DISPATCHES By Hank Kalet: Nevermind the mainstream, where are the Sex Pistols?
By: Hank Kalet
The rock ‘n’ roll cognoscenti patted themselves on the back Monday, inducting a new class into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
It was a star-studded event, with the hall welcoming this year’s class Jackson Browne, the Dells, George Harrison, Prince, Bob Seger, Traffic, ZZ Top and Jann S. Wenner into the fold. (The ceremony will air on VH-1 on Sunday, March 21.)
Now, I love the rock hall and I see a real benefit to having an institution that both celebrates and explores the history of a music that served so central a role in the cultural history of the second half of the 20th century.
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But looking at the current crop of inductees, I can only wonder what kind of criteria the folks who make the decisions on induction used this year. And my criticism can be boiled down to one basic question: Where are the Sex Pistols?
I know, the Pistols managed one groundbreaking album and a handful of stray singles during their short life as a band. I know they basically existed as a band for maybe two years. And I know they had little commercial impact.
That misses the point. The Sex Pistols helped launch a musical revolution in the late-1970s, along with such punk stalwarts as the Clash, the Ramones and others.
That revolution, which came to be known as punk rock, was a direct assault on the staid, conformist rock of the time, a music that had grown fat with an inflated sense of its own importance.
"Punk was a new music, a new social critique, but most of all it was a new kind of speech," wrote author and critic Greil Marcus in the introduction to his book, "In the Fascist Bathroom." "It inaugurated a moment a long moment, which still persists when suddenly countless odd voices, voices no reasonable person could have expected to hear in public, were being heard all over the place: sometimes as monstrous shouts in the marketplace, sometimes as whispers from an alleyway. There was an absolute denial of self-censorship in the Sex Pistols’ songs that gave people who heard them permission to speak as freely. If an ugly, hunched-over twenty-year-old could stand up, name himself an antichrist, and make you wonder if it wasn’t true, then anything was possible."
The Pistols tore through complacent England, riding Johnny Rotten’s barely literate and nihilistic lyrics and the band’s ragged, unprofessional musical assault, attacking the royals ("God save the Queen and the fascist regime") and proclaiming that there was "no future, no future, no future, now."
The Pistols were not the first punk band or the best. In any legitimate accounting of the history of the punk movement, they must share time not just with the Clash and the Ramones, but with Elvis Costello, the Gang of Four, the Dead Kennedys, X and a long list of bands that turned their backs on what was a bland and bloated music industry.
The Pistols, however, maybe the most significant. It was the Pistols, as Marcus pointed out, that made it all seem possible. Joe Strummer was said to have formed the Clash after seeing the Pistols on stage.
All of this makes me wonder how the Pistols could be excluded from the hall for the last three years. There have been few rock ‘n’ roll bands in the last 30 years that have had as much influence on music as the Pistols, which should be the prime criteria for selection.
It has been 25 years since the Pistols released their first record (The single "Anarchy in the U.K." was released in November 1976 and the album "Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols was released in October 1977) which makes them eligible.
No other inductee this year aside from George Harrison can claim the level of influence or the "significance of the artist’s contributions to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll" as the Pistols.
I have nothing against ZZ Top, but they are a decidedly mainstream band that made some fun songs and got a real boost from the early days of MTV. And I like Traffic, Bob Seger and Jackson Browne, but it is the Sex Pistols that have left us the most profound legacy.
Then again, perhaps it’s fitting that the Pistols have not been invited to the party. I doubt it’s one they would have wanted to attend way back when.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail by clicking here.