VIVE LA PUNK!

摘要

Martin Scorsese vexes me, and not just because he refuses to read my script for Raging Bull 2: Jake LaMotta Goes Gymkata. I'm livid because his upcoming HBO series, Vinyl, is an incorrect portrayal of the origins of punk rock. (To be fair, Scorsese is one of several executive producers, but I blame him for this-he's Johnny Effing Rotten compared to Mick Jagger and Terence Winter!) The show centers on a hedonistic music producer in 1970s New York who discovers a band that's a hybrid of Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. So far, so good; I have a fondness for any group that played its first show in a homeless shelter. My own band, the Voight-Kampff Testes, maintains an unsolicited residency at the Hartford Airport Panda Express. RAWK! But here's the real problem: Vinyl treats this ersatz band as punk pioneers, when the roots of the movement in fact go far deeper. Has no one involved with Vinyl read Greil Marcus' book Lipstick Traces? The true roots of punk trace back to a 1950s European philosophical movement. If HBO wants to get real, then Vinyl needs to be about Parisian intellectual Guy Debord breaking off from the Lettrist arts movement and penning the manifesto that established the Situationist International! Think of the cinematic potential, HBO: genteel conversations in Gauloises-fogged cafes, feverish screed-writing montages. It's not just TV, it's French history. Ratings gold! Just send that honorary Emmy to the Panda-I've got rehearsal tonight.