Dearest readers, friends, miscreants, and assorted malcontents, I regret to inform you that we’ve reached a new nadir in the never-ending corporate hijacking of art, rebellion, and everything holy that once made rock’n’roll a weapon, not a beige commodity slathered in nostalgic platitudes and sold back to us like overpriced junk at a yard sale.  What I am referring to, nay railing against with every ounce of venom my synapses can muster, is insult of cataclysmic proportions masquerading as a “Sex Pistols” tour.  Newsflash, you clueless cash-drunk husks clinging desperately to your fading youth like it’s an oxygen mask on crashing plane: without Johnny Rotten (John Lydon), it is NOT the Sex Pistols.  It’s a farce.  A sideshow.  A garishly bad cosplay act smeared together with the sticky residue of corporate nostalgia and aged opportunism.

I’ve been up most of the night having a goddamn fit about this, dear reader.  I mean, really, who are we kidding here?  Two original members.  Two.  That’s what we’re left with.  A skeletal, emaciated version of one of the most incendiary bands whose sheer existence once sent puritanical tabloid hacks scurrying to their typewriters in terror.  Nobody would have ever even heard of Steve Jones and Paul Cook if not for the raw, uncontainable vitriol that spewed out of Johnny Rotten like a Hellfire missile shot at the vinyl-soft underbelly of 1970s British society.  But here they are, zombifying the entire concept of the Pistols, dragging its bloated, lifeless corpse onto a stage to jiggle it around as if that crude facsimile could even begin to conjure the anarchic genius that defined the real deal.

And for what, exactly?  Spare change?  Relevance?  Some morbid desire to prove to themselves that they weren’t just side characters in Rotten’s caustic, venomous opera?  Because whatever it is, one thing is abundantly clear: it’s not integrity.  It’s not art.  It’s not even rebellion.  It’s the opposite of rebellion.  It’s compliance.  And worse, it’s embarrassing.

The Sex Pistols I remember would never have done this.  My first memory of them was when I was about 8.  My mom was driving us to church, and we’d listen to a Top 40 radio countdown show.  One week, Dick Clark or whoever it was came on and announced there was no #1 song on the British charts that week because the #1 song that week was, in fact, God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols, which song had been banned in England.  The BBC and many independent radio stations refused to play it, and major retailers declined to stock it, Dick said, due to its controversial lyrics and timing, coinciding with Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee.  As an 8-year-old in suburban America, I did not have enough of an understanding of England’s politics or culture at that time to truly appreciate the lyrics, but the song itself was unmistakenly assaultive.  It made me want to sneer, which was new to me at 8.  Fast forward a couple of years…I was still a kid living in Suburbia and I remember hearing about Sid Vicious dying in New York City.  That one made me want to both sneer and change my name to something as awesome as Sid Vicious.  The next time the Pistols showed up on my radar was just after I graduated from high school with the release of Sid & Nancy, the biopic released in 1986, directed by the execrable Alex Cox and starring Gary Oldman as Sid and Chloe Webb as Nancy.  Though Johnny Rotten said the movie had a “duff script,” and its historical accuracy has been oft-debated, the film quickly became a cult classic, and I was very much a member of that cult.

Big jump to August 23, 1996…I was in my mid-20s and living in San Francisco when I saw the original Sex Pistols line up (with bassist Paul Cook resuming his role) when they brought their Filthy Lucre Tour to the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View.  That reunion tour marked the first time the band had performed together since their initial breakup in 1978, and it was amazing.  And I would be remiss in not mentioning my trip to Manhattan in 2000, when I first visited the Chelsea Hotel, where Sid and Nancy had been living in Room 100 when Sid allegedly stabbed Nancy to death in October, 1978 (Sid was charged with her murder but died of a heroin overdose before the case could go to trial).  The room numbers had been changed, but sneaking up the stairway to the first floor, I felt some very heavy vibes in that place (not just from the Sid debacle, but the many other personally influential artists who had lived there).  I decided it would probably be interesting to spend a year living in the Chelsea, but that never came to fruition as I started having a lot of success as a freelance writer in San Francsico.  Whilst living in San Francisco, I was a frequent patron of the Beni Hana in Japantown, which Beni Hana was located in the same mall as the Miyako Hotel (now the Hotel Kabuki), where Sid famously walked through a glass door during the Pistols’ infamous 1978 U.S. tour.  That chaotic incident occurred on January 14, the same day as the band’s final show at the Winterland Ballroom.  Sid, in a drug-fueled haze, smashed through the glass door, injuring himself in the process.  When I’d come stumbling out of Beni Hana, toweringly drunk on sake bombs and Sapporo, I’d often threaten to go around the corner and go ploughing through the glass doors as a sort of moronic tribute to Sid.  Fortunately my people never allowed that to happen.  I say all this just to show that for good or ill, the Pistols have oddly informed many instances in my life as I was growing up.  But I do digress.  Returning to the travesty at hand…which was the shameful bastardization of the greatest punk band in history.

Because, believe it or not, dear reader, this fever dream somehow gets worse.  What got me really worked up about all this nonsense was hearing that this contraband knockoff of the Sex Pistols has been invited to open for Guns N’ Roses?  G’n’F’nR?!  Far be it for me to throw shade at Axl Rose, who, for all his faults, has at least managed to preserve the rough-edged lunacy of his legacy (even if he has done so while occasionally resembling a sleep-deprived Willy Wonka whose chocolate factory has long since closed).  But endorsing this sacrilege?  Giving this shameful cover band some shred of legitimacy by lending them a prime spot on your globally adored, pyrotechnic-heavy circus tour?  C’mon, Axl.  Is there no sense of responsibility anymore among the elders of this subculture we once dared call “countercultural”?  How much more abuse can the spirit of punk endure before it just curls up and dies, exhausted, in the corner of some overpriced arena hosting another “nostalgia night”?

This absurd Karaoke Kabuki is insulting, not just to the legacy of punk or the Sex Pistols themselves, but to anyone who once believed in the raw, pugilistic necessity of rock as an art form.  Anyone who screamed along to “God Save the Queen” or shredded their vocal cords to “Anarchy in the U.K.” because for once, someone out there seemed real.  Rotten wasn’t just a front man…he was the face of punk’s refusal to be nice, digestible, or safe.  He was the shard of glass tucked under the rug, the sputtering voice that declared with full, unrestrained fury that everything the establishment told you to believe was a bowl of beige horseshit.  He was the heart.  The lungs.  The fire.  And without him?  Without him, the Sex Pistols are just a hollowed-out carcass, trotted out in front of audiences who don’t seem to care that their rebellion has been taxidermized and sold back to them at $120 a ticket.

This isn’t punk, this is pantomime.  A travesty wrapped in a tragedy, shaved down into a palatable consumer “experience.”  And I, for one, refuse to clap politely as legends deface their own mythology for another damn payday.  Rotten may be absent from the stage, but his spirit cries foul from the shadows, mocking this grotesque imitation for what it is.  A scam.  A theft.  And a reminder that no matter how loud their amps, Jones and Cook have proven that the sound of desperation is deafening.

N.P.: “L F C L” – Public Image Ltd.