Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)
RICHARD HELL – (I Could Live With You In) Another World/(I Belong to the) Blank Generation / You Gotta Lose (Stiff Records,1976).
Looking immaculately wasted on the cover , Richard Hell was an early poster boy for punk. The Blank Generation inspired Pretty Vacant and Hell laid claim to inventing the ripped T-shirt anti-fashion look.
The other two tracks on this EP are disposable and the A side positively sucks.
The Brits took the Punk blueprint from USA but made it into something more savage and less in thrall to the Garage Rock ethic.
Blankness – the void – a vacancy – all made the idea of nothingness into an identity – a statement of non-being.
The message, in so many words, was the world doesn’t owe us anything and we give nothing in return. “I was saying let me out of here before I was even born”, sings Hell.
In David Foster Wallace’s short story ‘The Girl With The Curious Hair’ a character called Cheese says “that my punkrocker clique all felt as if they had nothing and would always have nothing therefore they made nothing into everything”.
Ironic to say that is you google blankgeneration.com you find a fashion site which includes as its mission statement the reminder that “corporate culture is killing creativity. What the world needs is free thinkers, independent spirits, self sufficient people doing things differently.People with a global conscience that share a common point of view or central belief”.
What goes around comes around.
