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Never Mind The 25th Anniversary
jonerik writes "Considering that much of the controversy surrounding the Sex Pistols was centered around Queen Elizabeth II's silver jubilee, it's somewhat ironic that the band is now celebrating their own: The group's seminal album, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols" was released 25 years ago today, according to this article from Reuters. Interestingly, although the album was hugely influential (and remains so), like most punk albums of the time, it wasn't a huge success in the U.S. at the time, taking until 1987 to be certified gold and another five years to be certified platinum. God save the Sex Pistols - we mean it maaaaaaaaan." Yeah, so it's not precisely topical - but still, whata band.
I helped run a trash (pop-culture) quiz bowl tourament about 9 days ago, and damned if this wasn't one of the things they asked about (but not in any way relating it to the band's 25th anniversary). Sweet...
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Sorry Chuck, but there happens to be a lot more to music than mere technical proficiency.
.......please.
....sometimes all you need are 3 powerchords, a couple rhyming words, and sense of what makes a song good. ........and if the heart is in it from there, who gives a shit about the lack of intricacy.....
Granted, I whole heartedly agree with your classification of mallcore, and that they have demonstrate no musical accumen.......but that and that alone shouldn't make them a bad band.
The fact that they are bad bands say that, with or without all the arpeggios, neck tapping, or whammy dives.
Would you also say that old videogames--or further more, the programmers thereof--weren't any good because of the technical specifications, and intricate detail (which, mind you, didn't exist at the time) isn't up to par with today's games? I doubt it. (slightly fudged that analogy tho)
indeed.....
It took Nirvana before the US mainstream finally started understanding punk. 1991 seems like a more significant date.
I once saw an interview with John Lydon. He said they had the option of touring the northern states. To him (or so he claims now) that was preaching to the converted. So instead they went south and got a lot of grief for their efforts. Who knows, if they had toured the north, their album might have done better.
Real punk ethics are for lazy white kids too pampered and drug addled to get a job, the kind of people who go from the suburbs to the homeless shelters. People who can't play instruments don't entertain me, either -- it's very boring.
Politics and music should be kept entirely separate -- idolizing someone like Jello Biafra or, on the other end, Ian Stuart can lead to some blind political choices.
The DIY ethic, distrust of corporations, and the "scene" are just anarchistic (which doesn't mean punk) ideals. Punk itself is long dead and still lingers in forms of trendies, poseurs, emofags, Blink 182, and Straight Edge Earth Crisis idiots.
Mallcore is where all the music is at -- real underground, pure enlightenment.
Unless you they were speaking out against 25 year anniversaries or something?! (It's debatable whether they were really speaking out about anything, but it was a pretty effective way to sell records.)
Amusing anecdote about the Pistols -- they were originally signed to EMI, but were dropped after they said some naughty words on British TV. A&M gave them a deal but cancelled it a week later, after a couple of little incindents (one of which left a TV engineer needing stiches). A&M paid them £7000 to leave the label, which I think is about twice what my parents paid for our house, around that time.
Nice work if you can get it.
Your criticisms are very much centred round the American music scene, and probably go a long way towards explaining the slower sales of Pistols product in America compared to Britain.
Rock music is not the same dominating force in music over here, pop, disco, r'n'b, even rap have much more mainstream success. The 'rock' bands that were successful before 1977 over here were in the middle of the excesses of 'prog-rock', where 3 disc concept albums roamed the earth like dinosaurs.
Effectively, we had such lame music scene that it was possible for an insightful person to step totally outside the types of music that were avaialable, pull influences from the punk scene (let's not forget that the Pistols were just the successful packaging of what The Damned and others were already doing), assemble the most objectionable people he could get, and capitalise on the disillusionment of the record buying public so successfully that we are still talking about it to this day.
The closest thing the US had to this was Nirvana - not such a big jump in musical style, but still a band that no-one in the record industry thought would sell.
btw, I'd disagree that the Pistols were talentless, they had a LOT of memorable songs (even if it was Tenpole Tudor that played some of them for them!), and as for guitarists, have a listen to Richard Thompson and tell me there are no amazing ones left!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I've always felt the Sex Pistols to be an incredibly overrated band. I'm not a fan of punk to begin with, but I can't really give the Pistols even basic credit for "inventing" the genre... The Monks were doing their sound 10 years before they did, with a slightly different timbre (same minimalistic riffs, same lyrics, but they used a banjo and an organ), and of course there's Iggy & the Stooges. I'm not sure what the hype over the Sex Pistols is all about.
Punk Rock i have found in the years that I have been a punk rocker is more than Fast Cars, Loud Guitars and Easy women it is a way of life, it is a mind set, but according to people on MTV it is about Skateboarding and Drinking Beer with your friends, Punk Rock isnt a Fashon or a TV Show, it is not a concept on MTV it is somthing I have inside of me, it is not going to hot topic (or your favorite "Non Conformist" Store) and buying a Dead Kennedys Shirt, and saying "Anarchy in the UK Man" It is about trying new things and changing. It is not about Your Cool Tattoos (Even though I am sleeved) It is about being your own person and not letting people tell you what to do. If you wanna see a movie about punk rock go see "Another State of Mind" it is a good movie about the early west coast punk movement, or SLC Punk, is a killer show, but Its up to you.
-Shon
---
The Sex Pistols didn't begin as a packaged commodity. With their original bass player, Glen Matlock, they were an authentic band. It was only at the very end of their short career, when the musically competent Matlock was sacked and replaced with Sid Vicious, that they were successfully commoditised and sold as "punk" to naive teenagers.
Most Americans are only familiar with this stage of the Pistols, because it was during this stage that the Pistols toured America.
What people forget is that this is not punk. The whole idea of a punk 'uniform' is in itself against everything that punk ever was - or is. Punk is about rebelling about what one does not like, and doing it how one wants - sticking your middle finger up at the world, in a sense. It's not about mohawks and leather jackets - or about self-destruction, a la Sid Vicious. In that sense, as other /.ers have pointed out, the Sex Pistols were a Spice Girls band in nature, having been created by Malcolm McLaren, who failed in his previous attempt with the New York Dolls; however, having said that, the original motivation for bands such as the Ramones, the Clash and so forth is more about what punk is.
Punk music is just that - a variety of music, nothing more. Like it or love it, whilst it has come to represent, along with the Sex Pistols at the forefront the ideals of a generation of disaffected British youths, it is not punk. Hell, punk rock (to give the music a name) is not even English in origin - it's American...
25 years on, yes, there are still punk bands out there - by this I do not mean punk rock bands such as the Sex Pistols, I mean bands who have the punk attitude. And they don't even have to play punk rock to be punk. Bands such as Die Toten Hosen, to name one, is a good example. Whilst they may have a punk rock background, they are not punk rockers now - but they are still punk in attitude. Blink 182, the Offspring - ha, don't make me laugh. They are not 'punk'.
Therefore, in a sense, Linux users can even be considered punk - sticking their middle fingers up at Microsoft :)
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
Hehe but that's the point, maaaan! You're there worrying about postmodernist intrepretations of popular cultural music, and _Sid_couldn't_play_ and _we_didn't_give_a_fuck!
What a breath of fresh air punk was. We all knew it was a laugh and it was taking the piss and if were in their boots we'd take the money and run! Skool kids wearing safety pins and singing "Frigging in the Rigging" in the school playground, punks on telly swearing at boring old middle aged presenters, bands that couldn't play a note and didn't care any more than their fans, the Metropolitan Police trying to ban the Never Mind the Bollocks album cover for obscenity and losing. Total breath of fresh air after the analytic self -infatuated prog rock triple album scene we'd had in the UK. Kicked against an incredibly conservative society and culture.
Wot a laugh! I think that's something a lot of these (mainly US) punk bands nowadays forget, they all take themselves terribly seriously..IT WAS A LAUGH! :-))
By the way, on your list of 'important artists' I think you missed the seminal band The Snivelling Shits.
Now I understand why my (US) gf surprised my (EU) sensibilities. She said she was really in to punk music when she was younger. I thought 7 was a bit too young!
I have seen lots of posts here concerning the commercialization of punk rock and about how the Sex Pistols were a commercial band, yet they suffered lots of controversy. Am I the only one here that sees the controversy as part and parcel of their marketing? Bear in mind that there was no such thing as an independent record label in the mid seventies, so any band that wanted to get their music out to the masses had to play ball with the corporate record labels. I bet that one day a record exec sat down and said "How can we really cash in on this punk rock thing that all of these suburban kiddies seem to be spending their parent's hard-earned money on?" And now, twenty-five or so years later, we are talking about the results.
I personally don't appreciate the Pistols music, but there was lots going on in the scene at the time and what the Pistols did was rocket themselves AND punk rock into the limelight. Essentially, everyone made out; the Pistols and their label made some cash and the rest of the punk rock and hardcore punk rock bands gained some notoriety.
Now, just because punk rock is another commodity that is marketed by the recording industry, is somewhat ignorant to comment that punk is just another fashion. This is somewhat akin to saying that open source is just another fashion. Just because there are charlatans in the movement doesn't make the movement worthless. Conversely, to those that whine about punk rock bands selling out - if you had the choice between a career doing what you love or working a sting of minimum wage jobs so you have time to spend on your passion, what would you do?
Just my view,
rdg
PS - it is widely accepted that the first punk band was the MC5. They formed in 1964 and came from Detroit, same as the Stooges, and were associated with the hippie White Panther Party who espoused "total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock & roll, dope, and fucking in the streets."
jeez, i remember SLC Punk as being the movie that hit just a lil too close to home for my friends and i, who survived the 80s.it was a documentary for the H/C era.Most of that stuff happened to us as i suspect it did to any outsider yobbo who was stuck in a bullshit lil city with NOOOOOOO FUTUUUURE.All the social situations,the friend who trips out of the game completely,the ones who just died.jeez that was a spooky movie.I really did prefer the days when I was part of "the blank generation" Punk wasnt necessarily politically motivated and didnt have a buncha stupid rules.it was just a reflection of the hopelessness felt during end of the cold war by the rightfully cynical."where were you in '77" pistols were great but we already had Ramones,Suicide,Richard Hell,James Chance,the NY Dolls,Television,etc.My Beef is the kiddies who think the pistols invented it."c'mon granpa iggy,tell us about the ol' days
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
No. Rent The Decline of Western Civilization . A much better film, an attempt at a documentary of the Los Angeles punk scene. SLC Punk is a rather poor movie, more fantasy than anything (though the best scene is at the end when the 2 long haired '70s teenagers discover The Germs and their life is forever changed).
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Showing my age, but I remember when the album came out. Everyone knew they were a joke. That first BBC interview made headlines around the world. Yes they were pre-packaged. Yes, their schtik was to be as offensive as possible at all times. But it was funny. Nobody had ever called Paul McCartney an old fart before.
Nobody thought they would ever get their shit together to actually put together an album. And when they did, it looked like it would never be released. And when it was, it looked like it would never be distributed.
But the big suprise was that the album was incredible. Pure distilled venom with a beat. People would recoil when they heard it. It was shocking to a degree hard to imagine today.
The amazing thing was that this "punk version of NSync" went off like an atomic bomb. And the music business looked like Hiroshima afterwards. Don't kid yourself, they changed everything.