A Great Friggin' Swindle? Sex Pistols, School Kids and 1979

I mentioned in an earlier post that I have written an article about the Sex Pistols for the academic journal Popular Music and Society. It is now available via this link. The article looks at the popularity of the Sex Pistols in 1979, a year that is still overlooked in favour of the headline-grabbing punk year of 1977. In many ways this is unjust. In Britain, there were more punk hits in 1979 than any other year; there was also a new, younger generation of fans who were getting into the music. These schoolchildren discovered the Sex Pistols via Sid Vicious rather than Johnny Rotten, and their rebellious anthem was 'Friggin' in the Riggin'' rather than 'God Save the Queen'. They heard The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle before they heard Never Mind the Bollocks. I know, because I was that schoolchild. The article locates the teenage appeal of 'Friggin' in the Riggin'' in its themes of swearing, sex and piracy. It also explores the media infrastructure that enabled young adolescents to access punk music. It then looks at the legacy of the Sex Pistols', charting the triumph of Johnny Rotten's narrative over that of Malcolm McLaren, and argues that The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle fell prey to notions of coherence, canonicity and - dare I say it - authenticity.

Somali Spears

Another story from the Metro. On Monday they reported that Britney Spears recordings are being used as a weapon to scare off Somali pirates. Merchant navy officer Rachel Owens, who works on supertankers operating off the east coast of Africa, is reported as saying, ‘these guys can’t stand Western culture or music . . . as soon as the pirates get a blast of Britney, they move on as quickly as they can’.

            I’m intrigued by these tales of musical counter-terrorism: elsewhere it has been reported that Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ has been used as a form of torture in Gauntanamo Bay, while Transport for London regularly uses classical music to ward of loitering kids at its more ‘urban’ underground stations. Whose taste is really being exposed here: the terrorists or those who are trying to combat them? Owens appears to be as anti-Britney as she is anti-Somali pirate, and elsewhere in the Metro article Steven Jones of the Security Association for the Maritime Industry is quoted as saying ‘I’d imagine using Justin Bieber would be against the Geneva Convention’. Surely it is the relentlessness and loudness of the musical exposure, as much as it is the artist in question, that is the cause of annoyance to the victim. And so are the DJs of these tracks just having some harmless fun, or are we witnessing the terror of cultural capital in action?