Warhead

This song is featured in the film "This is England," symbolizing a moment where a right-wing extremist group  misunderstands the clarion call of punk and takes up literal banners to foment discontent and promote racist ideals. I felt that this choice of song was an interesting one for several reasons, given how many times punk of that era, and the UK Subs in particular, have managed to be misunderstood. I was recently reading some histories of the UK Subs and Crass where a story of a misunderstanding between two bands was told from each perspective. The UK Subs "The Early Years" page, at http://www.newredarchives.com/bands/uksubs/chapter03.html, explains: "At the ‘White Lion’ show, Crass had an argument with Charlie (Harper, the band's vocalist -- ed.) over a Subs song “All I Wanna Know” during the set, claiming it was sexist. Some members of Crass pulled Charlie from the stage. But later, after going through the lyrics with them and explaining the context in which the song was written, things were resolved and we decided to do a double headline show way out in a residential area of Northeast London." While Crass were known as an overtly leftist, anarchist political ensemble, the UK Subs were certainly not of that brand of punk, so the idea of the two bands having an ideological dispute over the lyrics of the less political (apolitical?) group is kind of amusing. 

Perhaps Crass's intention was to work to politicize their fellow punks; perhaps it was a more reactionary, less measured critique, but either way, it makes something clear to modern listeners and enthusiasts of the early punk rock of the late 70's: it was, and is, music that desperately requires context to be understood. Poor Siouxsie Sioux is still plagued with questions from interviewers asking why she donned swastika armbands in the late 70's, even though she has explained a number of times that it was essentially an ill-advised tactic to provoke and shock audiences (and indeed to alienate people of her parents' generation). This clumsy provocation translates to a palpable, visual translation of the generation gap between jobless, aimless youth ready to shake things up, and complacent, conservative adults looking toward England's past, a division characteristic of the era in which she started performing and recording. This dissatisfaction and protest were, of course, at the roots of UK punk. Without an understanding of this context, you get music journalists (who really should know better by now, if they've done their reading) asking the same questions of an artist who has recanted her youthful mistake, apologized, and even written a song about Israel to show where her sympathies truly lay. Siouxsie provides a good example of how early punk needed context to be understood properly as an artistic expression, but she is far from the only artist of her era and movement who has had to explain herself and her youthful foibles on several occasions. However, she tends to be unique in that she will storm out of interviews if the point is pressed, rather than defending herself. I believe that she last did this a few years ago during an interview with Q, but she did make it up to the magazine later with a follow-up discussion and a very good performance at their awards show in 2011. (Honestly, I also feel that the interviewer had been baiting her throughout their discussion, trying to get her to talk about increasingly more sensationalist topics such as past drug use, the dissolution of her relationship with Steve Severin and then Budgie, her troubled working relationship with various other musicians, and then this. I can kind of understand why she was not willing to tolerate more goading about old times and old decisions.)

Like Siouxsie, like the Pistols, like most punks of that era, the Subs managed to be understood more than once, and are still not completely understood by fans. To this day, comments on their YouTube videos show that fans still weren't sure who really sang on which version of some of their more popular songs, or who was playing guitar, given the changes to their personnel that meant some rapid-fire shifts, then shifts back, in who did what on a few different albums. There is the great divide about whether or not it was a good idea for them to cover "She's Not There" by the Zombies, and whether or not it was a good cover (I prefer some of the live versions to the studio version myself). Charlie Harper began gigging as a singer in the R & B scene earlier in the 70's, and therefore had an identity as a performer that predated punk rock. Therefore, his band's sometimes less-than-p.c. treatments of women and cover versions of older songs, including "She's Not There," which is not precisely a song praises the goodness and merit of women, can be understood as hearkening back to older pop music traditions.As much as punk musicians liked to position 1976 as this sort of year zero of culture at the time, many notable artists have spoken about their affection for other, earlier pop music movements; Steve Ignorant turned the phrase that I just used and mentioned his involvement in glam rock prior to discovering Dial House and meeting the other members of what would be come Crass, whereas the rest of Crass were mostly hippies and art school students. John Lydon/Rotten's storied affection for progressive rock, reggae, and Hawkwind eventually left its imprint on his work with Public Image Limited. Many artists understood as part of the first rumblings of punk in the UK, such as Eddie and the Hot Rods, were in all actuality pub rock artists. Noted sex offender Jimmy Pursey from Sham 69, the father of all street punk and Oi!, actually got his start performing by miming Bay City Rollers and Rolling Stones songs at local discos, so didn't even get a start in performing rock, exactly, so much as just performing visually and kinetically to pop music.Then, in the US, the Ramones were fronted by a former hippie who had once dubbed himself Jeff Starship, whereas the rest of "punk" in the US made in the mid-70's was essentially art-damaged pop/rock, also made by art school students. The notion that punk sprung fully formed from a vacuum, played by fledgling artists who had only recently picked up a guitar or other instrument for the first time, is part of a mythos and misunderstanding that has plagued the subculture since its origins.

Back to the Subs and misunderstanding them in particular, though. They are commonly understood as the originators of "street punk," a sub-subgenre known not for being apolitical, but for its simplified political content, including a very populist discourse on being an everyday, working man, with simple pleasures like beer and girls, who just wants to make an honest living and live a good life in an often unfair, oppressive world. In this world, violence is a sad part of life, reflecting systemic corruption, poverty, social divisions, etc. Street punk was birthed from Oi!, which was always meant to be understood as a "working-class protest," yet somehow managed to split into two diametrically opposed branches, one of extreme right-wing ideology that claims "outsiders" as the scourge of working-class happiness, and another that just took the "working-class" idea and saw it as "proletarian," and ran with it allllll the way to the left, some groups even adopting Communist rhetoric and creating the "redskin" movement. Street punk, though, is music that is often easy to misunderstand because it is vague. It's political in that it discusses problems, but rarely proposes many specific solutions geared toward policy, voting, organizing, activism, etc. in the music, preferring to suggest instead, if it suggests any solution, things like unity, jobs, and telling people like Margaret Thatcher that they are "cunts." (Well, that's what the Exploited tended to do, anyway.)  The Subs maybe had a few more good-time party songs about girls, &c., than the Exploited, and talked less about necrophilia and prostitutes than G.B.H., and tended less toward shout-along choruses than Sham 69, but they were still pretty good exemplars of early street punk, in that they also managed to have a few more or less vague political songs along with pieces like "Stranglehold."

In order to explain to you why I think the song works really great in the film, I will give those of you who haven't seen it a quick synopsis. "This Is England" is the story of a young teenage boy who is picked on by bullies in his neighborhood for being poor and fatherless until some older teenagers, a ragtag group of skins and punks, offer him first protection, then camaraderie. The protagonist and his clutch of friends drink, listen to various kinds of punk music with alternately vaguely political and apolitical, good-time themes, and generally have a happy time until some crazy right-wingers come in and start complaining about the economy and have a simple, yet elegantly foolish solution: it's those damn minorities and we need to get them out! These guys are initially welcomed into the the house of the gang's unofficial ringleader, because they were mates before the right-wing guy was sent to prison for his rowdy violence, but when it becomes clear that being in prison radicalized him in a rather unsavory way, he and his friends are quickly made to know that their sort of views are not shared or tolerated by many members of the group... except for those members who DO agree, of course, and join these neo-Nazis in their political meetings and protest, leading to some scathing portrayals of bogus extreme right-wing rhetoric and meetings where people hesitantly and inaccurately repeat ideas that they heard from someone they know who knew a guy who knew a guy who once read part of Mein Kampf. We also see the concerned-ish, yet half-hearted intervention of the protagonist's mother, who somehow manages not to stop her 12-year-old soon from hanging out with a gang of older teenagers and adults that are mixed up in fascist politics. The chilling catharsis of racist violence and murder leads to a sad and painful realization for the young protagonist, as well as the end of the internecine war between the apolitical punks/skins and right-wing extremists, as the members of the group of friends dabbling in fascism come back to their senses. This leads us to some slightly heavy-handed, but very effective symbolism in the very last scene, as the disillusioned, sobered young protagonist tosses a Union Jack given to him by the leader of the fascist splinter group into the ocean. Overall, I really enjoyed the movie, but I kind of found myself a little bothered when the protagonist, even though he was clearly supposed to be a naïve little kid, takes up with the fascists. Like, why would he be so easily swayed? Shit, when I was his age, I spray-painted "Fuck Social Darwinism" on my bedroom wall. Kids are capable of understanding politics!

The more I've thought about it, the more I've thought that the ambiguity of political messages in street punk and most classic punk (here, I am excepting anything like Discharge and any d-beat following in their wake, crust punk, or political hardcore, for obvious reasons... it was of the same era, but was thematically quite different, of course!) is kind of what allows for this slippage of meaning and misunderstanding. Punk has always been understood as a cultural movement of bricolage (see: Dick Hebdige), and, accordingly, draws from many disparate elements: R & B and classic rock 'n' roll songs about cars and women; Situationist revolutionary politics and critiques of capitalism, advertising, war, etc.; a reaction against "normal" society and a desire to subvert, or often simply invert, its morals and values; art-school theoretical folderol that most people like to play with, but don't understand perfectly; the ever-lingering presence of hippies and DIY movements, psychedelic rock and art, and the idea of dropping out of society; populism; etc. All of these movements bring with them an entirely different set of cultural baggage and political messages, often ones that clash entirely. Like, "respect women's autonomy and sexual freedom, but they're all lying heartbreaking bitches." "Fuck society and our scheming, untrustworthy politicians, but we need them to give jobs for everyone and fix this economy before we get disillusioned and drop out again." These discordant messages are definitely confusing, and any artists that wished to perpetuate a punk aesthetic had a bit of cobbling together of ideas to do before they could write and perform songs.

Certainly the gamut of themes in the UK Subs' songs makes this sort of cut-&-paste aesthetic pretty apparent; their basic, sped-up 60's rock guitar riffs and 4/4 beats, which are present in most of their songs, offer a unifying thread to their assorted different thematic elements. All of their songs sound like punk rock generally sounds, which helps make their image and aesthetic easy to pin down. However, "Warhead" was always a bit different from their other songs, and even though the group were not conventionally understood as being super leftist or even very political, I have always thought the lyrics to this song were pretty insightful, although still simple enough for most people to understand. First of all, the song is still a 4/4 punk song, but slower and perhaps more ominous-sounding than many of their songs, with a simple, repetitive guitar riff, no soloing, no exuberance, and thudding, lumbering drums with the low end mixed pretty high up in the mix: it sounds like marching, or like a heart beating, or both. The lyrics to "Warhead," if I understand them correctly, provide a jarring contrast to a scene of neo-Nazis carrying signs and banners and marching to a political meeting about how to oppress minorities, in that they are actually a critique of wars fought by the "little people" and orchestrated by history's "great men" who watch from a distance. The Subs actually seem to suggest that "Soldiers of Islam... loading their guns,"  "Russian tanks... mowing them down," and "Children in Africa loading tommy guns" are actually reacting to Western cultural imperialism and xenophobic, violence toward "Others" in distant lands (and well, also within their own countries, as is evidenced by the film's story and just reading the news and histories of that era, or today, or basically anytime within the last 150 years or so): 

"There's a burning sun

And it sets in the western world
But it rises in the east
And pretty soon
It's gonna burn your temples down

While the heads of state are having their fun
Are they ready?
We're looking at the world through the barrel of a gun
Are we ready?
And you stand there beating on your little war drum
Are you ready?
And it won't be long before your time has come
Are you ready?"

While the song doesn't come right out and say "War is bad and this is why people in Africa and the Middle East are upset with us," certain textual elements spring out to demean and belittle the military campaigns, and show that not everyone is taking them seriously enough given the consequences: "LITTLE war drum," heads of state having their FUN." The lyrics do note that the Western world needs to look toward the day of reckoning when the rest of the world fights back and "burns our temples down," equating the Western world with the sinful Babylon, whose temples were destroyed by fire in the Bible (since early punk and reggae were bedfellows, it is easy to find a lot of punk songs that talk about the Western world as Babylon), and asking us if we are really ready, for our time, the time to confront our culpability, shall come. This is one reason I appreciate the film, even though sometimes its story takes a couple of turns where I am just like, "WHY DID THEY LET THAT HAPPEN??" (to move the plot along, duh, but still!) -- the juxtaposition of a song critiquing war between the West and the rest of the world, with a scene in a film depicting some people who don't get how punk is also a protest against that, and not just a call for jobs or whatever, is great. This is why I chose this song -- I feel that its use in the film is masterful, in that it evokes the marching militancy of this extremist group being portrayed, provides a period-accurate soundtrack, and is a damn good song... AND it embeds a critique of the fallacies in the group's understanding (or misunderstanding) of punk politics and the workings of the world within the scene at the same time. Well, or it does for those who listen to the lyrics of the song and consider the ways in which punk can be understood and misunderstood.