The genius of John Lydon (Part I):"Two sides to every story / Somebody had to stop me..."

Two sides to every story
Somebody had to stop me
I'm not the same as when I began
I will not be treated as property!

-- John Lydon, in P.i.L's "Public Image"

This item inaugurates a series of posts dedicated to the discussion of the lyrics, singing, songwriting, image, fashion sense, rhetoric, persona and politics of John Lydon. I'll explain more about what I'll be discussing as I go along (since that's when I'll be deciding what I'll be discussing). Lydon -- a.k.a. Johnny Rotten -- is a complex artist, and almost every aspect of his career and life is more or less contentious. I don't intend to get to the bottom of any deep debates, particularly not as regards Lydon's significance in the United Kingdom, because his career draws from and contributes to the UK cultural consciousness in ways that will always remain partly beyond the scope of my comprehension.

In fact, my chief goal in hammering out these brainstorms about John Lydon is to make a case that people in the United States should take his contributions to music and culture more seriously; also that the US is now in many respects ready to understand Lydon's work, because the country has gone through plenty of growing up since the late '70s: a period not noted for American optimism, but which in retrospect appears to have been extremely naive, especially in comparison to the culturally revolutionary activities taking place in London contemporaneously.

I also should make clear that I'm not much going to be talking about Lydon's work during his creatively bankrupt phases, of which there have definitely been a few. To the extent that I touch upon, for instance, the Lydon of Public Image Ltd.'s 1983 release Live In Japan (not recommended!), it will be to point out how his work at its best is so good and so important that such missteps carry zero weight in a serious assessment of the quality and impact of Lydon's overall career.

I. Three general hypotheses.

It's my intention to argue that John Lydon, despite being held in high esteem by many punk rock enthusiasts, record collectors, and otherwise 'tuned in'-types, has not been given the sustained critical attention that is his due for his innovative and enduring contributions to arts and culture. For evidence of this, we need look no further than archived film, video and news articles about the Sex Pistols, which are quite often so hyperbolic, so full of clichés, so superficial, as to demean their subject. This is true, by the way, irrespective of whether the article or television spot in question is favorable or unfavorable!

For example, unfailingly they'll refer -- either blithely or enthusiastically -- to Lydon's lyrics or attitude as 'nihilistic', which in fact is a terribly wrong-headed term with which to describe his work. They'll read sarcasm into his moments of greatest sincerity, they'll mistake honesty for braggadocio, and they'll mistake braggadocio for hate. They'll read his odes to self-centeredness as disdain for that which is external to the self. And let's pause on this for a moment: just think about the kind of mind that thinks "self-centered = bad thing," instead of, for instance, asking itself "bad in relation to what, exactly?" And then going on to think, "Mighn't there be some things in relation to which self-centeredness is good? And what might those things be?"

Obviously, journalism and particularly music journalism isn't going to give us the latter mind. So I therefore am undertaking to brainstorm about what more people would know, were the latter mind out there writing for USA Today. But to begin with, we would be well served to explore what cultural or historical trends might hold regular media back. To account for this failure to give Johnny his due on the part of journalists and other types who are in the business of 'due-giving', I have a host of hypotheses. Just to list three rather general examples:

1. Plenty of ink has been spilled particularly in England on the subject of John 'Johnny Rotten' Lydon. Believe it or not -- despite all the dust kicked up by London's famously lowbrow tabloids, beginning with The Sex Pistols' famous appearance on the UK's Bill Grundy tea-time television show
   
   
   
   -- at least a respectable percentage of the commentary on Lydon's projects over the years in the UK actually treated its subject seriously. However, paradoxically, because the impact of the Pistols exploding into English culture was so seismic, a lot of what Lydon represents is by definition left unsaid by commentators from within that culture, even those commentaries that are most wildly sympathetic to Lydon's work and point of view. A gruesome but nonetheless instructive point of comparison in the United States is September 11th. If we were to look back at newspaper articles in the months and years following that event, it's unlikely that after an initial period we would find references to the details of that day. You just take it as a given. There's no reason to talk about all of its details explicitly. *
   
   
2. By its very nature, The Sex Pistols' -- and especially John Lydon's -- persona and media presence is/was oppositional. Therefore, the band's and the singer's impact is measured most fruitfully by the degree to which media reports and the rantings of the commentariat reacted to rather than assessed soberly the phenomenon of The Sex Pistols. There's nothing wrong with this fact as such. But it means that the articles or commentaries have a very short shelf-life. They appear to contemporary eyes -- especially if those eyes are American -- to be as ponderous and obscure as, say, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (not recommended!).
   
   
3. While all of the above holds true particularly on the Right Side of the Pond, here in the US of A, the problem could be described as the converse of both 1) and 2). The music and culture-oriented media here -- to the extent that they can be said to exist -- simply don't know or understand or care about how revolutionary was the impact of The Sex Pistols in their native land. This goes not just for glossy toilet paper like, whatever, Rolling Stone or something, but also for media that should know what the fuck they're talking about but don't. You know, sophomoric middlebrow, middle class crap like Pitchfork Internet Magazine or whatever it's called, which is in a way even worse than Rolling Stone, because it doesn't pay its writers, and its writers write like it.

II. Oppositional thinking ≠ nihilism.

There. I've drawn our attention to the fact that the American press tends neither to know it's history nor to care about the history of cultures outside of its purview/target market, and that this has a lot to do with the fact that it doesn't understand Lydon, and especially didn't understand him during the late 70s. Compounding this problem is another uniquely American phenomenon whose relevance is undeniable despite the fact that it's....erm....extrinsic to the question of the relation between media and Lydon himself.

Our country's free fall into a bucktoothed, torture-promoting, redneck, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, corporate-oligarchic shambles has been set in motion by more than merely the blood-lust alliance brokered between the uneducated and stupid in one corner, and the neurotically fearful and repressed in the other. True, ours is a drooling and masochistic nation, but that's not what lies at the center of its obsession with mediocrity. To the contrary, the USA's real reason for failing to comprehend the nature of Lydon's art, politics and persona has to do with naiveté. Or maybe: a kind of insouciance.

Let me put it this way, it's for largely the same reasons that people in the United States have still managed to trick themselves into believing that there's no class system here. And if we have trouble coming to grips with that now, in the midst of the Second Gilded Age, you can be sure that we had trouble understanding it in the 1970s. Not that the 70s was a by any means prosperous time here in the good old US of A... But it was a naive time. The mainstream could no more have understood Johnny Rotten than it could have produced its very own Johnny Rotten, out of the remotest enclaves of Orange County.

No, the United States was on balance unprepared for the Pistols when they landed here and marched like a counter-clockwise Sherman through the unsuspecting countryside of the Bible Belt. Actually, I think in a weird way those Southern towns were somewhat ready, as evinced by the willingness of their cowboy-dressin' citizens to engage in confrontation,, particularly in San Antonio, where they gave as good as they got. And what they got was Sid Vicious cutting himself, calling the audience (in a righteously inspired moment), "a bunch of fucking faggot cowboys," and thwarting the advance of a particularly menacing faggot cowboy by hitting him over the head with his bass guitar.

Irrespective of the American South's readiness, San Francisco definitely wasn't. By the time Lydon came charging through with the early P.i.L line-ups, there had already emerged nationwide substantial pockets of understanding, receptive people. But the vast majority of culture still wasn't ready; they liked The Clash, maybe (and nowadays, what upwardly mobile professional doesn't like The Clash?), but Lydon was, in the estimation of the mainstream, still too demanding. Too, er....'nihilistic'.....

Tom Snyder: Back now with John and Keith who are with Public Image Limited. You know, it's been so long that I've almost forgotten where we were when we were at it!

John Lydon: Uh, you went into a bit of a tantrum as I likely remember!

Tom: Oh, yes I did.

John: You want to hear about us. Right. We have record commitments with Warner Brothers in America and Virgin for the rest of the world. We will, of course, oblige them, but, in the meantime, there is the possibility of us doing a soundtrack to a film in Hollywood. This interests us greatly.

Tom: What are . . .

John: We are not a band, we are a company. We have many interests. We are also making our own film in England right now at this very moment.

Tom: The music that you will do for the record companies that you mentioned. How will this music differ from what we thought was rock 'n' roll?

John: It's no more of that twelve-bar ditty, waving hair in the breeze, platform boots, flap your flair nonsense. It's not a packaged image of third-rate idiots. It's not a pose. We just do our stuff, hated as it usually is. I was very shocked by the reviews of the last album. I believe none of them. I think they liked us for the wrong reasons.

Tom: Well you told me all the things --

John: Trendy reasons. Can I have a cigarette again, please?

-- The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, 6/27/80

Is this exchange -- a video clip of which I have featured previously -- nihilism? The answer is that it so totally and utterly is not. When most former Lydon-naysayers encounter this golden nugget of Lydon lore with refreshed or attentive eyes, they find it exceedingly difficult to deny its brilliance. Fuck the charlatans like David Bowie: in the late '70's and early '80's John Lydon's total immersion in the trappings of a persona of his own invention is truly breathtaking to behold.

Of course it was rife with internal contradictions, of course it announced ambitions on which it could never ultimately make good. That's all more or less the point. The lines between theater and reality are blurred, and this blurring is always a gift to art, even if, from time to time, it may have cost Lydon his credibility in vast expanses of American straight society, people who are used to having their expectations and assumptions confirmed; people who are used to mediocrity. It's not these people to whom Lydon was or should have been reaching out: rather, it was their disaffected children. Who needs, after all, the kind of 'credibility' that would have accrued to him, to his name, to his brand were he to have on such occasions restrained himself from rocketing at breakneck speed to the spectacularly eloquent rhetorical extremes to which he would push his capacity to negate??

I'll tell you where such restraint would have gotten Lydon -- which is also, by the way, what we'd have gotten from him. Picture a John Lydon who focused not on individual emancipation, but on large-scale political change? A John Lydon who aims for the approval of the broadest possible cross-section of the music- and culture-consuming population. A John Lydon focused upon moderation; a John Lydon whose raison d'etre is consensus-building! All manner of restraint, politeness, dependability, bang for yer buck!, middlebrow-ness, all couched in a facile/sheek rhetoric of radicalism...

A John Lydon, in other words, who is out to uphold such binaries as authenticity vs. disposable pop, manly-man vs. pussy-licker, solidarity through discipline vs. creative, anarchistic utopianism, politics vs. beauty, brotherhood vs. individualism, etc., instead of setting out to dissolve these binaries. A John Lydon who first pauses to consider whether or not you will find what he has to say palatable before letting you know what he thinks. A John Lydon whose idea of respecting his audience is to be nice.

We're not necessarily out there to give people a good time.

-- Keith Levene, describing P.i.L's live performances, 1978.

So, what would this parallel-universe John Lydon look like?

It would look like The Clash, of course!

III. The Clash vs. The Sex Pistols

And, after all, there's nothing wrong with The Clash, in the same way that there's nothing wrong with the Stones's Sticky Fingers. You know, play it at the afternoon barbecue, and I won't complain.

But whereas The Clash was good -- at times, even great -- it was always just a rock 'n' roll band. The Sex Pistols and early P.i.L was and is much much much more than that.

To explain why the Pistols are far-and-away the greatest of the original wave of UK punk bands we could simply point out Lydon's and Co.'s disdain for the term 'punk' -- who the fuck gave you license to label me? insisted ** John Lydon in 1976, when the term first appeared in the UK press, describing him as 'King of the Punks'. And as for 'rock', The Sex Pistols were, after all supposed to be that Last Rock 'n' Roll Band. In other words, rock is "vile. It's dead, it's a disease."

But I'll go a tiny bit further to verify that beyond a shadow of a doubt, that The Sex Pistols kick The Clash's ass every time. As I remarked earlier, just take a look at The Clash's audience:

I give you Stephen Metcalf, Slate's good-natured -- if somewhat mealy-mouthed -- book critic-guy, in whose estimation The Clash reigns supreme. If ever you find yourself participating in the tried-and-true punk rock parlor game of THE CLASH VS. THE SEX PISTOLS: WHICH IS THE GREATEST PUNK BAND OF ALL TIME??, would you really want to find yourself choosing this man's side? Just look at him! It's so clear that he really really likes Bruce Springsteen, and probably what's more, he uses the phrase "creative class" with a straight face. I can't see for sure, but is that a pair of khaki shorts that he's wearing with his winning wrinkled blazer/twice-unbuttoned shirt combo? Try and convince me that he doesn't wear Birkenstocks, that he doesn't in fact refer to them as his "Birks," and that he doesn't wear his Birks while he listens to London Calling on his I-Phone, while sunning himself at his friends' timeshare? Just go ahead and try.

Metcalf reveals that he's partial to The Clash in an article that was published by Slate in 2005. In this article, he refers to the Pistols as "a bunch of lowlifes tossed together by a cunning impresario." I should explain that it's not entirely clear whether Metcalf means this as a dis or as high praise. Frankly, very few things about Metcalf's article are even partially clear, and the few things that are clear are also stupid.

Case in point: Metcalf's pro-Clash stance appears to hinge on the fact that -- unlike The Sex Pistols -- The Clash weren't in actuality a punk band at all. Instead, they were a rock 'n' roll band! And bulwarking Metcalf's thesis is the fact that the Strummer/Jones songwriting team consisted of a (furtively) middle class guy (Strummer) and a partner who was truly working class (Jones). Previous examples he identifies -- after conducting careful research -- are Jagger/Richards (middle class/working class) and Lennon/McCartney.

(I've heard it said many times that Lennon -- the writer, after all, of the brilliant "Working Class Hero" -- was not himself working class, but this point has been wildly overstated. Fine, he was upper-lower class then. There just wasn't that much of a difference. My real point, of course, is that the Metcalfs of the world are wasting their and our time by using such dumb criteria to categorize musical or pop-cultural phenomena. And my real real point is that the Metcalfs of the world should just, um...like, NOT write about music or pop culture or punk rock in the first place. [I should add that I do dig the specs he's wearing in this pic.***])

IV. The USA's malaise means that The Sex Pistols & early P.i.L
make more intuitive sense to us than ever.

And so anyway. This is where I would like to enter the conversation. Because, for some of the reasons articulated in the upper reaches of this post, the majority of media in the USA still get Lydon totally wrong. Even -- or perhaps especially -- the media that purport to like him. Doubtless for all the wrong reasons; trendy reasons. It's for all of the same reasons that a sizable portion of the American mainstream did understand the slogan-politics and militarism/machismo of The Clash. (And to give Strummer & Co. some credit, they too were obviously turned into a self-caricature for reasons that were not always the band's own doing.)

Lydon's art is not 'nihilistic'. Nor is it 'ironic'. Nor is it 'stream-of-consciousness'. Nor is or has Lydon ever been a 'bad singer'. In fact, he is the single most superb, innovative, important and influential singer of the last 30 years. Is Lydon's music 'punk rock'? Only if you mean it in the way that recognizes that 'punk rock' has no meaning.

Is Lydon's art 'oppositional'? You fucking bet it is. And herein lies the key.

To be continued...


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* Of course, in aftermaths of both the Pistols and of September 11th, people also eventually stopped thinking about it, which is a more complex issue that we won't go into right now.

** I'm paraphrasing here.

*** I should also point out, if I've not made it clear, that I actually like The Clash. I simply don't think they hold a candle to The Sex Pistols. This holds both musically and with respect to cultural significance. Not that I really believe those two things can be separated, but let's save that discussion for another day.....