Tonight's clip: "Anarchy in the UK" by the Sex Pistols.
I certainly won't aruge that the Sex Pistols had any actual identifiable political leanings. They were a carefully manipulated and guided creation of Malcolm McClaren; "Anarchy" as a marketing concept -- one has to appreacite the irony there.
But sometimes, a thing takes on a life of its own, supercedes the designs of its creator(s), and becomes something entirely else. Did this song, or the Sex Pistols, bring about anything close to "Anarchy in the UK?" Obviously not. John Lydon became a pretty minor rock star. Sid Vicious died a lurid but in the end rather prosaic death. And yet, the Sex Pistols did come to represent the leading edge of something that changed rock music around definitively. And this song remains a powerful statement, even if the message is untenable, impossible, and inherently negative, and despite the fact that its genesis was driven by the classic music business motive: money.
4 comments:
So, you're saying that they were kind of like, a punk version of The Monkees?
Tom
The Edge of Vanilla
Pretty much, minus the obligatory "cute one."
Back in the day when MTV actually played "music videos", Sunday night would be the time for guest VJs. I remember Johnny Lyndon (he normalized his "Rotten" name since the breakup of the SPs) several times, and wondered if his demeanor was an act. I mean, nobody could be so consistently punk, could they?
Either way he was a strange one.
Tom
The Edge of Vanilla
Tom: From what I've read/seen I think that a good 90% was an act. Your previous comment about the "punk version of the Monkees" wasn't far off -- every move (up to a point) was orchestrated by McClaren. Lydon was no disaffected "punk," -- he was an art-school kid.
Where McClaren was maybe different from most other promoters was that he used politics to try to shock with (draping the New York Dolls in hammer-and-sickle flags, for example).
But in the end, a promo gimmick is a promo gimmick. That the Sex Pistols were even able to create, for a short period of time, the image of transcending that, is pretty cool. (And I presume that Lydon calling his post-Sex Pistols band "Public Image, Ltd." was a slap at McClaren along with Lydon's personal declaration of independence.)
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