It never ended. It will never end. He will keep agitating. They will keep repressing. 1977, in England, meant something, even in the new world, and means something still, to him, and the other few that kept the aesthetic. The scowling presence, the jackboot jaunt, but the stuff wears thin on a second decade. Most left for sell-out status, few stayed. At the brokerage houses the powder was free, but that proposition  was unattractive to the real partisans if they had to become yuppies in the bargain. No, he won’t do it. No condos and babysitter budgets, no working wives and money markets. He knows Joe Strummer would never cave. Even the pressure of stardom and the cascade of money couldn’t make Joe a Tory. Here, on the other side of the pond, he himself could think of nothing to make him a Republican. Even music of the 50’s was too progressive for those people; Christ, they were still listening to Benny Goodman. Meanwhile, the modern soundtrack slashes through his mind and he navigates the street scene back then; of homeless wanderers and sick refugees, turned-out factory workers and people cut off the dole. It’s morning in America but the sun don’t come up here. The passing of years erased the obvious evidence but left the collateral damage. It was a trick they pulled, letting it get so bad that people would become grateful for the slightest improvement, then watching the grateful spend the rest of their lives toiling just to keep the status quo, while access to real capital swirled invisibly, unknowingly just out of their reach, to the powerful few. It never ended. It will never end. He will put on his leather and yell at the world.

-Danny Grosso 

Memory can latch onto odd things. Sometimes the endeavor of a moment’s glance can burn a lasting impression.

He remembered her face for awhile, but that image faded over time, overpowered by the starkness of her get-up, all that boxy contrast, a somehow delicate squareness. Against the hazy sky, she looked like she was placed in a light box for viewing. Her clothes moved herky jerky smooth, like a long-form modern dance, alone on stage, out there on the street. The world was changing; cold war to glasnost, malaise to ambition, downers to amphetamines.  It was beginning to look different as well.

Walls come down, trends evolve from muddled to clean, people open their eyes anew.  Freedom can mean everything, and sometimes, it can be just the littlest thing. The loose proportions of a new design that is worn on the body, an intimate artistic display, can mean freedom in a small but not unimportant way. The breeze between the garment and the body, the freedom of movement at the joints, the respectful limitation of palette, all of this can elevate the feeling, embody a new era, and by hyperbolic extrapolation, generate hopefulness.

He had no idea if she knew anything about the heaving sociopolitical changes that gave him vertigo, or if she cared that there was still apartheid in South Africa, troubles in Ireland, and a plague of homelessness, disease, and unemployment here at home. What he saw in her was the seed of hope. She looked different, so times may be different, and things might somehow be getting better.

-Danny Grosso