Reconstruction 10.3 (2010)
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Mathew J. Bartkowiak's The MC5 and Social Change: A Study in Rock and Revolution. McFarland, 2009. x, 200 pp. US$ 39.95 (softcover)
/ Mark Ouellette
<1> When I saw the announcement for Mathew Bartkowiak’s book, The MC5 and Social Change, I had two immediate thoughts: a) damn, somebody beat me to it and b) I just hope it is not a book done by some kid who only just discovered the MC5 and thinks he invented them. After opening the book I discovered that Bartkowiak had probably anticipated this sort of reaction from people like me. First, he does not write yet another biography or history of the band but instead offers a critical look at the MC5's controversial position among politically-charged music and musicians. While the book is insightful and thorough in its investigation, the specific focus on the band’s relationship with the White Panther Party (WPP) is such that there is room, even encouragement, for additional study. In this second regard, Bartkowiak admits to encountering the MC5 very recently and recognizes the minefields that surround the band, its music, its fans, its critics and its scholarship. This is especially the case for the growing number of us who can claim membership in multiple categories in that list.
<2> I am old enough that I was not quite five-years-old when they broke up for good and while I have no precise memories of them, I had heard plenty.[1] They were legends in southeastern lower Michigan and southwestern Ontario. Kick Out The Jams was the first CD I owned, to replace a cassette that was old and damaged from years of play. The call to “Kick out the jams, motherfucker,” was a motto for a particular way of doing things: hard, fast, with everything you have, like it’s your first and last time; otherwise, go home. As I grew older and began teaching, the MC5 were also reminders that few beautiful things come out of our little part of the rust belt and that such beauty is fleeting anyway. I was also among those who felt a little surprised and a little saddened when the remaining members of the MC5 “sold out” to Levi’s in 2002. Then again, it made for a terrific lesson plan in my “Modern Countercultures” class and I had already realized that my father was right when he told me rap was just a fad. Surely, Gil Scott Heron had 50 Cent in mind no more than Rob Tyner could have foreseen Bono.
<3> In the fall of 2003, while teaching that class for the first time, I found out that Rachel, on Friends, had been spotted wearing an MC5 shirt. My students were excited and connected. In popular and lexical use, this was an example of “co-opting,” as my students called it. Some of them were experiencing this for the first time via the commodification of their gear, especially “trucker hats” by cheezy chains and posh kids. A more academic explanation comes from Dick Hebdige, in his seminal writings on punk culture. Hebdige calls the process “incorporation” and offers that it has two distinct forms: a) commodity incorporation, by which elements of the sub/counterculture are turned into goods to be sold to the masses; b) the ideological version by which the sub/counterculture is turned in meaningless exotica and disempowered (209). The importance of Hedbige’s approach is that he goes beyond the superficial notion of simply selling signs of group identity and into the ideological ramifications of stalling the momentum of any sub/counterculture by making it attractive and worse, mainstream. Not surprisingly, students have always grasped the commodity form, but the ideological form remains elusive to them.
<4> In the case of Aniston’s character wearing the MC5 shirt, it becomes clear that some processes Hedbidge had not anticipated are occurring. The commodity form, my students frequently argue, is the sign of success. They reason that the message still is being transmitted and shared. In fact, its reach expands with commodification. However, Rachel, as I have learned, is among the most vacuous of hipsters.[2] She wears what is hip for that reason and for that reason alone. There is no investment in the sign. There is no subcultural ideology to be contained or restrained. Here, the commodity form is the ideological form, but only if there is a precession of the sign. What happens when the consumer does not know? For whom is the meaning lost? Is there meaning? It all depends on the authenticity and the historicity of the sign. In the end, it seems to confirm that the axiom that readers make texts. Small wonder, then, that the further appearances of Tim Robbins and of Justin Timberlake (on the cover of Vibe, of all places) in MC5 shirts features in Bartkowiak’s study as locations of grief for him and for other followers of the band (7-8). There is no pin-pointing the location of the band musically or politically.
<5> Legendary music critic Dave Marsh says it best: “Halfway didn’t exist for the MC5.” They were either too political for the mainstream or not political enough for those bent on revolution. The latter became especially noticeable after the band dropped John Sinclair, a cult figure in Detroit’s underground, as their manager following his imprisonment for marijuana distribution. The move was seen as necessary for the survival of the band, since Sinclair’s sentence was for ten years (Bartkowiak 144). Here, it is worth noting that Bartkowiak makes little note of Sinclair’s distance from the band or of allegations voiced by the wives of bandmembers that Sinclair had become dictatorial (qtd in True Testimonial). Of course, even the sensible move would backfire on the band, for the imprisonment served to solidify the WPP and increase Sinclair’s fame (Bartkowiak 151). A benefit concert on Sinclair’s behalf featured John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Phil Ochs, Allen Ginsberg, Stevie Wonder and other luminaries, but not the MC5. Ironically, their music had become more politically charged even while John Landau toned down – some argue sanitized, or worse – the sonic assault that Norman Mailer had worshipped in Miami, and the Siege of Chicago.
<6> Even the band itself remains unsure of its politics and its intentions. Bartkowiak’s introduction recounts an interview with Michael Davis in which the bass player claims the entire affiliation with the White Panther Party was a joke, “a cartoon” (1). Dennis Thompson, the drummer for the band admits, “Sinclair was in charge of the beatnik community then; he was the head man. Basically, Tyner, Kramer, and Smith realized it would be a good thing to get in line with John, because John was a powerful figure in the beatnik community. This was the same time as things were happening in Frisco, and we were [thinking] ‘Hey, let’s get something happening back here’” (qtd in Szatmary 179-80). In the controversial documentary, A True Testimonial, Thompson simplifies the message: “If we get Sinclair [. . .] we get Wayne State [University],” meaning that affiliating with Sinclair was a stepping stone to playing in bigger venues before wider audiences. By the end of 1968, however, the group’s fan club had transformed from the “MC5 Social and Athletic Club” into the “White Panther Party,” a group that was “totally committed to the revolution” (Sinclair). In a 2004 interview with Chris Hollow, Wayne Kramer refers to himself as an “intellectual anarchist.” Yet in a later interview with NOW Toronto, Kramer refers to the star-crossed release of a concert and a documentary as being a great opportunity to “sell a truckload of both” (qtd. in Perlich 53). Clearly, “authenticity,” a highly contested term itself, remains the central question for anyone discussing the MC5.
<7> As Bartkowiak explains, the layers of interpretation need to be stripped away and analyzed. Admittedly, there is ample evidence that the authorities took the WPP and the MC5 quite seriously. Not only is there the widely circulated FBI footage of the band playing at the DNC in Chicago, in 1968, Bartkowiak painstakingly scoured archives to find notes including a series between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to then Senate Minority Leader (and future president) Gerald R. Ford regarding the groups’ activities and the threats they posed (Bartkowiak 135-7). At the same, time the contemporary comments of living band members must be taken with several grains of salt. Not only do they have the benefit of decades of hindsight, there remains a sense of resentment among them for the band’s failure to achieve the sort of fame and fortune, including membership in the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame, enjoyed by their rivals.[3]
<8> However, as musician and professor Daniel Fischlin writes in Rebel Musics, “the long-standing imaginary divide between doing and theorizing, materiality and abstraction, making and imagining [. . .] frames any consideration of what rebel musics actually accomplish [. . .] as opposed to what they may think they accomplish” (21). In this regard, Bartkowiak really is to be commended for he thoroughly presents the evidence but has the confidence and generosity to leave the ultimate decision to the reader: i.e., to the audience: “The media, performance and lyrical content created a larger picture from which the MC5 revolutionary mythos was created and received by numerous audiences [and] are still actively deconstructed and debated to determine if the band was a hollow shell selling records under the guise of social revolution. These are the very same questions asked at the advent of their career” (136-7). Bartkowiak rightly recognizes that music can be one part of a larger process for change, but the key is in its ability to become personalized, to reach individuals and to produce shared meanings.
<9> In examining fans’ projection of nationalism onto the Tragically Hip, the University of British Columbia’s Minelle Mahtani and Scott Salmon find that fans’ readings “[take] place somewhat independently of the band members’ own intentions for their music” (159). Not only do readers make texts, they bring something of themselves to the text. Perhaps nobody sums up the dichotomous reception and perception of the MC5 better than noted critic and professor Don McLeese, in his retrospective: “Though I would eventually comet to think of the MC5 as the greatest live band I’d ever seen (and ever would), my initial impression was that they were the goofiest” (14). Commendably, Bartkowiak never meddles in the multiple readings. He leaves us with many questions answered but also shows us the next conversations. Even though it has taken substantially more than five seconds, as Brother J.C. Crawford implores at the beginning of the concerts that were recorded as Kick Out the Jams, each of us must choose.
Notes
[1] Although the MC5 played dozens of small venues, Belle River DHS, the school where my father taught was not among them. It did host Rush, BTO, and others in the era when bands played schools. Since my father was the basketball coach, an awful lot of Friday evenings were spent in the gym watching games but also watching bands warm up and perform. The hurt of not seeing the 5 is compounded by the fact that they did play at arch-rival Amherstburg DHS, among others. The fact that the MC5 played schools and gave free concerts – as they did on Belle Isle, at Wayne State and most famously in Chicago at the DNC in 1968 – made them accessible to young audiences and certainly contributed to their image as leaders in a kind of revolution. This would be an interesting entry point for future investigations.
[2] Despite teaching a class on pop culture and one on TV, I have never watched an entire episode of Friends. As I tell my students, the next time I laugh at anything on Friends will still be the first time. This could be because of my age, the fact that I was in grad school during its run, or that its vacuity reflects something deeper than writing and acting.
[3] The most notable band on that list is Iggy Pop and the Stooges, who were the “little brother band” of the MC5. This is most evident in the True Testimonial documentary, especially when Thompson refers to Pop as “a little faggot” and tells Kiss that “we thought of [outlandish] costumes first, dumbasses.”
Works Cited
Friends. “The one with the lottery.” NBC. 3 Apr. 2003.
Hebdige, Dick. “Subculture: The Unnatural Break.” Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham & Douglas Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002: 198-216.
Kramer, Wayne. Interview with Chris Hollow. Online. 16 June 2004. Internet. Sept. 2004. Available http://brella.org/sandpebbles/Wayne%20Kramer.html.
Mahtani, Minelle and Scott Salmon. “Site Reading? Globalization, Identity, and the Consumption of Place in Popular Music.” Cultural Subjects: A Popular Culture Reader. Eds Allan J. Gedalof, et al. Toronto: Thomson-Nelson, 2005. 146-61.
Marsh, Dave. “The MC5: Back on Shakin’ Street.” Creem. Oct. 1971. Online. 7 Sept. 2008. Internet. Jan. 2009. Available http://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/ category/reviews-articles/dave-marsh/.
McLeese, Don. Kick out the Jams. New York: Continuum, 2005.
Perlich, Tim. “DKT/MC5: Where the Detroit rock rebels go, trouble still follows.” NOW Toronto 23.40 (2003): 52-3.
Sinclair, John. Liner notes to Kick Out the Jams. Perf. MC5. Elektra, 1968.
Szatmary, Peter. Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll 4th edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2004.
Thomas, David C., dir. MC5: A True Testimonial. Future Now Films. 2002.
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