Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols

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A few months after the Sex Pistols released their first and only album, lead singer John Lydon stood onstage in San Francisco and asked the audience if they ever had the feeling they’d been cheated. The question could’ve been self-deprecating—as in, after a year of hype and rhetoric about the revolutionary power of rock ’n’ roll, weren’t you expecting a little more from the Sex Pistols? But Lydon could’ve easily been asking the question of himself. The Sex Pistols hadn’t tried to destroy the business and culture of rock ’n’ roll, but they hadn’t planned on becoming a casualty of it either. And now, here they were, sponging up the spit and beer-spray of hundreds of disaffected teenagers who took their messages of blind rebellion to heart. Their manager, Malcolm McLaren, had purposely avoided booking the band in places like Los Angeles and New York in favor of Southern cities where the cultural clash—between young British punks and a presumably conservative part of America—would be more volatile. If it was all just controversy, you’d feel cheated too. They didn’t play another show for nearly 20 year. Whereas <i>The Clash</i> has a set of politic, 1977’s <i>Never Mind the Bollocks</i> doesn’t. They don’t like other people (“Anarchy in the U.K.”) but don’t seem to like themselves either (“No Feelings”). They have nothing good to say about the older generation (“God Save the Queen”) and worse to say about the younger one (“Pretty Vacant”). In the same way that a St. Bernard looks melancholy regardless of how it feel, Lydon conveys a disgust that runs so deep, it feels beyond performance. The album’s bleakest song, “Bodie,” isn’t just a snapshot of an aborted fetus and its dehumanized mother—it was written about a fan. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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