Here is someone who really did change the world, and it never really
recovered.The spirit of '77 lives on in music, fashion, art and most
importantly in attitude. Some might say it was a change for the worse
but if you were there and felt the raw excitement of sudden change and
self discovery and self expression you'd see it as a necessary, if
shocking, social revolution.
I can't see there being another like McLaren, everything since has been
a re-hash or cheap imitation. The law of diminishing returns has set in
and we are trapped in a post-modern whirlpool of ever increasing
mediocrity, pop has eaten itself. The king is dead.
Malcolm McLaren: Blood, spit and tears as the punk provocateur dies
Malcolm McLaren stirred up chaos all his life and even in death,
punk's most inspired interloper will cause controversy
* Alexis Petridis <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/alexispetridis>
* guardian.co.uk <http://www.guardian.co.uk/> , Thursday 8 April 2010
21.28 BST
* Article history
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/08/petridis-mclaren-punk#histo\
ry-link-box>
[mclaren]
Malcolm McLaren, who has died of cancer aged 64 Photograph: Vincent
Kessler/Reuters
You can, if you so desired, make a strong argument for the importance
and originality of the largely forgotten albums Malcolm McLaren released
under his own name in the 80s.
The first, Duck Rock, was a particularly innovative blending of hip hop
and world music, while the video for the hit single Buffalo Gals offered
most Britons their first glimpse of breakdancing. But it's as The Sex
Pistols' manager that he will be remembered, which means the question of
how successful he was in the role is likely to be debated for years to
come.
McLaren certainly had an acute grasp of what was wrong with British rock
music before The Sex Pistols' arrival.
He was a nonpareil orchestrator of outrage during their early career,
but proved incapable of dealing with its consequences. McLaren knew
exactly what buttons to press, but seemed to have no idea what to do
once he'd pressed them: fatally so in the case of Sid Vicious, who was
only too willing to play the monster role that McLaren wrote for him
right up to a suitably grim conclusion.
You could argue that Vicious' death from a heroin overdose while on bail
for the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen was the greatest disaster
of McLaren's career, but it was a close-run thing.
Even before that, he had seemed at best unable to protect the band's
members from the unprecedented public antipathy he had stirred up, at
worst he seemed actively disinterested in doing so. Perhaps he had his
mind on higher concepts than the day-to-day reality of life in a band so
reviled that the tabloids stopped just short of actively advocating
violence against them: PUNISH THE PUNKS demanded the Sunday Mirror in
1977.
Perhaps the whole situation had simply run out of his control. Either
way, it wasn't much fun being a Sex Pistol in the summer of the Jubilee
they so brilliantly mocked on God Save The Queen: Johnny Rotten was
attacked by a knife-wielding mob outside a Stoke Newington pub; later
the same day, drummer Paul Cook was beaten with a metal bar in west
London; three days later, Rotten was attacked again.
It wasn't until after the band split up that McLaren attempted to
reassert his authority over the Sex Pistols: rewriting their story in
the film The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle as a masterplan he had controlled
all along, the band merely his stooges. It wasn't a terribly convincing
argument, nor was it a terribly good film.
Understandably outraged, Johnny Rotten has spent the subsequent years
airbrushing McLaren from the Sex Pistols story, pointing out that the
music had nothing to do with him, reinventing the band as autodidacts
who would have been even more successful without his interference.
But that seems reductive too: without McLaren's ideas, his art-school
grounding in Situationism, without the clothes he and Vivienne Westwood
designed for them, the Sex Pistols wouldn't have been the same band, nor
would they have had the same impact. Neither party would ever admit it,
but they needed each other.
Still, if nothing else, the ongoing argument meant Malcolm McLaren
remained a controversial figure up to his death, and will remain a
controversial figure beyond it which is presumably just what he
wanted.
