Authors: Greil Marcus
It was there from the start—a possibility, one of the alleys leading off the free street. There was a black hole at the heart of the Sex Pistols’ music, a willful lust for the destruction of values that no one could be comfortable with, and that was why, from the start, Johnny Rotten was perhaps the only truly terrifying singer rock ’n’ roll has known. But the terror had a new cast at the end: certainly no one has yet seen all the way to the bottom of “Holidays in the Sun,” and probably no one ever will.
They had begun as if in pursuit of a project: in “Anarchy in the U.K.” they had damned the present, and in “God Save the Queen” they had damned the past with a curse so hard that it took the future with it. “NO FUTURE”—
NO FUTURE
NO FUTURE
NO FUTURE FOR YOU
NO FUTURE
NO FUTURE
NO FUTURE
NO FUTURE FOR ME
—so went the mordant chant as the song ended. “No future in England’s dah-rrrreeming!”: England’s dream of its glorious past, as represented by the Queen, the “moron,” the nation’s basic tourist attraction, linchpin of an economy based on nothing, salve on England’s collective amputee’s itch for Empire. “We’re the future,” Johnny Rotten shouted, never sounding more like a criminal, an escaped mental patient, a troglodyte—“Your future.” Portrayed in the press as heralds of a new youth movement, with “God Save the Queen” the Sex Pistols denied it; every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled.
The Sex Pistols were after more than an entry in the next revised edition of a sociology text on Britain’s postwar youth subcultures—just what more, one could perhaps have learned from a fragment that made up part of the collage on the back sleeve of the Clash’s first record, “White Riot”/“1977”:
“that there is, perhaps,
some
tension in society, when perhaps overwhelming pressure brings industry to a standstill or barricades to the streets years after the liberals had dismissed the notion as ‘dated romanticism,’ ” some unidentified person had written at some unidentified time, “the journalist invents the theory that this constitutes a clash of generations. Youth, after all, is not a permanent condition, and a clash of generations is not so fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be a clash between rulers and ruled.” So maybe that was what the Sex Pistols were after: a clash between rulers and ruled. As the number-two London punk band, the Clash’s pop project was always to make sense of the Sex Pistols’ riddles, and this made sense—except that a single listening to “God Save the Queen” dissolved whatever sense it made.
The consumptive disgust in Johnny Rotten’s voice (“We love our Queen / We mean it, man / God
save”
—that was the end of the line), the blinding intransigence of the music, so strong it made intransigence into a self-justifying, all-encompassing new value: as a sound, “God Save the Queen” suggested demands no art of government could ever satisfy. “God
save”
—the intonation said there was no such thing as salvation. A guitar lick ripped the song and whoever heard it in half.
What was left? Mummery, perhaps: with “Pretty Vacant,” their third single, the Sex Pistols had risen from graves hundreds of years cold as Lollards, carriers of the ancient British heresy that equated work with sin and rejected both. Work, the Bible said, was God’s punishment for Original Sin, but that was not the Lollards’ bible. They said God was perfect, men and women were God’s creation, so therefore men and women were perfect and could not sin—save against their own perfect nature, by working, by surrendering their God-given autonomy to the rule of the Great Ones, to the lie that the world was made for other than one’s perfect pleasure. It was a dangerous creed in the fourteenth century, and a strange idea to find in a twentieth-century pop song, but there it was, and who knew what buried wishes it might speak for?
“We didn’t know it would spread so fast,” said Bernard Rhodes, in 1975 one of Malcolm McLaren’s co-conspirators at the Sex boutique, later the manager of the Clash. “We didn’t have a manifesto. We didn’t have a rule book, but we were hoping that . . . I was thinking of what I got from Jackie
Wilson’s ‘Reet Petite,’ which was the first record I ever bought. I didn’t need anyone to describe what it was all about, I knew it . . . I was listening to the radio in ’75, and there was some expert blabbing on about how if things go on as they are there’ll be 800,000 people unemployed by 1979, while another guy was saying if that happened there’d be chaos, there’d be actual—anarchy in the streets.
That
was the root of punk. One
knew
that.”
Socialists like Bernard Rhodes knew it; it was never clear what Malcolm McLaren or his partner Jamie Reid, before Sex an anarchist publisher and poster artist, thought they knew. Unemployment in the U.K. had reached an unimaginable one million by the time “Pretty Vacant” was released in July 1977, and the punk band Chelsea summed up the social fact with the protest single “Right to Work.” But Johnny Rotten had never learned the language of protest, in which one seeks a redress of grievances, and speaks to power in the supplicative voice, legitimating power by the act of speaking: that was not what it was about. In “Pretty Vacant” the Sex Pistols claimed the right not to work, and the right to ignore all the values that went with it: perseverance, ambition, piety, frugality, honesty, and hope, the past that God invented work to pay for, the future that work was meant to build. “Your God has gone away,” Johnny Rotten had already sung on “No Feelings,” the flipside of the first, abortive pressing of “God Save the Queen”—“Be back another day.” Compared to Rhodes’s sociology, Johnny Rotten spoke in unknown tongues. With a million out of work the Sex Pistols sat in doorways, preened and spat: “We’re pretty / Pretty vacant / We’re pretty / Pretty vacant / We’re pretty / Pretty vacant / And we don’t care.” It was their funniest record yet, and their most professional, sounding more like the Beatles than a traffic accident, but Johnny Rotten’s lolling tongue grew sores for the last word: like the singles before it, “Pretty Vacant” drew a laugh from the listener, and then drove it back down the listener’s throat.
So that was the project—God and the state, the past, present, and future, youth and work, all these things were behind the Sex Pistols as they headed to the end of their first and last year on the charts. All that was left was “Holidays in the Sun”: a well-earned vacation, albeit geopolitical and world-historical, sucking up more territory than the Sex Pistols had set foot on, and more years than they had been alive.
The sleeve was charming: on the front was a borrowed travel-club comic strip, depicting happy tourists on the beach, in a nightclub, cruising the Mediterranean, celebrating their vacations in speech balloons Jamie Reid had emptied of advertising copy and filled with the words Johnny Rotten was singing on the plastic—“A cheap holiday in other people’s misery!” On the back was a perfect family scene, dinnertime, a photograph Reid annotated with little pasted-on captions: “nice image,” “nice furniture,” “nice room,” “nice middle age lady,” “nice middle aged man,” “nice food,” “nice photo,” “nice young man,” “nice young lady,” “nice gesture” (the nice young man is holding the hand of the nice young lady), “nice little girl” (she’s sticking out her tongue), and even, at the bottom, “nice sleeve.” “I don’t want a holiday in the sun,” Johnny Rotten began. “I want to go to the new Belsen.”
He went. Off he goes to Germany, the marching feet of package-tour tourists behind him, drawn by the specter of the Nazi extermination camp that, for the British, serves as Auschwitz does for Americans: a symbol of modern evil. “I wanna see some history,” he says, but history is out of reach; now Belsen is not in Germany at all, but part of something called “East Germany,” less a place than an ideological construct, and so Johnny Rotten finds himself at the foot of the Berlin Wall, the ideological construct symbolizing the division between the two social systems that rule the world, a world that is more like it is now than it ever was before.
Johnny Rotten stands at the Berlin Wall. People are staring at him, and he can’t stand it; the sound of marching feet grows louder, and he can’t stand that either. As the band behind him spins into a frenzy, he begins to scream: he wants to go over the wall. Is that where the real Nazis are? Is East Berlin what the West will look like in the no-future he’s already prophesied? He can’t stop himself: he wants to go under the wall. He seems not to know what he’s singing, but the music presses on, squeezing whoever might hear it like Poe’s shrinking closet. The shifts in Johnny Rotten’s voice are lunatic: he can barely say a word before it explodes in his mouth. Part of the terror of the song is that it makes no apparent sense and yet drags you
into its absurdity and strands you there: time and place are specific, you could plot your position on a map, and you’d be nowhere. The only analogue is just as specific, and just as vague.
In 1924 a forty-two-year-old North Carolina lawyer named Bascom Lamar Lunsford recorded a traditional ballad called “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground”—how traditional, no one knows. A reference to “the Bend,” a turn-of-the-century Tennessee prison, might fix the piece in a given time and place, but the reference could have been added long after the piece came into being; all that was certain was the measured count of Lunsford’s banjo, the inexorable cadence of his voice. The song, the music said, predated whoever might sing it, and would outlast whoever heard it.
“I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” wasn’t an animal song, like “Froggy Went A-Courtin’ ” or “The Leatherwing Bat.” It was an account of everyday mysticism, a man dropping his plow, settling onto the ground, pulling off his boots, and summoning wishes he will never fulfill. He lies on his back in the sun:
Oh, I wish I was a mole in the ground
Yes, I wish I was a mole in the ground
Like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down
And I wish I was a mole in the ground
Now what the singer wants is obvious, and almost impossible to comprehend. He wants to be delivered from his life and to be changed into a creature insignificant and despised. He wants to see nothing and to be seen by no one. He wants to destroy the world and to survive it. That’s all he wants. The performance is quiet, steady, and the quiet lets you in: you can listen, and you can contemplate what you are listening to. You can lie back and imagine what it would be like to want what the singer wants. It is an almost absolute negation, at the edge of pure nihilism, a demand to prove that the world is nothing, a demand to be next to nothing, and yet it is comforting.
This song was part of the current that produced rock ’n’ roll—not because
a line from it turned up in 1966 in Bob Dylan’s “Memphis Blues Again,” but because its peculiar mix of fatalism and desire, acceptance and rage, turned up in 1955 in Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train.” In that founding statement he tipped the balance to affirmation, concealing the negative but never dissolving it, maintaining the negative as the principle of tension, of friction, which always gave the yes of rock ’n’ roll its kick—and that was the history of rock ’n’ roll, up to October 1977, when the Sex Pistols happened upon the impulse to destruction coded in the form, turned that impulse back upon the form, and blew it up. The result was chaos: there was nowhere to lie down and no time to contemplate anything. This was actually happening. The Sex Pistols left every band in the world behind them for the last minute of “Holidays in the Sun”: Johnny Rotten was climbing, digging with his hands, throwing pieces of the wall over his shoulder, crying out his inability to understand more of the story than you do, damning his inability to understand what, in 1924, Bascom Lamar Lunsford had accepted he could not understand.
What is happening? It sounds as if Hitler’s legions have risen from the dead, taking the place of nice tourists, nice East German bureaucrats, nice West German businessmen—or as if Nazis have jumped out of the skins of the capitalists and communists who replaced them. Johnny Rotten is drawn like an iron filing to a magnet—but he slows down, stops, tries to think. If Buñuel had damned those who found his movie beautiful or poetic when it was fundamentally a call to murder, much of the twentieth century has been taken up with the attempt to prove that the beautiful, the poetic, and the call to murder are all of a piece—and in the last seconds of “Holidays in the Sun,” Johnny Rotten seemed to understand this. His incessant shout of “I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS BIT AT ALL!” as the song headed to a close may have been his way of saying so, of saying that he didn’t want to understand it: his way of saying that when he looked into the void of the century, he found the void looking back, Johnny Rotten went through the wall; “please don’t be waiting for me,” he said. The song ended.
His aim, one can believe, was to take all the rage, intelligence, and strength in his being and then fling them at the world: to make the world notice; to make the world doubt its most cherished and unexamined beliefs;
to make the world pay for its crimes in the coin of nightmare, and then to end the world—symbolically, if no other way was open. And that, for a moment, he did.
Thus did the Sex Pistols end the world, or anyway their own. The followup news was dissolution, murder, suicide—and though in each case the facts were formally logged in the relevant civil and criminal courts, who can tell if the events took place in the realm where people actually live more than in the symbolic realm of the pop milieu? As a double, the nihilist holds the negationist’s dope; usually they rent the same rooms, and sometimes they pay the same bills. Usually the coroner—be it fan, epigone, critic, or best friend—cannot tell the difference by looking at the corpse. The Sex Pistols were a scam, a bid for success through scandal, for “cash from chaos,” as one of Malcolm McLaren’s slogans had it; they were also a carefully constructed proof that the whole of received hegemonic propositions about the way the world was supposed to work comprised a fraud so complete and venal that it demanded to be destroyed beyond the powers of memory to recall its existence. In those ashes anything would be possible, and permitted: the most profound love, the most casual crime.