Her punk-rock self-examination bests hippie-style narcissism. Ahem, Neil and Joni.
Poly Styrene’s voice — a siren of joy and alarm — reaches into the millennium with a lesson for us all in the documentary Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché. This bio-doc about the lead singer of the British punk band X-Ray Spex brings back a key figure of that cultural movement whose difference from contemporary American pop stars couldn’t be more extreme — or more relevant.
The X-Ray Spex songs from the 1978 album Germfree Adolescents took the experiences of advertising culture and sci-fi social engineering that gave English youth dire speculations about their plasticized political future and reassembled them into a worldview combining cynicism and idealism. It was unlike the conceited virtue-signaling by musicians of the Kardashian era that now includes grandstanding by established cultural figures you’d think were old enough to know better—such as the anti-free-speech follies of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.
I Am a Cliché vividly presents Poly Styrene’s story (Day-Glo costume image, proud teeth braces, and reggae influence) so that we understand the contrast between a self-conscious pop-music movement and the self-serving nature of the Young-Mitchell movement that now offers an erroneous exemplar of social consciousness. One cultural commentator noted the left-based solipsism of American showbiz, always attaching itself to social causes, whether civil rights and Vietnam in the Sixties and Seventies or social justice and communism today.
But when you hear X-Ray Spex on the doc soundtrack — first “Germfree Adolescents” then the band’s signature song “Oh Bondage, Up Yours” — it burns through the sanctimony of today’s pop-star politics. That sound was designed to blow away the likes of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, Jackson Browne, etc., the Seventies’ Laurel Canyon bards who had become rich, self-satisfied, and politically smug. (They were recently celebrated in Rock Me on the Water by the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein.) X-Ray Spex’s sqwonky, saxophone-based, drum-and-guitar-driven art had been inspired by the Sex Pistols’ punk revolution, which sought to shock but also to spark social consciousness. (The Au Pairs named their record label Ideal Home Noise.)
Poly Styrene (born Marianne Elliot in 1957) skirted ideology, yet she took on ideological assumptions that affected society and herself. Her fervor, wit, and instinct produced music that is still rousing and intellectually stimulating. I Am a Cliché was directed by her daughter, Celeste Bell, and Paul Sng, with Bell providing modest, confessional narration: “I was not prepared to handle her legacy.” But Bell and Sng admirably explore the native genius of a young artist who dared make the stunning “I Am a Poseur.” Another X-Ray Spex song, “Art-I-Ficial” is as forthright. None of these tunes, or propositions, is redundant. They belong to the blazing insight and self-examination of pop art that defies narcissism thorough hilarious honesty.
Bell points out, “My mother wrote songs critiquing consumerism, but my mother was the ultimate shopper. I don’t think she felt any allegiance to any particular [political] stance. She secretly wished she could be a lady of leisure.” Yet Bell’s doc describes a non-leisurely life and Poly Styrene’s intent to forge a career that would best its limited origins. The diary passage “I’m just an ordinary tough kid from an ordinary tough street” begins Marianne Elliot’s recall of her biracial heritage as the daughter of an English mother and a Somali father. In an effective narrative stroke, actress Ruth Negga brings a Bromley accent to the diary; her vocal animation complements Bell’s: “My mom is half-caste, I’m quarter-caste. Even growing up in the Nineties, these are the terms people would use to describe me.”
But this is not a conventional BBC or PBS doc about victimhood. Race consciousness equates to social consciousness where, as musician-filmmaker Don Letts says: “The whole mixed-race thing was a new phenomenon in this country. The kids were confused. Which side should you play on?” Negga reads Elliot’s poem “Half-Caste:” “Black is beautiful / White is all right / I’m infiltrating, can’t you see.” Her song “Identity” has that Johnny Rotten ringing sound, drilling into your awareness, becoming part of Britain’s cultural heritage.
Poly Styrene figured it out for herself (“When you’re mixed race, it’s difficult feeling like you’re an outsider looking in all of the time”) and without ever using today’s PC platitudes “icon” and “woman of color.” Bell respects that intellectual courage, even when detailing Poly’s later psychological stress. The doc’s perspective honors Poly Styrene by placing her within a cultural lineage: David Bowie’s “Heroes,” Andy Warhol’s “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes,” and finally Poly Styrene’s “I Am a Cliché” — perhaps the boldest, non-ironic assertion in the history of pop culture. Joni Mitchell and Neil Young should listen up and get over themselves.
