WHY JOHNNY ROTTEN CAN GO F*** HIMSELF

Never mind the bollocks, although it's very difficult where John Lydon is concerned. John Lydon, once styled Johnny Rotten, suddenly jumped onto the Brexit and Trump bandwagons and into the headlines a couple of weeks back, which caused a bit of a stir among the chatterers of society. Over the past forty years, Lydon has been groomed as a cultural ambassador by those in power, while playing the old game that he is somehow an anti-establishment rebel. The unfortunate thing is that many on the Alt Right - rather like what happened with Donald Trump - seem to have been taken in by him, so let us take a look at this new 'hero' and the cultural movement known as punk at large, which John Lydon as Johnny Rotten represented.

 

 

Let us begin with Lydon's origins and rise, for these are intertwined with the punk phenomenon at large. Lydon's immediate heritage is Irish, hence the title of his autobiography: Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs - the title being based on a typical sign on properties to let in the 1950s. The 'No Irish' part, which may look strange to us today, can be explained by the IRA terrorism of the time and also by the behaviour of Irish gypsies, otherwise known as Travellers. I remember in the good old days before political correctness, many public houses and inns would have signs on the entrance saying 'No Travellers'.

 

It is clear, then, from the book's title that he identifies his own purported second-class citizen status with that of the Negro, who, at the time of Lydon's birth, had only been in the country in any meaningful sense for barely a decade. This has extended to raising his elderly wife's half-caste grandchildren like a good little cuck. He has always identified himself with the Other and has an Irish rather than British passport to foreground his at least civic otherness. He therefore also identifies himself as working class in a Marxian sense, his idea of working class as being antagonistic to traditional British and even European norms. He talks about being purportedy working class at every given opportunity.

 

Certainly, his parents were working class, but is Lydon? There are two ironies here: the first is that he has married Nora Forster, a German publishing heiress fourteen years his senior; the second is that he has never done a working-class job in his life, manager Malcolm McLaren having turned him into a pop singer at the age of eighteen. Lydon is as bourgeois as they come. Indeed, it is telling that the venue for the very first Sex Pistols concert was St Martin's Art College, about as middle-class as one can get. I must point out that I have nothing against anyone who is born into one class or another, but John Lydon has spent his entire life sneering at the middle classes despite his own bourgeois existence.

 

As regards that sneer - and the sneer worn by punks in general - one must look at the chief architect of punk rock itself, Malcolm McLaren. Born into a family of Jewish diamond merchants on his mother's side and raised by his Jewish grandmother, McLaren was heavily influenced at art college by the Situationist avant-garde movement, led by French Communist Guy Debord and his Jewess wife Michèle Bernstein. On the artistic level, Situationism was a Leftist attack on the arts through absurdist or provocative happenings that deconstructed traditional norms and underpinned the May 1968 cultural revolution in France and Germany. The ultimate goal was to normalise the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Starting with the shop that became SEX, a fetishwear retailer co-managed with fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, McLaren applied this ideology firstly to clothing and then to music. Clothing included t-shirts with two homosexual cowboys naked from the waist down and red leather fetishwear emblazoned with the hammer and sickle for the New York Dolls. John Lydon, a young nihilistic eighteen-year-old without any discernable talent but self-defined by what he hated, fit the bill perfectly for McLaren's new musical project. Lydon could not sing a note in tune, but this was a plus point, as was his green hair, overall ugliness and 'I hate Pink Floyd' t-shirt.

 

The story of Glen Matlock within the band is interesting. The only member who could actually play to a good level, he was ousted when McLaren caused friction between Matlock and Rotten. This made way for the talentless drug addict known as Sid Vicious. Matlock co-wrote all but a handful of the band's songs and was just too good for a band with the intention of marketing crap to the masses. McLaren also set up post-punk band Bow Wow Wow, with its thirteen-year-old half-caste lead singer, Annabella Lwin, born Myant Myant Aye to a Burmese father and English mother. Lwin appeared naked on Bow Wow Wow's debut album as McLaren assaulted traditional norms with miscegenation and child pornography. You will never watch the video to McLaren's single 'Double Dutch' in the same way again.

Lydon is very fond of telling how he exposed Jimmy Savile as a paedophile. It is interesting though that he has tried to ban the recording of his comments back in 1978 from public usage in order to sell them as part of his latest album. Ever the altruist. He has also always been suspiciously quiet about his own ex-manager McLaren's involvement in the world of paedophilia. Financed by both the BBC, under the auspices of (((Alan Yentob))), and EMI, in 1980 McLaren began creating an ostensibly music-related magazine that would be a more risqué version of Smash Hits, which had just been launched two years previously. In reality, the publication, originally titled Playkids, but then changed to Chicken, would serve to get child pornography into the mainstream. McLaren attempted to get the aforementioned Annabella Lwin to do a full-frontal nude shoot, but after she became distressed and tearful, brought in a replacement thirteen-year-old girl. Fortunately, enough concerns about the magazine ensured its shelving.

Punk rock was essentially a perversion of pub rock for middle-class Leftists. For all the talk of it being a roots, working-class movement that 'just sprang up', it was in reality orchestrated by middle-class communists, who used a (sometimes miscegenated) underclass rabble as a musical battering ram against traditional norms. Pub rock, with bands like early Slade, Captain Beefheart, The Who and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, was what punk rock purported to be. Incidentally, my father rated the latter as the best live band he had ever seen. Bands like the Sex Pistols were fawned over by the Leftist media and catapulted into the mainstream, while Beefheart and Harvey remained genuinely underground. And therefore I say to Johnny Rotten in a style he might appreciate: Go fuck yourself, you fake posturing establishment shill.