Malcom McLaren
Duck Rock

I needed to explain what was happening in the early Eighties, trying to find something that characterized, at least, my perception of that period, and I find myself wanting to fit “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five with “My life in the bush of ghosts” by Eno & Byrne, that “Calypso” mood so dear to the Talking Heads, and a bit of good punk.
Coming to my aid was an album not very well known, so much so that there is still no review on DeBaser where practically everything and anything has been discussed.

The album is “Duck Rock” by Malcolm McLaren. McLaren was a young “situationist” thinker, a lover of provocation, husband of Vivienne Westwood, creator of punk iconography, mentor of the Sex Pistols. Someone who, when he saw Richard Hell, was more struck by the torn t-shirt than by the concept of “blank generation.”
In short: one of those you must always remember when reconstructing, for better or worse. Duck Rock has a lineup that practically describes what would soon become the Art of Noise project: Trevor Horn, replete with earnings from his “Video killed the radio star,” ready to lend a hand to Yes’ “90125” (baby), Gary Langan, Anne Dudley, J.J. Jezcalick.

The focus, however, might be something else.
The most well-known track of this collage album by McLaren is “Buffalo Gals”: a sound icon of old school rap with that “First buffalo gal go around the outside” imported from a nineteenth-century folk song and brought back to chart honors a few decades later thanks to “Without me” by Eminem (and in another five hundred billion samples).
The album is a continuous succession of world music and rap echoes, reminding me of one of those “Cruisin’” compilations recorded by KHJ in Los Angeles. It seems more like a radio program than an album, which in turn intersperses samples of old tracks, between the pioneering cowboy style and Kool & The Gang, recorded voices, Latin rhythms, South African choirs.

Malcolm McLaren was a trendsetter (today we’d say influencer) who placed an often exaggerated signature on almost all the most significant musical movements of that era.
This year, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the birth of London punk, his son thought it well to organize a bonfire with old period memorabilia, provoking the ire of John Lydon who didn’t spare him fuckoff and jokes about his work (he has an underwear brand): “Fottuto egoista, brucia il tuo reggiseno.” Because yes: that era is also made of memorabilia and fetishes of millionaire value (five, to be exact, that Er mutanda wants to give to the public fire within an event organized with the Queen’s own blessing).

Whether it’s punk or hip hop culture, regardless of the genuine motherfucker and break the rules, there’s always someone who influences and decides what has value and what doesn’t: Miranda explains it well in “The Devil Wears Prada” regarding a cerulean sweater. McLaren branded the cerulean of the youth revolts of that era, which at times told more of bourgeois anomie than popular torment.

Yes, okay: anarchism in the United Kingdom, fuck the queen, sell dad’s valor medal to buy gin and condoms, the coast derby here and there, but that I hate Pink Floyd t-shirt and those gold chains on lace-less Adidas could really go crazy this year, Malcolm and his wife thought.

There’s always a Mugatu in Zoolander deciding. And a Mugatu’s son selling underwear. C’est la vie.

And maybe those targeted by the London system, which gained endless income and tourist flows from punk between Piccadilly and Camden Town, thought the same.
The extraordinary Crass intoned (so to speak) “The name is Crass, not Clash,” offended by Strummer’s “commercial” turn. A turn that would lead straight to London Calling.

Perhaps McLaren chuckled a bit. Perhaps, it was with London Calling that Strummer definitively demonstrated what it means to escape the spiral of conformism of nonconformism and to show music and poetic form, giving back to life a little bit of healthy beat generation.

And, irony of ironies, Malcolm McLaren, often depicted as a manipulative puppeteer more attentive to style than artistic content, leaves behind a very valid work, very intelligent, quite “seminal,” a good ethnomusicological work free from the social critique intents present in “My life in the bush of ghosts,” but equally loved by insiders, even if little known by the public, more or less demanding. A niche album, to be clear. A niche but not a relic.

An album “against” any predefined category. Imagine that.

And to complete the work, the cover art is by Keith Haring. That disk there is the Eighties. Beyond some equally significant genres but with different narratives, the rest includes everything that characterized that decade, and especially the most vivid sound and graphic stereotypes in the collective memory: disco dance, rap, “Africa inside” so mainstream in the years of “We are the world,” marimbas and cheerfulness, like a sound interlude in a John Hughes film and other 80’s comedies.

And Mr. McLaren taunts us, wherever he may be, intoning “We’re gonna punk it up and funk it up!.”