By K.A. Laity
Punk icon Poly Styrene (given name Marianne Joan Elliott-Said) has died at the far too young age of 53 after battling advanced breast cancer. She'd been on Twitter for weeks getting the word out about her new album Generation Indigo with its catchy single "VIrtual Boyfriend." With the too-early death of The Slits' Ari Up still fresh in mind it's beginning to feel as if some contagion of the poisonous years of Thatcher and Reagan worked its way into their very flesh and given them cancer.
The raucous saxophone of X-Ray Spex and its iconoclast singer inspired many during the formative days of punk. From the braces on her teeth to her unconventional looks and wild attire, she found a freedom in the wildness of punk rock that changed her life. But like most revolutionary movements, it quickly became regimented and stylized into fossil-hard rules.
As Billy Bragg wrote on Facebook,
Little girls should be seen and not heard wasn't only a view held by our parent's generation - the rock hacks of the mid-70s also subscribed to the idea that female musicians should be rock chicks a la Suzy Quatro. Poly pushed against that and the boys club that was early punk rock.
Always the iconoclast, after a breakdown at 21 she eventually turned to Krishna and dropped out of the music biz to be a mother. The girl who once bawled "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" seemed to find a great peace in her life and continued to make music, including the unique Christmas single, "Black Christmas" with her daughter, which demonstrated that her outlook might be positive but she remained sharply observant of the world around her -- and expected it to do better. "Virtual Boyfriend" takes on the often disjointed interactions online: "You're like a MySpace friend, that's all" and "We hardly see each other at all," but she also used Twitter effectively to get the buzz going for the release of the album. Reality is never precise and all too often, it's not really fair.
Requiescat in pace, Poly/Marianne.
Image via Uroica's Flickr