Word: lydon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...world of rock and roll that made such bands as the Talking Heads, the Clash and Elvis Costello and the Attractions possible, and jolted Mick Jagger and his Old Masters into renewal. The Pistols have left rock and roll to the others; Sid Vicious is dead, and Johnny Lydon (nee Rotten), in light of his recent efforts with Public Image, Ltd., might as well be. All that remains is a movie, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, due for release this summer, which promises, if nothing else, the usual bathukolpian prodigies of director Russ Meyer...
...public image" is the unifying concept for the album. Clearly uncomfortable with the sneering, puke-spitting persona created for him by Pistols manager Malcolm MacLaren (who gets singled out for abuse in "Lowlife"), Lydon wants to defy public expectations while still maintaining an audience, a limited public image. Unfortunately, it is Lydon's purposed demarche, his frankly experimental music, which fails most miserably...
Three tracks might fairly be called "experimental": "Theme," "Fodderstomf," and "Religion I and II." "Theme" grates along for over nine minutes, with Lydon repeatedly wailing in a disembodied voice "I wish I could die" over a ponderous bass line. At the coda, Lydon intones "terminal boredom," an apparent gloss to the song. "Fodderstomf" features a disco bass line and the refrain "We only wanted to be loved" chanted in a sort of Monty Python falsetto. In the background we hear Lydon variously maundering belching, and playing with a fire extinguisher, for almost eight minutes. One manifest fault of these tracks...
...Lydon's experiments fail not only because they are overlong but because they are, at base, ill-conceived; he is plainly playing with things he doesn't understand. haphazard electronic effects and innovation for innovation's sake do not succeed for experiment's sake; valid experimental music requires a knowledge and understanding, a directive genius, that this album simply lacks. However much he thinks producers are "rubbish" and superfluous, Lydon could only have been helped by the masterful touch of someone like Brian...
...Lydon overreaches his intellect as well. The political and social critique of Bollocks was acceptable because it was sincere and angry; the critique in Public Image rings hollow, the dull abstractions of a pseudo intellectual. Consider "Religion," a tedious diatribe against the Church, which is trite and too long...