Imagine if John Lydon had died in 1980 and Ian Curtis was making adverts for Country Life butter

what if billy corgan died of an od and jimmy chamberlin went on to release a series of shit albums under the name "smashing pumpkins"?

what if Benny Spellman had been sidelined during the recording of Ernie K Doe's "Mother-In-Law" and Allen Toussaint made an executive decision to have the title refrain sung in a falsetto by Aaron Neville

What if the Beatles released the Black Album and Metallica released the White Album?

what if the bus landed on lars ulrich instead of cliff burton, we'd probably be listening to metallica 100 thrash classixxx on napster right now

Seriously though guys, Johnny Rotten would be some kind of untouchable icon.

what if Brian Jones hadn't died, and he just kept doing drugs like Keef but just got more and more insufferable and ended up being like a Lou Reed level dick to everyone for decades and Lou seeing what a dick Brian Jones was he became kind of kindly and nice

that would be weird

Brilliant

Imagine if Sid Vicious... Oh wait

what if mozart hadn't died? ever?

woah.

Star Trek TOS episode about that, iirc. Requiem for Methuselah.

what if simon le bon had turned down that nme advert and jarvis cocker became the duran duran vocalist

xxpost think he would have got really freaked out by Falco

what if jarvis cocker had actually decided to go and live like common people do

what if blixa bargeld had been driving that car in the dominican republic and falco had recorded 'silence is sexy' xp

What if they never cancelled firefly

What if billy crystal had been born a woman

What if the sun exploded tomorrow and this thread was the last thing you saw

What if ROM was the best character Marvel ever came up with?

what if prince had stopped being such a dickhole

what if Brother Pele was in the front
and Sweet Zina was in the back

how bizarre

what if the clowns were to the right and the jokers were to the left

What if the ghosts of the London Boys took and MTV presenting job in 1994 and Miles Hunt died in a car crash

what if james booth fronted a band called 'tim'

what if the people would have been the times or between clark and hilldale

What if dre forgot about dre and y'all muthafuckas bought snowbiles

what if we give it away

what if God was one of the acts at the Us festival

Imagine if Chris Cornell had died in 1994 and Kurt Cobain had sung the theme tune for Casino Royale.

what if Little Steven couldn't wait to play Sun City

What if Nick Cave ate a cheeseburger, like, yesterday?

What if we had psychedelic ketchup?

what if Tim Yuro were still alive?

Aw, still miss hearing from that guy.

What if Zac de la Rocha set himself on fire and a Buddhist monk was the front man for Rage Against the Machine?

in two years this thread will become a series of links to news articles about disappointing sellouts

What if Snoop and Nas were killed in the 90s and Pac was making terrible reggae and Biggie was divorced from Kelis?

what if Tim Yuro were still alive?

― m0stlyClean, Saturday, April 6, 2013 9:13 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Aw, still miss hearing from that guy.

― pplains, Saturday, April 6, 2013 9:54 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

still miss seeing that guy ;_;

He was a good guy and an ideal poster.

yup

S-S-S-Superstar

(Grouper)

What if Kenny Rogers had fallen in love with a dreamer

what if he performed 'islands in the stream' with patti smith

THAT WOULD BE AWESOME

what if Dolly Parton married Fred Sonic Smith

what if fred sonic smith married knuckles the echidna

What if they didn't have to move those refrigerators?

what if they built this city on brostep

O_O

What if Lol had kicked Robert Smith out the band in 1989 and went on to record 5 albums under the name "The Cure"

Including the famous album The Cure- Squeeze.

What if Kurt Cobain had quit Nirvana and gone on to make South Park cartoons?

http://images.mylot.com/userImages/images/postphotos/2379385.jpg

Big Audio Dynamite

Talking of which, that Don Letts is a tedious look-back eejit, and I'm not racist - I have at least 2 Burning Spear albums!

What exactly is Lydon selling anyway?

$1.9 million house in malibu last i heard

Can't get more working class than that.

Well he's anti middle class. Said nothing about the Malibu crowd.

john, when yer dead you should ly don.

People do seem to try and bend over backwards to try and defend Lydon over shit like this because of what he might once have represented

lol what did he represent? mainstream marketing of the ironic swastika?

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, March 28, 2017 9:27 PM (one hour ago)

john lydon and sid vicious were different ppl fyi

People do seem to try and bend over backwards to try and defend Lydon over shit like this because of what he might once have represented

lol what did he represent? mainstream marketing of the ironic swastika?

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, March 28, 2017 9:27 PM (one hour ago)

john lydon and sid vicious were different ppl fyi

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Tuesday, March 28, 2017 4:02 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/41/35/bb/4135bb044df33619f5a8ba22bc3e4912.jpg

"Good heavens! You frighten me to death"

when he was on Desert Island Discs he chose 4 Wagner numbers, 4 Beethoven and one by Hayden. His book choice (bearing in mind you already are given a bible) was the Old Testament in Hebrew.

tbf these are good choices

His luxury item was a fish smoker but I didn't mention it since there's nothing fascist about them.

Wondering about the literary merits of the old testament in Hebrew.

he chose 4 Wagner numbers, 4 Beethoven and one by Hayden.

Interesting that he'd mix things up with an indie singer-songwriter.:P Also, if that means he picked four operas by Wagner, I'm pretty sure that's cheating.

Wondering about the literary merits of the old testament in Hebrew.

the Psalms, Job, Jonah and the Song of Solomon are among the greatest literature ever produced imo. of them I've only translated a phrase or two from Psalms & SOS (and the little Hebrew I studied for a year in college has long since atrophied) but iirc the word is the OT in Hebrew has quite stunning literary merit

Job needs more car chases and people being kicked in the face IMO, but I guess that'll have to wait for the movie version. Jason Statham is...JOB.

https://wiwibloggs.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/ireland-john-lydon-eurovision.jpg

Imagine an alternate timeline where Tony Hadley and Ian Curtis were touring as part of Blue Wedge.

What if someone had started another thread about Lydon’s politics and the life hadn’t been sucked out of this awesome one?

No suitable thread to comment on, so picking this one..

Yeah, John’s talking tour gets pulled in Glasgow because his tour manager was aggressive with staff.

No news story has named the tour manager, but.

I’d not bother with this, but some comments allude to a high possibility that the Glasgow venue has ‘form’ for being .. dunno.

I mean, what would a tour like this need, beyond a chair, table and a mic?

It's probably John "Rambo" Stevens, his long time manager/henchman

Total psycho apparently

Friend was managing a gig for a local venue a couple years ago around the time that comeback album that was decent came out, she said they were a total nightmare and she almost got into it with someone in the camp

Not exactly surprised that Lydon is surrounded by boorish wankers tbh.

i think he is just an old hooligan friend of lydon's from his youth that just kept hanging around as his enforcer

there's a um....tribute video to him on youtube lol, quite something

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUqHd0POosI

Video: Carnival Cruise Line
Audio: Ian Curtis "This is the way, step inside..."

there must be literally hundreds of sad old football hooligan tossers nicknamed Rambo in the UK, they should all get together for a death match until there is only one true Rambo left.

Not all of them get to spend their entire adult lives wiping the arse of a friend who ended up famous.

On another note, I've only seen Lydon in-person once (in 2018 at PIL's Brooklyn stop), and I was surprised by how sheepish he seemed to be when he wasn't on and the music wasn't playing. During a song, it all melted away, and it was still like daggers when he flashed that famous stare directly at you, but outside of that, he seemed like a polite, harmless and insecure guy. I hadn't seen a picture of him in a while so I thought maybe it was because he had put on so much weight. (He seems to have lost a bit of it now.)

Kaleidoscopic culture critic Chuck Klosterman rewrites the history of reality, built off a question that has never been asked or (in all likelihood) even considered: What if Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle was actually about rock music?

The Velvet Underground & Nico was released in the spring of 1967. For decades, the cliche has been that it initially only sold 10,000 copies, though everyone who bought it supposedly started a band. It is the definition of a record whose influence outstrips its mass popularity. But what if the opposite had transpired? What if instead of selling 10,000 copies, it had sold … 10 million copies? What if it had sold 100 million copies? What would have happened if the Velvet Underground had inexplicably become the biggest group in the history of popular music, and everything about the rest of the 20th century was merely a footnote to that phenomenon? Whatever answer you imagine is an infinitesimal splinter, at least when compared to Rock*.

Chuck Klosterman has generated a fictitious universe where almost everything is different, except for the songs. The songs remain the same—the difference is how they are heard and what they now mean. Lou Reed is a messiah, reversing the monoculture and dictating the outcome of presidential elections. The Beatles disappear, though they never break up. The Rolling Stones collapse while Led Zeppelin goes bankrupt. Punk rock fills stadiums, undermined only by insouciant radicals like Boston and Van Halen. Disco is destroyed. Hip-hop becomes country. The 1980s are defined by disposable pop icons (like G.G. Allin) and Christian revivalists (like Madonna). Lenny Kravitz lets love rule, Oasis collides with a wonderwall, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are somehow blamed on the Strokes.

Presented like The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll if written by Jorge Luis Borges and Patrick Bateman, Rock* intermixes satiric contrarianism and Spinal Tap-ish absurdity with darker theories about what makes art popular, how success delineates perception, and the inescapable consensus of subjective history. It is not, nor does it claim to be, the greatest book ever written about rock and roll. But it’s probably the last one that ever needs to be written.

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/k/chuck-klosterman/rock.htm

Really makes you think

Wait what?

Bring the jubilee!

FWIW both PiL and the Sex Pistols w/o Rotten are playing Riot Fest. We'll see if they actually cross paths, but they could be booked on different days.