Reason & Wrath Over Right-Wing Rotten

It’s the morning after this year’s frankly anemic and depressing Halloween (no trick or treating, no parades, no parties, etc.), and I found myself up at what was going be 8:00 am but turned into 7:00 am due to Daylight Savings. As such, I decided to go for an early-AM walk.

Standing at my front door, I did something of a mental coin-toss and decided to head east, serpentining my way through quiet East Village streets until I reached Avenue C, and then meandering back. While detritus from the last night’s muted festivities were indeed evident, comparatively speaking it might has well have been any other Saturday night. St. Marks Place, meanwhile, is looking its most anarchic in a long time, between hastily assembled al-fresco-dining sheds, shuttered age-old businesses like Gem Spa and Khyber Pass and a robust array of blithely-strewn garbage. I happened to glance up the stoop at the doorway of Search & Destroy as I was heading back west, and noticed a small detail.

I honestly don’t know how often they formally redecorate their exterior, if ever, but only scant weeks ago, in the porthole-like window in the center of their door had been Ray Stevenson’s iconic photograph of Johnny Rotten, glaring with signature punk insouciance under the legend “FUCK YOU, CORONA.”

A little under a month later, however, Johnny’s gone, replaced by the similarly over-rhapsodized mug of his late comrade, Sid Vicious.

I know, I know … big friggin' whoop.

But, I couldn’t help wondering. Might this be in response to John Lydon’s recent espousals of Trump that I’ve been repeatedly wringing my hands about?

I have a couple of regular readers who sounded off mightily on this point, incredulous that, in my last two posts on the subject, I was allegedly treating Lydon/Rotten’s latest stream of half-baked humbug  -- especially his quips arguably diminishing the impact of COVID-19 -- with kid gloves and not asserting the same burnt bridge policy I applied to, say, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine after he asserted from a stage somewhere to a baying audience that Obama orchestrated the mass shootings during his administration as an excuse to ramp up gun control. Deal-breaking comments, to be sure.

With Lydon, it’s just more complicated. Beyond the seemingly obvious irony and neck-snapping reversals of the guy who penned “Anarchy In The UK” suddenly chugalugging the Kool-Aid of a “law & order”-fixated administration Hell-bent on lining the pockets of the corporate elite, amplifying racial divide, overturning basic human rights, disenfranchising immigrants, manifesting a draconian overhaul of our Supreme Court and basically dismantling our democracy, I’m just wondering if John’s own once-razor-sharp powers of cognition are in decline. I’m just having a very hard time reconciling his lapses in judgement.

Actually, the real reason for this post is that quite recently, I stumbled upon an outtake from my friend Drew Stone’s excellent film, “Who The Fuck Is That Guy?,” an absolutely amazing documentary about storied A&R exec Michael Alago. It is fucking required viewing. In any case, given Alago’s longtime association with John Lydon, Stone sought him out as a contributor fo the film. Lydon — always with something to say — happily obliged with typical aplomb.

In the clip below, however, Stone got Lydon talking about his tenure living over on the western fringes of Chelsea in New York City in the 80s — a topic near and dear to this blog’s heart. He also takes some enjoyable potshots at NYU and Rudy Giuliani.

Listening to the lucid and reasonable John Lydon here reinforces my stated suspicions above, although that’s ultimately all just projection. Who knows what’s a wind-up anymore?

Anyway, enjoy. To be continued.

Comments

[DrBOP]

The piss-ant puzzle here is solved by following the money:
Estimated net worth $15 Mill
Estimated residual/royalty income per year $500 G's
Owns homes in Venice Cali and UK

Whose tax scheme hurts lil'Johnny's pocketbook the most?
And there's been quite a few rich fucks, musical and otherwise, suckin' up the Clown-Cult Kool-Aid for their wallets' sake lately.
Not so puzzling, eh?

[NoOriginalArt]

Back in the early aughts (which feels like a century ago at this point) I remember seeing Lydon in a reality TV show on...VH-1? where he was filmed in his Venice (California) home with his wife and kids, storming about and swearing at the camera crew and anyone else getting in his way. He was overweight and ragged looking, made worse by his dressing either in suits or in really bad beach tourist clothing, baggy shorts and XXL t-shirts with abstract prints in primary colors. I found myself glancing at the mirror (he and I were born in the same year, 1956) and thinking, 'Yeah, it happens to the best of us, but god, he didn't age well.' His on camera antics however made me wonder if he wasn't just making fun of the genre and us, the viewers, for watching a washed-out celebrity wander the SoCal beachscape like a lost dementia patient.

That said, I was not sympathetic to his pro-Trump rant. Even if it was satire, it's the kind of privileged snot-wiping that can only be practiced by someone distanced from the people not so lucky to escape Trump's and the GOP's SS-like cruelty. I'm not buying his latest Public Image Ltd. album---he obviously doesn't need the money---and I'm half tempted to throw my old Sex Pistol albums in the dumpster, which I think even my 20-year-old fangirl self would support.