Back in the Silver Jubilee year, 1977, The Sex Pistols were at war with progressive rock. A rather asymmetrical war, for sure, in which only one side probably knew themselves to be engaged, but still. The music press love a feud — what would Britpop have been without the North/South Divide?
The Sex Pistols were angry young men — sois-dissant situationists who hated the dreamy Jung men with their Hipgnosis gatefold album art, their endless concept albums and “song-cycles”, and their am-dram dressing-up box shenanigans. The progs were pretentious and effete and disdained, not only for being able to read music, but for littering their lyrics with symbols from the collective unconscious. It all came from doing too much prep — they were the decadent ancien regime to punk’s snotty sans culottes.
Whether there was any truth to all this didn’t matter much. As mediated by their friends at the NME, the punks despised prog — a genre they regarded as anything but progressive. And Genesis were among the original sinners. True, it was a Pink Floyd t-shirt onto which Johnny Rotten had scrawled “I hate”, an alteration which amounted to all the wit he needed back then to get hired by Malcolm McLaren. But Genesis were the Druidic Lords of the iddly-diddly — the eye-wash and the whimsy that the bin-bag and safety-pin boys and girls found so contemptible.
The Pistols drew as much of their energy from the desire to make overfed rock dinosaurs like Genesis extinct, as they did from making music themselves. They wanted to see the carcasses of these privately educated fops littering the impact crater of punk rock, exposed for the cold blooded, lumbering, vegetative grotesques that they were. The nimble-witted likes of Rotten and Co. pogoed jubilantly on the wreckage of shattered Melotrons and twin-necked Gibsons and their long-overdue graves. Their hour — 1977, year zero — had surely arrived.
Simon Evans, “Rocker Crocked. Pistol Shot.”, Quillette, 2021-10-04.
January 24, 2022
QotD: The Punk-Prog War of 1977
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