I Was a Teenage Anarchist
“But Sidney’s more than a mere bass player. He’s a fabulous disaster. He’s a symbol, a metaphor, he embodies the dementia of a nihilistic generation. He’s a fuckin’ star.”
-From the movie 1986 Film, “Sid and Nancy”
It’s easy to surmise that when punk rock impresario Malcolm McLaren created the Sex Pistols, he was looking for a way to market rebellion. While on the surface that may be true, McLaren wasn’t just a punk rock carnival barker, he was also a member of the Situationist International, an organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals and political theorists.[1] A key part of Situationist theory was the concept of the “spectacle”, something McLaren mastered during his tenure with the Sex Pistols.
I’m not here to pass judgment on the music of the Sex Pistols nor do I plan to extensively critique the non-organic nature of their creation. However, I do think the manufactured idea of what they represented visually and sonically both defined the first wave of U.K punk music and later came to inject a snotty anti authoritarian attitude and sound into the hardcore punk scene in the U.S.
The Making of the Punk Moment
The Presidency of Ronald Reagan in the US and the Premiership of Margaret Thatcher in the UK — born out of rising inflation, a…
