jungk food

several years ago, my friend rob and i met malcolm mclaren at his london home. we were there to talk about a new act he was shopping called jungk.

i was surprised by how “upper class” his place was. instead of a showcase of the iconoclastic befitting a man who brought us the sex pistols, bow wow wow, and the word famous supreme team, the décor was conventional if not traditional, more south kensington than soho.

mclaren was psyched. he told us how through a series of auditions in asia, he hand-picked the 4 group members, all working models in the asian fashion scene and fresh to the music business. it was a great story.

i met the ladies about a month later in nyc, at a high-profile social meant as the official debut of jungk: great food, beautiful people, even willie ninja was brought in to mother the girls and teach them how to walk. it was completely glam and fab, and to top it off, mclaren somehow got a major cosmetics company to foot the bill.

the jungkettes were thrilled. clearly aware of malcolm’s track record, they were more than down with his master plan, even if it’s a bit fuzzy on the details.

a few weeks later, we were in the studio with the ladies, having been persuaded by malcolm to have kurtis produce covers of iggy pop’s “china girl” and kraftwerk’s “the model” for the european release of the “mulan” soundtrack that rob was sourcing for buena vista. all expenses, of course, were covered by buena vista. during those few weeks in the studio i learned mclaren did not discover the jungkettes through a spice girls/n’sync style “star search” (it was actually through friends in the fashion business, and some of the ladies were already friends) and, more surprisingly, he wasn’t even their manager.

what happened next was a blur. before rob and i fully understood mclaren’s game, he scored a deal with emi, and when emi subsequently went through some corporate convulsions, resold them to chris blackwell at palm. as far as i know, nobody saw a piece of the action except for malcolm.

the ladies didn’t seem to care, however. i think they were actually somewhat relieved to be free of mclaren and were more preoccupied with their own dream of stardom.

a few months after they were signed, palm unceremoniously dropped them.

i remember reading a piece by mclaren about sid vicious’ last days in the new yorker and being impressed by how he shaped the pistols' cultural significance and legacy. indeed, rob told me malcolm considers himself an artist who works with people to create his artwork, the same way that a painter works with paint and a sculptor may work with metals.

in other words, mclaren realizes his art through the manipulation of people, from the pistols to jungk and from major label a&r to fleet street hacks. it’s really quite brilliant: take an emerging cultural trend and recruit the right people to create content that could serve both as a media beacon and a commercial brand.

i was also struck by my own reaction to the different mclaren creations. uncharacteristically, i’m agnostic on the music, not because i don’t care, but because i believe for mclaren, it’s not about the music; the pistols’ primal squall and jungk’s mandarin beats seemed meaningful only as extensions of provocative ideas. punk’s rebellious petulance and the growing influence of all things asian in western pop culture are his true passion, everything else is just marketing.

last spring, daphne and i caught the vivian westwood retrospective at the victoria and albert in london. it was an exhilarating document of her artistic journey - from sex era safety-pin chic to more recent foreys in rei kawabuko-like deconstructionism – and more important, her self-reinventions.

as we perused the collection and marveled at the way westwood repeatedly redefine and realize her vision with increasing sophistication, it dawned on me why she is one of the few among many mclaren “collaborators” who managed to escape his creative orbit (the other is producer trevor horn). her aesthetic shape-shifting makes her poor material for mclaren’s creative process, which from the pistols to jungk, had pretty much stuck to the same formula (a further case in point is the recent rumor that he is working a new all-girl punk band from beijing). in musical terms, malcolm is that proverbial one-hit-wonder who spend most of his career milking the same tune at a vegas lounge, or a well-appointed dig in london.

Posted by cellpharmer at May 9, 2005 07:27 PM