Marking
its 45th anniversary today is the debut album from the Sex Pistols,
Never Mind the Bollocks, which was released on October 27th, 1977.
After spending the previous year creating havoc within the British youth
scene and terrorizing government authorities with their bad behavior on
the TV screen and stage, the Sex Pistols finally got themselves in a
studio and created one of the most influential LPs in rock & roll
history, albeit with Johnny Rotten intending it to be the end of rock
& roll, full stop!
I believe that rock & roll music
essentially has 3 epochs and they are hinged upon the appearances of its
“holy trinity”: Elvis Presley, The Beatles and the Sex Pistols. When
you look back across the history of the genre, it’s those tent-poles
which most define the major shifts in its nature and cultural potential.
Elvis introduced it to the mainstream, The Beatles turned it into a
fine art and the Sex Pistols weaponized it. I say that because the
Pistols were the last rock band to wield any legitimate sense of threat
to the status quo. Sure, there have been controversial trends and
popular movements, but the Pistols were the last band to seem dangerous
and to make the establishment quake in their boots. Anyone who’s come
along since then has been no more than an irritant to the powers that
be. The Pistols were actually debated in Parliament and the government
sought to crush them and stop them from spreading their message of
revolt, going so far as to actively ban them from performing. It’s an
unprecedented reaction which simply hasn’t happened since then.
Their
one and only proper studio album now stands as a memorial to a scant
few years when outrage seemed to have some import in the world. It’s
also a damn good set of songs, well written both musically and
lyrically. It says something about its time and the society that tried
to silence it. Those messages remain relevant today, perhaps even more
so than at the time they were penned. The fact it’s been co-opted into
crass commercialism since then still doesn’t take away from the fact
that it drew a line in the sand and we still look back at that time as a
moment of epiphany and realization. Perhaps it was all a "swindle" as
Malcolm retroactively postulated, but it changed the way people thought
and that change keeps resonating around the world to this day.
As
trite as kids thrashing out a few chords and bellowing their angst can
be, you can still see when a culture is coming of age by the point at
which its youth twig to the methodology and iconography of “punk”. You
can observe these scenes happen in places like the middle east, Asia or
Russia and see that there’s still a spirit of rebellion struggling to
find a voice. It may often fail to create a distinction from Ramones
style thrash, but it does show a desire to expose the energy pent up
during that time when a new generation demands to be heard.
A lot
of people want to push the flashpoint for punk to New York with the
Ramones & New York Dolls or Detroit with the Stooges & MC5 and,
while the structural elements may have been coming together in those
places, they were only so much fuel without a spark. Those bands and
scenes, as legitimate and eventually influential as they became, were
only known to a tiny clique of hipsters until the Sex Pistols came along
and put a match to all that kindling. It wasn’t until Johnny Rotten
snarled that he was an “antichrist” that the world perked up and took
notice of that generation and its rage. Others may have come sooner,
but no one else struck the spark that would ignite the world. There is
most certainly an undeniable “BP - before Pistols” and “AP - after
Pistols” demarcation within the lineage of rock ’n’ roll.
I
remember being intimidated to even buy Bollocks at the time I was first
crossing the threshold from mainstream music into the looming
underground. I was just starting to delve into the punk and new wave
scenes and had a mere handful of records by bands like The Clash,
Ramones, Elvis Costello & DEVO. I thought it was the nastiest thing
in the world to pick up a Sex Pistols record and almost felt like I had
to smuggle it into the house without my mom spotting it. When I heard a
song like Bodies with it’s litany of “fuck this and fuck that” in a
lyric about abortion, well I felt it was about as controversial a record
as I could possibly bring home. 45 years on and it still sounds as
ferocious and confrontational as it did back then. Of course it’s all
paper tigers now and nobody’s gonna be threatened by a rock star again,
but for a special, precious moment, the danger did seem rather real.
