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New Day Cafe: the Copy Machine and the Punk Band [1]

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Date: 2023-10-23  

JSTOR Daily ran a recent piece on the intersection of Xerox machines and punk bands.

From JSTOR,

“They both have origins in Queens, born of offbeat tinkerers whose impact would, after difficult starts and plenty of setbacks, far exceed the wildest imaginations of their inventors. Here, one might think, is where the story arcs of the copy machine and punk cease to overlap. On the one hand, Chester Carlson’s 1938 invention of xerography in an Astoria kitchen begat the photocopier, a machine whose ubiquity in corporate settings and innate emphasis on sameness made it virtually synonymous with the soulless drudgery of twentieth-century office life. As for punk, the irreverent, anti-establishment attitude concocted in the early 1970s by, among others, the four Queens natives who formed the Ramones, continues to assert itself today as the negative image of corporate culture.

But, as with many things that appear diametrically opposed, there’s more to it than that. Cornell University’s vast collection of toner-rich, xerographically produced punk flyers, spanning five decades and two continents, provides an object lesson on anti-art in the age of mechanical reproduction, illustrating the dependence of punk proliferation on corporate innovation—and the raw power unleashed by seizing the means of (office paperwork) production…

Punk bands tended...to toil for years in obscurity before their logos became mall t-shirt mainstays, it took time for Carlson’s invention to gain traction. A full decade elapsed before the name “xerography” (meaning “dry writing”) was coined and the trademark “XeroX” adopted by the Haloid Photographic Company. The flourish of the capitalized second “X” was eventually dropped, as it demanded an attention to aesthetic detail that was lost on the marketplace. But, when the company dropped “Haloid” altogether to become simply “Xerox” in 1958, consultants anticipated problems from the slightly less stylized name as well, fearing it would sound too much like “zero,” which would surely turn off investors. Of course, these concerns turned out to be moot, and the term has since become so fully integrated into English as to become an accepted verb. But here, too, there’s a sort of aesthetic anticipation at the heart of the Xerox story, as, two decades later, the punk landscape would be awash with zeros (e.g., the Zeros, the Zero Boys) and X’s (e.g., X, X-Ray Spex, Generation X), responses to and appropriations of the empty and anonymous consumer landscape that Xerox helped establish.”

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