X-Ray Spex - Oh Bondage Up Yours!

For the Women in My Life

1. Browsing through the history of advertising is a jarring experience. Marketing can be equal parts hilarious and disgusting - appalling caricatures, stereotypes, and rampant misogyny abound! “Don’t worry darling, you didn’t burn the beer!” says the consoling husband as wifey dries her eyes with his handkerchief while a pan is smoking in the kitchen. A woman works at a laithe in a factory and the fun tagline is “Turns out you gals are useful after all.” The gold medalist might be the Chase & Sanborn coffee ad with a wife bent over her husband’s lap as he’s about to hit her for “not store testing for fresher coffee.” A spanking can be a fun time if that’s your bag, but that’s about consent. GAWD! That pesky consent. Anywho, the message is clear: Women, you must all consume shit, buy shit, but remember, you ain’t shit. Be a dutiful mother and buy products to take care of your family. Be a dutiful wife and buy products to keep your youthful glow. But ladies, please do keep in mind that you’re not allowed to have money of your own. Before 1974, American women weren’t allowed to have a bank account or apply for credit by themselves. Ladies are simply brood mares for the state, as everyone knows, but only when ordered to give birth. Until 1978 it was legal for an employer to fire women simply for being pregnant. Women were to be kept in bonds, and then Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex arrived to shove a stick of dynamite up the patriarchy’s ass.

   Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard
   But I think
   Oh bondage, up yours!
   One, two, three, four

2. Poly was not invested in the routine joys of disposable capitalist materialism. She was prepared to offer a giant “FUCK OFF” to the mechanisms of the culture industry, decrying its standardization, homogenization, and manipulation of mass culture for profit-driven ends. The kids in the street always see what’s coming next in mass culture long before it arrives in stores, mostly because they play the largest hand in creating it. Poly plainly saw how advertising and marketing perpetuate inequalities and obfuscate power dynamics. Poly equated consumerism with servitude and she had negative, less than zero, interest in serving at the system’s behest. She later described it as a measure of self-destiny, a call for liberation.

   It was saying: ‘Bondage—forget it! I'm not going to be bound by the laws of consumerism or bound by my own senses.' It has that line in it: 'Chain smoke, chain gang, I consume you all': you are tied to these activities for someone else's profit.

   -Poly Styrene, as quoted by Jon Savage in England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond

   Poly recognized at 20 years old what it took tenured scholars decades of study to understand: cultural products are homogenized and consumers (and their desires) are manipulated ceaselessly and for profit. The culture industry absorbs all forms, old and new, and refines them into a planned process with predetermined outcomes (One can purchase an X-Ray Spex t-shirt for $26.90 plus shipping and handling through a well-known pop culture and merch store’s website). Authentic expression is lost in favor of profit-driven formulas. Poly Styrene was Spider Jerusalem before bat-shit beautifully crazy Warren Ellis invented him (I’m quite sure Warren has X-Ray Spex in his collection).

   

   That's what a monoculture is. It's everywhere, and it's all the same. And it takes up alien cultures and digests them and shits them out in a homogenous building-block shape that fits seamlessly into the vast blank wall of the monoculture. This is the future. This is what we built. This is what we wanted. It must have been. Because we all had the fucking choice, didn't we? It is only our money that allows commercial culture to flower. If we didn't want to live like this, we could have changed it any time, by not fucking paying for it. So let's celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger.

   -Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson

3. 16-year-old Lora Logic is on saxophone here on a punk record (That’s three delightful peculiarities in a single sentence). The band kicks in after that spoken-word entrance and count-off, and what happens over the next 2:47 is a firestorm of caterwauling vocals and outrageous staccato saxophone wails as Poly points a high-powered finger of parody at the paradoxes of being a woman.

   Chain-store, chain-smoke
   I consume you all
   Chain-gang, chain-mail
   I don't think at all

   Oh bondage, up yours

   Writing about sex is too obvious and too tired a (hot) topic, so Poly used the idea of bondage to subvert expectations. X-Ray Spex attacked with rage and joy the foundations of a consumer culture that would homogenize us all if given the chance. A German philosopher and theorist from the Frankfurt School once opined “…the technique of the culture industry is, from the beginning, one of distribution and mechanical reproduction, and therefore always remains external to its object.” Poly Styrene understood this innately without the schooling and scholarly approach. I argue hers was probably more effective. She refused to be a party to a machine that would create a false sense of choice and individuality while reinforcing conformity to societal norms. She was still denouncing consumerism at political debates until her death in 2011. True to form, the original version of Oh Bondage Up Yours! isn’t available on streaming because of licensing issues. Wouldn’t Poly be pleased.