Remembering Malcolm McLaren

On the anniversary of his passing

The story of Malcolm McLaren’s emergence onto the pop music stage is pretty well-known, but as is usual with  mythical creatures, any number of variations have presented themselves  over the years.

McLaren, owner of a King’s Road shop  that first attempted, with the help of partner Vivienne  Westwood, to cater to the fashion tastes of Teddy Boys, then to Rockers  (both unsuccessfully), followed the rapidly disintegrating New York  Dolls to Paris and then to New York. Along the way, he convinced them to  make him their manager, which meant next to nothing since the band  could hardly get a gig of any kind by this time. They famously  self-combusted during a club stand in Florida that McLaren had managed  to obtain for them, which sent McLaren scurrying back across the pond.

The Dolls’ guitarist and nihilistic heroin addict par excellence Johnny Thunders stated that “Malcolm  McLaren is the greatest con man that I ever met.” The events which  followed certainly don’t dispel such an assessment.

McLaren’s vision of a great, anarchic,  semi-amateur rock band that would be the figurative grapefruit in the starlet face of the 1960s and ‘70s rock star fantasy began to coalesce around  the youngsters who populated the Kings Road shop, by now rechristened  Sex and selling McLaren and Westwood’s anti-design clothing which included t-shirts  bearing excerpts from pornographic texts, and a full line of rubber and  bondage-wear.

The story of how Malcolm McLaren  transformed a group of musicians known as the Swankers into the Sex  Pistols, eventually ‘discovering’ punk prototype and vocalist John Lydon  and dopey mook Sid Vicious, who became the band’s bass player in name  only, is well recounted in rock journalist Julie Burchill’s The Boy Looked At Johnny,  a scathing history of the punk movement from the formation of the  Sex Pistols through about 1978, by which time the original British punk  movement was pretty much over. McLaren welcomed the group’s chaotic  disintegration because it allowed him to realize his vision and to move  on. 

And move on he did, ditching the  moribund punk movement for tribal music with New Romantic costuming  (Adam and the Ants) and tribal music with a Burmese hottie (BowWowWow). Madame Butterfly, square dancing, it was all grist for Mal’s mill, and it’s hard to imagine that he took any of it too seriously. 

Malcolm McLaren’s point of reference  wasn’t really rock music at all, but art. Known as an infant-terrible of the ‘60s art school scene from which he emerged, McLaren loved museums  and declared that “I learned all my politics and understanding of the  world through the history of art.”

“It’s hard to say just what McLaren does as an artist,” writes Ira Robbins in his 1989 3^rd revised edition of The New Trouser Press Record Guide.  “He’s more an assembler than a creator, piecing together artifacts from various musical cultures in such a way that at the end of the day, his  own input seems invisible. And yet his perspective as a hip outsider has  continued to provide a link between his Anglo-American audience and  Third World forms. If McLaren’s a musical tourist, these records are his home movies.”

  Duck Rock,  released on Island in 1983, contained McLaren’s bonafide hit single  “Buffalo Gals,” which sets square dance calling over a hip-hop track. He  also recorded a girls’ double-dutch rope-skipping crew and featured  that over a hip-hop rhythm track. McLaren also explores Appalachian and  African music on the LP.

Duck Rock was one of the first pop albums to explore sampling and play around with setting found music from various cultures to a beat. A concept album conceived by McLaren as a pirate radio broadcast featuring the DJs of The World Famous Dream Team, it was brought to life by eighties mega-producer Trevor Horn. It still sounds very current today, which is amazing considering all that has happened in the music and tech worlds since its release.

While there are issues of cultural appropriation--not helped by McLaren's lack of credit to artists of sampled material--Duck Rock is a brilliant presentation of the idea of roots music as being on an equal footing with Western pop, and of using technology (in this case pirate broadcasts) to transgress the rules of polite society. In McLaren's defense, there was no protocol for how to handle credits, which had already been rendered moot by rock and roll's liberal use of uncredited studio musicians, in the face of music that was essentially a collage.

In 1984 McLaren released Fans,  which combined hip-hop with famous operatic themes (Carmen , Madame  Butterfly), and which again proved that the erstwhile auteur had a  certain charm in piecing together these improbable projects. 1985’s Swamp Thing simply combined cast-off bits of his 1982-84 sessions, and as a result is something of a mess. 

Malcolm McLaren was that rare rock  auteur who recasts the music in his own image, a reflection of his own  neuroses and obsessions. One has only to remember that others of this  lineage include Phil Spector, Kim Fowley, and Brian Epstein to  understand that his impact was immense.

McLaren helped forge the musical and stylistic landscape of the 1980s. While there are many who would consider  him a minor figure, it’s difficult to imagine the pop music landscape  without such a colorful mad hatter roaming its bounds. It is characters  like McLaren who remind us of both the innocent Absolute Beginners promise of pop music and its cynical manipulation of our deepest dreams and desires in one fell swoop. 

I’ll give McLaren the last word. In a special 2002 issue of Q magazine which detailed the history of British punk ’77-’79, he wrote, in the issue’s ‘Afterword”:

“Manifestos are always written after the event. Looking back on punk, its lasting testimony, its manifesto if you like, is it allowed one to be a flamboyant failure rather than a benign success. It made failure a noble pursuit—the music, the fashion, the movement itself, was all one big artistic statement born out of my life and times at art school…I wanted to bridge that gap between art school and the street…From one tiny shop on the Kings Road in Chelsea we had created our own code of living, our own laws, our own identity. In other words, we had created the infrastructure for an alternative society.” 

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