The overlap between punk and Situationism was neither wholly accidental nor entirely intentional, and the average punk artist, whether visual or musical, was often not as unschooled, as the myth would have it. Later, much would be made of this, especially surrounding punk impresario Malcolm McClaren’s claims to have manufactured the Sex Pistols as part of an elaborate scheme to rip off major music labels. McClaren, an art school dropout, was associated with the 1960s English Situationist group King Mob. Around the same time, he met fellow art student and future Sex Pistols art director Jamie Reid, who contributed graphics to the seminal 1974 Situationist anthology Leaving the Twentieth Century.
Together, McClaren and Reid had a knack for translating elements of existing subcultural styles into an immediately identifiable package of image and ideology, and transmitting it with incredible efficiency and effectiveness. For example, while the “ransom note” style of typography certainly preceded Reid, it was he who made it a part of the punk aesthetic package. As for McClaren, his verbosity and knack for finding a platform meant punk had a media mouthpiece providing instant interpretation. Indeed, regarding punk posters, Ensminger quotes McClaren as proclaiming them “a declaration of war against art” that “screamed ugliness all across town—designs made to address an army of disaffected youth. These were the rats’ ears of the city fighting the consumerist ideology of the mainstream.”
While the surviving members of the Sex Pistols have made clear that McClaren was pulling fewer puppet strings than he pretended, he wasn’t the only one stocking the ideological arsenal for up-and-coming punks to draw from. Punks were doing it themselves, too, turning out an endless array of photocopied fanzines full of their own articulations. Through a series of self-produced zines, fellow Brits and Sex Pistols contemporaries Crass worked assiduously to combat media simplifications and create a coherent punk narrative. In one 1982 publication, they promise “insight into much of the thinking of the ‘punk generation’ which, contrary to the media portrayal of punk as mindless and violent, is both caring and articulate.” In the same issue, they also provide a “manual on how . . . the victims of ‘oppressive institutions’ can not only get by, but subvert and use to their own ends the tools of that oppression.”
Whether through the media manipulation of McClaren or the Xeroxed pages of zines, there was no shortage of pre-packaged ideological supplies for founding a punk band—and, of course, no shortage of “tools of that oppression” ready be subverted.