Showing posts with label SEX PISTOLS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SEX PISTOLS. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

THE SEX PISTOLS ARE NOW ABOUT GETTING PAID.

According to The Guardian, two of the three surviving members of the  Sex Pistols (Steve Jones and PaulCook) have won a lawsuit they filed against SP singer Johnny Rotten (John Lydon). Lydon who was blocking their right to use Sex Pistol songs for a limited series that's being made about the band, maintaining that the other two needed his consent. The British court awarded Jones and Cook the right to use the iconic and anti-social tunes in what is termed a "majority rules" principle. Essentially, the other two surviving members did not require Lydon's consent to have access to the songs at issue.  We ought not to be surprised that a band famous for being young, angry, and contentious would eventually become quarrelsome in their waning years. Still, the dispute between the parties involved makes pondering about the glaring irony impossible to avoid. It was quite a thing when Gil Scott -Heron declared in 1971 that the revolution would not be televised. It gave us restless, agitated youth comfort to know that the Man would not win this fight. And now The Fucking Sex Pistols, the harbingers of the Judgement to Come against the soul-less corporate machine, have become merely another piece of intellectual property that is being made into a limited series for Disney, that anti-life capitalist Moloch that wears a Happy Face. If anyone ever wondered what Herbert Marcuse wrote about "repressive tolerance" was, this is it. Crudely put, the System tolerates to a degree those social forces that threaten it, assimilates their energy, and turns them into grist for the mill. Johnny Rotten complains about the perversion of the Sex Pistols legacy while Disney and other entities profit off his labors in brasher days. Rotten/Lydon still hasn't realized, it seems, that he sold out the second he signed a recording contract and a publishing deal. He was working for the Man all along. Young angry punk rockers who don't die young suffer the indignity of getting old, bloated, and cranky. This revolutionary contrarian has become the old man yelling, "get off my lawn."