Never Mind The Flaming Here's The Classic Or Dud

Indubitably. But on whose part?

For the record, I certainly can't deny that that album resonated with a ton of people. I just cannot understand why. I think my brain is hard-wired against it or something. Had I been a contemporary to the punk scene rather than riding its fallout, I probably wouldn't have liked a good 75% of the groups who helped me make it through high school.

In 1976/1977 A&M and Virgin were indie labels.

Warner Bros. on the other hand...

Well I was the right age at the time and I remember being disappointed by it. Although I respected them as 'leaders' of the Punk scene the music seemed to me, and I suspect many others, too slow and closer to competent mainstream rock than what punk rock was 'supposed to be'. So I was, for some time, a Clash obsessive (yet now the Clash seem crude and ugly, and bizarrely the Pistols stuff sounds like 'classic 70's rock' if that makes sense to anyone.... probably not).

I'd still afford it a classic status, simply because of its cultural significance and lasting influence, and *nothing* quite captures the impotent rage and boredom of being 16 and hopeless. But musically, it just hasn't held up and continued to be interesting into my adulthood the way other "punk classics" (hah hah hah) like The Clash, Buzzcocks and Wire have.

NMTB is a classic, incidentally. It's kind of like an undie rap album - the deliberately basic backing exists to compliment the flow. In this case it works.

No future!

Dunno if this is as revelatory as it seemed to me whilst I was in the potty, but - McLaren gets inspired by the NYC punk scene (whose stalwarts were, in a sense, borrowing / taking inspiration from the pop music of the '50s & early '60s), & assembles this group of musicians to project this image of danger & rebellion to, in essence, sell merchandise (i.e. his Sex shop wares). Not hard to draw parallels between McLaren & Lou Perlman, is it?

Someone else could take this ball & bounce it, if you'd like - I'm trying to do work over here (sorta).

A POST WHICH IS CALLED “SHADOW BEHIND THE HEART”

People up-thread have veered towards the Thing, then just swerved past it [OK, OK, so remember this is a record that mattered so much to me that I probably didn’t play it ONCE from c.1979-92: oh yes, an impossible unfaceable disappointment on first arrival, but already by then I *wanted* to be disappointed; by then betrayal was already the best we had to look forward to anyway] and the Thing is this. The centre of the core of the essence of the Thing: that if Sex Pistols gave us (“us”) the territory in which to live out our so-called adult lives, if that was the word, it was because they alone seemed to know that contradiction was: All. That. Mattered. Their heart, their motor, their hook, their end.

[You know, I read England’s Dreaming seven times straight through when it first came out: the compulsion only broke when I realised I was trying to _make the ending come out another, a nicer way_]

And I’m tempted just to talk about ‘Bodies’: after all, there’s a thread over there somewhere which says (to me) that this song — of all their hits and misses, deep projects and silly-thing throwaways — is the one that *hasn’t* yet been hoovered up into mere CD- collectable classicness. The *really* difficult one. Not Holidays, not Belsen. The * really* ugly one. The *really* scary one. The one that tricks you (= me) into stepping back from what they are, into, like, questions about — oh — guitar layering and song sequencing. Into scholarship. Objectivity. Somewhere safe, where I needn’t listen *and* think *and* hear. Because the contradictions are written right through that song: through words, delivery, even there in the peculiar anti-pop intro, a surging hostile undecided pure-music [dunno].

The first four lines of ‘God Save the Queen’ could furnish a punk William Empson with a perfect new project: Four [hey, Forty!] Types of Sarcasm. Every one delivered at a different level and/or setting of “irony” (too weak a word, obviously). But you can read the claim and you can read JR’s attitude to it, each time. In ‘Bodies’, what’s he saying, who’s he being? Who the *hell*? Himself, her, the infant, the watching world? All? None? In the interviews on Ltd Edn 2-CD set, they all just blabber abt Pauline, some poor mad early stalker-fan, doomed self- mutilator attracted by the spooky punk dog- whistle that all the insane and the now-long- dead also heard. Answer given to: “What made you write the song” Answer NOT given to: “WHERE DID YOU GO WITH THE SONG...”

…“‘When that Indian spoke to us,’ went on Brown in a conversational undertone, ‘I had a sort of vision, a vision of him and all his universe. Yet he only said the same thing three times. When first he said, ‘I want nothing,’ it only meant that he was impenetrable, that Asia does not give itself away. Then he said, ‘I want nothing,’ and I knew he meant he was sufficient unto himself, like a cosmos, that he needed no God, nor admitted any sins. And when he said the third time, ‘I want nothing,’ he said it with blazing eyes. And I knew that he meant literally what he said; that nothing was his desire and his home; that he was weary for nothing as for wine; that annihilation, the mere destruction of everything or anything—’”…

So, just some of those contradictions: here’s a song — a hard song, a song that’s a vortex of irresponsible, irrecuperable nastiness — which sits with both sides. Yes with nasty- child gross-out facepulling , deliberate fake-thoughtless adolescent pigtail-pulling, and Yes with righteous rage at such jerky capering. A song which sits with both sides. Not mediating, though: EXACTLY not mediating. More like dragging each impossibly opposed side through the guts of the other. You say either/or, you imagine some nice you-choose consumer ambiguity: this is more like, whichever you wanted, you get the *other* one. Punk = feeling SO MUCH you have to pretend that nothing touches you, that the worst is a joke like all the rest. Punk = feeling SO LITTLE that you’ve no problem pretending you care about everything and anything. Both. The good * and* the horrible. The invaluable *and* the worthless. Begin there (which the stupid Clash stupid didn’t).

The guitars and rhythm section are fantastic YET the production is amateur and rubbish, murkily mastered, arbitrarily sequenced: a careless maybe-deliberate assault on the very idea of the LP as desirable item, repeatable proposition, nice-thing-to-grow- old-with. The package is amazing YET the sleeve was chucked together, designed to seem to be random rubbish non-design. The death of rock intended YET this was the sought-for apotheosis of all rock culture, to date, when the unspoken promise was called in. Malice, yes: venom, rage, yes yes, all that blah blah ho-hum. YET also Lydon’s incredible *wide-openness* as performer and songwriter, never so mobile, so unguarded, so daring. Manufactured boyband mindgames: of course — all the time. Lydon is the second most manipulative man in all pop culture; McLaren the third (or vice versa/ doesn’t matter). YET the people they fooled most of all — themselves and one another — they tricked into a zone from which even retreat was just another kind of weary advance, because it meant working through so many otherwise unspoken things, especially compared to [insert anything you like or hate here].

Rage and deeper rage: rage for, and rage against life. He hurls himself down into the dank well of his disgust — imagine singing this song, night after night after night after night — and finds, what? You looking back at him. Me looking back at him. I don’t know how to end this bit. (You know Sex Pistols briefly had a notion to tour with Henry Cow ...)

Lydon: “I regard myself as working class, but I know damn well working class doesn’t regard me that way” *YET* Lydon: “Why are the working class so angry, lazy and scared of education? Why are they so scared of learning and stepping outside their clearly defined class barriers?”

Jesus: imagine listening to the hideous churning fucker for casual pleasure! For DIVERSION!!

McLaren : “Of course, the *real* fans aren’t buying it”

But yes, Eminem: something not dissimilar to what you said. But he lacks the absolute spark of amoral spiteful glee, tho.