You can’t talk about X and Los Angeles, and X and their first album, Los Angeles, without talking about “Los Angeles.” It starts with the familiar four-beat chime of a bell peal translated into Billy Zoom guitar awesomeness, and keeps going. It’s sped up, emotional, head-bang-worthy – whatever you look for in an X song, it’s there.
However. We have a problem, and that problem can be summed up in four words: trigger warning: racist language.
Like most of X’s songs, “Los Angeles” is rooted in the personal. In this case the “she” being described is Exene’s roommate at the time, who went by the name Farrah Fawcett-Minor. (Googling around, I’ve seen that stage name linked with a real name, but am reluctant to post it here without further attribution.) The description is of someone so alienated from her surroundings – from her “own best friend,” even – that she lashes out, taking out her disillusionment and loneliness on everyone not like her. “Los Angeles” turns into a document of how racism happens: it takes us inside the mind of a person saying racist and homophobic things and links that hatred to the larger issue of alienation within society. That makes the song interesting, even powerful; but its sympathetic focus remains on the unhappy bigot and never glances back at the classes of people she’s slagging.
To quote Greil Marcus, writing on the LA punk scene:
The opening lines of X’s searing “Los Angeles”… tell us not that the subject of the song has her hangups, but that the objects of her rage are types, not like us, deserving of the crimes they get: crimes against nature. The song has enough musical bite to make any n—–, Jew, Mexican, homosexual, or idle rich want to hear the tune again, and then think, “That’s not me, I’m not like that” (like what?) and that is the true black hole of the number, and of L.A. punk: attacked, one may side with one’s attacker, and accept the terms of the attack.
(“Crimes Against Nature,” originally printed in Ranters and Crowd Pleasers [Doubleday, 1993]; reprinted in Duncombe and Tremblay, White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race [Verso, 2011].)
I should add, for those wanting to point out that 1980 was a different time, that as late as last year X was performing the song live without changing the lyrics.
Michelle Habell-Pallán, writing largely about Chicana punk artists such as Alice Bag, described her own reaction at the time to “Los Angeles”:
I, too, remember cringing at those lyrics as a teenager, as I do now, wondering why my favorite band had to write such horrendous words, especially since, at the time, I thought, mistakenly, that the lead singer, Exene, was Mexican American. As a high school student, however, I found it less difficult to digest those lyrics in a a mostly white, conservative, working- to middle-class public school, in which I experienced no small amount of anti-Mexican hostility, despite the fact that I had been born in California… At the time I made sense of the song “Los Angeles” by imagining it was about one of my bigoted classmates. Nonetheless, this interpretation did not take away the sting I felt every time I heard the lyrics. Yet, I was able to hear beyond the sting and maintain my identification with punk…
(Originally printed in Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture [New York University Press, 2005]; reprinted in Duncombe and Tremblay.)
Habell-Pallán goes on to note that X, and Exene, were familiar with the East LA punk scene: they knew the Vex, they were friends with Los Lobos, Exene did graphic work for the Brat. When the Claremont Museum of Art put together an exhibit called “Vexing: Female Voices from East L.A. Punk,” Exene was represented. That doesn’t make the lyrics of “Los Angeles” suddenly kosher; it does hint at a more complicated history than I can give you.
So far I have not been able to find much commentary from the X members themselves on the question of race and the L.A. punk scene, or race and “Los Angeles,” for that matter. In 2006 Exene told an interviewer,
Punk was founded on this whole different cultural model than what we have today. It was against the excesses of rock stars and it was against the wealthy and had all these ideals about anyone who could get on stage and play an instrument. There was no sexism and there was no racism… When the civil rights happened, I was around. When rock and roll started, I was around. I respect all those people that broke through some of those sexist and racist barriers because it was really hard to do and a lot of people died doing it. So I still have that model and the punk rock model that I live by and self-respect to me is really important and respect for other people is really important. Not objectifying people is really important and not degrading people is really important because it makes for a better culture and a better society.
I believe she believes it. I find it much harder to believe she’s remembering right. In a world of “no sexism and no racism,” X had no one who could come up to them and ask them if there was a way to tell the story in “Los Angeles” without making listeners cringe?
X sings from a very personal worldview, and that personal worldview was very much informed by its whiteness. The personal storytelling is their strength; it’s the reason I find them so compelling. But “Los Angeles” may be where that strength turns out to be a weakness. And I can’t tell you the band has addressed that weakness. I wish I could.
