Sex Pistols
Never Mind The Bollocks

THE REVIEW

There are countless things to say about an album like this, and most of them are already well known.

So, I'll start with the musical aspect; the Pistols learn the lesson of the Ramones better than the masters themselves and create a blend of a wall of guitars and continuous invectives, perhaps even more convincing than the American group. The reasons for this greater strength probably lie in the rotten and damned singing of Rotten, much more suited for this type of music. There's not much to do; we are faced with 12 furious hits, the lyrics bring a breath of never-before-seen iconoclasm to the world of rock.

Thus, legendary tracks like “Anarchy In The U. K.” are born, which, among attacks on politics and customs, gives us a gem like “Don't know what I want but, I know how to get it”, a phrase capable of summarizing the entire punk movement, without an end (except to systematically go against customs), but necessary. “God Save The Queen” is perhaps the absolute pinnacle of punk rebellion; a spit in the face of everything, authority, religion, culture. “When there's no future, How can there be sin, We're the flowers In the dustbin” is one of the most pessimistic phrases ever. It is an earthquake shaking everything from its foundations; the anger of the guitars is perfect to express the discomfort and frustration of that generation, the voice does even better. Every song is a slice of metropolitan reality; from “No Feelings”, a portrait of the emotional coldness and rampant selfishness of Western society, to the realism of “Seventeen” and “Liar”. The loudest explosions, alongside the already mentioned tracks, are “Holidays In The Sun”, “E. M. I.” and “Problems”; but it remains difficult to find a weak song, rather we can talk about a unified and raw sound that hardly gives us time to breathe. In short, musically we are facing the final act of the anti-artistic revolution launched by the Ramones.

Going deeper, however, it is quite difficult to find a sense of coherence in an album like this. It is a halfway point between the wild and the catchy; probably, instead of revolutionizing people's minds, the Sex Pistols have created a new type of consumer music. The simplicity of punk is the transposition of the beat, made for the kids of the '70s, who meanwhile had transformed love and a sense of solidarity into hatred towards everything. Ultimately, this album is a product of society and not musicians (and indeed they were not); therein lies its importance. It's all a pretext aimed at expressing one's discomfort or simply demonstrating that the kids of that time were not any less "inspired" than their predecessors. Fantasy turned into realism, beauty into wickedness, melody into violence; but the functionality of the music does not change. True punk died before it was born because it was too extreme to exist. The punk that everyone refers to, of which “Never Mind The Bollocks” is a part, is simply a re-adaptation of '60s pop music to the new society that had formed.

The Sex Pistols were the true heralds of punk only during the period when they performed violent and nihilistic concerts; the very act of producing a record already goes against its founding principle. As a genre, punk, despite being appreciated, doesn't differ much from other consumer genres, it just changes the style. This becomes even more evident now that we are faced with waves of pop-punk bands. Standardized punk is worth as much as pop. However, the crazy attempt to transform a musical genre into a political and social tool will forever remain in the history of music; an initiative suffocated by its own ambition. Those kids wanted to overthrow the thrones and incite the crowds; what they truly managed to do was to give vent to the anger of their generation, setting their discomfort to music. The mark they left on music was devastating; a mass of violence that influenced many musicians in the years to come.