At the end
of "Acid Drops," the first song on the seventh consecutive
Public Image Ltd. album that it's tough to care one way or another about,
the man who used to be Johnny Rotten samples himself hectoring, "No
future, no future, no future." This is probably John Lydon's idea
of a joke -- a decade and a half after "God Save the Queen,"
Lydon's "no future" is our present. And while you could grant
him the benefit of the doubt if you think the world's a worse place
than when he bagan, it's sad to ponder how the prophet's own future
wound up. In a pop climate that he laid the groundwork for -- from hip-hop
declamation to industrial abrasion, from thrash blitzkrieg to Gothic
mope, there's barely an alternative available today that Never Mind
the Bollocks and Metal Box didn't anticipate -- he's the
consummate boring old corporate pro.
Does he realise
that? Lydon's so far out of it that his crackpot crankiness can almost
be charming, even cute -- that's the effect of a lot of That What
Is Not. He's still basically ranting agains chicanery and smoke
screens ("What does it mean? What does anything mean?"
he sings), but the music is pleasurable enough to suggest that he rants
are just there to fill spaces because that's all he could think of to
say. And though the craftsman in him has picked up tips from every Young
Turk who ever ripped him off, he almost invariably one-ups them. Few
factory-noise guerrillas have his sense of melody, few oceanic feedback-droners
hav his sense of rhythm, and his voice still sputters and snarls and
guffaws and gargles in ways that only prove what passive twits most
post-hardcore poets really are.
Still, That
What Is Not mainly comes off like a unduly eclectic, if uncharacteristically
catchy, progressive-rock record. By current art-metal standards it's
fairly typical: PiL (whoever that is these days) tries to sound, by
turns, Teutonic, Middle Eastern, jangling, funky and loud. If "Love
Hope" is a fast Zep knockoff that outkicks Soundgarden (not hard
to do, really), most of the rest feels an awful like old Van Der Graaf
Generator -- somber but cynical and ultimately just silly. The album's
best jokes are the ones Lydon probably didn't mean to be funny.
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