Punk rock turns 30 this year - that is, the age of its original enemies, and then some - and those of us who lived though the filth and the fury remember well Johnny Rotten's favourite, acidulous crank: "You're too old."
Now, Rotten (real name, John Lydon) is old: Well, he is 51, but in this month's Spin he looks, if still ferociously beautiful, ancient, and the entire movement - which the issue is devoted to elegizing - seems like so many hooves stampeding from a great, impassable distance.
Lydon is in great form in the Spin interview, unlike most of his colleagues who have either died or fossilized in infinitely less pleasing ways. Even punk's children have shotgun-scattered, leaving, among the wobbling, Courtney Love, who writes in a recent Blog entry: "i go this place we care and fast about theree four time s ayear and you fast and get c olonics and they showecx us a welathyw oman of the worlds partasite wich cam eout of her in ajar they keep it slik ethe siz eof an evergae penis lebgth wise you know 6 inchs plus ish and narrow like afat worm and ha dthousands of legs and a sick little faqce and i relaised we llhavethem and i dont want anyone livong inside me eccet me and even my cemons ..."
That's right: she has "cemons" and penile parasites: One begins to look at Lydon, in spite of his Judge Judy appearances and so on, as an exemplar of Liv[ing] Through This.
"Journey is one of my favourite bands!" Lydon exclaims in the piece, a view that is, variously, trendy ( The Sopranos have elevated this 80s curiosity to an unprecedented height), or willfully eccentric and sweet - the way Sid Vicious liking Abba was sweet. It seems foolish to remember punk as sweet, given how determined it was to be dangerous, and failing that, repulsive. Yet it may be more foolish to continue to herald its political significance, which was virtually zero.
This music and fashion trend that barely rose to usher in the banality that was New Wave has been the subject of an inordinate amount of critical scrutiny, and self-described punks still exist (even if they are, in the main, washing strangers' cars with squeegees).
Punk always was squalid, which remains its only point: It is the impoverished's only means of communicating this desolate truth as style and substance.
Yet, as Lydon continues to assert, punk was designed to free people of uniforms, not create them, and it was this, the homogeneity of the look and the sound, that killed the spirit of punk, as if it were a rigged séance all along.
Was it?
When I recall the 30 years past music of 1977, I remember only the excitement of something new, or something to love if you were the sort whose friends wrote "Disco Sucks" in their yearbooks with such loathing, they might as well have been signing Andy Gibb's death warrant.
This new thing, the music, has been so influential it is almost impossible to remember it as never having been around, but Never Mind the Bollocks, the peerless and only Sex Pistols album, incredibly, still sounds like nothing else and still terrifies.
That's why Lydon's midlife is saddening, somehow: It is a lot to ask of artists that they die young and imperfect, but I wish that many would. Reading the ravaged singer happily (and moronically) parsing politics and talking about the happy little fish on his ankle socks is a horrible memento mori. On the cover of the magazine, he is 20 and attempting to explode a blemish into a camera lens: One hears the old mermaid Love singing, "Oh come on, be alive again, don't lay down and die."
Lydon is not dead, of course, and seems to be living well and with grace, but I miss who he was. Then again, as we get older, we start to miss everything, in both senses of the word.
I have no idea what artists are currently providing the soundtrack to the lives of teenagers; or I do, and am unmoved.
Lydon seems equally unmoved. At the Spin interview's end, he seems content to rest on his laurels. Asked about the Sex Pistols' "legacy," he says he does not ever want to make another record because, "We've said enough. We've done enough. There's no point."
But there is a point: The art is always far wiser than the artist, and Johnny Rotten screaming about "England's dreaming" is still more vital, more urgent than the mature Lydon now calling God Save the Queen "good fun and sweet and innocent."
But you said the Queen was a "potential H-bomb," a "moron" and the head of a "fascist regime" is what I want to say to him, or remind him that in 1977 he still believed, like his devil-bride, Love, that "if the world is so wrong then you can change it all with one song."
They did. And they didn't.
He is as content and pallid as a "partasite"; she is, unfortunately, keeping her "cemons" at bay.
Johnny Rotten, Courtney Love, all the complicated heroes who were broken or tamed by life's incessant ardour: I miss your "sick little faqces."