Never mind the credit cards, hereâs the bollocks
The announcement that a new line of credit cards featuring artwork from the late 1970s band Sex Pistols was met with a near-universal amount of shock and grief among the legions of punk rock fans online. These devoted followers of punk, many who are at least in their early 30s, lashed out in comment sections, Facebook posts, and tweets directed at the band, John Lydon, Virgin Money, and anyone who would listen. The cries of âsell-outâ and âpunk is officially dead nowâ are, in a word, hilarious.
Hilarious because theyâre coming from such bastions of underground thought as The Huffington Post, TIME, and - naturally - that stalwart publication of all that is wrong with the music industry in the first place, Billboard. Surely punk died long before such mainstream outlets decided they should be the torchbearers for the movement.
After all, the band weâre talking about here is not one who ever self-released an album. They never made much pretense about anything other than âcash from chaosâ. And frankly, no matter which side of the Malcolm McLaren fence you fall on, thereâs nothing else to say other than the fact that the Sex Pistols were nothing besides an incredibly good pop band. And in the words of The Red Crayola on their song âPortrait of V.I. Lenin In The Style of Jackson Pollock, Part IIâ, âIf you think cultureâs revolution, then stick it up your ass.â
Were they snotty? Yes. Outrageous? Sure. Were they lashing out against a boring conformity that had gripped England in the 30 years since the end of World War II? Absolutely. Did they, in some way, alter the course of rock history? Well, maybe (sentiments like that one are deeply fraught with a poor understanding of how history works). Were they a political movement? No.
Sure, in many ways the Sex Pistols - or, at least, Johnny Rotten, pushed an envelope that needed pushing in those days. Telling an interviewer who asked about their heroes, âI donât have any heroes. Theyâre all uselessâ was probably a remarkable thing for 1977. And it would be a remarkable thing today if it werenât for the fact that the Sex Pistols have been elevated to the status of hero, much in the same way everything they (supposedly) fought to destroy had that status.
Worse than that, even, is that âPunk Rockâtm not only died a long, long time before these credit cards were announced. The body of punk became itself some venerated religious icon, with codes and uniforms as strict as anything introduced in Catholicism or certain brands of American evangelicalism. Stray from those codes and youâre ostracized. A sell-out. A whore. If anything remains of Punk Rock, itâs just the tired notion that most things are not, in fact, very Punk Rock.
Happily, though, we have the Onionâs AVClub to remind us âIf there was a line of Fugazi or Crass credit cards, now that would be something to get upset about.â But would it really? After all, members of both of those bands did the least punk thing imaginable by setting up their own record labels, becoming - in effect - sonic landlords over tenant bands. Donât want to DIY? Well, let us Do Some Of It For You.
At the end of the day, none of this really matters. All these angry words about the death of an already dead cultural touchstone amounted to little substance. This response itself matters probably less. We all used corporate word processors on corporate computers paid for with filthy lucre in the hopes of getting a little lucre back in the exchange. If anythingâs a sell-out, ultimately everything must be, in some small way or another.
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