TOO LOW TO BE LOW : Art pop and the Sex Pistols

Abstract

What is it about Never Mind the Bollocks that makes it stand out from anything else in the history of popular music? What is it about ‘Anarchy in the UK’ that makes it, to borrow the words of Greil Marcus, ‘as powerful as anything I know’ (Marcus 1989:1)? Is it that it constituted the most the most authentic, the most ‘real’ form of pop to have been made, that it represented the very essence of rock ’n’ roll? Or, did punk transcend pop and become something else, like performance art, for instance? Or, was punk an instance of that ubiquitous postmodernist trope, a ‘crossover’ phenomenon, an example of the transposition of art ideas into pop that, therefore, lent it a substance, a self-consciousness that it would otherwise have lacked? There is something to be said for all of these, but none of them really seems to add up to an explanation as to why, 20 years on, ‘Anarchy’ still possesses an edge, still disconcerts and resonates. Perhaps there is no single means of explaining the phenomenon that was punk at its best, but what does seem clear is that the Pistols were singing from somewhere else, someplace that hadn’t existed before and that only existed for a brief moment in time. It was a zone that was neither high nor low; it was a space between art and pop. It was probably closer to pop than it was to anything else, but it was at the same time something unprecedented. This is what made punk singular, in that within that space bands like the Pistols created something that couldn’t be made within art or pop, or anywhere else for that matter. Referring to punk as either art or pop diminishes it and, at the same time, diminishes the specificity of art and pop themselves. Discussing punk alongside art and pop, however, brings into relief its singularity.

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