The Truth About Punk: De-Mythologizing The Sex Pistols

With each passing year it becomes increasingly apparent that the idea of the punk rock musical revolution of the 1970's isn't so historically or even spiritually accurate. Really, it's more of an invention of the hopelessly nostalgic millennium's end Best Of lists that popped up a decade ago. Some combination of overgrown kids, irresponsible music journalists and various amateur revisionists created and then perpetuated the reductive understanding of new music in the mid-to-late 1970's, much to the delight of programming producers at VH1. Listening to the truly big, truly influential stuff that happened in major scenes around the world during that period, it's clear that supposed revolution of punk rock wasn't the first shot fired, but the popular revolt that followed.

If the mythologists are to be believed, on a single, glorious day The Ramones were birthed from the smokey clubs of New York City while The Sex Pistols emerged from a cockney-swept chimney in London. The real story is a lot less epic and, more to the point, significantly less punk than that. The Sex Pistols were the result of a mix-and-match game orchestrated by, of all things, a couple of clothing shop owners. Malcolm McLaren ended up managing everything from the band's image to its jumbled lineup, all while juggling a career of selling faux-edgy fashions to young Londoners.

This isn't it to say that The Sex Pistols didn't make interesting or influential music, only that it wasn't as revolutionary as purported. Equally hard, equally political material had been sprouting on the other side of the Atlantic for at least three years by the time Never Mind the Bollocks hit the shelves. Richard Hell and the Voidoids were screaming raw at CBGB's before The Sex Pistols even had a frontman. In fact, Malcolm McLaren tried to recruit Richard Hell for that very job before he found John Lydon back in Chelsea.

Listening to the music of The Pistols and The Ramones, who really are reflections of one another circa 1977, it's important to remember that it didn't exist in a cultural vacuum. The riffs they employed are slightly more distorted versions of southern rock, blues rock and surf rock that had been on the airwaves for close to twenty years by the time punk was even a concept. Hell, listen to the opening moments of "Liar" and just try not to hear the funky, Shaft-like high-hat.

I suppose the reason we want to think of The Sex Pistols, and by extension punk itself, as being so violently opposed to pop music is because we equate coolness in rock with novelty. Punk's not punk in the hearts of fans if it's a natural, even predictable, evolution of existing styles. I'd like to take a different tack, though. I think it's pretty awesome that a few snotty kids from England could take a handful of chords that had been a part of pop music for decades and make them sound new. I don't care if The Sex Pistols were manufactured and marketed by a would-be fashion guru, they still sound interesting thirty years after the fake revolution.