The Sex Pistols: A manufactured boy band | Or why illegal downloads are the BPI’s own fault

Sid Vicious was a prison bitch

The 1970s gave us thousands of hours of music performed by gifted wonderful musicians. But music journalists from all persuasions, from NME and Rolling Stone to mog.com bloggers are each and all determined to retrospectively eject the contribution of innovators like Herbie Hancock and Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa and Todd Rundgren and supplant them in the collective consciousness of those of us who weren’t yet born or weren’t paying attention at the time, with an ill conceived C.S.E. grade art project that got exceedingly lucky.

A bunch of lads from London, who just as surely paved the way for Britney Spears and Paris Hilton as they did Simon Cowell and the so-called MTV generation, the Sex Pistols were specifically designed by Malcolm McLaren to produce as much return on as little investment as possible. The total year on year profits of Boy-Zone, Blue and Take That combined are dwarfed by those of the band which gave us such innovative concepts as spitting on the audience, on-stage substance abuse, slam “dancing” and the wearing of Nazi Swastikas as fashion.

The social hangover of punk should be familiar to anyone today living on a housing estate with rising youth knife crime, that to engage in the illusion of control over their own destiny, youths must first rid themselves of any cultural or historical awareness, and fight to protect their ignorance by celebrating the illiteracy of their peers.

John Joseph Lydon, also known as Johnny Rotten

Previous to punk the recording industry had laboured under the illusion that for something to sell, it had to be melodic and played by musicians. Punk, headed by The Sex Pistols, set out to prove that this was bollocks; that if you marketed it right, if you managed to convince enough people that they were part of ‘something’, even if that amorphous something was substantively ‘nothing’, they would nevertheless rush out in their droves to buy whatever clothes and music they’d been told to buy, and rejoice in their bought and paid for canned identity, as if it were uniquely their own.

As legions of wannabes line the streets of your home town to audition for the next series of (insert name of premium rate phone-in freak show “talent” TV here), desperate for their 15 megabytes of fame, consider the lineage of the manufactured pop act. Its similarities to the way in which punk was devised can hardly be lost on even the least cynical among you, who continue to buy into the bottle-fed notion that although you didn’t personally “get it” at the time, punk nevertheless undid decades of pomp and elitism which needed undoing for not just the British music industry to survive, but youth culture itself.

This lofty ambition, inserted after the fact into the story of punk, once its profiteers blended into the establishment they pantomimed such an unconvincing struggle against, betrays the real world devastating effects which punk had on the music business and how quickly the industry learned from it, that to mistreat the ears of the audience is even more profitable than mistreating actual musicians; who for decades before Vivian Westward had begrudgingly accommodated each other in a simian act of mutual grooming for the juicy fleas of commercial chart success, fame and fortune.

Punk tilted this fragile ecosystem on its side, rolling the most heavily bug infested chimps onto their backs, exposing their genitals to the yawning wide open mouths of every A&R department in Christendom, each more desperate than the last to suck down every last morsel of mass-produced smegma which squirted from punk’s white middle class brand of boil in the bag teenage angst, until it was drained and the next money chimp to come along was ready for the milking.

Zzyowwmmmm

The dawning realisation that while you can’t polish a turd, you can nevertheless put it in a pretty box and tie a ribbon around it, came at exactly the right time for a music industry which desperately needed to rid itself of the escalating costs involved in paying people with talent to write, record and promote creative melodic music. The shitter it is the better it is “style” of punk saved many a struggling independent record label, who quickly found themselves swallowed up by the major publishers, savvy to the fashion trend.

The victims of the cull were acts who didn’t comply. Look through the back catalogue of any artist who’d been around for a while circa 1978. That difficult third album which didn’t sell as well as it should, will contain somewhere on side two, just after the American FM radio rock ballad, a “punk sounding” cut, hurriedly mixed to give it “that raw edge all the kids are going for”, as the cooking-pot pressure mounted on artists with any degree of substance and taste to “get with the times”.

And now here we are, the year 2008. The music business has so catastrophically failed to develop an on-line strategy, the UK has become the first place in the world to afford new legal powers to ISPs, to criminalise people who the British Phonographic Industry have deemed unworthy of an internet connection; who’s effrontery to show their disdain for the way talent has become nothing more than a genre of TV game show, by turning their backs on what “the man” considers to entertainment and instead seek out the sound we love in the collective consciousness of our brothers and sisters in music around the world.

Search Google for live music venues in your area. Go see a band. If they can play their own instruments and you like their music, buy a CD directly from them. Upload it to the internet and tell people who also like it to go see the band live too. No record companies involved, no Feargal fucking Sharkey making you feel bad about loving music, no obligatory fashion accessories to “enhance the image” – you listen to music with your ears and your good taste.

Just maybe, given enough time (although you’d be right to say they’ve had long enough already) the music industry will wake up to it’s real failings, which are not based so much in how to more effectively sell shit to deaf cattle (Cold Play fans), but more constructively, how it might rectify decades of greed and London-centric art-house stupidity, by investing in music made by musicians, the development of artist with something to say worth listening to and a way for their fans to be confident, when they pay an artist directly for a copy of their music, that most of the profits will go towards recording and touring, instead of glorified Pepsi ad promo videos and drug rehabilitaion programs. How about that for a modest proposal?