Poly said that “Identity” was partially inspired by the time she saw a girl slashing her wrists in the bathroom at a punk club. It’s easy to interpret it as a commentary on the commodification of individuality and the influence of mass media. Yet, I’ve long used it as a bit of a personal clarion call about my own messy struggles with identity as a black girl who grew up in largely white spaces. Poly expressed similar grievances: She endured insecurity and complex after complex about everything from beauty to whether she was girlfriend material based on being, in her words, “half-caste.” I’m not mixed, and our life experiences were likely very different, but if there’s one thing I do understand, it’s racial anxiety.

X-Ray Spex's Germfree  Adolescents on vinyl. Photograph by Rob Stengel.

X-Ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents on vinyl. Photograph by Rob Stengel.

I’m going to be honest: It’s really easy to unconsciously project onto Poly, especially since I’ve been so thirsty for representation. Hell, I don’t even know if Poly personally identified herself as black or mixed-race. But after feeling like a bit of an oddball, punky black chick for most of my life, it was easy to look at Poly as some sort of validating figure, the perfect person to discover once I matured out of my special snowflake period (no, Ashley, you’re not the only black person who likes indie rock and Harry Potter, get over yourself) and really started to crave an unconventional black woman to look up to. Of course, subversiveness and nonconformity have always had black practitioners. Grace Jones, Prince, Missy Elliott…their entire careers challenge the notion that weirdness is inherently white, but to find someone in the overwhelmingly white world of punk? It felt like a special secret.

I’m not sure how much Poly would appreciate all this hero worship. At least, when she was young, she expressed her disdain of excessive attention or adoration beyond the sweaty punk venues. In a lengthy, revealing interview with NME in May of 1978, Poly touched on the weirdness that encapsulates sudden celebrity: “They scream and things like that. Oh, strange! People had already heard about us and came specially to see the band; kept coming up to me and asking me all these questions about this, that and the other. They try to make you special, because that’s what they want…you wouldn’t be worth anything to them if they thought you was just ordinary.” She was fiercely protective of her integrity and would sometimes play contrarian just to throw off the parasitic sorts that leech on to young talent and novelty. In the end, the fame was too much for Poly. In the aforementioned article, Poly made it clear that that she wouldn’t be in the music industry forever. Her prediction was supported by a fascinating BBC special from 1979 called Who Is Poly Styrene?, Poly’s offstage introversion is on full display, a sharp contrast to the loud, brash powerhouse she is onstage. She laments the idea that she has to be on at all times for fans and observers and sounded excited about the prospect of going to college to study science. Poly didn’t come across as unappreciative of her success, just…tired.

I hate to sound dramatic, but this was the beginning of the end for X-Ray Spex. Sometime around 1979, after a gig in Yorkshire, Poly had hallucinations of pink lights in the sky. She was institutionalized for several months and was misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic.

Information about Poly’s life after that episode is winding and scarce. In 1980, she released a solo album called Translucence. Shortly after, she had a daughter, Celeste. From 1983 to 1988, she had a stint with the Hare Krishnas. By 1991, Poly was (properly) diagnosed with bipolar disorder and spent the next several years forming a stronger bond with her daughter. In 1995, X-Ray Spex reunited and released a commercially unsuccessful album, but they subsequently reunited a few times in 2008 for comeback gigs. The day before Poly’s death, her last solo album, Generation Indigo, was released and received critical acclaim.

Poly Styrene was an unconventional woman with an unconventional life to match, and I wish I knew about her earlier. As someone who came of age in the ’00s, an introduction to the originators of punk was so rigid online and at record stores. This was before the social media-driven feminism revival when you could scroll Tumblr for a little bit and find out about Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Sleater-Kinney, and the Riot Grrrl movement. Nah, this was 2004. If you wanted to let the music snobs at school—in other words, pretentious teen boys—know that you were invested in “real punk,” you were expected to push the saccharine joys of the pop punk you fell in love with behind you and buy the Sex Pistols’ Nevermind the Bollocks or the Clash’s London Calling in an attempt to prove your punk street cred (which was always denied to black girls like me anyway, but that’s another story). It was bullshit, and while I discovered a lot of great music, in retrospect I’m disappointed by, again, how white-male centric my reintroduction to punk was. Why weren’t black punk bands, like Bad Brains, included in my punk primer? Why was Debbie Harry of Blondie reduced to a pretty face and disco jams? Why was I familiar with Kathleen Hanna’s yowl of “Rebel girl, rebel girl, rebel girl you are the queen of my world” before Poly Styrene’s invigorating screech of “Oh! Bondage, up yours!” when Hanna herself admitted that, while they’re often compared, she could never be as good as Poly?

I don’t want people to stumble on Poly Styrene or X-Ray Spex as a happy accident anymore. I want Poly’s legacy to be part of the punk canon, her screams to be a rite of passage for punks, music lovers, and black girls who are tired of wallowing in their own out-of-placeness. If that means writing over 2,000 words about Poly’s impact on my life and music as a whole, so be it. If you’ve made it this far, just do me one favor: Make sure nobody forgets her. It’s time to make sure that Poly Styrene is more than just an afterthought, she’s a legend. ♦