the only way to be

I want to be anarchy...

--Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols, 1976

Watching John Lydon as Johnny Rotten performing "Anarchy in the UK" with the Sex Pistols back in 1976 almost calls up nostalgic and sentimental feelings. Not quite, though.

It's strange now to remember how much the Pistols scared people back then. All the folks out there in TVland watched in horror as images of these twitching, thuggish, dope-fiend cockney teen-agers rudely invaded their living rooms. They feared that Sid Vicious would become a role model for the little ones growing and fermenting under their own roofs, but Sid didn't live long enough for that, and Lydon's turn as Johnny Rotten was likewise short lived.

Watching the Pistols today they don't seem so scary, but they remain just as loud, screechy, nasty, and anti-social as they were in the 70's, and their competently played, adamantly crude garage-band sound, full of one-note/one-chord interludes, is the perfect vehicle to convey the band's message, which remains appropriate even today. How else are adolescents supposed to react to coming of age and simultaneously realizing they're trapped inside a civilization that's coming apart at the seams?

The mid-seventies was a turbulent time, as much so in its way as were the sixties, and there were several noteworthy and lasting cultural expressions of extraordinary feelings of fear and outrage. Besides the Sex Pistols there was the American splatter movie "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," possibly the greatest horror film of all time, and the one that most effectively conveys a sensation of stark terror from beginning to end.

The Wikipedia article on "Texas Chainsaw" relates that In discussing influences on the film, (director and writer Tobe) Hooper cites the impact of changes in the cultural and political landscape. He directly correlates the intentional misinformation that the "film you are about to see is true" as a response to being "lied to by the government about things that were going on all over the world", including Watergate, the gasoline crisis, and "the massacres and atrocities in the Vietnam War". The additional "lack of sentimentality and the brutality of things" that Hooper noticed in watching the local news — whose coverage was graphic, "showing brains spilled all over the road" — led to his belief "that man was the real monster here, just wearing a different face, so I put a literal mask on the monster in my film."

Looking back from today, as oil gushes into the gulf of Mexico and the functioning of the New York Stock Exchange is threatened by a generation of Frankenstein's-monster computer programs, it's easy to understand why in the mid-seventies, the most cutting-edge music and film expressed hopelessness. The same response would still be justified today, but most of us have now adopted the attitude that despair isn't appropriate to our situation.

Enjoy yourself. It's probably later than we think.