Children of the Revolution. T-Rex. 1972. EMI

 After her arrest in the late summer of 1975, Patty Hearst famously gave “urban guerilla” as her occupation to processing authorities, a provocation that effectively capped a high water mark in this country’s late twentieth century flirtation with armed resistance to what was then called the “United States capitalist war machine” among its militant, radicalized youth. By the time of Hearst’s capture the inflammatory rhetoric of that era had been worked into the rock and roll common tongue by artists compelled to bring contemporary real world energy into the recording studio, and focus it into a creative passion that would lend combustible properties to their material. When T-Rex released the 45 rpm single Children Of The Revolution in September, 1972, ten days and three years before Tania’s arrest, performers from Rob Tyner to Jimi Hendrix had already stylized the physical, confrontational attitudes of those boldly misguided idealists whose sudden presence in American media signaled the arrival of a new brand of glamorized youth rebellion that Jean Luc Godard unhesitatingly identified as the “children of Marx and Coca Cola.” Prefiguring Queen, the T-Rex single is both muscular and coy, its glam lyric seductively arch, along the lines of Roxy Music’s “a danceable solution to teenage revolution,” but its core sensibility is both butch and femme, like a miscreant bottom mollied to the gills, happily strewing sexual confusion inside a crowded leather bar. The major difference between T-Rex and Queen is that where the former celebrates avant-garde eroticism, the latter’s talent is for teasing an ostensible evocation of personal, fascistic tendencies; which helps explain their massive popularity in the States. That Children Of The Revolution should perform more liberating work on the consciousness of a pop audience than armed insurrectionists could have on behalf of a poverty class should come as no surprise, especially today. War’s brutalizing specter has been with us for so long now that our only option for circumventing its disastrous effects is to buy our way out of it and into the widely expanding entertainment industrial complex which is increasingly pricing out entire blocks of the buying public. Commodifying and marketing normality—the promise that one can remain secure in his home, biases and prejudices intact, during business week off hours—has cleaved the national populace into race and income specific demographics, all the while convincing us that we are responsible for our own mass ideological self-alienation. Children Of The Revolution is T-Rex’s love letter to the world of pop as it adjusted to a post-sixties nocturnal hegemony of intemperance  and pageantry. Its vitality still holds emancipatory enchantments.

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