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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
Sex Pistols are great, but goddamn do I love Phil Collins. In the air tonight is a powerful, emotional song, buried in urban legend...
Whoa, sorry, didn't mean to get all American Psycho there.
evil adrian
has slashdot just discovered Reuters? Seems a oft quoted source recently (and by and large a good source)
I'm not trying to troll here, but I never did quite understand punk. What is the purpose? The punks I know talk about punk meaning not caring about anything and not conforming, but they spend all their money on punk clothes and releasing their music on vinyl. I mean, what is the appeal? Just what does punk mean and why is it so popular?
The Pistols were a marketed, packaged commodity -- the punk equivalent of the Spice Girls. Many other bands maintained a semblance of integrity, and deserve more credit: the Damned, the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, hell, even the Clash.
What exactly is there to celebrate about a band that was all hype and zero substance?
Oh yeah, it is quite ironic that their album was released 25 years ago. Who'd thought that time would pass? I really didn't see that coming.
This page was generated by a Barrel of Circus Midgets, and that is the way I like it!!!
Pretty Vacant for damn sure. But still I like Bullocks, it had a beat and you could puke to it.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
We nerds ain't so good at appreciating the most significant artistic achievements of our respective generations. Maybe more art-related stories on here would broaden a few horizons? :)
I dunno, Black Flag, Circle Jerks and Kennedys were more California Hardcore than straight british punk. And I don't know Corrosion of Conformity but according to their allmusic.com writeup they seem more metal than punk. Related but diffrent. Stuff like the Clash, Stiff Little Fingers, Buzzcocks and so on are more dirivated from the british punk vein of the pistols creation.
I think of Hardcore as the most comparative of the American punk offerings to british punk (ie. Politically Relavant subject matter), but sonicaly Pistols-like it is not.
Oh and if you haven't seen "The Filth and the Fury" (the 2001 version) check it out it's a good documentary on the pistols.
You listen to a very narrow band.
All the technical flourishes you praise are current in my listening vocabulary of "popular" music. From recent retros like Groove Collective, Air, Corduroy, Mother Earth James Taylor Quartet- to chillers like Morcheeba or Groove Armada. Even the waxies I still listen to from the late 70's and early 80's were big on improv solos and apeggia. I'm thinking of Squeeze and Madness, etc. here. Regular products of a post-punk explosion.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Wha? Are we talking about the same Sex Pistols here? The shallow exercise in media manipulation masquerading as YOOF KULCHA? The shamelessly-pimped whores invented by publicist Malcolm McLaren who staggered from one carefully-planned media event to another?
Sorry to sound so pissed, but... they were a band only in the sense that the Spice Girls and N'Sync are bands.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
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 say current, since we're pretty far away from 1976. And I'm not saying all punks (or free-software types!) live up to those values, but they those are commonly expressed values.
There's also a more intellectual connection via those who consider the Pistols to be the all-time Situationist art piece linked to anarchism linked to certain anarcho-trends on Slashdot.
Anyway, even if you dismiss the Sex Pistols as hype (true enough), you've got to hand it to them:
punk requires no real talent -- they could barely even play a few power chords on their instruments
Oh god, spare us the guitar-weenie pomposity already. Punk rock came in and washed away a pile of doodly-doodly-doodly "solos and exotic scales" and frankly, a bunch of tuneless *wankery*. And if grunge finished off the job, that's a good thing.
Playing music that resonates requires talent. Knowing theory and memorizing scales doesn't, and the former is not dependent on the latter. But you can't teach "memorability" in the latest issue of "GuitarYanker" magazine, so....here's how to play doodly-doodly-doodly in Mixolydian, dooooodes......
Steve Vai, Slash, or Ritchie Sambora
[sarcasm]Yeah, and the state of guitar art is so much poorer for losing the talents of Slash and Richie Sambora, innovators who have been unjustly passed over.[/sarcasm]
I mean, where's the mention of quarter-tone guitarists like you'll hear in ambient music? By the criteria you seem to be going by, exotic tone systems are a step beyond knowing which pentatonic scale D Phrygian maps out to, right? Christ, if you'd at least mentioned Fripp, I might have thought you even knew what you were talking about...
No solos, no exotic scales, nothing.
See above. This is a Good Thing.
Go forward from grunge and you have the mallcore bands -- my favorite genre -- such as KoRn, Limp Bizkit, Taproot, Adema, POD, Disturbed, and so forth, of which none know anything when it comes to scales, arpeggios, solos, etc; in many song, one string is played or bent. It's all about detuning and creating the proper timbre, not showing off knowledge of Lydian modes or doing sweep picking and so forth.
But by the same overgeneralization: Go backward from grunge and you have the heavy metal crowd, almost none of whom know anything about riffs, melodies, or songwriting; in many songs, 10 to 15 different riff changes are yoked together for no apparent reason except to present a facade of "complexity." It's all about showing off chops, like knowledge of Lydian modes or doing sweep picking, or copping riffs from classical composers instead of actual songwriting or experimenting with textures, timbres, dynamics.
I'm sorry, but the guitarists worth looking up to today (or yesterday, or 30 years ago) don't put such a cartoonish overemphasis on "exotic" scales or hyperfast arpeggios -- and the power metal bands you've named are weak throwbacks to a style that died out somewhere in the mid-80s. Ditto "progressive" metal; it's just hilarious, IMO, that so much "progressive" rock & metal, by placing so much emphasis on chops and theory, ends up trying to pretend that Yes and ELP and __(fill in your fave Shrapnel Records act here)__ is on the same level as 400-year-old Baroque music, even if none of these guys could write a memorable three-part fugue to save their lives. We've seen where that kind of "progression" leads: The Great Kat.
The DIY ethic, distrust of corporations, and the "scene" are just anarchistic (which doesn't mean punk) ideals.
from the very beginning punk rock has been about these diy and independent ideals. minor threat, dead kennedys, etc. continuing on into today. and there are very good reasons for this. it's not just anarchist ideals put to music. it's bands wanting to focus on the music and the show rather than the business, the package, the marketing, and all the sleaze involved in trying to "make it". most punk bands are just out there doing all the things that matter -- playing shows, writing music, putting out CDs or records -- and none of the things that don't -- paying off DJ's, shmoozing, marketing, advertising, trying to cater to the lowest common denominator, etc.
we distrust corporations because they have earned our distrust. good friends of mine, a band called Violent Society, is currently owed over $40,000 by their record label. i've watched other friends' bands get screwed over in similar ways. plus there's the whole RIAA, who want only to insure the profits of the executives at the major labels. true story: i have a friend, she used to work for a major label. her JOB was to call up DJ's and say "hey, i've got two trips to disneyland i'd like to give you, for you to give to your listeners in a contest. in exchange, i want to hear the new Limp Bizkit single 40 times a week. and, if you keep one of those trips for yourself, i'm sure we won't notice." she quit because she couldn't face herself anymore. if you don't actively oppose this system, then you are only reinforcing it. music shouldn't be this slimy. and it's the money that did it. punk bands operate outside of that greed. we take ourselves out of that game.
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.
there's nothing wrong with music being about something. frankly songs about girls or how cool the singer is or nothing at all bore the fuck out of me. to each his own, man, don't act like your opinion is fact. i enjoy listening to music whose lyrics actually make me think or even educate or enlighten me. propagandhi in particular is a band whose lyrics are at the same time both political and personal, deeply accurate and informed as well as emotional. they also tell you up front that you shouldn't make opinions based on theirs, or take what they say as fact. they want you to read the papers and make your own decisions.
Punk itself is long dead and still lingers in forms of trendies, poseurs, emofags, Blink 182, and Straight Edge Earth Crisis idiots.
you couldn't be more wrong. the underground punk scene is alive and well, has been that way since its birth in, what, the mid 70's, and will still be here once all this nu-metal crap has gone the way of that swing craze a few years ago. my band plays hardcore punk rock, like minor threat or the dead kennedys, and we play literally about 100 shows a year. and there are bands in every major city right now with gobs of integrity and heart, pounding out punk shows, doing it just like we do. i guess you won't know they're there if you don't go out and look for these shows. you won't hear em on the radio and you won't see them on mtv, cuz they don't have that kind of funding, but i guarantee their shows are more fun than 20 metallica concerts. we're not the "latest thing" but we'll still be here when the latest thing is dead and buried.
i could live a little longer in this prison
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.
What a lot of you people don't realise is what a cultural revolution the Sex Pistols were part of, and how the authorities tried to stamp it out.
The pop charts were rigged especially to keep God Save The Queen off the number one spot, and the record was banned from airplay.
Retailers were actually threatened with arrest and imprisonment should they have the "Never Mind The Bollocks" album on display in their stores.
So while they may not have been the best punk band, they had a major impact on our culture, as what was banned 25 years ago is now perfectly acceptable.
Of course, a lot of the stuff that passes for punk on MTV these days is just bollocks.
"Information wants to be paid"
As far as I'm concerned, the day punk died was the day that Sporty Spice did a live performance of Anarchy In The UK.
"I am the antichrist, I am Sporty Spice..."
Oh, the pain.
Let's face it... Music just boils down to personal taste. If I want to crank the bass boost on my amp so high the subwoofers drown out the vocals and I don't even hear what the song is about, that is my (insert deity(s) of choice) given right. If I like the way it sounds, I'll listen to it. I could care less what skin color the artist currently is (or what color he/she used to be), what gender or sexuality or who he/she is sleeping with, whether or not they're RIAA-owned or indie. All I care about is if the song(s) they've created are something I find enjoyable.
I know this post is kind of geared more towards music in general than to the Sex Pistols, but the attitude on Slashdot seems to lean towards "My x music is more closely represents the genre than yours" or "Band X is cool until they sell out, then they're just commercialized pop." I can understand having a beef with a video card cause it gets texture flickering in the latest Quake-engined game... That's something you can back up with actual facts. Music is meant to be entertainment.
I can respect that your music tastes are different than mine. Arguing that your artists or genres are better is like arguing chocolate is better than vanilla. Do I enjoy any music The Sex Pistols have released? No. Am I going to point out artists that I think are better than the Sex Pistols? No - the Sex Pistols created their own catalog of unique songs and comparing them to other artists' different songs would be comparing apples to oranges.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I highly recommend Greil Marcus' outstanding book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century to anybody trying to understand the Pistols or punk rock. And I forget the author but The Wicked World of Malcolm McLaren is a great book illuminating McLaren's background and experiences.
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!
1. They hated each other
2. They hated you
3. They made one stellar, brilliant album
4. They broke up
Now THAT is a rock band! Too many bands continue after the "plane crash album", sad really.
The hottest thing on the charts when the Pistols came was Hotel California. The trend would later continue when Nirvana decimated (and I don't mean grouping into ten) glam metal.
Sigh. It's time for someone to come along and decimate today's cock rock in the same manner.
Fuck You.
;)
That's the purpose of punk
The 'You' being either conservative british government, or Fleetwood Mac, depending on who you ask....
Advanced users are users too!
English music is like a funhouse mirror of American music. While occasionally there are interesting results (The Beatles, Black Sabbath), it's mostly only a pale imitation with little "soul". The Sex Pistols don't hold a candle to American punk bands that came before them like The Ramones or The Stooges. No bands from England have ever quite had the visceral punch of, say, The Doors, Janis Joplin, MC5, Black Flag, The Pixies, Jane's Addiction, Nirvana...
Anytime English bands get popular in the States it's only because they're superficially exciting in an over-the-top kind of way.
Of course, American music is itself only a reflection of African-American music. I know that there are lots of black people in England, but they tend to be very... well... British. The black American has a very special creole culture that constantly innovates musically. You might think that punk rock is purely a white-boy phenomenon, but consider that the Ramones' sound is a simplified and aggressive form of 50's rock'n'roll ala Elvis and Buddy Holly... and Elvis' sound was merely a countrified R&B (country music itself was already heavily influenced by blues and swing at this time).
African-American music is always evolving in it's own direction while the white boys jump on a tangent and run with it or take ideas from their current sound (note the influence that hip-hop currently has in rock music). Occasionally someone will step into the white man's game (Hendrix, Bad Brains) and prove that they can still do it better.
Remember, rock'n'roll is just African-American slang for sex.
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.