Word: punk
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...import. The album raises the intriguing question of whether a defunct band can produce the best rock and roll of the year; the answer, despite the carping of the British press, is yes. The Great Rock and Roll Swindle gives us the most complete statement yet of the punk sensibility...
...Punk rock emerged when rock and roll first became self-conscious, when the obvious possibilities of a new art form had been all but exhausted. The spontaneous creativity of the early years was replaced by an inhibiting historical perspective and a prevailing pessimism, a sense that there was nothing new left to do. George Thorogood, perhaps the most distasteful of a new breed of rock and roll reactionaries, declared his intention never to write his own songs because "Chuck Berry wrote them all already." Keith Emerson and other art-rock enthusiasts tried to lift the medium out of itself...
...These old songs, worn by rehearing and rote performance, take on a new quality, derived from Rotten's conviction that they really matter, at least to him. Sid Vicious contributes two sock-hop numbers--"Something Else" and "C'mon Everybody"--and a rollicking remake of "Rock Around the Clock." Punk rock wants to be fun and these tracks succeed in being just that. As Johnny Rotten once said, "Rock and roll is supposed to be fun. You remember fun, don't ya? You're supposed to enjoy it. It's not supposed to be about critics, or spending 100 fucking...
Necessarily, such a self-conscious form as punk will involve parody; as for the doomed Adrian Leverkuhn of Mann's Doctor Faustus, everything is a parody, of previous forms or even of itself. Creation of the new means the "deconstruction" of the old, and a sardonic snipe at other contemporary musical forms. The Pistols start parodying right off on side two with a symphonic version of "God Save the Queen," as much a parody of themselves as of art rock. A bizarre disco medley of "Anarchy in the U. K.," "God Save the Queen," "Pretty Vacant...
Facile condemnations of this sort of thing clearly won't do. It's hard to get a handle on the punk fascination with Nazism: Elvis Costello talks about emotional fascism, Johnny Rotten sings about Belsen, and the swastika is the dominant icon in punk life, but what does it all add up to? With Rotten, it may just be the shock value, as when he used to tell people he cut out his hemmorhoids with a razor. And just how is one supposed to react to something like Belsen, anyway...