When I think about Poly Styrene most of my other punk rock heroes just seem like total poseurs in comparison. In photos and interview footage from the late 1970s she has this unguarded quality about her – and I don’t mean in some naive, adolescent way – but rather in an unpretentious, matter-of-fact, totally smart and honest way.
While most other punk icons of the time were busy being either totally nihilistic or posing as third-world guerrillas, Styrene (born Marian Joan Elliot Said to a British legal secretary and an expatriated Somali aristocrat) offered up biting and intelligent social commentary that was both feminist and anti-capitalist. Indeed, the lyrics that she penned for X-Ray Spex focus on the ways that patriarchy and late capitalism intersect. The opening words of “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” offer a perfect example:
“Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard – well I think, oh bondage, up yours!”
As do these lines from the song “Art-I-Ficial”:
“When I put on my make-up/The pretty little mask not me/That’s the way a girl should be/In a consumer society”
What Styrene is arguing here is that the consumerism and commodity fetishism of modern capitalism as it manifests in developed nations proves to be a mechanism through which male supremacy operates. Women are oppressed by a market system which encourages passivity through the purchase of consumer products, devalues work typically considered to be the responsibility of women, and promotes a construct of binary gender roles in which feminine characteristics are considered inferior.
Styrene’s words are so important to me, and X-Ray Spex made such a huge impact because songs like the ones mentioned above were the first exposure I had to analysis which linked systems of oppression which I had previously viewed as independent. Poly Styrene’s critique was really quite profound, but the lyrics were so succinct and accessible, and the vocal delivery so shrill and confrontational, that it provided me with a lesson in feminist theory cloaked in an aesthetic that appealed to my youthful, and often underdeveloped, punk sensibilities.
Tags: class, feminism, gender, Oh Bondage Up Yours, Poly Styrene, X-Ray Spex
July 9, 2010 at 9:13 am |
Poly has just finished her new solo album produced by Youth (Killing Joke). In her true style it is another important piece of work in our times, and the world as it stands today.
Stay tuned for any release dates…..
July 9, 2010 at 12:22 pm |
Thanks so much for the heads up! I will be sure to check it out!