Pistols

I picked up "Never Mind the Bollocks" in December of 1987, about 10 years after it came out, and it completely changed my life, as it has done for thousands of teenagers over the years. Apparently, we are now closing in on the 30th anniversary of its release, and to celebrate that I checked out the book "England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond" from the library.

I have never understood why and how academics turn something like rock music into an over-analyzed, rung out, politicized, quantitative mess like Mr. Savage did with this particular book. I read the first 20 pages, the first segment belonging to a leftist critique of Churchill (a man who has now become a hero of mine--perhaps I'm getting old). I couldn't get past the fact that Savage was trying to tie in the "anti-capitalist" riots in England in 2000 with the release of "Bollocks." Honestly, Johnny Lydon has never seemed like a leftist to me, I always thought he despised the left and the right, anything that had been standardized and f*cked up in the tragedy that was the 20th century. Vicious was simply a sycophant. Glenn Matlock just wanted to play rock and roll. These guys didn't give a damn about politics.

The long and short of it--I really can't stand leftist critiques in rock music. It has no place, and I wish academics would just leave it alone and just do to a goddam show and drink tequila and forget about being pretentious for a little while. The Pistols influenced contemporary music, for better and for worse, more than any other band in the 20th century. Any attempt at causality with political movements in England and the rest of the world is a real stretch.