Johnny Rotten was one of
the few terrific anti-heroes rock & roll has ever produced: a violent-voiced
bantam of a boy who tried to make sense of popular culture by making
it suffer the world outside—its moral horror, its self-impelled
violation, its social homicide. By contrast, John Lydon—who rose
from the ashes of Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols to form the experimentalist
post-punk band Public Image Ltd.—has impressed some erstwhile followers
as just a plain antagonist: a tedious, ill-affected artiste who deserted
his own dread visions for fear they might destroy him. In a way, that
might be true. By dealing exclusively in abstract images and accidental
sounds, Lydon no longer has to run the risk of caring—which also
means he no longer needs to run the risk of meaning.
But it’s true, too,
that Lydon rankles critics and punk die-hards alike because he’s
repudiated his past. By his own admissions, the music he makes with
PiL aims to devastate classicist rock & roll—including punk
rock—by blackening its schemes and confounding its forms. It’s
as if, after distancing himself from the merciless primitivism of the
Sex Pistols, Lydon found a fatal flaw in rock & roll itself—namely,
that it imparted the illusion of order and transcendence—and decided
to remake the genre. Actually, Lydon and PiL merely rerouted the Pistols’
much-vaunted- anarchism, applying it to song structure, and in the process
authored the first major attempt to transmogrify rock parlance since
Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica. (PiL also managed
to give momentum and focus to the English post-punk avant-garde: a burgeoning
movement of art theorists and futurist musicians, several of whom—Cabaret
Voltaire, a Certain Ratio, the The, In Camera, This Heat, Dome, et al.—are
trying to codify PiL’s inventiveness.
Paris Au Printemps
(recorded live in Paris in January 1980) is the album on which PiL’s
formlessness finally became formulated—which is to say that if
they could reproduce their apparently inchoate, unpremeditated music
letter-perfect live (and they could), that it wasn’t really orderless
or even all that experimental. Yet it is visceral. Guitarist Keith Levene,
bassist Jah Wobble, and drummer Martin Atkins play momentously throughout,
interweaving deliberate rhythms and backhanded melodies into a taut
webwork of cross-current designs and motions. Lydon offers a stunning,
protean vocal performance: by turns gleeful, derisive, virulent, and,
during "Chant" and "Careering," so terrifying—invoking
images of mob rule one minute, murder the next—as to be almost
unendurable.
But what we hear on Paris
Au Printemps is more animated, frictional music: we hear the way
the music can rub up against, even threaten, people who aren’t
ready for it. By the LP’s second side, the crowd, a horde of recherch¹,
loudmouthed, self-conscious gothics—have had about all the cacophony
they can handle. They want pogo-beats, block chords, primal thrums—in
short, the familiar punk mannerisms they know how to react to. Not getting
these, they start to taunt Lydon, spitting jeers, demands and audible
gobs of phlegm at him. John Lydon returns the contempt, leaning lethally
into his vocals, narrowing the distance between himself and the implied
violence, turning the insensibility of the moment back into the faces
of an audience he helped to conceive but can no longer abide. "Shut
up!" he barks at one point, his scorn echoing through the hall.
"I’ll walk off this fucking stage if you keep spitting...
Dog!" Minutes later, at the close of "Poptones," that’s
exactly what he does, dropping his microphone to the saliva-soaked floor
and stomping into the wings. In that moment you can hear Lydon further
remove himself from any conceivable culture or subculture that might
contain him. He kisses off the whole oppressive orthodoxy of punk mindlessness,
just as he once decried the manifest hopelessness of British society.
Little wonder that Paris
Au Printemps also depicts an end of sorts for PiL. Following the
group’s 1980 American tour, Martin Atkins (the finest drummer PiL
every had, he made the music pounce where others made it loiter) left
to form puerile and comedic postpunk band, Brian Brain. Then, a few
weeks later, Lydon, Levene, and hidden member Jeanette Lee (who handles
much of PiL’s business) parted company with Jah Wobble after he
released two solo albums in quick succession, charging that the bassist
had used PiL backing tracks without permission.
The Flowers of Romance
sounds as if it were recorded to scorn a myriad of losses. Only Lydon,
Levene, Lee and, on a strictly work-for-hire basis, Atkins, make the
music this time, and it’s probably the most brutal, frightening
music Lydon has lent his voice to since "Anarchy in the U.K."
(A bit too frightening for PiL’s British-based label, Virgin, which
initially balked at issuing the new LP, claiming it was arrantly noncommercial.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros., which declined to release either the first
PiL album or Paris Au Printemps in America, grudgingly agreed
to a small pressing.)
In contrast to the group’s
earlier records—on which Levene and Lydon piled thick, splayed
layers of guitars and synthesizers on top of thunderous, bass-heavy
rhythm tracks until chance melodies and imperative tempos seemed to
take perverse shape and then pull apart again—The Flowers of
Romance pares PiL music down to minimalist, primordial-sounding
mix of mostly vocals and percussion. In the first cut, "Four Enclosed
Walls," Atkins’ drum shot cracks in the air like rifle fire,
and Lydon answers it with a quavering howl. From there the track turns
into an awesome drum-and-vocal dialogue, with Atkins pounding out an
aberrant martial pattern and Lydon ululating through the clatter, chanting
an obscure, dreamlike conjuration about Western dread and Islamic vengeance.
Later, in "Under the
House"—in which John Lydon and Martin Atkins carry their colloquy
to a harrowing peak—Lydon can’t seem to separate the nightmares
from wakeful terror. Something’s after him: maybe a cadaver, maybe
a mercenary, maybe even a bad memory—it’s hard to say exactly
what. Specters of fear, death, and flight stack up so fast that words
and meanings cease to matter much. All that counts is the way the singer
gives in to the momentum of his tale, letting animistic horror possess
and propel him as if he might fend off doom with its own likeness.
Almost everything on The
Flowers of Romance pulls back, shrinks into shielding self-interest.
The title tune has already been described by certain critics as John
Lydon’s belated farewell to Sid Vicious (who, before joining the
Sex Pistols, once belonged to a band called Flowers of Romance—named
by none other than Johnny Rotten.) And indeed, the song, with its disdainful
references to failed friendships and its resigned air of parting, sounds
like some sort of remembrance. But it could just as easily be about
what the lyrics purport: a ruined romance that Lydon has no difficulty
leaving. For that matter, the singer manages to denigrate of refuse
so many possible alliances over the course of this LP—sexual commitment
("Track 8"), punk fandom ("Banging the Door") and
notions of musical accord in general—that sometimes the only ground
he seems left with is the narrow path of his own hubris.
Suddenly, in the album’s
final compositions, "Go Back" and "Francis Massacre,"
the world closes in. "Go Back," which features Keith Levene’s
only flaring guitar part on the record, is a methodical, mocking sketch
of life in Tory Britain, where the future has been banked on recycled
mottos ("Improvements on the domestic front," gibes Lydon.
"Have a cup of tea—good days ahead / Don’t look back,
good days ahead.")
"Francis Massacre,"
on the other hand, is about a future sealed off forever. It’s a
scanty, discordant account of Francis Moran who’s presently serving
a life sentence in Ireland’s Mountjoy Prison for murder. Nobody—including
Irish penal officials and Lydon’s own representatives—cares
to dispose any specifics about either Moran or his crime, and it’s
hard to tell from the lyrics alone (a yowling litany of "Go down
for life Go down for life") how Lydon feels. But the sheer desolating
force of the music he and Levene make—a blaring, claustrophobic,
rapacious tumult of atonal piano, metallic drums and furious singing—seems
to act out the passions of murder while simultaneously seeking to annihilate
those passions, which is as jolting a deed of protest as music can perform.
It’s something like
those incandescent moments in "Bodies" or "Holidays In
the Sun" when the singer sought to illuminate terror by embodying
it. In "Francis Massacre," though, John Lydon means to turn
the terror outward—to level it against a world that contains to
much pain and so many nightmares that the most reaffirming recourse
available is a brutal, racking cry of unwavering outrage. |