Finally A Reason To Like the Sex Pistols

[il ragno]

The Rock n Roll Hall of Fame is an "institution" that should never have existed. Ever. The only "Rock n Roll Hall of Fame" that matters is located in any garage where four kids are bashing through "Heartbreaker" or "Train Kept A Rolling". Period.

Sex Pistols Insult Rock Hall of Fame
New Inductees Compare Institution to 'Urine in Wine'


NEW YORK (Feb. 24) - For years, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame didn't deem the Sex Pistols, the revolutionary punk rock band, worthy of inclusion into its ranks. Now that the Sex Pistols have gained entry into the club, they've decided the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame isn't worthy of their presence.

The group was finally inducted into the hall late last year, along with Black Sabbath, Miles Davis, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Blondie, and induction ceremonies are scheduled March 13 in New York City.

However, in a crude letter posted on its Web site Friday morning, the group made it clear that they would not be attending.

Comparing the rock hall to "urine in wine," the handwritten letter said: "Were (sic) not coming. Were (sic) not your monkeys and so what?"

"Fame at $25,000 if we paid for a table, or $15,000 to squeak up in the gallery, goes to a non-profit organisation (sic) selling us a load of old famous," the letter read, apparently referring to the cost of attending the dinner, although a representative for the hall said each inductee gets two free tickets, and other tickets are $2,500.

When informed of the group's statement, Susan Evans, the executive director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, said: "They are being the outrageous punksters they are, and that's rock and roll."

The Sex Pistols had been eligible for the Rock Hall since 2001, but voters snubbed the groundbreaking punk rock band in favor of contemporaries like Clash, Police and Talking Heads. They broke up after just one album but left a lasting legacy in rock, as Johnny Rotten and late Sid Vicious shocked the rock establishment with songs like "God Save the Queen" and "Pretty Vacant."


02/24/06 17:09 EST

[O'Zebedee]

In the parlance: fucking A!

[tempus fugit]

Finally a rock band that acts it.

[Sinclair]

It's funny that they put (sic) after organisation.

OH MY GOD THEY DID NOT USE A ZEE WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO? Damn Americans.

[Stanley]

Years ago, I heard from a conservative source that the Sex Pistols were actually interesting. As an example, they referred to East Germany as the "new Belsen." (That sounds so Seventies now. I don't give a rat's ass about communism any more.) One minute of actually listening to their album convinced me that I didn't need to hear what they had to say.

[Dan Dare]

I'm not sure who else is of an age that allowed them to personally experience that brief incandescence of punk from 1976 to 1977, sandwiched as it was between The Carpenters and Foreigner.

Privileged we were.

[Billy Score]

Punk is a worthless vile movement that is the outward display of what society has become and the kind of people who inherit our world and society. At least the sex pistols did this, but they were talentless vermin who made a fortune for their lack of talent, ideas, etc.

and i am sorry, but you aren't so hip or "rebellious" when you are a band formed and put together by a fashion mogul.

[Starr]

Just living up to their reputation, I guess.

[Kodos]

Agree generally with Mazdak here... I feel so dirty.

[Basil Fawlty]

I'm not sure who else is of an age that allowed them to personally experience that brief incandescence of punk from 1976 to 1977, sandwiched as it was between The Carpenters and Foreigner.

Privileged we were.Yes, it was an amazing moment alright.

[Heimdall]

Years ago, I heard from a conservative source that the Sex Pistols were actually interesting.

The song Bodies could be considered somewhat conservative since it is essentially an anti-abortion song.

"Bodies"

She was a girl from Birmingham
She just had an abortion
She was case of insanity
Her name was Pauline she lived in a tree

She was a no one who killed her baby
She sent her letter from the country
She was an animal
She was a bloody disgrase

Body I'm not an animal
Body I'm not an animal

Dragged on a table in factory
Illegitimate place to be
In a packet in a lavatory
Die little baby screaming
Body screaming fucking bloody mess
Not an animal
It's an abortion

Body I'm not animal
Mummy I'm not an abortion

Throbbing squirm,
gurgling bloody mess
I'm not an discharge
I'm not a loss in protein
I'm not a throbbing squirm

Fuck this and fuck that
Fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat
She don't wanna baby that looks like that
I don't wanna baby that looks like that
Body I'm not an animal
Body an abortion

Body I'm not an animal
An animal
I'm not an animal.....
I'm not an abortion.....

Mummy! UGH!


Source (http://www.plyrics.com/lyrics/sexpistols/bodies.html)

[Dr. No]

and i am sorry, but you aren't so hip or "rebellious" when you are a band formed and put together by a fashion mogul.

A Jewish fashion mogul, no less.

(I'm referring to Malcolm McLaren, of course.)

[Petr]

A Jewish fashion mogul, no less.

(I'm referring to Malcolm McLaren, of course.)
Yup, that guy had a Yiddishe mama. A stereotypical manager from hell:

http://www.jewishtribalreview.org/24media3.htm#Like%20the%20film


"The "godfather of punk," manager and "mastermind" of the seminal "punk" band -- the Sex Pistols, was Great Britain's Malcolm McLaren. He was also the manager of the New York Dolls, Adam Ant, and Boy George. According to Sex Pistol lead singer Johnny Rotten, his manager was "the most evil man alive." [HARRIS, M., 8-19-94, p. 11; SHAW, D., 12-16-99, p. 5] McLaren "was brought up by his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Corre, a formidable woman from a very rich Sephardic Jewish family." [BARBER, L., 12-22-91, p. 8] The anarchistic Sex Pistols, notes the London Independent, were "brought into being quite cynically by Malcolm McLaren as an advertising gimmick to promote sales of the fetishistic clothes and other devices designed and sold by himself and Vivienne Westwood."


Petr

[cerberus]

My youngest (15) listens to them along with some 1960's -70's bands - Who , Zeppelin spring to mind.
( Her other bands - so many but in them some good material I am pleased to say - "Panic at the Disco" , "My Chemical Romance" etc.

Punk as a movement - looking back I agree with basil it was so rradical and different but was it unique , not really.
Mal. Maclaren he made the Sex Pistols and created an image and legend which made him a few millions- as far as I am aware Johonny Lindon and he don't speak and don't get on - J.L. is not behind the bush about saying they were pretty bad musically to begin with and some didn't improve any.

Having seen " Mr. Rotten" interviewed in recent times on would you believe a Sunday Morning religious show on BBC-1 he is a very switched on guy - very intelligent , articulate and not the aging " feck you" punk that you might expect.

"Rock and Roll hall of Fame" - bit like the "Country Hall of Fame" , " They're so pretty , Oh so pretty , but we don't care"

[Petr]

I'd say that Martin Lindstedt is the only one who has demonstrated genuine "punk spirit" on this forum...


Petr

[il ragno]

I'd say that Martin Lindstedt is the only one who has demonstrated genuine "punk spirit" on this forum...

Petr

I laughed at this but it's essentially correct. Lucky started out as Johnny Rotten and is going out Sid Vicious.

I don't begrudge you fellas your golden glow of nostalgia for incandescent moments and all, but punk to me was anything but. It represented the wholly-undeserved triumph of the Rock Critic and the Vulgarian Middleman in a 'fight' that was fixed to begin with. There was no way I would've known it at the time, but the ascendance of punk was my first real-world encounter with the Bernays Method of shaping public reaction through repeated application of media stimuli, simultaneous with the Selling of Bruce Springsteen.

Musically what was appealing about punk was lifted whole hog from NUGGETS and PEBBLES and RELICS - the ten-days'-wonder garage bands and singles of the mid/late 60s - in the first place, thereupon updated/downgraded with an extra coat of loathsomeness (spitting, piercing, heroin addiction, lurid lyric content) for that tuff-guy/rebel posturing so central to its salability. Playing a Vox or Farfisa organ rather than a Hammond B3 was retro, not revolutionary. Some good music did come out of punk-rock, but later, when those of its practitioners who could play their instruments after all, decided they'd rather get on with making music than continue currying favor with Sounds and the NME.

It's the supposed cultural significance of punk - that voice of a generation nonsense, the fake populism and fake bravado and fake revolution it still flatters itself with, and takes bows for - that got up my nose, then and now. Here was an 'organic' movement that might as well have emerged from a Union Carbide lab; a phenomenon created, sold, capitalized on and then abandoned by the media, that had the brass to attack music that had, for better or worse, found its audience organically as...and this makes me smile...'corporate' and 'corrupt'.

'Member all those classic punkers of '76 - already over 30, pretending they were nowhere near it - snarling about 'fat, disgusting' rock musicians? The other day I watched a then-and-now punk doc called, typically, ATTITUDE: all you saw were fat old punks, dessicated old punks, bald old punks, self-satisfied, double-chinned, late-middle-aged punk relics reminiscing of their glory years with exactly the sort of self-adoring nostalgia that a Jimmy Page or a Keith Emerson might display. Still convinced they'd somehow earned their fame, their backstage blowjobs, and a lifetime of comped liquor tabs...when the bare-bones fact of the matter is if you'd sold a million records on word of mouth, without radio play or print ads, you still had no chance of getting any ink in the music press ca 1977, which was undergoing a self-enforced complete media blackout of any bands but these few critics' darlings who, at the time, were avoided like the plague by all but a handful of poseur cognoscenti. Rock journos - the least essential scribes on this planet, or any other- had taken it upon themselves to create a market by combining saturation-coverage of their pets with non-person status conferred upon everybody else. Records you heard once and ran away screaming from were front-page news mostly because of staged and televised 'outrages'. Records you'd worn out the grooves on a month after purchasing - you couldn't find hide nor hair of em in the music rags for some reason.

Within a year or two, Western college students - every one of them uniquely rebellious and individualistic and 'different', in the exact same way - had taken the bait. Even that old fart Edward Bernays could've predicted that whatever's on the tube or the cover of the magazine becomes 'important' because it's on the tube or the cover of the magazine - the Mobius loop of consumer culture. I'm still, for instance, curious to discover why it was that when the fat old corrupt mainstream rockers that punk 'showed up' as outmoded held sway, it was a commonly held perception that tv and rock music were ill-matched bedfellows who could never comfortably co-exist: music, for all its excesses and silliness, was something authentic...while tv was hopelessly smarmy and innately artificial. Yet in the aftermath of the bracing and 'necessary' enema of 'reality' that punk delivered to a grateful throng, tv suddenly became the most vital and necessary component of marketing new music - the two were, and still are, welded at the hip like Siamese twins.

I think it was because, during the 60s and early 70s, when the revolutionary changes in popular music were organically-occurring, the vulgarian Jews who ran the business were blindsided - they hadn't expected it, didn''t understand any of it, and thus could not effectively capitalize on it. By the mid-70s they'd acclimated to these now-permanent changes in the music environment and, this time, they were in position to max out on a wholly manufactured and custom-engineered youth-subculture...so the tric ws to engineer and manufacture one! While the NME and CREEM were gushing over the latest safety-pinned sensation to the exclusion of everyone else, Sol and Murray were quietly buying pre-ripped clothing in bulk on consignment: the fix was in, and they were all gonna wet their beaks....this time, from the very beginning. The trick to Sol and Murray consolidating their power and extending their grasp was to sell the thing as a generation's loogie-hocking 'fuck you' to Sol and Murray. Everybody went for it, too.

But, ok, if it makes ya feel better I did like the Stranglers. And the singer-songwriters that came out of punk...Graham Parker, Joe Jackson, etc...were very good. And there were even those musicians who were doing what they were doing all along and kinda-sorta caught a ride on punk's trouser-leg if it was gonna lead to better bookings and higher album sales...Mink deVille comes to mind, among several others.

[Count Eustace II]

Well, I'm sad that the Pistols won't be showing up to the induction ceremony. What if they showed up in full Nazi regalia, like they used to do on TV appearances in the 70's? Now that would be punk rock.

[Kamandi]

Malcom McClaren is the most despised man in the history of the music business - I've never heard anyone say a positive word about him, even among those he made rich.

The Rock n Roll Hall of Fame is an "institution" that should never have existed. Ever. The only "Rock n Roll Hall of Fame" that matters is located in any garage where four kids are bashing through "Heartbreaker" or "Train Kept A Rolling".
^Agreed, or "Carbona Not Glue."

[O'Zebedee]

I'm not sure who else is of an age that allowed them to personally experience that brief incandescence of punk from 1976 to 1977, sandwiched as it was between The Carpenters and Foreigner.

Privileged we were.

I was too young and too far away for that first wave, but I caught the splash of it in 1981 when music interested me not at all. I'm guessing that if it wasn't for punk (and the subsidiary "new wave") I would never have cared. For a 13 year old at the time, what else was there? Journey? Rupert Holmes? I'm a loooong way from that now, and I'm generally not prone to nostalgia, but I sure remember the feeling that music gave me.

[Petr]

There was no way I would've known it at the time, but the ascendance of punk was my first real-world encounter with the Bernays Method of shaping public reaction through repeated application of media stimuli, simultaneous with the Selling of Bruce Springsteen.
Hmm, "the Selling of Bruce Springsteen" - would you like to share your pop-culture expertise on this phenomenon as well?


Petr

[Billy Score]

I laughed at this but it's essentially correct. Lucky started out as Johnny Rotten and is going out Sid Vicious.

I don't begrudge you fellas your golden glow of nostalgia for incandescent moments and all, but punk to me was anything but. It represented the wholly-undeserved triumph of the Rock Critic and the Vulgarian Middleman in a 'fight' that was fixed to begin with. There was no way I would've known it at the time, but the ascendance of punk was my first real-world encounter with the Bernays Method of shaping public reaction through repeated application of media stimuli, simultaneous with the Selling of Bruce Springsteen.

Musically what was appealing about punk was lifted whole hog from NUGGETS and PEBBLES and RELICS - the ten-days'-wonder garage bands and singles of the mid/late 60s - in the first place, thereupon updated/downgraded with an extra coat of loathsomeness (spitting, piercing, heroin addiction, lurid lyric content) for that tuff-guy/rebel posturing so central to its salability. Playing a Vox or Farfisa organ rather than a Hammond B3 was retro, not revolutionary. Some good music did come out of punk-rock, but later, when those of its practitioners who could play their instruments after all, decided they'd rather get on with making music than continue currying favor with Sounds and the NME.

It's the supposed cultural significance of punk - that voice of a generation nonsense, the fake populism and fake bravado and fake revolution it still flatters itself with, and takes bows for - that got up my nose, then and now. Here was an 'organic' movement that might as well have emerged from a Union Carbide lab; a phenomenon created, sold, capitalized on and then abandoned by the media, that had the brass to attack music that had, for better or worse, found its audience organically as...and this makes me smile...'corporate' and 'corrupt'.

'Member all those classic punkers of '76 - already over 30, pretending they were nowhere near it - snarling about 'fat, disgusting' rock musicians? The other day I watched a then-and-now punk doc called, typically, ATTITUDE: all you saw were fat old punks, dessicated old punks, bald old punks, self-satisfied, double-chinned, late-middle-aged punk relics reminiscing of their glory years with exactly the sort of self-adoring nostalgia that a Jimmy Page or a Keith Emerson might display. Still convinced they'd somehow earned their fame, their backstage blowjobs, and a lifetime of comped liquor tabs...when the bare-bones fact of the matter is if you'd sold a million records on word of mouth, without radio play or print ads, you still had no chance of getting any ink in the music press ca 1977, which was undergoing a self-enforced complete media blackout of any bands but these few critics' darlings who, at the time, were avoided like the plague by all but a handful of poseur cognoscenti. Rock journos - the least essential scribes on this planet, or any other- had taken it upon themselves to create a market by combining saturation-coverage of their pets with non-person status conferred upon everybody else. Records you heard once and ran away screaming from were front-page news mostly because of staged and televised 'outrages'. Records you'd worn out the grooves on a month after purchasing - you couldn't find hide nor hair of em in the music rags for some reason.

Within a year or two, Western college students - every one of them uniquely rebellious and individualistic and 'different', in the exact same way - had taken the bait. Even that old fart Edward Bernays could've predicted that whatever's on the tube or the cover of the magazine becomes 'important' because it's on the tube or the cover of the magazine - the Mobius loop of consumer culture. I'm still, for instance, curious to discover why it was that when the fat old corrupt mainstream rockers that punk 'showed up' as outmoded held sway, it was a commonly held perception that tv and rock music were ill-matched bedfellows who could never comfortably co-exist: music, for all its excesses and silliness, was something authentic...while tv was hopelessly smarmy and innately artificial. Yet in the aftermath of the bracing and 'necessary' enema of 'reality' that punk delivered to a grateful throng, tv suddenly became the most vital and necessary component of marketing new music - the two were, and still are, welded at the hip like Siamese twins.

I think it was because, during the 60s and early 70s, when the revolutionary changes in popular music were organically-occurring, the vulgarian Jews who ran the business were blindsided - they hadn't expected it, didn''t understand any of it, and thus could not effectively capitalize on it. By the mid-70s they'd acclimated to these now-permanent changes in the music environment and, this time, they were in position to max out on a wholly manufactured and custom-engineered youth-subculture...so the tric ws to engineer and manufacture one! While the NME and CREEM were gushing over the latest safety-pinned sensation to the exclusion of everyone else, Sol and Murray were quietly buying pre-ripped clothing in bulk on consignment: the fix was in, and they were all gonna wet their beaks....this time, from the very beginning. The trick to Sol and Murray consolidating their power and extending their grasp was to sell the thing as a generation's loogie-hocking 'fuck you' to Sol and Murray. Everybody went for it, too.

But, ok, if it makes ya feel better I did like the Stranglers. And the singer-songwriters that came out of punk...Graham Parker, Joe Jackson, etc...were very good. And there were even those musicians who were doing what they were doing all along and kinda-sorta caught a ride on punk's trouser-leg if it was gonna lead to better bookings and higher album sales...Mink deVille comes to mind, among several others.

Did you write this yourself? If so i demand you receive a nobel prize. That post was ridiculous. Heil Il Ragno, you are the man with the midas touch.

[il ragno]

Hmm, "the Selling of Bruce Springsteen" - would you like to share your pop-culture expertise on this phenomenon as well?

Expertise? I dunno about that -strongly-held opinion? Definitely.

Brooooce was anointed a king before any of the commoners had heard a note of his music. And I'm talking cover of TIME magazine, not just the music rags. He was sold as Tough and Gritty, but also Good For You and An Important Part of a Balanced Breakfast - like green vegetables that could also get you laid.

My problem with these unnaturally-occurring phenomena is the self-righteous, self-aggrandizing pretension attached to their marketing. I mean, I'm still trying to figure out how Jethro Tull or Led Zeppelin were suddenly bloated, corrupt, corporate entities when there was no MTV, no 'rock reviewers' in the daily paper, no mass media as we currently know it, no cross-ownership of media, and the music press didn't like 'em and made no bones about saying so. There was generally only one way of knowing who was playing where, or who was releasing a new lp, and that was basically through word of mouth - I used to have to call up record companies for their upcoming-release lists and their artists' touring schedules...that's how well-oiled this 'vast corporate machinery' was: you hadda dig this shit up yourself because there wasn't any other way to find out.

And I'm still asking how The Clash and the Dead Boys and Television were supposedly real, and authentic, and grass-roots an' stuff, when they were the only bands covered and publicized by what media outlets there were ca. 76-78, despite the fact that almost nobody was buying their records, and some of them had yet to record anything at all.

[il ragno]

Did you write this yourself?
Yes.

If so i demand you receive a nobel prize.
Thanks but I won't hold my breath on that.

Heil Il Ragno, you are the man with the midas touch.
This is true.

[O'Zebedee]

nd I'm still asking how The Clash and the Dead Boys and Television were supposedly real, and authentic, and grass-roots an' stuff

Can I just jump in here and say that authenticity is kind of overvalued, anyways? I never bought that line of thinking, even as a kid. Screw the idea that someone from the street is that much better than someone from a middle class home - just good tunes for me, thanks.

[Count Eustace II]

Expertise? I dunno about that -strongly-held opinion? Definitely.

Brooooce was anointed a king before any of the commoners had heard a note of his music. And I'm talking cover of TIME magazine, not just the music rags. He was sold as Tough and Gritty, but also Good For You and An Important Part of a Balanced Breakfast - like green vegetables that could also get you laid.

My problem with these unnaturally-occurring phenomena is the self-righteous, self-aggrandizing pretension attached to their marketing. I mean, I'm still trying to figure out how Jethro Tull or Led Zeppelin were suddenly bloated, corrupt, corporate entities when there was no MTV, no 'rock reviewers' in the daily paper, no mass media as we currently know it, no cross-ownership of media, and the music press didn't like 'em and made no bones about saying so. There was generally only one way of knowing who was playing where, or who was releasing a new lp, and that was basically through word of mouth - I used to have to call up record companies for their upcoming-release lists and their artists' touring schedules...that's how well-oiled this 'vast corporate machinery' was: you hadda dig this shit up yourself because there wasn't any other way to find out.

And I'm still asking how The Clash and the Dead Boys and Television were supposedly real, and authentic, and grass-roots an' stuff, when they were the only bands covered and publicized by what media outlets there were ca. 76-78, despite the fact that almost nobody was buying their records, and some of them had yet to record anything at all.

Great post there. I might venture to say that probably most rock bands were pre-fab products of some producer, or group of producers, who had tight connections with those in the record and publishing industries. This includes The Beatles and Rolling Stones. As for the Sex Pistols, I think it's pretty obvious that they didn't come about by accident.

[Jimbo Gomez]

A midas touch must be annoying to have if you have to go take a leak.

[sugartits]

John Lydon is a funny bastard. I'm guilty as charged for liking the Sex Pistols. No reason really, sometimes I like music that SUCKS.

http://www.johnlydon.com/images/congrat1a.jpg

[il ragno]

Can I just jump in here and say that authenticity is kind of overvalued, anyways? I never bought that line of thinking, even as a kid.

I was just ranting about a number of things that had annoyed me that I seldom have the opportunity to merge'n'codify or the venue to merge'n'codify 'em in.

But no worries, you're still up there on my Whatta Guy list, O'Z.

A midas touch must be annoying to have if you have to go take a leak.

Especially those last two drops!

[Jimbo Gomez]

I feel your pain friend.