The Time is Ripe for Ruin Now.
Malcolm McLaren, the former manager (and founder) of the Sex Pistols, has died. Deserves kudos for helping to piss off the rock establishment and reinvigorate the radio in the late 70s. I He was also a performer in his own and did something early hip hop with Buffalo Girls and Double Dutch which were pretty dern catchy.
I always confused him with Marshall McLuhan who was of course very different and respectable but sort of related as students/practitioners of modern media manipulation.
I thought the title of this post came from the SexPistols' "The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle" (interestingly enough not actually performed or written by the members of the band but after a dispute, by some kids Malcolm found hanging around or so the story goes) but according to on-line lyrics sites, the actual line is "The time is right to do it now"- Anyway I like what heard better.
posted by New England Guy @ 12:41 PM
2 Comments:
With John Lydon out there still working with PiL, it's easy to forget about McLaren. There's always been a debate as to how much he contributed to the Sex Pistols sound, but there's no question he helped bring the whole thing together. What's fascinating is when you watch the old footage, how relatively mild the whole scene was, compared with what would follow. Short hair and a torn t-shirt held together with a diaper pin was enough to get people worried, and then short songs with no guitar solos, featuring lyrics that weren't about love affairs sounded like the end of music as we knew it.
The dwarf in drag was kind of creepy and that was one of the images (sometimes surrounded by freakish sorts in bondage paraphernalia) was one of the early images used when the mainstream US publications started writing about the band ("Britain's vulgar new invasion" was one headline I remember in the local paper. I think that was Malcolm's doing (he ran a sex shop) - a very McLuhanesque move which influenced the cultural revulsion and increased the Pistols' "cheap appeal"
(This, I suspect, is where Woody Allen jumps in w/ Marshall and explains I'm misinterpreting everything)
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