Crass crumbles
In 1984, after seven years of touring and producing records, the
English punk rock band Crass broke up. That same year, Penny Rimbaud,
the band's founder and one of its vocalists, commented "[w]e were no
longer convinced that by simply providing what had broadly become
entertainment we were having any real effect" ("... In Which Crass
Voluntarily"). What made the breakup of Crass different from that of
any previous punk rock band--for example, the much more famous
collapse of the Sex Pistols in 1978--was what Crass had come to
represent for punks across the globe. As the English music magazine
Sounds noted in 1986, "Crass became an unwilling legend. Their
complete control over their records and their unbridled assault on
all things authoritarian made them the reluctant leaders of an
anarcho-punk movement that was about anything but leaders" (qtd. in
Rimbaud 303). What Crass was about was an attempt to carve out a non-
commodified cultural space inside a late capitalist economy that
seemed capable of co-opting any cultural production, no matter how
aesthetically or economically resistant to the commodity market, for
its own ends. In 1984, Rimbaud and the other members of Crass
believed that they had failed.
It is difficult to disagree with Rimbaud's assessment that Crass did
not achieve its aim of freeing itself from the commodity market. The
band's history demonstrates that even when punk bands refuse to sign
with major record labels, attempt to develop an anticommercial
aesthetic, and operate as small enterprises rather than corporations,
they still remain vulnerable to the very forces of commodification
that they oppose. However, the band succeeded, inadvertently, in a
different register. The efforts of Rimbaud et al. to resist co-
optation into commodity culture successfully map the shape of the
very impossibility of such a project. I do not aim, then, to
celebrate Crass or demonstrate the band's resistance to the commodity
market, but rather to derive from their failure the logic of their
inability to do so.
What is punk?
In order to grasp the significance of Crass to the field of punk, it
is first necessary to sketch out, in broad strokes, the "punk
history" from which the band emerged. First, punk is the contemporary
cultural form that refuses to abandon aesthetic negation and economic
resistance, both of which inflect the entire "punk project,"
understood as not just punk rock (both recorded and performed) but
also punk writings (including fanzines or 'zines), style (especially
clothing), film, and events (punk happenings aside from shows). This
adherence to aesthetic negation, where negation means the rejection
of any and all commercially viable aesthetics coupled with an attempt
to found an anticommodity market aesthetic or "antiaesthetic,"
persists despite its ultimate ineffectualness. Nevertheless, through
various textual forms, punks have endeavored to resist the punk
project's commodification through both aesthetic and economic
practices, beginning with punk's 1974 birth in CBGBs (a small
nightclub in New York City's East Village) and continuing through its
current multiplicity of scenes, which is international in scope.
Second, for many punks, the major record labels represent the threat
of commodification. In 2002, the "Big Five" major labels were Time
Warner, Sony, Universal, EMI, and Bertelsmann AG. As John Goshert, a
former member of the punk band Monsula, comments, punk's "tendency is
a resistance to working within the usual terms of commercial success
and visibility" (85).
Third, a series of "scenes" constitutes "punk history," where a scene
is a nexus of punk performances, writings, bands, styles, and
participants situated in a specific place and time. The major scenes
of the past 28 years, each of which had participants numbering in the
thousands, include the 1974-76 New York City scene popularized by the
Ramones, the 1976-78 English scene of the Sex Pistols and the Clash,
the early 1980s California Hardcore scene, which included Black Flag,
the early and mid-1980s Washington, D.C. Straight Edge scene of Minor
Threat, the mid- and late 1980s New York City Straight Edge scene
from which Youth of Today emerged, the early 1990s Olympia,
Washington Riot Grrrl scene of Bikini Kill, and the early and mid-
1990s Berkeley Pop-Punk scene of Green Day. Numerous minor scenes,
with participants numbering in the hundreds, have sprung up alongside
the major scenes. One of these is the anarcho-punk scene that Crass
initiated in the outskirts of London in 1977 and which continues to
exist in 2002, although Crass does not.
This essay unfolds from the conflict between culture and economics
embodied in Crass, whose members wish to eschew the commodification
of their productions (and of themselves) but discover that they
cannot prevent the interpenetration of punk and the commodity market.
Unwilling to accept this inevitability passively, they employ various
aesthetic and economic practices aimed at mediating between
aesthetics and economics. Below, I will detail those practices and
their effectiveness, not to celebrate Crass's distancing of
themselves from the commodity market, which the band could not do,
but because the band's existence speaks directly to one of the
central concerns of contemporary cultural studies--the possibility of
cultural resistance to late capitalism. As the progenitors of the
most anticommercial strain of punk--anarcho-punk--Crass occupies a
ratified space within punk history. Consequently, the band's
interactions with commodification are more telling as a
representation of the impasse that Crass faced and that punk, in
general, still faces, than as a means of overcoming that problem.
Modernism--punk--postmodernism
In much of the theory on modernism/modernity and postmodernism/
postmodernity, the current possibilities for resistance to a globally
structured economy dominated by the commodity and commodification
seem to be shrinking rapidly. Midway through The Origins of
Postmodernity (1998), Perry Anderson defines modernism as a "field of
force" out of which exploded a "wide variety of artistic innovations"
(81). Despite the plurality of these innovations, they shared a
defining feature: they opposed "the market as the organizing
principle of a modern culture" (81); in fact, they
were "constitutively oppositional: not simply flouting conventions of
taste but, more significantly, defying the solicitations of the
market" (63). In short, modernism employed negation, and it was the
commodity market that it attempted to negate by establishing a market-
free sphere. But, Anderson argues, by 1972 the modernization of the
globe was:
all but complete, obliterating the last vestiges not only of
pre-capitalist social forms, but every intact natural hinterland,
of space or experience, that had sustained or survived them....
[In] a universe thus abluted of nature, culture has necessarily
expanded to the point where it has become virtually coextensive
with
the economy itself. (55)
Echoing Fredric Jameson, Anderson claims that it is at this moment
that the late capitalist commodity market became ineluctable, that
the turn from modernism to postmodernism occurred.
For Anderson and Jameson, this turn closed down certain cultural
options. Anderson names the Situationist International, which
dissolved in 1972, "the last of the historic avant-gardes" (70) and
understands it as the final moment of modernist art, the last moment
when art could still stake out, via negation and oppositionality, a
semi-autonomous sphere for itself that both opposed the market and
endeavored to imagine alternatives to it. Jameson, theorizing
postmodernism in 1991, remarked that:
No theory of cultural politics current on the Left today has been
able to do without one notion or another of a certain minimal
aesthetic distance, of the possibility of the positioning of the
cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to
assault [capital].... [H]owever, that distance in general
(including "critical distance" in particular) has very precisely
been abolished in the new space of postmodernism. (Postmodernism
48)

Consequently, "even overtly political interventions like those of The
Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of
which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can
achieve no distance from it" (49). "Critical distance" disappears,
for Jameson, because he understands post-modernism "not as a style
but rather as a cultural dominant" (4), although "not the cultural
dominant of a wholly new social order ... but only the reflex and the
concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism
itself" (Cultural xii). While the productions of the cultural realm
during modernism could challenge the economic realm from outside of
its confines, modernism concluded with the collapse of the last avant-
garde movement, and the cultural realm lost its outsider status.
Jameson labels the result of this modification in the relationship
between culture and economics "late capitalism" and uses the term to
refer to the economic and cultural ordering of the globe post-1972.
Anderson and Jameson thus situate a break between modernism and
postmodernism, monopoly capitalism and late capitalism, the negation
of the market and absorption by it, and, in each of these paired
terms, the second term cancels out the first. Postmodernism, late
capitalism, and their concomitant powers of absorption displace
modernism, monopoly capitalism, and negation in favor of an
uninterrupted flow of commodity production, distribution, and
consumption. In his concluding move in Postmodernism, though, Jameson
describes the book as an experiment, an "attempt to see whether by
systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic
[postmodernism], and historicizing something that is resolutely
ahistorical, one couldn't outflank it and force a historical way of
at least thinking about that" (418). This critical strategy is what
he has called "cognitive mapping" elsewhere. Here, then, is where
punk's (and Crass's) success lies: although ultimately unsuccessful
at negating the commodity market or establishing a sustainable realm
to some extent removed from it, punk's efforts can be read as a
social text that describes the shape of that very problem.
Method: negation
There is a history of locating negation within punk, a move most
forcefully advanced by Greil Marcus, who invokes it as one of punk's
constitutive features, describing Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols'
manager, as someone who believed "that the affirmation where freedom
is grasped is rooted in a negation where freedom is glimpsed" (56).
Marcus does not advance negation much further as a concept, though,
because he lifts it out of Theodor Adorno's work without accounting
for the lag time between the Frankfurt School and punk. In so doing,
he elides the shift between modernism's employment of it, alongside
monopoly capitalism and punk's, within late capitalism. When he casts
punk as "a new version of the old Frankfurt School critique of mass
culture" (70), a critique now emerging from within mass culture, the
same lacuna reappears. This gap underscores the place where something
new needs to emerge: a coming to grips with punk's appropriation, at
the beginning of late capitalism, of a mode of critical practice that
emerged to counter monopoly capitalism. While the earlier cultural
forms that Marcus investigates--including Dadaism, Surrealism, the
Lettrist International, and the Situationist International--and their
employments of negation emerged alongside capitalism and could
consequently enjoy the distance from it that critical theory has
traditionally demanded (according to Jameson), punk exists within the
realm of late capitalism and, consequently, cannot attain the same
distance from it. Punk must enjoy--if that is the right word--a
different relation to negation.
Addressing the relationship between contemporary cultural production
and the possibility of negation, Jameson wrote:
There is some agreement that the older modernism functioned against
its society in ways which are variously described as critical,
negative, contestatory, subversive, oppositional and the like. Can
anything of the sort be confirmed about postmodernism and its
social
moment? We have seen that there is a way in which postmodernism
replicates or reproduces--reinforces--the logic of consumer
capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also
a way in which it resists that logic. (Cultural 20)
He adds that:
there is very little in either the form or the content of
contemporary art that society finds intolerable and scandalous.
The most offensive forms of this art-punk rock, say, or what is
called sexually explicit material--are all taken in its stride by
society, and they are commercially successful, unlike the
productions of the older high modernism. (19)
Jameson raises an important question about punk's adoption of
negation, but, although punk's early mission--which was quickly co-
opted by the major record labels--was bound up with shock and
offensiveness, the most instructive contestatory practices of punk
lie neither in its capacity for scandal nor in its provocation of
social intolerance, but in its very failures using these aesthetic
strategies. Paradoxically, through negation, punk shuts down some of
the aesthetic possibilities that negation has traditionally
proffered, not by rejecting them outright but by passing through
them, by driving them to the point where they fail to transcend the
commodity market. This traversal of the options clears the ground for
other, as yet nonexistent options to emerge.
The Crass Collective
The Crass Collective ("Crass") is the first and largest form of an
early subgenre of punk, anarcho-punk, and can be understood as an
attempt, on a local scale, at imagining a cultural sphere that is not
entirely determined by, or coextensive with, the economy of late
capitalism. The particular and material form that this problem
assumes in Crass finds expression as a profound mistrust of, and
resistance to, the commodification of punk; the members of Crass
endeavor to oppose and negate, through economics and aesthetics, the
commodity market of rock music.
In its attempt at negation, Crass is shot through with a set of
aesthetic practices: the Collective experiments with the punk-rock
sound, the form and content of punk songs and albums, the practice of
deferring the consumer's expected forms of satisfaction, and
dialectical attempts to negate and transcend the punk/commodity
contradiction at the core of anarcho-punk. Crass also engages in
economic practices aimed at opposing punk products' entrance into,
and circulation within, the commodity market of late capitalism: the
Collective practices a DIY (Do-It-Yourself) (2) approach to business,
favors punk enterprises over punk corporations, attempts to induce
other punks to produce, and, whenever possible, gives away what it
could opt to sell.
However, just as Crass could not, ultimately, establish a viable
antiaesthetic, neither could the critique that the Collective brought
to bear upon commodification transcend the clash between culture and
economics in the specific forms that punks found themselves
positioned to negotiate. The critique absents neither a "punk sphere"
from the commodity market in general nor an "anarcho-punk" sphere
from the punk commodity market. At best, it is precisely in its
failure that Crass gestures toward the possibility of an aesthetic
space within the cultural field of punk that economics do not
determine or even significantly condition.
Aesthetic negation and economic oppositionality
Anarcho-punk, a subgenre that emerged in England in 1977 and
continues to exist in the year 2002, figures within punk as the most
oppositional strand of punk's resistance to commodification. In 1976,
an English hippie, Jeremy Ratter, and his commune mate Steve heard
the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." for the first time. Ratter
recounts their reaction:
although we both felt that the Pistols probably didn't mean it, to
us it was a battle cry. When Johnny Rotten proclaimed that there
was
"no future", we saw it as a challenge. We both knew that there was
a
future if we were prepared to fight for it. (Rimbaud 216)
Shortly after he first heard the Pistols, Ratter witnessed what he
took to be the death of English punk, a death that he attributed to
capitalism and, specifically, to commodification:
Within six months the movement had been bought out. The capitalist
counterrevolutionaries had killed with cash. Punk degenerated from
being a force for change, to becoming just another element in the
grand media circus. Sold out, sanitised and strangled, punk had
become just another social commodity, a burnt-out memory of what
might have been. (74)

In 1977, Ratter changed his name to Penny Rimbaud, Steve's became
Steve Ignorant, and together with some of the members of their
commune and, later, people who trekked to the commune and expressed
interest in the project, they formed a band--Crass--to attempt to
push punk toward "what might have been." The band began in 1977 and
dissolved in 1984. It featured Ignorant, Rimbaud, Eve Libertine, and
Joy de Vivre on vocals; Rab Herman helped found the band as the lead
guitarist, but Phil Free replaced him after a few months; Pete Wright
played bass; Gee provided backing vocals and tape loops; and N. A.
Palmer played rhythm guitar. (Fingers Tarbuck played piano on one
album, on which Honey Bane sang, and Paul Ellis played "strings" on a
single album.) The commune that Rimbaud founded in 1965 in a decaying
farmhouse in northern Essex, England, a few miles from London, was
Crass's combined living and working space throughout the band's
existence.
Aesthetic negation
Sound
In a confessional moment, Rimbaud notes that Crass did not push the
aesthetic negation of the punk song--in its major label, commodified,
English form, as exemplified by the Pistols' songs (3)--as far as
they might have. He comments that it is "true we have not greatly
influenced music itself, but our effect on broader social issues has
been enormous" ("... In Which Crass Voluntarily"), but it seems to me
that he underestimates Crass's aesthetic choices. True, their first 7-
inch, (4) The Feeding of the 5000 (1978), diverges only slightly from
what became the typical punk instrumentation of guitar, drums, and
bass guitar: Rimbaud adds a radio to the mix while N. A. Palmer plays
rhythm guitar. And, initially, the band adopts a sound similar to the
Sex Pistols': Ignorant sings in a snotty, nasal whine, while Rimbaud,
Libertine, and de Vivre shout most of their lyrics; the drums,
guitar, and bass guitar parts do not require much technical
proficiency. There are few solos for any of the instruments.
Feeding's first song, "Do They Owe Us a Living"--with its traditional
punk rock instrumentation, rapid tempo, rhythm section devoted solely
to laying down a hard, rapid, steady beat with little variation, and
predictable guitar chord progressions--is among Crass's most
accessible songs. Its sing-song, repetitive, and oft-repeated chorus
even serves as a simple, melodic hook: "Do they owe us a living?/Of
course they do/Of course they do/Do they owe us a living?/ Of course
they do/ Of course they do/ Do they owe us a living?/ OF COURSE THEY
FUCKING DO!"
However, in contrast to most punk bands, as Crass's sound matured, it
shifted away from the commercial end of the late '70s punk sound and
tried to stake out an anticommercial antiaesthetic. Between 1978 and
1984, the band incorporated additional musicians so that by the time
Christ--The Album appeared in 1982 Crass's lineup included a sitar
and a synthesizer player, and the band's sound included samples
of "strings" as well as "tape collages." By this time, the band had
dispensed with choruses for the most part and sounded something like
an insane circus with a crazed barker chanting over the din. Melodic
hooks and melody itself vanished almost entirely, while the
interactions between the instruments grew discordant and combative,
at times verging on cacophony. Songs did not so much conclude as wind
down, one instrument after another going silent until a final few
guitar chords reverberated arhythmically. The members of Crass
understood themselves as opposed to the major label form into which
the Pistols' records had been stamped; consequently, their songs
attempted to confront the commodified forms that the songs of English
punk bands assumed.
Form and content
Additionally, while Pistols songs have simple lyrics and catchy, sing-
along choruses, most Crass songs are simply structured but lyric-
heavy tirades against war, consumerism, Repressive State Apparatuses,
and Ideological State Apparatuses, (5) and, as I mentioned above, as
the band's career progressed, the songs contained fewer and fewer
choruses. In content, Crass's lyrics differ somewhat from those of
the Pistols as well. The Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." begins
with "I am an Anti-Christ/ I am an anarchist/Don't know what I want
but I know how to get it/ I wanna destroy passers-by/ Cos I wanna be
anarchy." Crass's "Nineteen Eighty Bore" begins:
Who needs a lobotomy when we've got the ITV?
Who needs ECT when there's good old BBC?
Switch on the set, light up the screen
Fantasise and dream about what you might have been
Who needs controlling when they've got the cathode ray?
They've got your fucking soul, now they'll fuse your brains away.
While the Sex Pistols invoked anarchy by name but did not engage in
political activism, Rimbaud, who penned most of the lyrics for Crass,
addressed popular '60s and '70s liberal reform issues, including the
dangers of consumerism and apathy and their connections with the
culture industry (specifically TV in the lyrics above), the threat of
nuclear war and of war in general, and corporate greed.
Where the Pistols' songs make a quick attack before beating a hasty
retreat, a Crass song launches an offensive and repeats it numerous
times within a single song. "Nineteen Eighty Bore," which is not an
especially lyric-heavy Crass song, contains 36 lines of roughly
twelve syllables each, compared with "Anarchy in the U.K."'s
seventeen lines of roughly seven syllables each. While in much of
late '70s English punk rock, the lyrics and instruments command equal
importance, in Crass songs the instrumentation serves as a vehicle
for the lyrics, and the lyrics are so copious that the songs seem
almost incapable of containing them. It is also worth noting that the
Sex Pistols employ little profanity, while even an early, relatively
catchy Crass song such as "Do They Owe Us a Living" begins with the
word "fuck" and regularly cycles back to the chorus, in which the
word "fucking" figures prominently. This consistent use of profanity
throughout Crass's work guaranteed that their songs would not obtain
the commercial airtime that the Sex Pistols enjoyed.
Deferred fulfillment
The sound and profanity of Crass's rantings/songs combine with the
bitter and mocking affect that Ignorant, Rimbaud, Libertine, and de
Vivre's voices carry to produce a specific effect: the singers seem
simultaneously gripped with both the need to condemn a particular
social issue, or cluster of issues, and the realization of the
futility of their effort. The band members play their instruments at
breakneck speed, which adds to the sense that they have much to
communicate but cannot possibly transmit it all within the limits of
a song or album. This aesthetic approach speaks of Crass's efforts to
militate against the commodification of their music, if the
commodity, as Marx claims, is "a thing which through its qualities
satisfies human needs of whatever kind" (Captial, Vol. 1 125).
Instead of satisfying needs, Crass songs speak to their own inability
to do so. Where most commodities promise at least the partial
fulfillment of a need, Crass songs attempt to exacerbate need,
adopting the logic of the advertisement rather than the logic of the
commodity, but the advertisement is for a product that does not yet
exist. All protest songs--and Crass songs are protest songs--are anti-
ads: they try, with one hand, to produce a need where one did not
exist but without offering, with the other hand, the remedy for the
new need. This idea can be expressed another way: Crass songs did not
forgo the effort to meet needs but only if those needs are understood
as qualitatively different from the ones that commercial commodities
address.
Deferred fulfillment (the dialectic)
Crass also introduced sampling--the inclusion of found sounds--into
punk. Although early albums do not employ this technique, as Crass
complicated their sound and Gee joined the band, she would insert
what she termed "tape collages" between songs. These were frequently
short snippets of news from the radio, often related to British
police actions or, after 1982, to the British conflict with Argentina
over the Falkland Islands. To the end of a snippet, she would splice
another snippet that seemed at odds with the first in its form,
content, or both. Between the first and second songs on Crass's
Christ--The Album appears this montage: a clip taken from a
documentary on insects begins in mid sentence: "... then they find
their mate. The female climbs into the male, where she'll live the
rest of her life. It's a simple life." This sample is fused to a
second clip, in which a woman speaks to a baby and the baby's
mother: "Come on now Ursula, come on, come on. She's lovely. Yes
isn't she. I'm gonna pinch you, I am, I am."
Gee's juxtapositioning of these two clips suggests that they are
related to one another, although the subjects do not seem to be:
insect mating habits and human child rearing. This tape montage is
sandwiched between "Have a Nice Day," a song about the "psychopaths"
of Westminster, and "Mother Love," a song denouncing parenting as
ideological brainwashing. Again, the form of the Crass commodity
endeavors to militate against its own consumption as a commodity. In
place of satisfaction, Crass tried to present their listeners with a
dialectical mix of media whose forms and messages seem to conflict
with one another and that, when presented together, posit two
implicit questions: What sort of social order could contain these
contradictions within itself? And how can these contradictions be
resolved? In the above example, the tape montage and the songs that
surround it pose two specific question to their audience: How do
insect mating habits resemble the way in which an English woman
raises her baby? And how are both of these phenomena related to
Westminster and ideological brainwashing? An implicit injunction,
again directed at the audience, accompanies these questions: find a
concept that can explain the interactions between these phenomena.
Rather than satisfying needs, the album acts as an anti-ad--it
attempts to create need and dissatisfaction without offering a "cure."
There is another way to read Crass's use of tape montages, though,
that dissolves their effectiveness as anticommodities: Crass albums
are themselves resolutions to the problems that they pose. Gee does
not attempt to splice her samples together seamlessly; she allows the
sound of her recording apparatus's halting of one sample and starting
up of another to remain as proof of the apparatus's--and,
metaphorically, her process's--violence as it cuts off one speaker or
sound and starts another in order to force the two sounds into
juxtaposition. However, despite Gee's method, Crass albums materially
demonstrate the power of the commodity to incorporate seemingly
discordant elements into a whole. Christ--The Album resolves the
friction between its disparate elements by binding them together on a
single vinyl (or aluminum, in the case of a compact disc) platter to
suggest that perhaps, within the form of the commodity, no two sounds
can be brought to bear upon one another in such a manner that they
cannot be sold as connected parts of a whole. In this sense, the
Crass commodity stands as the reconciliation of seemingly unconnected
fragments. Although no one really tracks the sales of independently
produced music, a potentially even more damning fact is that Crass
albums sold. Not only did an intensely loyal group of fans acquire
the LPs and 7-inches when they were released, but Crass's
noncorporate distributor, Southern Records, continues to keep the
music in print in both LP and CD formats, suggesting that demand for
them still continues eighteen years after the group disbanded.
There is a further way in which a Crass commodity cancels the
aesthetic possibility of negating the commodity market. Marx
initially presents the commodity, in the first six chapters of
Capital, Vol. 1, as a fairly undeveloped economic form operating
within the "sphere of simple circulation" (280), where it "satisfies
human needs of whatever kind" (125). In the Grundrisse, he notes
that, in the market, where a capitalist confronts potential
consumers, the capitalist "searches for means to spur them on to
consumption, to give his wares new charms, to inspire them with new
needs by constant chatter" (287). However, the capitalist rarely
appears as a person in the market but sends the commodity in his or
her place and relies, for the creation of needs, upon the
contradictory nature of the commodity--the manner in which it
functions both to satisfy desire, which becomes invested within it,
and to defer indefinitely the complete realization of desire. The
Crass commodity renders this logic material, in the sense that Crass
albums serve as ads, and not anti-ads, for other Crass albums. The
perfect commodity never satisfies a need permanently: obeying a logic
of eternal deferral, it only partially fulfills a need, while
allowing for the possibility that a further commodity might satisfy
the same need more completely or a new need suggested by the original
commodity. Even if a Crass album serves more to exacerbate need than
to meet it, it also prepares the way for subsequent Crass albums,
which bear with them the possibility that they might, finally,
resolve tensions that the earlier albums left open. In short, each
Crass album opens up on all the others, suggesting, through its
fragmentation, its possible completion within the network Crass's
complete output.
Economic oppositionality
DIY
Although Crass experimented with aesthetic strategies for negating
the commodity market, the band also focused much of its energy upon
economic forms of oppositionality. To begin with, the band recognized
the commercial music industry as its enemy and refused to sign with a
major label, despite EMI's offer of 50,000 [pounds sterling] in 1978.
Earlier the same year, Crass released its first 7-inch, "The Feeding
of the 5000," on Pete Stennet's independent label, Small Wonder
Records, but could not find a pressing plant willing to manufacture
the record or a printer willing to print the cover, which Gee had
designed, as long as the record included, as its first
track, "Reality Asylum," a song that attacked organized Christianity.
Crass eventually substituted a minute of silence, entitled "The Sound
of Free Speech," for the original opening song and had the record
manufactured. To avoid causing trouble for Stennet, later in 1978,
when the band members found a pressing plant willing to
press "Reality Asylum," they founded their own label, Crass Records,
to release it. They printed 5,000 covers themselves, rather than
searching for a printer again.
Although necessity seems at least partially responsible for driving
Crass toward a DIY approach to producing records, Rimbaud claims
that, by the time DIY had become associated with punk in 1976, the
members of the commune that he founded "had been doing just that ...
[for] many years" ("... In Which Crass Voluntarily"). Either way,
Crass's appropriation of the means of production marks an attempt to
resist the "punk commodity" in its Sex Pistols and English punk form:
while the Pistols and other English punk bands forfeited control over
their means of producing commodities, in both artistic freedom and
the manufacturing process, Crass did so to a lesser degree. In fact,
in order to maintain aesthetic control--specifically, in order to
produce "Reality Asylum"--the band members realized that they had to
find ways to bypass the dominant, or industry, mode of producing punk
commodities. Having founded Crass Records, Crass never released their
music on any other label. The band also managed itself, booked all of
its own tours, distributed its own records, and designed and printed
its own record covers.
C-M-C' not M-C-M'
The members of Crass also attempted to mediate between the two poles
of the commodity--use-value and exchange-value--by deemphasizing
their commodities' exchangeability expressed as a price. While
reducing a commodity's price facilitates its exchange in one register-
-affordability--it also reduces the amount of labor that the consumer
must exchange for the commodity, expressed as a portion of her or his
wages. While the Sex Pistols and other English bands could not
control the prices of their 7-inches and LPs, and, consequently, the
bands' labels set the prices according to how much the market would
bear, Crass controlled its pricing. The band members sold
the "Reality Asylum" 7-inch for 45 pence each, significantly below
the market value of a 7-inch in 1978. Since they first appeared on
the market, Crass albums have always sold for less than major label
products and, later, for less than most other punk products.
The members of Crass claimed that, unlike the commercial music
industry that had engulfed the first wave of English punk bands, they
did not want to make a profit. Instead, they wanted to be able to
sustain themselves and their commune, and, as Rimbaud claimed,
their "prime purpose was the dissemination of information" (241). For
this reason, even on their first 7-inch, they included all six songs
that they could play at the time, although the industry standard for
a 7-inch was one song per side. Rimbaud claims that "The Feeding of
the 5000" was the first multitracked 7-inch ever. In short, the
commodity served the band members not as a method for translating the
surplus labor of others into surplus value for themselves, but as a
method for sustaining themselves as a small enterprise. Marx
expresses this process of exchange as C-M-C', (Capital, Vol. 1 200)
where "C" stands for "commodity," "M" stands for "money," and "C'" (C
prime) stands for a different commodity. The band exchanges
commodities for money solely to purchase other commodities that it
needs. For the record industry, the process of exchange can be
expressed, according to Marx's model, as M-C-M', where "M'" (M prime)
stands for a larger amount of money than "M": the major labels
purchase bands and their products in order to exchange them for
greater sums of money so that the labels can grow as corporations. By
adopting a different form of exchange than that of the music
industry, Crass replaced the corporate drive for profit as the force
behind making music with the enterprising drive to
transmit "information" of some sort and the possibility that money
need not entirely determine the production of music. Nevertheless,
the band still operated within the logic of capitalist commodity
exchange, at best choosing an earlier stage of capitalism over the
corporate version that EMI offered them.
Induce to produce
Despite their low prices, Crass albums sold well enough for Rimbaud
et al. to expand Crass Records in 1980. Rimbaud recalls that:
Over the years we were able to introduce an ever broadening
cross-section of the record-buying public to the music of
nearly one hundred different bands. Many of the records released on
Crass Records barely covered their production costs, but as profit
wasn't the aim, it didn't seem to matter ... [w]e had created an
outlet for ideas and information which, apart from the small
anarchist presses, had hitherto been unavailable. (125)
Commenting upon the process of production in general, Walter Benjamin
wrote that "what matters ... is the exemplary character of
production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce,
and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal" (233).
Where critics of punk such as Michael Hoover and Lisa Stokes claim
that "radical pop music without concerted political action and
organization lessens the impact of cultural critique" (35), Benjamin
demands that cultural critics distinguish between
political/ideological and materialist work. More important than the
producers' attitudes toward the relations of production--expressed,
for example, through the "political" song lyrics and even activism
that Hoover and Stokes describe are their positions within those
material relations (Benjamin 222). Similarly, Crass Records induced
other bands to produce by covering their production expenses,
regardless of whether or not the bands showed a profit.
The "apparatus" that the label placed at their bands' disposal was
not "improved" upon technically (in fact, it was cruder than the
industry model), but it was qualitatively different from the major
labels' apparatus: it granted the bands a degree of control over
their means of production similar to the degree that Crass exercised
over their own. In short, Crass helped make possible a number of new,
small, capitalist enterprises.
The band extended its efforts to establish a sphere of music
production not entirely conditioned by commodification in its
approach to performance. Rimbaud estimates that, over the band's
seven years of existence, it performed roughly three hundred shows,
most of which did not make any money for the band. For their first
gig, the members of Crass played a benefit for squatters in a North
London children's playground in 1977, and, for their final gig, in
August 1984, they played a benefit for striking miners in South
Wales. Apart from their first few gigs, Crass did not play commercial
venues, opting instead for what Rimbaud describes as "an
extraordinary venue of far-flung places in the British Isles where no
band had ever played before ... [including] scout-huts, church halls
and sports centres" (124-25). During performances, the band dressed
all in black and used only "domestic lighting" in an effort to create
a sense of anonymity and avoid the "cult of personality" pervasive in
commercial music, a strategy that was marginally, if at all,
effective according to Rimbaud (102). The band also tried, with
little success, to work against the establishment of its individual
members as commodified rock stars, a move the collective hoped would
express the possibility that audience members could become
performers, because the difference in economic class between the two
would not be underscored by the rock star status that the commercial
music industry manufactured for its artists.
Give it away
Crass employed one other technique against the form of
commodification that the major labels engaged in: the band gave away
as much as it could for free. It printed leaflets on topics ranging
from "industrial sabotage to breadmaking" (Rimbaud 102) and
distributed them at shows, and, in 1982, reacting to the British
conflict with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, the band recorded
a flexi, (6) "Sheep Farming in the Fucklands," without identifying
themselves on it and sent it to France to obscure its origins. From
there, it "was smuggled into the country [England] and, with the aid
of like-minded distributors and retailers, was randomly slipped into
albums and singles of any label but our own," recounts Rimbaud (220).
The band proffered gifts whenever it could afford to; the gift
negates exchange between owners of commodities and owners of money
because no exchange occurs. Instead, a material object moves from one
owner to another, but no reciprocal movement of money occurs.
In 1984, the band broke up. Rimbaud comments that "[a]fter seven
years on the road, we had become the very thing that we were
attacking" (254); "[w]e may once have had revolutionary potential,
but somehow we'd been nullified, becoming merely another element of
the grand social circus that I'd predicted could destroy us" (274).
Two factors led to the band's end: first, as Rimbaud notes, Crass had
become commodified, although not in the same way that the early
English punk bands had been. While the Pistols never had much of a
political position to begin with, and signed with major labels three
times, Crass explicitly promoted anarchism (although, Rimbaud and
Ignorant admit, without any detailed knowledge of its history,
theory, or practices) and never signed to a major label. However, the
band members discovered that they had become salespeople for "anti-
authoritarianism" and their professed belief that all authority
resides in the individual. Steve Ignorant remembers occasions when
Crass
would be playing to packed houses of anarchist Punks who [knew] all
our songs, records, and ideas by heart. We were up there saying "be
individuals" while leading a movement full of followers. It's
always "Crass did this" or "Crass said that." (qtd. in O'Hara 97-
98)
The members of the band believed that, rather than giving anarcho-
punks the impetus to become producers of their own ideas and lives,
they had produced fans who consumed Crass's ideas as they would any
other commodity: fans packed the band's shows and behaved much like
other audiences at rock shows, fairly passively accepting their roles
as consumers.
When Rimbaud et al. founded Crass, they were optimistic about their
powers to construct active fans who embodied a punk desire to reshape
the music industry along noncapitalist lines. Because they eventually
became convinced that their fans did not embody that model, they
dismissed the potential agency that their fans exercised outside of
Crass's sphere of influence. Commenting upon the youth subcultures
prevalent in England just prior to punk, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson,
John Clarke, and Brian Roberts claim that these subcultures "are not
simply 'ideological' constructs. They, too win space for the young:
cultural space in the neighbourhood and institutions, real time for
leisure and recreation, actual room on the street or street-corner"
(45). Participants also "adopt and adapt material objects--goods and
possessions--and reorganize them into distinctive 'styles' which
express the collectivity of their being-as-a-group" (47). Hall et al.
temper this explanation of subcultures' material gains, though, when
they insert the subcultures back into the geographical, historical,
and economic context from which they, and punk, emerged: "There is
no 'subcultural solution' to working-class youth unemployment,
educational disadvantage, compulsory miseducation, dead-end jobs, the
routinisation and specialisation of labour, low pay and the loss of
skills" (47). Instead, youths "'solve', but in an imaginary way,
problems which at the concrete material level remain unresolved" (47-
48).
Like the youths that Hall et al. comment upon, Crass fans briefly won
space for themselves. In 1980, with a gift of [pounds sterling]
12,000 from Crass (but no actual participation from the band's
members), a group of anarcho-punks and anarchists opened the Anarchy
Centre in London and kept it open for a year. The Centre contained a
bookstore, living quarters for punks without homes, and a performance
venue. It closed after numerous intra-Centre clashes between anarcho-
punks and older, nonpunk anarchists. However, a significant
difference distinguishes the Centre from Hall et al.'s primarily
symbolic victories. On a public street corner, the "possessors" can
be shooed away at any time by the police, but the same could not be
said of the Centre, whose occupants owned it, despite the fact that
they could not sustain it.
Crass, and punk as a whole, are both underpinned by a desire for more
than symbolic ownership or imaginary solutions to real problems,
though, and, regarding these aims, the members of Crass were correct
in their assessment of their effectualness: they had not shaped fans
who could restructure the capitalist mode of producing music in
England, and they refused to be satisfied with anything less, because
they believed that radical, material changes could still be effected
by cultural movements, by subcultures. Crass's question to Hall et
al. might be: Why is a "subcultural solution" impossible rather than
absolutely necessary? However, Crass's absorption into the
entertainment business of its historical moment might serve as the
response.
Crass also folded because it had become a business that forced its
members into a single, nonindividuated unit. Although the band
members had intentionally attempted to maintain their anonymity in
front of their fans, by 1984, after an especially effective media
prank, they became increasingly occupied with interviews (although
they eschewed the commercial press) and the operation of the band and
record label. Rimbaud remembers: "'There is no authority but
yourself,' we said that, but we'd lost ourselves and become CRASS"
("... In Which Crass Voluntarily"). Not only had the band produced
consumers rather than revolutionaries, but it had fashioned the
band's members into workers responsible for maintaining the producer
of commodities that was the band. Rimbaud et al. had believed that
Crass's distancing of itself from the major labels and the forms into
which they pressed bands would grant the band's members some type of
freedom, but they discovered, instead, that the economic basis of
their band determined their lives. Marx wrote that there is an
economic "realm of necessity," but the "true realm of freedom, the
development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it,
though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its
basis" (Capital, Vol. 3 959). Ironically, the more economically
successful Crass became, the more it relegated its members to
the "realm of necessity."
In Rimbaud's writings on Crass, he decries the Collective's co-
optation into capitalism and reads that subsumption as, ultimately,
the band's failure: Crass did not successfully negate or oppose the
sphere of commodification aesthetically or economically. The
Collective interrogated the extent to which the punk song, as a
commodity, could incorporate aesthetic contradictions and still sell,
but, as Rimbaud would have it, in their success at selling their own
and others' anarchopunk commodities, the members of Crass
accidentally cancelled the potential to negate the commodification
that they had hoped that their products would offer.
The shape of the problem
Nevertheless, Crass's two-pronged attack upon the commodity, which
employed both aesthetic and economic practices, participates
productively in the project within contemporary cultural critique to
sketch the shape of the current impasse between culture and
economics. The collective applied pressure to the pop culture
commodity, pushing at the form of the mass-produced punk rock song,
including its sound and its content, by forcing it to contain
multiplicities. And, by turning the logic of the commodity upon its
head and producing commodities aimed at creating rather than
satisfying needs, Crass inadvertently demonstrated that eternally
deferring satisfaction is in fact the very purpose of the commodity.
The collective's attention to this aspect of their albums
simultaneously underscored both the commodity's power to subordinate
to its form and render saleable the most disparate components and the
poverty of the commodity--its inability ever to satisfy a need,
because every commodity advertises another commodity.
Additionally, and interestingly, the history of Crass serves as a
cautionary tale, suggesting that efforts to avoid corporatization can
lead, unexpectedly, to successful small business enterprises, in part
because the anticorporate aesthetic sells. (7) Crass never separated
itself wholly from capitalism, try as it might to replace the
commodity with the gift, but demonstrated, inadvertently, that in the
highly industrialized economy of late-'70s England, severing oneself
from the dominant, advanced form of capitalism prevalent at the
current moment might land one not outside the economy but rather in
the net of a slightly less advanced form of the same old capitalist
mode of production. If abolishing capitalism through punk rock was
the ultimate aim of Crass--and it was--then the Collective failed. It
never produced what Paul Kohl, borrowing from Jacques Attali,
describes as a system of "individuals [who] create, perform, and
listen to music for its own ends, no longer producing distinctions
between producers, commodities, and audiences" (6). But, with
Jameson, the Crass Collective counters the frequent postmodernist
assumption that the surface of contemporary commodity culture is a
sheer face that offers no handholds to those who would grasp and
change it. In fact, there are fissures everywhere, but they look more
like failures than successes, and they are not mapped in the "Arts
and Leisure" section of the New York Times. Instead, their topography
is described in the 'zines that punks distribute, for flee, at the
local, independently owned record store just down the street.
Notes
(1.) A revised version of this essay appears in the SUNY Press book
Punk Productions: Unfinished Business by Stacy Thompson. We reprint
it here with permission in accordance with fair use legislation.
(2.) For punks, DIY (Do-It-Yourself) means producing punk products
without any support from the major labels. In the US, the majors are
responsible for between 85 and 90 percent of all music production.
(3.) In 1977 alone, the Sex Pistols signed with A&M, EMI, Virgin, and
Warner Bros. In response to scandals that the Pistols provoked and
that were widely reported in the English media, both A&M and EMI
dropped the band shortly after signing it.
4.) What used to be called "45s" are now referred to as "7 inches,"
because some spin at 45 rotations per minute (rpms) while others spin
at 33 rpms, but they are all seven inches in diameter.
(5.) For Louis Althusser's famous description of Ideological State
Apparatuses (ISAs) and Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs), refer to
the chapter "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
Towards an Investigation)," in his book Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays.
(6.) A "flexi" is a 7-inch pressed on cheap and extremely thin (hence
flexible) plastic or cardboard.
(7.) For an insightful examination of a more recent example of this
phenomenon, see Fairchild.
Works cited
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
Towards an Investigation)." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.
Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. New York: Verso, 1998.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Author as Producer." Reflections: Essays,
Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New
York: Schocken, 1986. 220-38.
Fairchild, Douglas. "'Alternative" Music and the Politics of Cultural
Autonomy: The Case of Fugazi and the D.C. Scene." Popular Music and
Society 19 (1995): 17-25.
Goshert, John Charles. "'Punk' After the Pistols: American Music,
Economics, and Politics in the 1980s and 1990s." Popular Music and
Society 24 (2000): 85-106.
Hall, Stuart, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian
Roberts. "Subcultures, Cultures and Class." Resistance Through
Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. Ed. Stuart Hall and
Tony Jefferson. London: Harper Collins, 1976. 9-74.
Hoover, Michael, and Lisa Stokes. "Pop Music and the Limits of
Cultural Critique: Gang of Four Shrinkwraps Entertainment." Popular
Music and Society 22 (1998): 21-38. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural
Turn. New York: Verso, 1999.
--. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke UP, 1991.
Kohl, Paul R. "Reading Between the Lines: Music and Noise in Hegemony
and Resistance." Popular Music and Society 21 (1997): 3-17.
Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth
Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin,
1990.
--. Capital, Vol. 3. Trans. David Fernbach. New York: Penguin, 1981.
--. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Penguin, 1993.
O'Hara, Craig. The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise! San
Francisco: AK, 1995.
Rimbaud, Penny. Shibboleth: My Revolting Life. San Francisco: AK,
1998.
Discography
Crass. "Nineteen Eighty Bore." Christ--The Album. Crass Records, 1982.
Crass. "... In Which Crass Voluntarily Blow Their Own." Best
Before.... Crass Records, 1984.
Sex Pistols. "Anarchy in the U.K." Never Mind the Bollocks. Warner
Bros., 1978.
Stacy Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the English Department of
the University of Wiscosin-Eau Claire, where he teaches Critical
Theory and Cinema Studies. His book, Punk Productions: Unfinished
Business, was recently published by SUNY Press.
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