Dragging
Wild Angels, Fat Hogs & Cycle Sluts Down To Hell
Catalogue essay for the King Pins'
RHAPSODY HAPPPENS, Artspace, Sydney, 2005
Reprinted for the 200 Gertude St. exhibition, Melbourne,
2006
Track 1
Mark
‘Chopper’ Read – infamous for employing
chop-shock mythology to maintain power in the Melbourne
underworld of the 70s – comes from a line of choppers.
The inverse of the cool hitman of pulp lore, Chopper chose
his moniker well. Chopping is the work of hacks. Artistry
evaporates in the steaming gore unleashed by their frenzied
chopping-up of those who crossed their paths. The chopper/hacker’s
victim is sign of their brute handiwork. Chopper played
out (and now replays) the anti-artist who – like your
average building subcontractor in the Yellow Pages ™
– does the job shoddily, fucks you over, and moves
on. His chopped ears recall the art-brut of Ned Kelly’s
chop-top iron-gear. Ned’s armour suggests a Westie
yob in Camelot. Sydney Nolan romanticised the pre-Ellsworth
Kelly design of Ned Kelly’s minimalist body sculpture
and lionised it in his own Kelly Paintings (1946/7). But
old Ned was a hack and could care less for art. He was a
crim and a two-bit folk hero, and like all asocial crims,
seduced the intelligentsia to suck his metal.
Track
2
‘Choppers’ mostly recall revved-up motor bikes,
but they owe their procedure to customizing cars. Chopping
in car culture emanates from American post-war modifications
of early 40s cars. ‘Chopping the top’ meant
slicing half the height of the windows all round, then sticking
the roof back on to create a quasi-aerodynamic bullet-machine.
But chop-tops weren’t invented for speed: they were
carved as signs of stealth, slinkiness, slyness. These vehicles
hugged the road (especially once the chopped-top combined
with the lowered chassis of the Hispanic Low Rider) in a
street performance of prowling and cruising, proclaiming
their predatory status in the face of the Law. The notion
of chopping one’s body – be it your car or your
physique – extended into 60s American biker culture.
Motor bikes underwent a frenzy of modifications: extended
front-forks, elongated banana seats, elevated sissy bars,
exaggerated handle bars. Only a retard would miss the point:
the chopper bike was a hard-on, in line with a long, long
history of erectology in man-machine mutations.
Track
3
Bikers occupy a unique niche in this history and its pop
mythology. From Brando in THE WILD ONE (1951) to the Hells
Angels in GIMME SHELTER (1970), two decades of real and
unreal bikers enacted the cock-stroking machismo that makes
the biker one of the most hysterical male-o-dramas of the
20th Century. Like Joseph Campbell being blown by Hunter
S. Thompson while Tom Wolfe camcords it for posterity, the
grand myth of the biker is tackier than the footballer drag
queens of today’s television. Messiah, Viking, Jesus,
Satan, Blackbeard all rolled into one, the hirsute brute
of the biker is so desperately male that his performative
energy creates a transformative field around his body. Robed
in his mystical tokens, he becomes a riotous delusion of
warrior supremacy. Ranging from weedy runts on speed to
fat pigs full of booze, the classic bikers of the post-Altamont
70s meld straddle their Harleys ™ like giant dildos,
tea-bagging their balls and massaging their anal ring. They’re
not riding: they’re being rid by their mama with a
strap-on. All the leather – sign of animal skin –
and all the hair – sign of wild trappers – doesn’t
hide the fuck-me thrill these macho bitches dig. But you
can't thrill to the dill and still live the butch myth of
Bikerdom. Hence the open debasement of women as a sign of
Dionysian debauchery. Bikers stage wild rodeos to rustle
their women, tying them up as bitches, hogs, mamas, whatever.
With no fundamental difference from the respectable doctrine
of marriage, some die in the process while others revel
in it. Hell-driven harlots in their vertical cross-laced
suede pants hugging their thighs like trussed-up turkeys
ready for devouring, they provide a feast for the Nordic
warrior and his K-Mart ™ pewter goblet. His bike –
he calls it the bitch. His woman – she’s his
hog. He doesn’t know if he’s fucking or riding,
coming or going. His whole world is a vaginated machine
realm for his meta-cock machinery. He is Hell on wheels.
Track
4
Ultimately, bikers are drag artists. Like any mythology
hanging on its heralded costumery, it has to don and put
on in order to become. Glen Hughes (the ‘Leather Man’
from the Village People ™) is the epitome of what
Bikerdom becomes. With a forest round his mouth like a bush
round a gash, his dense folliculary frames the gay fuck-hole
with vaginal lure. Adorned in shiny (not grimy) black leather,
he is a Hell’s Angel drag-god, figurehead to a complete
fist-fucking empire of armed cocks. His trans-theatricalised
S+M (already the most theatrical of all sexual practices)
figures his ilk less curs from Jean Genet’s day-dreams
and more cads from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wet-dreams.
Today, yuppie real estate agents take their pana-tanned
bimbos out on picnics riding their Harleys ™ in a
healthy sexual pantomime. The missus is good for keeping
the leather shiny, while hubby preens his cylinder shafts
like the family front garden. He shaves her pussy; she shaves
his head. They’re a regular Demi Moore and Bruce Willis
at their 80s peak. If they’re real ‘crazy’
they probably had a Harley ™ wedding. If you want
one, just check the Yellow Pages ™ for one in your
area. The 90s weekend hoggers visiting wineries aren’t
a bastardization of the ‘real’ 70s macho studs
with their porno-moustaches and metallic belt buckles. They're
the same thing in the same drag outfit.
Track
5
The first mention of ‘heavy metal’ has been
sited as occurring in Steppenwolf’s BORN TO BE WILD
(1968). The phrase “heavy metal thunder” refers
to the roar of the Harley ™ and its noisy Futurist
subsonic bleating. The firing of the motor bike’s
cylinders that produces the low-end jittering is refigured
in 80s Death Metal. The double-kick pedal ‘bleats’
its beats as a rumbling blur, while the ‘parox-seismic’
vocal chords are left to flutter similarly. Growling and
howling, Metal music is the abject sound of Bikerdom: Death
Metal, Speed Metal and Black Metal verge on sounding like
roaring motorbikes. Conversely, the musical sound of Bikerdom
is bad boogie rock. Like an anti-mirror to gatherings at
Jimmy Buffet concerts, Broadford resounds to the blur of
Southern/Texan hard rock, fuelled by white macho angst and
bulk-buy bins of Southern Comfort ™. The Angels seemed
to always be playing there – maybe because of their
name. Bastard children of the Vanda and Young dynasty (which
also brought us the foxy shopping mall bitches of Cheetah),
the Angels chugged like a new-waved AC/DC. None of these
bands rode Harleys as part of their mythology, but big bad
bikes seemed to cluster around those who wished to be bad
to the bone. The best insignia of Bikerdom occurs in early
70s Glam. Alvin Stardust, Gary Glitter and Suzi Quatro all
drove massive bikes on stage as part of their ‘spectacular’
entrance (or had their stage hands push them in on the bikes).
Suzi went on to become Leather Tuscadero – a pink
leather-clad biker to Fonzie’s bad-boy on HAPPY DAYS
(1975). To say either were ‘real’ would be like
writing the word ‘rebellion’ somewhere in this
paragraph.
Track
6
The Aussie Biker is a feral mutation of his American mytho-type.
Low budget Oz classics like STONE (1974) and COSY COOL (1977)
copy the American templates of WILD ANGELS (1966) and its
para-doco slap-dash of scenography, BORN LOSERS (1967) and
its Western loner anti-hero, and EASY RIDER (1969) and its
pithy distilled spirit of the dying 60s. (The irony is that
rednecks shoot the hippy bikers in EASY RIDER while redneck
bikers shot a black hippy in GIMME SHELTER.) By the 70s,
the biker in cinema believed itself to be heroic, tragic,
vainglorious, epiphanous, whatever. STONE and COSY COOL
revel in this delusion, positing their characters as ghosts
of Ned, living in the cultural wasteland of rural Australia.
Coming well after the genre, MAD MAX combines its remnants
with dystopian sci-fi and fetishizes Bikerdom even more.
Its deluded attempts to ‘be bad’ (especially
in MAD MAX II, 1981) reveal the hardcore drag-core of Bikerdom.
The leathery feathery paraphernalia of the mohawkers and
toe-cutters is straight out of the style-conscious Italian
comic RANXEROX (1980) and joins a global continuity of issuing
punks and bikers in leather as ‘bad boys’. The
badness in MAD MAX III (1985) is hyper-drag: Mel in bad
wigs; Tina in bad wigs: Angry Anderson in bad wigs. From
Frank Thring’s thespian queen to Tina Turner’s
Acid Queen, the whole film drowns in drag, yoked as it is
to the drag condition of Bikerdom’s originating machismo.
The American film HIGHWAY TO HELL (1992) depicts a biker
cop who has been necromantically revived to patrol his own
Highway Hell, trapping and devouring those who innocently
cross its threshold. From WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971) to THE ADVENTURES
OF PRISCILLA QUEEN OF THE DESERT (1994), the Australian
landscape is a gigantic shallow hell-hole (as if Sydney,
Melbourne and Adelaide aren’t cosmo-wannabe-shitholes).
HIGHWAY TO HELL’s use of the AC/DC anthem mythically
aligns itself with our landscape, but the original song
as heard through Bon Scott’s head has nothing to do
with the intellectualised angst of our ‘distant shore’.
It’s a paean to the rev-head dead-end compulsion to
drive on into the unknown full-throttle and substance-fuelled.
Maybe the inner beauty of AC/DC is that they escaped drag
– and still do to this day.
Track
7
The King Pins aren’t drag. For them, drag is a verb:
they drag stuff. The invocation of lesbo drag kings clearly
rises from their name, but it’s not central to their
domain. The King Pins are on stage all the time: everything
and everyone around them is already in drag – from
fairy princesses to shopping mall lords to pimply kids working
at Starbucks ™. Everyone is a performer and every
space is a stage. The King Pins accordingly frame the performative
that already exists, producing multi-layered mime and mimicry
which could care less for what’s real and what’s
not. In line with the drag king effect, the King Pins are
celebratory in their performance. It’s a crucial difference.
Where the Drag Queen abjects himself in the act of becoming
that which is most monstrous to him – the feminine
– the Drag King becomes the masculine in recognition
of a monstrousness pre-celebrated in machismo culture. Men
love being enraged and ravenous monsters, figuring them
as drag artistes of their own fucked-up psyche. Their desire
is always an act of becoming the monstrous, so no points
for ‘pointing it out to us’. The King Pins rework
this through a twisted and inseparable mix of playing-up
and dressing-up; playing-out and going-out. The drag queen
tragically dreams of actually being the prom queen in a
phantasmal space of that which most becomes a woman, and
in turn burlesques his fractured womanhood in a self-destructive
viciousness that marks the drag stage as mix of misogyny
and nihilism (hence its popularity with the footballers:
two tinnies and they’re in a frock). The King Pins
would have nightmares over becoming their characters. Of
course they could be fun nightmares of carnivalesque thrills,
but the through-line of the drag king is comparatively clearer
than the drag queen’s oft-desperate performance.
Track
8
When the King Pins invoke Bikerdom, the nightmare is laughably
writ large in glowing lights. If they abject anything, it’s
the tacky tokens of machismo that make male-ness so laughable.
In an act of transformation that is more trans-gendering
than gender-dividing, their biker bitches are chimera of
bearish lumberjacks in a Goya-esque void – but riding
a grotesquely sissified girlie-girl BMX ™. Their go-go
dancers evoke Tina Turner’s lion mane morphed onto
a glittering Mattel poseable-action doll from SHOWGIRLS
(1995 – no there are no such dolls, but there should
have been). The staging is part televisual, part videosonic,
part fairground attraction. It’s the mash-up of coded
fashion and socialised bodies that generates the King Pin
drag. Like girl biker gangs from movies like FASTER, PUSSYCAT!
KILL! KILL! (1965) and SHE DEVILS ON WHEELS (1968), the
King Pins are a girl gang of thrill-seeking artists. If
it shits you that they’re dressing up, screaming,
laughing and having fun – that’s your problem.
They aren’t going to give you a poe-faced affectation
of post-feminist griping. In a world that is happy to have
an endless supply of Dianne Arbuses, Virginia Woolfes and
Frida Kahlos – the whole ‘beautiful tragedy’
of fucked-up and fucked-over women – the King Pins
refute the ‘exposed self’ in preference for
the ‘developed self’: woman as vessel, container,
well and vial, ready to take any culture jism going and
able to expel it back as a reconverted figure. The King
Pins have pulled in to another desolate truck-stop on their
hogs. Filled up, fired up and revved up, these bitches are
ready to head down their hard-on to hell.
