Bollon, Patrice. "The miracle of the multiplication of punks." L'Écho des Savanes (French), no. 34, Sept./Oct. 1977, pp. 58-62

— A substantial French cultural analysis of the punk phenomenon by Patrice Bollon.

— Punk as a reaction, failed dreams of the hippie counterculture, the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK and The Clash's White Riot.

— Contrasts the spectacle of British punk (Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Clash) with the colder approach of New York acts like Television and The Ramones, and touches on the emerging French scene (Téléphone, Stinky Toys).

L’Écho des Savanes was a pioneering French adult comics magazine (1972–1983) founded by Claire Bretécher, Marcel Gotlib, and Nikita Mandryka, blending eroticism, satire, counterculture, and avant-garde art, and by the late 1970s incorporating punk-inspired graphics and cultural references alongside its politically charged comics.

L’Écho des Savanes #34 (Sept./Oct. 1977), published by Éditions du Fromage, featured adult/underground comics by Georges Pichard, Martin Veyron, Yves Got, and a punk-era Bazooka collective spread referencing the emerging UK punk scene, coinciding with The Clash’s breakthrough year.

Some members of Bazooka explained the way they illustrated the article. Their statement: Here it is. The author proceeded in his piece with a selection of the groups he talks about. We did the same with the essential difference that he did it deliberately – and we did it randomly – at our place so that the inevitable injustice would not be the result of premeditation — José Perfeccion, Lim Novak, Jan Cook. The Last Time Paranoia Paradise "Wayne County".

Punk: four letters that spontaneously bloom on the devastated walls of the Halles district, four letters that have not (yet) been tamed, classified by dictionaries. But everything arrives in its own time... and here is what one might perhaps read under the heading "punk" in the "Petit Robert" – 2000 edition:

Punk (punk) n. (1977; from the English punk, Elizabethan slang of the 16th century: prostitute; New York slang of the 20th century: ugly, crazy, out-of-date)

1° mus. The third generation of rock: hard, snarling rock, driven flat-out on an implacable binary rhythm. Adj.: said of any mechanical, urban, synthetic music. "Long as a day without punk" (A. Pacadis).

2° fashion. Clothing kit based exclusively on synthetics: black plastic sunglasses, black imitation-leather jacket, nylon shirt, trainers, etc. Practice of diverting everyday utilitarian objects (safety pins, razor blades, padlocks...) for purposes of ornamentation, jewellery. "The proliferation of signs of punk-tuation marked the end of the 20th century" (O. Tiste).

3° by extension. (1900) State of mind that glorifies the sordid, the ugly, the discordant. Attitudes made of deliberate provocations, self-mutilations and gratuitous violence. See Zazou, Catastrophism, Spectacle (society of the). Ant.: hippy, cool, laid-back.

Originally, an appellation claimed by a few short-lived American groups, trying in vain to (re)live in the middle of the hippie wave the spirit of Swingin’ London, punk developed irresistibly... Promoted to "label", it sold records by unknown groups. Having become a fashion, it rehabilitated the wearing of short hair and synthetic materials. Finally, it was accompanied by attitudes (wearing the swastika) and statements (Johnny Rotten – "the rotten", of the Sex Pistols on English TV) that were violently provocative, which opened wide the columns of the scandal sheets.

In turn, punk fascinates, irritates, worries, intrigues... And everyone gives their commentary: punk and unemployment for "Le Point", punk and hard drugs for Olivenstein, punk and revolt for "Libération"... revolutionary punk, fascist punk, situationist punk... working-class punks, thug punks, dirty-youth punks, decadent petty-bourgeois punks...

One could continue the inventory like this. One can laugh at it, but not be surprised. Because rock has become the great fantasy machine of our societies... perhaps even the only one, since cinema, breaking with the "star system", has prioritised the function of staging. This is why punk can teach us a lot: like a distorting mirror, it sends back a caricatured reflection of the dead ends and imbalances of our society, and thus of our own.

But let’s start at the beginning... punk is above all the "new wave" of rock. And for rock music, ’77 will remain the year of the barbarians: "Anarchy in the UK" by the Sex Pistols, "White Riot" ("Émeute blanche") by The Clash, "Neat, neat, neat" by The Damned, "Teenage Depression" by Eddie and the Hot Rods, etc., mark an undeniable return to the primitive energy of rock ’n’ roll.

It must be said that rock badly needed this shot in the arm... Because it was seriously starting to drag. Over time, rock refined itself, enriched itself, intellectualised: leading to formal explorations close to contemporary music. But what it gained in respectability, rock lost in authenticity: originally a music of revolt and a spectacle of teenagers’ frustrations, rock gradually became a musical genre in its own right, with its canons, its schools, and its leaders. A few years from now, Frank Zappa will play at Beaubourg before a cultivated audience,

whose discreet applause will no longer disturb the master’s solos. How do you expect kids to find themselves in this complex, refined music, full of winks and references for informed music lovers (Varèse, Stravinsky, Cage...)?

As for those who have not changed, they have simply aged... "Too young to die, too old to rock ’n’ roll": at 33, Mick Jagger is no longer what he was. The show is slick, the musicians more experienced, but nothing remains of the early fire. One had to see Mick Jagger last year in Paris clinging to the microphone between two songs to catch his breath, mangling his most rebellious lyrics ("Street fighting man" – "the street fighter"), to understand that the Rolling Stones already belong to the past.

Punk would therefore arrive just in time to take up rock’s original project: an immediate, minimal music, reflecting the hopes and disillusions of daily life – in short, our blues or our reggae. "The blacks have some serious problems / But they don’t hesitate to rebel / The whites go to school / Where they are taught to fit the norm" ("White Riot").

Punk is above all a reaction against the complexification of rock and its degeneration into a musical genre. "We made a group because, for 6 years, there had been nothing new, nothing really exciting. Everything had become too technical... and besides, we didn’t want to work", explains Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols.

Far from any musical research, punk would promote a kind of "do-it-yourself" rock, returning to a simplistic, direct expression, therefore closer to daily life. In doing so, it would occupy the place left vacant by those great groups of the sixties, who knew so well how to capture the fantasies of their generation, such as The Who or The Kinks: that of an everyday rock.

Since we are talking about daily realities, there is indeed one that imposes itself, despite ecological dreams: it is the suffocating and filthy city... the city and its parades of interchangeable streets... the city and its amassed, fragmented solitudes, streaked by the death-howl of ambulances and police cars... the city and its products: pollution, housing projects, boredom, violence.

The titles (Métal Urbain, Asphalt Jungle) and the lyrics of punk groups revolve around this reality: "Suicide city" (Doctors of Madness), "London’s burning" (The Clash), "Sat’day night in the city of the dead" (Ultravox)... But even more perhaps, the music, in its violence and aggression, gives us to hear the noises of the city. This surge of notes; this deliberately "dirty" sound; this mechanical, inhuman rhythm; these screamed, thwarted words, chopped up by the violently slammed chords of the guitars: where else to find the model, if not in the city? In the same way that Detroit rock (The Stooges, MC5, Frost...) referred to the factory (Detroit: Motor City), punk cannot be understood without reference to the megalopolis.

Punk is a fundamentally descriptive, realistic music... A realism that, in the best cases, achieves a radical critique of reality, by laying bare its absurdity and inhumanity. Punk thus appears as the equivalent in rock music of hyperrealism in painting: a meticulous, obsessive description of reality... like a delirium of normality, which opens onto great disorder, subversive madness.

This is the case with the Sex Pistols who, through their "enormous" provocations, display with cruelty the mechanisms of their (our) alienation. The Sex Pistols, it’s Artaud revisited by Andy Warhol and the New York Dolls: "I am the antichrist / I am an anarchist / I don’t know what I want / But I know how to get it / I want to destroy everything / Because I want to embody anarchy" ("Anarchy in the UK").

But not everyone reaches excess: most other punk groups remain along the way and only offer a cold, cynical observation of reality (the kind: it’s like this and it’s take it or leave it). This is the case with the New York groups The Ramones (through their miserabilism and deliberate banality) and Television (through their seriousness and coldness, in a word: their lack of humour): it is then that critique regresses to complacency and falls into acceptance.

This difference materialises in stage performances, either mobile and exhibitionist (The Damned, Sex Pistols), or on the contrary static and interiorised (Television). A Television concert is four robots pouring down a veritable musical leaden cloak upon you... A sort of Nuremberg rock: an unhealthy black mass, intended to seal the allegiance of the listeners (the slaves) to the omnipotence of the musicians (the Masters).

Looking closely, punk systematically defines itself "in opposition" to the values brought by the counterculture of the sixties: to long hair, it opposes short hair; to the hippies’ search for the beautiful and harmonious, the celebration of the ugly and discordant; to the naturalism of the ecologists, technology ("I want to be a machine" sings Ultravox) and synthetics; to the revolutionary hope of the leftists, the nihilism of "no future" and asociality, etc. The list could be extended infinitely. "The blank generation" by Richard Hell is the manifesto record of New York punk. Generation of nothingness, but even more a generation "in negative" (in the photographic sense): thus could the punk generation be defined.

To the hippies’ angelic slogan "Peace and love", punk replies with a cynical and desperate "Hate and war". This is a process that had already been used in rock music, when to the Beatles’ candid "Let it be" ("So be it"), the Rolling Stones replied with the brutal "Let it bleed" ("Let it bleed!"). But in this case, for punk, this series of oppositions is much more than a game: it is a radical denunciation of the values introduced by the previous generation and which have become today’s conformisms.

For the more skilful, the "fringe" was a fabulous way to make a career: the former leftist militant dethroned the old organisers; the cool hippy became the "facilitator" of human relations that companies needed; the former journalist from Actuel became a writer for Le Monde, etc. One can cry betrayal, "recuperation"... Nevertheless, the objective function of the fringe was indeed to renew a society that was short of imagination. Which means it perhaps changed mentalities more than it effectively transformed things.

"Stop dreaming, look at the reality around you": this is essentially what punk will say, methodically taking the opposite approach to the hippie or ’68 spirit. "Shit love and peace... the dream no longer exists, no more spontaneity, so we become violence. We will be violence" (Readers’ letters – Libération).

Yet this critique is too systematic not to conceal a deep regret that the hippie dream did not come true. Punk is the hangover of waking from a night of drunkenness, when reality reasserts its rights: like the remorse that the insane dreams of the night before come to such a brutal end.

"Guilty Razors" (literally: "the guilty razors") is a French punk group. Their music is an extraordinary chaos, from which incomprehensible snatches of words emerge at times. Eyes rolled back, the singer paces the stage as if powerless to tame the audience. Then he mimes hanging himself. Thus has come the era of rock catastrophe: The Damned ("the damned") sing "Born to kill"; the singer of Suicide, a New York punk group, simulates mutilation on stage; The Hot Rods present on the cover of their record "Teenage Depression" the photo of an adolescent blowing his brains out...

From then on, for the press, the case was closed: punk could only be a matter for the violent, and the sacrilegious word was dropped: fascism... A hasty analysis, because punk’s violence is essentially spectacular, far below the essential violence of a Muddy Waters (listen to the recent "Hard again" with Johnny Winter) or the absolute revolt of a Kevin Coyne ("Eastbourne ladies" and "Fat girl" on the excellent "In living black and white").

"Dole queue rock" – the rock of the unemployment lines – is what the English journalists have called punk... And certainly, the spectacular violence of punk has a lot to do with the "crisis". For the crisis profoundly changes the conditions of emergence of speech and thus, of musical production.

By increasing unemployment, the crisis has rejected from the "normal" circuits of integration (work, marriage, etc.) a whole section of youth, but without offering them others: the underground is dead, leftism is running out of steam, and as for advanced liberal society or the common programme... they hold little appeal for young people.

For the "generation of nothingness", the alternative is simple: silence (students take their exams, the unemployed make themselves forgotten) or violence. For silence and violence are intimately linked: the recourse to violence always sanctions the failure of speech (remember "Taxi Driver"). And punk will be the reflection of this impossibility to speak, and thus to be teenagers.

Provocations, self-mutilations (the safety pin stuck through the cheek), gratuitous violence are all blackmail for the recognition of young people by society. Having no more channels of expression at their disposal, punks will use derision to make themselves heard. They will transgress the most untouchable taboos: "The Queen is not a human being", sings Johnny Rotten at the time of the Jubilee celebrations.

They will attack the ancestral fears of society, and thus its unconscious desires: hence the wearing of Nazi insignia or the celebration of the rat, symbol of fascism ("Rattus Norvegicus" by The Stranglers). Finally, they will take to the paroxysm of their stupidity the ideas of Mr. Average. Ugly, punks will (want to) be more so than the sensationalist papers would ever have dared imagine. Deep down, punk could well be the Anglo-Saxon translation of the Italian "Metropolitan Indians".

Far from opposing the crisis, punks will, on the contrary, display it, flaunt it as a quality, push it to the absurd. So, punk: complacency or subversion? You be the judge.

The fact remains that there is not one punk movement, but punks – and that any systematisation would be stupid. For, in its vagueness and richness, the word "punk" allows the boldest and the most simplistic connections.

Among the so-called "punks", there are first of all those who asked nothing of anyone (especially not to be called punks) and who, by simple coincidence, emerged or "broke through" at the moment of the arrival of the "punk" wave: this is the case with Little Bob Story, the best French group along with Magma, and which is making a return to the pure tradition of rock ’n’ roll; there are The Hot Rods, who have more to do with Dr. Feelgood (after all, they are from the same town: Southend) than with the Sex Pistols; or again The Saints, an Australian group that makes a solid, "manly" rock, a rock to accompany beer binges in the bars of Brisbane.

There are also, as always, the little tricksters, who retain from punk only the label that will allow them faster promotion. This is the case with Doctors of Madness and Ultravox, two avatars of "decadent", who produce elaborate music accompanied by deliberately "poetic" lyrics. The result is not always up to the ambition. But these two groups are certainly the most accomplished musically (listen to the electric violin of Urban Blitz of Doctors of Madness on "Figments of Emancipation").

The London movement is without doubt the most vibrant. And the "punk" explosion is not without recalling that of Swingin’ London in the years ’66–’67. There, there is something for all tastes: punk is derisive (Sex Pistols), "committed" (The Clash), grand-guignolesque (The Damned), nostalgic (The Jam), etc.

French punk, for its part, is more moderate and corresponds to the emergence of a true French rock music. Téléphone, Shakin’ Street, Les Lou’s, Stinky Toys, etc., are achieving what the Frenchies had not been able to do two years ago: the adaptation of rock in France. But punk is not limited to music: certain comics (Bazooka, in particular) represent this current quite well.

As for American punk, it is very mechanical in New York, but more innovative in Cleveland. Two major successes should be noted: Mink DeVille and his guitar covered in leopard skin (listen to "Cadillac Walk" – it’s worth the detour) and, above all, Pere Ubu from Cleveland (they’re not French, but it’s a fine tribute to Alfred Jarry, the Great Ancestor) with a fantastic track: "Final Solution"... Let’s take the opportunity to put the final punk to this article (It’s the final punk, let’s unite...).