Zippity doo dah, gabba gabba hey, my oh my Punk will be a Hell of a pay day. Little fudge of the truth here and checks are coming to stay. Zippity doo dah, gabba gabba hey!
I’ve had mixed feelings about watching a Sex Pistols miniseries put out by Disney/Hulu. The marketing and the commercials made it really appealing… of course that is what commercials are made to do. It isn’t hard to make something look good when it has Disney money behind it. I had to just grit my teeth and watch it.
The new miniseries Pistol is if nothing else a fucking ruckus joy ride down the booze, sex, and drug fueled brief moment in time when the Sex Pistols took a chunk out of society’s bland and corrupted bile.
How much of it is crap? I have no idea. I’m probably supposed to lie to you and say I know, but I wasn’t there and frankly, I wasn’t even born yet during their run. So, I won’t pretend like I know all of it. I will say if you look at Disney’s track record for changing things (the story of Cinderella, Pocahontas, The Little Mermaid) it is a hefty list that encompasses the majority of their catalog.
The show is based on the book “Lonely Boys” by Steve Jones and Ben Thompson. However, according to John Lydon, Danny Boyle denied him to see a script or anything, even as late as the day before the Hulu release. Danny “Mickey Mouse” Boyle wouldn’t get him a script to go over? He is a character in the miniseries. In fact, one of the main people of the story.
Lydon went on to say in an interview on This Morning about Boyle and the project:
“March, prior to me being informed about this project, Danny Boyle had signed up with them and never made any efforts to speak to me at all. His (Boyle) behavior in this really, really is quite appalling. It seems like a gargantuan effort to deny that I really do exist. And rather than deal with me, they’ve gone into this fakery. By not showing me the script, that tells me… secrecy implies lies.”
Jones has went on the record many times stating that the Sex Pistols were at the right place at the right time. He was probably right. They could barely play and hardly sing. It was honest and abrasive in all the best ways. There have been many imitations over the years, but nobody had quite the influence and respect that the Sex Pistols commanded.
While Punk music isn’t dead, it certainly hasn’t been what it was. I ask myself why that would be. It is just as political, just as snide, and simply wild. Here we are over 40 years later and now Disney with Boyle are rewriting the history of the Sex Pistols and Punk music.
Where are our Sex Pistols? What in the Sam Hell has happened to originality and integrity? One more person calls Machine Gun Kelly and Demi Lovato punk, I swear I’ll take a putrid asparagus piss down their throat. It is just a cheap knockoff of insert any 90’s Pop Punk band here _____________ because he couldn’t hack it as a legitimate rapper. As far as Lovato goes, your new Joan Jett haircut doesn’t make you punk no matter how hard your PR team is trying. Did I go to far? Hell with them and any other publication that goes along with this disreputable marketing push. Especially from one of Disney’s former pop princesses.
One of the very few and far off glimmers in the sky of poser stars is the band Ho99o9. They are raw, unabashed, and just aggressive enough to do some damage.
There are a few others, but I’m not here to promote them right now.
The fact is that things are bad in this world again. The world is primed for a true revolution of the arts and society, yet we are stuck with industry standards.
What I mean by standards is just regurgitated versions of wannabe Mariah Carey and Beyonce girls. We also have a bunch of feeble-minded money hungry guys recording bad white boy R&B music. And of course the new trend (Demi Lovato) to rip off Avril Lavigne’s already posturing punk, it is a collective smorgasbord of shit pies and cow scrotums.
There is music, but there is no scene. There is no movement roaring behind it. It is just calculated background noise made for the dribbling masses who can’t pull their eyes off of their TikTok streams. And frankly, Disney has perpetuated that with numerous generically pretty faces with universally basic voices and a team of hit making specialists determined to own all of the publishing rights of the major recording acts.
Punk music wasn’t a fashion statement. It wasn’t a sound. Punk was a stance. It was truth. If the music industry was the electric company, Punk is free renewable energy. That whole movement was about the underdog. It even brought women up with it.
Not saying there weren’t women before it, but Punk allowed them to be empowered. There was a difference between Ronnie Spector being held under thumb by Phil Spector and Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde, Suzie Quatro, and The Slits. The list keeps going on. These weren’t “My boyfriend’s back and you’re gonna be in trouble” girls. These were my boyfriend’s gone and I’m going to break your face women!
Punk was one of the most progressive movements that we could learn about in the 20th century. People came from all walks of life and were just treated like people. The Punk movement unlike Disney was already accepting the LGBTQ before their marketing experts deemed it a good move financially.
I’m not saying that there wasn’t a significant amount of sex, drugs, and boozing in the punk scene, but what Boyle/Hulu/Disney has done with this miniseries is almost unforgivable. They reduced the movement to nothing more than a bunch of drug addicted boys running around yet to be potty trained.
Punk music was threatening. It wasn’t a danger in the tragic Sid Vicious sense. Junkies were junkies whether they listened to the Bee Gees or the Sex Pistols. It made people think, feel, and act like individuals with their own brains. They didn’t need commercials, PR agents, and marketing on YouTube to tell them something was cool. Punk challenged society and most of the world’s conformist attitudes. According to Boyle and Disney, Punk is just another subject they can use to fatten their wallets.