Punk can be learned in school these days. Students around the world earn class points with essays that explore the movement and its legacy. My niece learned about punk in the British equivalent of the ninth grade. And I teach punk-related topics like DIY at the California Institute of the Arts. So when I saw FX’s “Pistol,” Danny Boyle’s new limited series about the Sex Pistols, I couldn’t resist looking for “teaching moments” to bring to the classroom next year.
“Pistol” is essentially a period costume drama based on “Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol”, a memoir by guitarist Steve Jones, set in 1970s London. Unlike a documentary, a drama carefully ration its explanatory moments and avoid anything that feels like a lecture. But if Boyle and the show’s creator, Craig Pearce, wanted to recreate the historic moment rather than just throw a cosplay commemoration, they needed to convey the socio-political context that unleashed punk’s fury. This is where ‘Pistol’ fell short: It’s hard to see how a young 21st-century person could get away with a real sense of how threatening the Sex Pistols and the punk movement were to the establishment.
One technique Boyle uses is to accentuate the story with vintage, evocative images of a disintegrating and divided kingdom in the mid-1970s — stale pageantry and the unwitting elite contrasted with striking workers and urban hardship. I shuddered at the frequent use of an anachronistic cliché that has become mandatory in punk documentaries and dramas alike: heaps of black garbage bags piled all over London. It’s a reference to a garbage collector’s strike, but it actually took place in early 1979, a few years after the events described in ‘Pistol’. Poetic license, perhaps: the waste mountains symbolize a disintegrating country.
Yet no punk song ever cried out for more efficient local government. Punk, in any case, rejoiced in scenarios of collapse and chaos. It is worth pointing out that the movement did not arise in response to Thatcherism (another punk doc cliché) but erupted during a period of Labor rule, against a backdrop of faltering and ineffective socialism. The initial politics were primitive: punks kicked against authority, but also used the word “liberal” as an insult.
Punk also lashed out at a different kind of status quo: the stadium rock splendor of the previous generation and self-indulgent hippie twists and turns. The music of the punks’ older siblings had become its own smug alternative establishment. Clips of prog rock keyboardist Rick Wakeman putting on a spectacular stage in a ridiculous costume are deployed in “Pistol” to represent the decadence into which the generation of the 1960s had fallen.
But would a younger viewer today understand what’s at stake here? What does it mean when Sid Vicious makes Bob Harris, the bearded, sweet-tempered host of ‘The Old Gray Whistle Test’, the BBC’s haven for prog, folk and singer-songwriters, sassy? Punks still remembered the New York Dolls performing on the show and Harris grinning denounced the proto-punk band as “mock rock.” But I can imagine a teenager today would find the attack mysteriously disproportionate. Picking a side of music this virulent probably isn’t good for kids who grew up in the streaming culture, where you can get a taste of every genre and era.
“Pistol” is graphic about the violent side of punk. Sid Vicious cuts his own chest with a broken bottle during a concert during the group’s chaotic tour of America in 1978. Later that year, the bassist, a heroin addict, stumbles into the bathroom of the Chelsea Hotel and finds his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, slumped in a pool of blood. (The series dodges the question of whether this was murder or, as one theory went, a suicide pact gone awry.) But the sheer shock of punk’s sadomasochistic imagery and actions is hard to recreate these days. In recent decades, we’ve seen a lot more outrageous behavior — on and offstage — from pop stars. Troubled kids cutting themselves in public is a plot point in “Euphoria.”
The series skips over the physical attacks on the band by royalists outraged by the single “God Save the Queen” – a strange omission, as it would have conveyed a sense of the fear and disgust the Pistols instilled in British publics. While punks committed symbolic violence through their looks, music, graphics and lyrical provocations, they were the overwhelming target of fists, boots and knives wielded by ordinary citizens as well as members of other youth subcultures (such as the reactionary Teddy Boys). Ari Up, the singer of The Slits, once told me that she had been stabbed by a normal disco-going youth and only her thick coat saved her from serious injury. Even in 1983 it can be risky to look even vaguely punky, as I learned after leaving a Killing Joke concert in a provincial English town and being chased by a gang of taunting youths who threw bottles at my head.
Now, 45 years after ‘Summer of Hate’ in 1977 – when ‘God Save the Queen’ raved about the ‘crazy parade’ of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee – punk itself is a motor of nostalgia. More anniversary than hostile, it’s entangled in commemorative cycles, dragging the same familiar but increasingly feral faces, voices and anecdotes for another round of exhibitions, documentaries and magazine retrospectives. First wave punk bands still perform. Some reformed after a break, others just never stopped. The Damned swore, “I’m going to scream and scream to my last breath / I’ll smash it till there’s nothing left,” but instead agreed to sing “Smash It Up” onstage into her sixties. If you want to hear the golden oldies of the Stranglers, you can go to a performance of what’s left of the band or to a concert by their estranged original vocalist, Hugh Cornwell, who has said, “We’re all tribute bands now. “
Because of my age, nationality and background as a rock critic, my social feeds are teeming with people who have a part in the Sex Pistols’ story. Either they were there, right in the middle of the case, or they were involved in the post-punk eruption of independent labels and fanzines. Reading the tweets and Facebook posts, I wondered how those who were parents would explain the significance of this supercharged moment in rock history to their kids without shrugging and playing an eyeball.
My youngest son is 16 – the same age I was when I joined the Sex Pistols. After choosing to watch ‘Pistol’ on his own, without the dubious benefit of my real-time annotations, he enjoyed the series (the look of it, the music), but admits, ‘I didn’t really understand it. importance of. Didn’t seem so life-changing.”
In part, that’s because things that were once shocking have become commonplace and acceptable. The F-bombs Steve Jones dropped during prime time are now everyday occurrences on cable and streaming TV. When my son dressed up as a punk for Halloween as an 8-year-old, it was hard to imagine that “people were ever really afraid of that look.”
“I get angry, destroy!” promised John Lydon in “Anarchy in the UK” But chaos probably doesn’t hold the same appeal for young people in these volatile times. Lydon himself has renounced anarchy, distancing himself from those “who hate to destroy everything for no reason” and pledged allegiance to “a community called humanity and an even closer community called culture”. He even has warm words for the Royals, stating that he is “really, really proud of the Queen for surviving and doing so well.”
The musical contradictions that defined punk have also faded. Punks once disdained the Boring Old Farts, their cruel nickname for the Stones/Led Zep/Who generation (then late 20s or early 30s). Lydon now admits that despite having legendary “I Hate…” scribbled on his Pink Floyd T-shirt, he loves “Dark Side of the Moon”. Steve Jones recently revealed that he would rather listen to Steely Dan than to punk rock.
Perhaps, with the political context so far back in time and with the original historical actors inverted on their formerly fierce stances, there really isn’t anything to be learned from the punk adventure: it was just an unrepeatable episode. Still, my younger one came away with one inspiring lesson. Although he has no interest in forming a band, watching “Pistol” convinced him that if someone asked him to join a group, he would say yes. “After watching those Sex Pistol guys,” he said, “I realize you don’t need to be able to play. Anyone can do it.”