(PiL also managed to give momentum and focus to the English postpunk avant-garde: a burgeoning movement of art theorists and futurist musicians, several of whom - Cabaret Voltaire, a Certain Ratio, the The, In Camera, This Heat, Dome, et al. Actually, Lydon and PiL merely rerouted the Pistols’ much-vaunted anarchism, applying it to song structure, and in the process, authored the first major attempt to transmogrify rock parlance since Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. It’s as if, after distancing himself from the merciless primitivism of the Sex Pistols, Lydon found a fatal flaw in rock & roll itself - namely, that it imparted the illusion of order and transcendence - and decided to remake the genre. By his own admission, the music he makes with PiL aims to devastate classicist rock & roll - including punk rock - by blackening its themes and confounding its forms. By dealing exclusively in abstract images and accidental sounds, Lydon no longer has to run the risk of caring - which also means he no longer needs to run the risk of meaning.īut it’s true, too, that Lydon rankles critics and punk die-hards alike because he’s repudiated his past.
has impressed some erstwhile followers as just a plain antagonist: a tedious, ill-affected artiste who deserted his own dread visions for fear they might destroy him. By contrast, John Lydon - who rose from the ashes of Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols to form the experimentalist postpunk band Public Image Ltd.
Johnny Rotten was one of the few terrific antiheroes rock & roll has ever produced: a violent-voiced bantam of a boy who tried to make sense of popular culture by making it suffer the world outside - its moral horror, its self-impelled violation, its social homicide.
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