The lie is in the fact that Johnny Rotten isn’t acknowledging that Sid Vicious was also the star for the legions of asshole fake fans of “The Sex Pistols”. But also Marky Ramone, so he gets a rueful chuckle from me.
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It didn’t feel like “Old Man yells at Cloud” at all.
Rotten still seemed the most individually self-aware that they were up there as show business, and that he had contempt for it as he participated and tried to push some buttons for his own amusement.
That was nicer than feeling he was embalmed or that he had ended up completely believing his own hype.
That was a convivial tea party of collegial sparring, and that made it a lot nicer than if they had came out as worthy dignitaries of the past, waiting for their praise. This was better than I would’ve thought, from the drama-baiting headline.
Thank humanity that the world didn’t stick to Pistols clones, but I did like the life that was left in these oldies, all of them.
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Well, Mr. Rotten certainly has the “divorced dad in court for being three years behind on his child support payments and also has to appear for no valid insurance” aesthetic down pat.
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I was thinking Zippy the Pinhead who has really let himself go.
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It’s true, but the entire time they were together, under McLaren’s direction (who was pretty interested in cultural disruption similar to the situationists), it was constant conflict, especially between Johnny and Malcolm. Johnny could never stay on “script” and ended up being more trouble than McLaren bargained for. but over all, it was manufacturing a band more for the sake of revealing the industry for what it was, rather than for pure financial gain… at least if Jon Savage is to be believed, and I think I do… more Andy Warhol and less New Kids on the Block… It was testing the boundaries of authenticity that became such a key aspect of the 60s counterculture…
Plus, Matlock was a solid song writer, so there is that. And then there is PiL, which was such a great band. Not to mention all the bands that saw or heard the SP and went on to start their own bands, as you rightly mention.
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John Lydon gave a wonderful performance as Johnny Rotten
“Jokes on them, I was only pretending.”
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I would watch the hell out of a movie with Henry Rollins as a too-serious mission-focused Batman faced with a Johnny Rotten Joker, at any age of those guys.
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Come on, Mindysan, you know as well as I do that PiL wasn’t a band. It was a company.
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Hear! Hear! I’ve seen both bands multiple times and can confirm that Black Flag in 1984 blew the doors off any Pistols gig. (Full disclosure: I saw the Sex Pistols with Glen Matlock instead of Sid Vicious so that might have made a difference).
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Right?
I though he’d died ages ago.
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Y’know, if you’re actively aware you’re explicitly about to post an annoying auto-play video …is thinking “Oh, don’t worry: I’ll just pre-emptively apologize for it!” really the right response?
So, Lydon is still Lydon? I’d like to say that attitude is beneath him, but I’m not sure that’s right.
Anyway, I’m not going to watch it.
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Works for me.
Even though he’s not my all-time favorite person in the world, I actually love that people are still finding ways to sneer about how Johnny Rotten looks, dresses, behaves, or that he doesn’t show sufficient gratefulness for his position in the public eye.
He always reminds me of the Monkees in front of a non-understanding audience, or the Beatles but only in those archived specific early moments in Beatlemania where they would be schoolboy snotty to fake-smiling old reporters who were patronizing them bitterly.
It’s all pretty moot, since the point and battle are lost, and I’m sure we still have as many iterations of the polite and digestible pop star as people will ever want…
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Fuck the Sex Pistols and John Rotten. The Ramones rock! Marky may not be an original but he was on more albums than Sid Viscous. How many Sex Pistols albums were there anyway? The Ramones recorded 14 of the greatest studio albums to ever exist!
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Why is anyone shocked that Johnny Rotten acts like a fucking asshole? That’s been his schtick for 40+ years.
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The Sex Pistols were just the Monkees in spiky jackets.
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