About a month into the pandemic, I was toying around with a piece that would reflect on our strange new life by commenting on a number rock and pop songs that seemed to best capture it. Pride of place was to be given to “Germfree Adolescents” as it seemed the just the right kind of lightly humorous conversation-starter for a songlist about the Covid era.
He’s a germ-free adolescent.
Ceanliness is her obsession.
Cleans her teeth seven times a day:
Scrub away, scrub away, scrub away,
the S.R. way.
The list would have been a mix of serious songs with others more funny and odd. I set it aside once the George Floyd riot-protests took off, and eventually totally reworked it as a reflection on the civic betrayals of 2020, such that it featured more portentous songs, such as George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness,” the Specials’ “Ghost Town,” as well as a couple of songs that directly addressed 2020 events, including Van Morrison’s “No More Lockdowns.” It’s called “A 2020 Playlist,” and I remain grateful to Mark Granza for publishing it on his fine website IM-1776.
That is, 2020 turned out to be too serious to take time for a song like “Germfree Adolescents.” And in 2021, while there are reasons to think that overdone pandemic propaganda might be contributing to upswings in hypochondria and agoraphobia that will stay with us for many years, the mental condition I am growing most concerned about is one I’d call denialist narrative addiction, such that those afflicted by this syndrome continually come to believe their government ministers have no choice concerning pandemic policy, and such that all rational people must go along with their imposing new kinds of segregation, risking massive developmental harm to a generation of schoolchildren, and ignoring (in America) slam-dunk science on needed mandate exceptions for the naturally immune. The denialist sleepwalking going on all around us, which is making our fellow citizens accomplices to despotism-creation, and to fundamental crimes against others’ livelihoods and basic rights, is genuinely terrifying.
Ah, but enough of that. Let’s rewind our minds back to sanity, back to the days of ’78 when we could more readily relish this sort of wit:
I know you're anti-septic,
your deodorant smells nice.
I'd like to get to know ya,
you're deep-frozen like the ice!
The Spex’s songwriter “Poly Styrene” was some wordsmith, and in “Germfree Adolescents” she sticks it to the way teenage-dom can degenerate into a competition of well-scrubbed self-packaging. Its abhorrence of blemishes, odors, and germs really can become obsessive-compulsive.
Now in the never-ending cultural tug-of-war between those advocating neatness, manners, and cleanliness, against those extolling naturalness, informality, and dirt-tolerance, I side more with Team Clean. I smiled when I saw the bumper-sticker Hippies Smell, and cheered on the gals in Damsels in Distress when they brought the gospel of soap-use to the “barbarian” boys of their college.
But yes, in these days, after all the reports of people who have gone way, way beyond the standard precautions, we do need, for the sake of helping the most impressionable among us to “stay mentally safe,” to lend our ears to Styrene’s mockery, and even to lend a few pulls to the naturalist side of the tug-of-war.
Her phobia is infection,
she needs one to survive.
It's her built-in protection--
without fear she'd give up and die!
Around 1971, teen-aged Poly had a stint as a festival-hopping hippie, sleeping in squats here and there. Not sure if her hippiedom followed the drug-besotted pattern set by the San Fran hippies, who as Tom Wolfe once noted had reintroduced, through their contempt of hygiene, all sorts of pre-modern diseases back into circulation. Still, one truth that the more thoughtful hippies were tuned to is that it is a great sickness to want a life removed of all dirt, germs, and signs of the bodily side of our being. And basic science about our immune systems growing stronger when younger and when moderately exposed to germs—science which does not recommend packed urban-living, let alone the druggie/vagrant tent-city kind—indicates that whatever the mental or practical costs, the germophobic lifestyle ultimately winds up working against its top goal, that of protection against disease.
X-Ray Spex were one of the pioneering punk-rock bands, and one of the more atypical ones. Part of it was their being led by the gawky-looking and half-Somalian Poly, other factors were the way they made the saxophone integral to their sound, their avoidance of the usual punk vibes of the snide or the nihilistically destructive, and most of all, their having absolutely brilliant lyrics.
These were all from Poly. People are understandably fascinated with her: she was the subject of a full-length documentary film released this year, and here is a short video on her story. Her fears for her mental health and a turn from the punk aesthetic cut her career short (the Spex only did one album), and like George Harrison, she later turned to Hare Krishna religion. Breast cancer her took her early from us, in 2011.
While one critic described her lyrics as “moralistic nursery rhymes,” they really are the strongest of the punk era—they take special aim at consumerism, and they meditate a great deal on youth culture identity. They are presented as expressing the views of a naïve teenager trying to make sense of her world—and while that presentation does involve a degree of honest self-reflection, it also is a matter of knowing irony. The songs were always witty, and often hilarious:
Freddy tried to strangle me,
with my plastic popper beads.
But I hit ‘em back,
with my pet rat.
Poly knew how, as I praised the filmmaker Jacques Tati for doing in my last post, to play amid the wastelands of the modern. And, she was willing to own up to the ways she had herself been stunted by them:
My mind…is like a plastic bag
that corresponds to all those ads.
It sucks up all the rubbish…
Like many a hipster, I find it impossible not to cherish this stuff, but given the added critic-catnip of Poly being a “POC” and one of the earlier female rockers, there is a way in which the she and the Spex have tended to be over-praised over the years. About two decades ago, there was list from Spin magazine in which Germfree Adolescents was rated as the third greatest rock album ever, which is preposterous. Musically, it is a middling-sort of achievement--and it would have been largely forgotten were it not for its lyrics. Not only was punk’s sound—even when tweaked by the Spex--pretty limited, but other of the movement’s top bands, such the Ramones, the Damned, the Buzzcocks, the Jam, and my favorite the Undertones, delivered it better. At the time, Poly bested all those bands’ vocalists, yes, and one could also say none of those bands gave us as interesting an album as Germfree Adolescents during the main punk years, sure. But it’s still fair to say that the Spex were a second-tier band, and within a movement that when regarded in purely musical terms, was itself second-rate.
The songs do live on, however, and Poly penned another that has been coming to mind during the pandemic, and perhaps, given the what-is-there-to-laugh-at grimness of our never-ending Wuhan Institute of Virology-shaped times, it is the more appropriate song to dwell upon. It is “Genetic Engineering,” as loud/fast and apocalyptic-in-tone as anything bands like the Pistols, Stiff Little Fingers, or early-era Siouxsie and the Banshees ever delivered:
In being so archetypally punk, it actually feels atypical for the Spex, and I detect a smidgen of self-mockery in the uber-dramatic moments of Poly’s vocal. About half the lyrics cannot by caught by the non-studious listener, so here’s the main bit:
GE-NE-TIC ENGINEERING!
Ein, zwei, drei, vier!
Genetic engineering could create the perfect race,
create an unknown life-force that could us exterminate.
Introducing worker clone as our subordinated slave,
his expertise, proficiency, will surely dig our grave.
It's so very tempting, will biologists resist?
When they become the CREATOR, will they let us exist?
A shallow 2021 commenter dismissed the claim that these lyrics were prophetic, by pointing out that the most concrete prediction here, the creation of a race of worker-slaves, hasn’t come true. But in truth, the relevant thing here is that Poly was among those in the 70s thinking the thoughts that would later become more seriously developed by various thinkers about transhumanism, such as Leon Kass, Peter Lawler, and various writers connected to the journal The New Atlantis.
The line that Poly takes care to repeat in the song is the will biologists resist? one that culminates in her CREATOR declamation. This is the basic objection that ordinary folks, and especially believers in Biblical religion, have about biotechnological advances being pursued apart from, or in defiance of, democratic oversight: it is too dangerous, and the danger here is a function of the ultimate form of hubris, in which Man presumes to create himself. Surely twenty pieces from The New Atlantis can make the point with greater profundity than Poly or myself can, but in 2021, now that we know that the most likely hypothesis about the origin of CV-19 was a laboratory engineering of it, with this pushed by the nefarious and all-corrupting CCP and funded/enabled by America’s personal-ambition-besotted epidemiological establishment, we have our first clear instance of biologists’ refusal to resist temptation threatening, well, our existence. I assume deadlier viruses than CV-19 could be brought into being, and perhaps already have; yet even the mid-level danger of this one has been sufficient to send every other nation, and especially the more modern ones, into a series of political and economic crises that have yet to play out.
So we now know that it doesn’t take biologists and governments so depraved as to want to engineer a slave-race to plunge humanity into disaster. We now know that is perfectly possible that ones who would never question the right of us ordinary folks to exist, who have never felt a desire to “rule the world,” and who would proceed in denial that they were endangering our lives right up to the very moment their latest experiment got out of control, could wind up killing millions of us. I mean, if some time-traveling alien (or angel) told us that a human-caused disaster would occur in the remaining 21st century that would kill 95% of us, which scenario, if the choices are a) nuclear war, b) rogue robots, or c) an engineered virus, would you bet upon?
So excuse me if I don’t want to celebrate things like CRISPR when it is players like Dr. Fauci who tend to get empowered in our scientific organizations, and excuse me for holding that in her wee little half-adolescent way, Poly really was prophetic.
She was also right that some biologists, even if Fauci doesn’t fit the profile, will be so drawn into an I’m-the-Creator type of hubris that they will come to look down upon the existing human form as something needing to be reengineered and replaced. (As that’s as far as I’ll take us here into thinking about transhumanism, maybe go to PostModernConservative’s friend James Poulos if you want more on such ideas, or scroll around The New Atlantis’ site.)
I’ll just wrap-up by noticing that the entire batch of songs that made up Germfree Adolescents indicate that Poly was thinking about the possible connections between a) corporation-promoted consumerism, b) the arrogance and control-plays of scientific establishments, especially present in their promises of our being able to live in guaranteed safety, and, c) the possibility of orchestrating personal identity, especially in its formative teenage years, on a mass scale.
The connection between these are also seen in the album cover, where we witness five teenaged-types (the band), wearing only slightly different new-wave fashions, confined in test-tubes. The similar clothes suggest a limited menu of options by which these teens will select their identity, and the tubes suggest that one can make—i.e., experts employed by corporations and governments can make—a reliably predictive science of identity-formation. Poly detected some commonality between the merchants of extra-hygienic living, and the larger forces of social control seeking to tame the unpredictable spirits of youth. Whatever Poly’s punk stands for, it stands against all this. One has got to break out of the conformist “lab-tube” into freedom, even if one’s mind has already been rather distorted and enfeebled. It is not so much the genetic aspect of the engineering that spooks her, as it is the social aspect of it.
Gee, that image looks a little too familiar, doesn’t it? To put the most-positive spin on it possible, we might reason that it was the only way the teacher could finagle his school into permitting his students to begin playing together again. I say good for him if so, but the symbolism is nonetheless dismaying. As I’ve said before, a multitude of social-control injustices are now being inflicted on today’s youth in the name of pandemic “necessity,” wherein the soft despotism is most evident in the way these controls keep them from spontaneity, prevent them from exercising their power to do and to try. It’s not so much its destruction of what exists that’s so awful, but all the unseen would-be things it’s preventing from being born. The connections it’s blocking. And as many have argued, the susceptibility to feel powerless was already a prominent characteristic of the millennial and Z generations. There are limitations to such generalizations, but there is also some creepy song-evidence for them, such as the underground popularity of Hazel English’s “I’m Fine.” (2016)
If the embrace of a song as shockingly resigned as that one is tells us anything generalizable, it is easy to see why today’s young persons aren’t rising up in rebellion. But I would counter that song with a similar evocation of teenaged confusion and helplessness, “I Can’t Do Anything,” also on Germfree Adolescents.
While the narrator of that song dwells upon a litany of her limitations, notice that when pressed into a corner, she hits back. And make no mistake, young ones, they’re really trying, even if largely blind to what they’re doing, to strangle you, to shove you down into some tube. And those of you who do know about Poly, you know how they just love to tell you to revere her as an icon of feminism and POC self-assertion, which is true enough as far as it goes. But what they don’t want you to think about is what she would say if she were still with us--I say she’d look today’s young people in the eye and say, “Why are you putting up with this crap? Where are the mass walk-outs from these institutions that mask you, coerce you, jab you, gag you, chain you to the wall?”
She’d even say this: “Look, if my talentless gal in ‘I Can’t Do Anything’ could at least hit ‘em back with her pet rat, why is it so hard for you, as they drag you to the manacles, to reach out for the only weapon left, a temporary alliance with populist conservatives? With those folks in the red caps?”
We’ve heard it too many times over the years about things that don’t deserve it, but such a move really would be a moment for the expression: “How punk-rock is that?!”
Eerie. When did Fauci's career start at NIAID?
I imagine an SNL skit depicting a young Fauci wearing white boxers brushing his teeth in the mirror of his parent's makeshift basement bathroom getting ready for his first day at NIAID singing this song with his mother yelling, like Howard's from Big Bang, "Are you ready?".