I don’t exactly remember my first reaction when I hear Poly Styrene scream out, “O! Bondage, Up Yours” as the intro to the X-Ray Spex single of the same name, but I’m sure it wasn’t contentment.
The song growls out of Styrene’s introductory yawp, an electric charge that shocks the musical soul back to life.
The initial response, however, seems unimportant now, the song’s aggressive mauling of rock ‘n’ roll conventions altered my music-listening DNA longterm, implanting within me a punk gene that has remained alive.
Styrne died Monday at age 53 of cancer, on the eve of the release of a new solo album, her first since 2004.
Pop Matters’ Mixed Media blog called her an “always…incisive cultural chronicler and commentator” whose “music was always smart and fun in equal doses, making listeners think about gender politics, while shaking their booty and enjoying her marvelous wit.”
Discussions of the punk era always begin with the British movement (don’t get me started on how this underplays the role of the artier New York and American punk sound) and tend to founder in a debate over whether the Clash or the Sex Pistols provided the most lasting model for future musical transgressors. But the English sound owed as much to other bands — Elvis Costello was a punk rocker, remember, hte Gang of Four helped pioneer what might be described as punk-disco or punk-funk — and other impulses.
Enter Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex. The 1977 single, “O! Bondage, Up Yours!”, and the 1978 album Germ-Free Adolescents were precursors to 1990s bands like L7 and Breeder and a feminist prototype within the largely male punk culture.
Poly may be dead, but her influence will live on.
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- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Hank Kalet 