three months before the actual election
and I realised I was being set up by this magazine whose owner, a man called
Jefferey Robinson, actually had to step down for corruption... He was at the
head of the Treasury. I think he wanted to get back at Tony Blair and I was
like the court jester set up to do this. To fire a few arrows like some old
fashioned Luddite... I accepted it because I thought that it was good at least
to fire an arrow. So I went on television together with the Minister of
Education and talked about the various issues involved. Like ”Why do we need a
politician as Mayor? Surely it's time that we didn't have a politician...”
Politicians today seem more like management consultants. They're all in league
with the big corporations and therefore they don't act independently. I decided
we needed an independent voice. Not to think that I wanted to be the Mayor at
all, but the only way I could get on the platform was to suggest I would be.
Once I had managed to air all my views,
from anti-Starbucks, anti-globalisation to basically wishing to be able to have
a beer while reading Charles Dickens in the library... Thinking about how
London could suddenly become a different place. Less serving the corporatations
and big businesses and more serving the community as a creative force. London
cared about that as I think any community does. There was a sense at that time
that one's freedom... That the expense in London, the economy, had grown out of
all proportions. It was booming but noone could afford to do anything other
than the tourists or big business handled by the City.
There was a desire that we needed to
enforce... ”London for Londoners”. Before London gets taken over by
corporations from foreign sources. So it was a kind of mad anarchic adventure,
just to plug in to those values. I was able to criticise in a way that I think
many people enjoyed. At one point a man who was once a Labour party MP decided
to cross that rubicon and become an independent... I think I helped him do
that. He sailed on the winds of my machinations, and of course his own, and
became Mayor. But by becoming the Mayor he was seriously shackled and I haven’t
heard more about him since. That isn't at all surprising...
Some of the ideas that you presented
certainly have a substance. I'm thinking about the fact that Germany will soon
have legal brothels and legal prostitution to a much greater extent than
before. That was one of things that you presented. Do you think that your ideas
will be the inspiration for actual politics in the future?
I think they were. Some candidates took
up parts of my manifesto. They were literally being peeled off. I'm talking to
a guy in opposition and he's using my own words... It was very funny to see
that. Suddenly everyone was saying that ”I am independent! I might represent
the Conservative party but I don't listen to head office... I'm an independent
person... I believe in London...” It was funny that I did actually set the cat
among the pigeons, as we say in England.
Do you see it as a blessing or a curse to
be this kind of instigator? A sower of seeds? Often, you don't get to reap the
fruits...
That's the curse of any artist. You never
set out to reap the benefits. It's your job. You're there to provoke and change
life. An artist's life is a failure, but in the most beautiful sense of the
word. Ever since I went to art school I was taught that it means to fail... In
a way that allows you not to have any fear, allows you the ability and genuine
freedom to express yourself... But to fail miserably is not the point. The
point is to fail magnificently! To rather be a flamboyant failure than any form
of benign success. That's the job of any artist.
What would you say is your greatest
strength?
My greatest strength is to have little
fear and perhaps be less concerned with that world of ”career” and more
concerned with that world of ”adventure”. It really is just a question of
staying creatively in a position where you are never for sale. I think if
someone stood up in England and said ”I'm not for sale!”, it would be a change
in that society.
Today we are all working under this
dreadful umbrella that Tony Blair created but that he now speaks very little
about. The word ”Cool Britannia”... We all had to serve under that word. He had
tried to turn the country into a commodity. If you didn't serve under Cool
Britannia and didn't believe in it, you really weren't wanted on the island.
This idea was something that you can't ever go along with, because it meant
that everything in it was for sale. The idea of not being for sale is something
that I think artists have somewhat lost the plot about. Today art is merely
fashion as fashion is art. We, probably more than anyone else at the moment,
have turned ourselves into commodity brokers in terms of culture.
The godfather of that was perhaps that
Catholic Andy Warhol. He was, inadvertently in some ways, responsible for the
children of Andy Warhol that you could call the britpop artists. New York would
deny that and say that Andy Warhol wasn't about that at all, it was much deeper
and far more profound than any of these britpop artists. I have gotten in many
arguments about that. To some extent I understand it but the facts are always
that people peel off what they want from a work of art, even other artists. You
take from a source and you take certain aspects. The aspects of Andy Warhol
were very simple. You took the idea of the artefact, this multiple, this idea
of concept, this idea of making art by the telephone, this thought of producing
objects of desire, objects that appear glamorous. Living your life in a very
fashionable world where you yourself become part of the media. Damien Hirst is
a prime example of someone who basically is a marketing phenomenon. Not unlike
Madonna who you could best describe as one big, fat dollar bill. That in itself
has caused us to think about culture in a way that really doesn't serve the
purpose of trying to discover the authentic. Quite the opposite. It serves the
purpose of authenticating the Karaoke. Most artists today do that. You often hear
in the film world ”I want this film to feel authentic...” The very notion of
feeling authentic sets up this idea that it isn't authentic at all. They just
want it to feel authentic. They want to authenticate something that is Karaoke.
I think that's what most artists do today.
What is your greatest weakness?
I adore living in chaos. I find chaos
incredibly comfortable. Because in chaos one always assumes that surprises can
happen. Things go inevitably wrong. One always loves to be at that point of disaster.
It's exciting. It inevitably leads to extraordinary confrontation and in a
world that is very corporate based and serious in concern of making everything
uniform, your weakness is not appearing to be a part of that endeavour. People
tend to see you coming. You are already coming with a set of precedence and
people have already formed opinions about you. For instance, some people say,
”You're a manager... How could you be an artist? A manager... That means you're
a schemer, a manipulator, a Svengali, a trickster... That means you're very
clever.”
To think of me as an artist... People
can't see those two worlds match... They feel they have to be very sceptical
about me. They feel they have to hide the silver when I come into the building.
”We don't know what game you're at, but you're not taking our money! You're a
swindler... We saw the movie! We know exactly where you're coming from...”
I found myself to be someone who had
great difficulty in explaining that I was the manager, I was the architect, I
am responsible for the chaos and disorder that the Sex Pistols presented, what
media termed ”punk rock”. But what they have to understand is that I wasn't a
manager per se. I was someone acting like a manager. My true objective
underneath it all was to utterly mismanage... I was a great mismanager! For
them to sit back and look at me when I said these things... They thought I had
messed everything up by changing the words. They said I'd reinvented new
meanings. It's the same way when I turn around and say to you, ”Failure is a
more interesting and more noble pursuit than success.” Why? Because I think
failure has much more creativity in the word than success does. Success I
always think of as someone who's a member of the golf club. Failure I always think
of as that person with mud in his hand, throwing it at the neck of the golfer
who was the prefect at school and who you always inevitably hated, who you knew
was completely bought, ambitious and horrible. But, in effect, that's the
world.
I'll never forget when I saw a movie
recently called Election, directed by Alexander Payne. It was about politics,
but politics taken inside a school. Politics seen from the point of view of
high school. You could see how certain people would become extremely ambitious
and be the ones who would define and conform and really use and abuse you. But
for all intents and purposes, they seemed incredibly noble. It was a beautiful
way of describing America and its concept. One couldn't help but be somewhat
sympathetic but also hate the liberal school teacher who didn't want this girl
to succeed and therefore fraudulently messed up the local school election by
manipulating the votes. In essence, he didn't like this girl. She was too
ambitious. He ended up being thrown out. At the end of the movie he was thrown
out, he was on the street, once a noble professor but now throwing mud at a
car, virtually a limousine, carrying this girl who was now looking towards the
White House. That was a complete metaphor for America itself. Things like that
imbued me with terror as I suddenly felt my weakness. I realised it could have
been me on the street, throwing mud at the car of someone similar in my life.
Will there be any more Malcolm McLaren
records? Any new musical projects?
It's so difficult to make records... I'm
defined as someone who's smart, who's not a real artist, who doesn't sing, who
doesn't play any real instruments... The record companies are constantly
subjected to thinking if I am for real or not. I'm like an enigma. I make
records like a film director. Without a camera. I've got to make my movie but I
don't have a camera to make it with, I just have a recorder. If I explain it
that way, they ask, ”How on earth can you make records if you don't play and
sing?” Well, I draw a map on a wall. Not a geographical map but a map of
feelings. I denote the ideas and I get a bunch of musicians, I infect them,
seduce them, manipulate them to do my bidding on this wall.
Somehow I come up with these albums that
sometimes look conceited, pretentious, difficult, contrived... But that's the
way I work. I try to support it with as much chaos as I can and that's usually
me trying to sing but inevaitably failing to do so... That's the piece of work
in the end. It lives or dies on that basis. The people in the industry usually
look at me as if I'm insane, saying that this is not the way they make music...
You're supposed to hurt your fingers as you play Chuck Berry 50 000 times and
you're supposed to swallow what he's done and manipulate it and regurgitate it
and turn it into your own work. All under the Karaoke guise of looking
authentic. It's just natural, it's not an outlawed acitivity anymore. It plays
perfectly into the hands of an industry that has co-opted this disenfrachised
musical form and turned it into a business.
So you're coming along and trying to
upset the bandwagon and it's very difficult to try and convince anyone that
that's a good idea. Occasionally the French understand it. They understand it
because the words ”entertainment” and ”marketing” don't quite fit in. An artist
who has a polemic, a philosophy, tends to be looked upon as intriguing and
fascinating in their ever growing existential outlook in culture itself.
Therefore they have managed to survive by believing in this auteur spirit and
not allowing themselves to be constantly subjugated to turning everything into
a commodity. In that pool, I've often found solace and the ability to work. I
think that's the reason I was given that freedom to work for French television.
About a year ago, I made a series of small films and was given a carte blanche
to say and do what I wanted. It's leading me back to Paris to do further films.
The conceptual values in America, as nebulous and contradictory as I think they
often are, also allows me to be a cultural warrior. In that sense, we can still
fight.
If you had immediate access and unlimited
funds, what kind of a record would you make?
I'm intrigued by the authentic. I look to
the origins, to the music, the phenomenon that was to be known as rock'n'roll.
A music that I have to say probably became a phenomenon due to organised crime.
Just after the war, by the Mafia. It was basically through the rise of the
jukebox business... It was a kind of culture that wasn't considered important
or worthy. It was left by the roadside and picked up by those that see a niche
in business.
The Mafia after the war saw this booming
business, the jukebox. A machine that could replace the live act in every bar
in Southern United States. They needed stuff to put in those machines. They saw
these raggedy old swing bands, top heavy, unwieldy, not economically viable 30
pieces. They broke it down to a bass player, a drummer, a saxophonist... Throw
them into a little studio, give them 20 minutes to cut a record and keep it
short. The saxophone plays the riff, the others play the rhythm... Take the guy
on the street corner who writes the filthiest lyrics, really rude... The word
rock'n'roll had been a currency since the 1920s inside black music. ”My baby rocks
me with one steady roll...” Rock'n'roll was merely an analogy for sex. They put
this together and gave it a boot. Before you knew it, these mafiosi had tons of
this new stuff pumped into the jukeboxes, which acted almost as a messenger.
This messenger was sent all across Europe through the US Army Camps during the
Marshall Plan after the war. It filtered through and a new generation desperate
to express itself sought that out as a counterpoint to the establishment and
before you knew it, the Mafia had discovered and inadvertently caused the
success of this phenomenon that later became known as rock'n'roll. That's the
true story! But a story that's never talked about...
As the Mafia grew, they swallowed up
profits and they found their way into laundering money and taking over and
becoming part of a much bigger industry. Towards the end of the 1950s, they
were almost in control. The American establishment, not wanting to deal with
this Southern white trash with these black illiterates... Chuck Berry in prison
on rape charges, Buddy Holly dying in a plane crash, Jerry Lee Lewis fucking
his thirteen year old cousin, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent thrown out of
America and ending up in a car crash outside London. The man that seemed to be
the lean desperado, also constantly imitating the black man, Elvis Presley, had
to go in the Army. In 1958, the whole notion of this music with filthy lyrics,
this rock'n'roll, this Mafia driven industry was stopped and moved to a fine,
little port town on the edge of Europe called Hamburg, run by villains, run by
gangsters... Anarchy reigned... Here, they had to serve the black GI, the white
GI... Merchant seamen and all the roughnecks... Here, rock'n'roll could be held
in a holding pattern for a new generation that wouldn't know what the older
generation listened to. Noone knew the origins, the authentic...
The same people who would play Chuck
Berry came back in the early 1960s and played in London to a whole new
generation and suddenly, without America not even knowing about it, these
English groups were going to export back to the US what had already been
written, coded and played in the 1940s. For all intents and purposes, it was
being played by ragged-haired white kids. It was English, so they thought that
maybe it was acceptable. They were playing to college audiences. Mick Jagger
would run back to England and say to Jeff Beck, ”Don't tell them it's anything
to do with their music... Just keep your mouth shut and we're going to make
millions...” That's what happened and that's the end of the story of
rock'n'roll really...
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