England's Dreaming: Anarchy, the Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, April, 1992 by John Heilemann

God save the Queen

The fascist regime.

It made you a moron

A potential H-Bomb.

God save the Queen

She's not a human being.

There is no future

In England's dream.

Within days, the tabloid press had headlines reading "Punish the Punks." People obliged. The Pistols were attacked by the police and by citizens with razor blades. The song was banned from radio by the government. A member of the Labour Party (the left wing, remember) said, "If pop music is going to be used to destroy our established institutions, then it ought to be destroyed first."

Looking back, all this seems hysterical. Punk was never going to destroy anyone's established institutions. Like every great pop movement before or since, punk would have its zenith and then fade, leaving society's foundations intact. This is a basic point that Savage never quite comes to grips with. Instead, he wrings his hands over the potential implications of punk's politics, which were always more than a little opaque. As he points out, the Sex Pistols and other bands were often accused of harboring neo-Nazi sympathies. That many punkers displayed swastikas prominently on their clothing did nothing to dispel this notion. And if such insinuations were ambiguous--the swastika more a shock-tactic symbol of defiance than a coherent political statement--Savage, a good liberal, still frets over a latent right -wing, even Thatcherite, subtext in punk's libertarian, do-it-yourself rhetoric. (Few punks, and certainly not the Sex Pistols, would have denied being capitalists.) "As it became clear that the country had to make a choice," he worries, "which side would the punks be on?"

There is rich irony here. Savage's reading of punk's politics is as literal as that of the people he scorns--the smug, insular British establishment that saw a bunch of black-leather-clad kids with spiked hair and safety-pin earrings and thought them a genuine menace. But it's precisely pop's political ambivalence that makes it interesting. When rock musicians become responsible, worthy spokesmen for right-on causes, churning out PC lyrics and performing in endless charity benefits, they become impossibly boring--just look at Sting. Punk seemed dangerous to some in Britain in 1977 for much the same reason rap seems dangerous to some in America today: It's "program" was radical, sometimes troubling, but more than that, it spoke in tongues that parents just didn't understand. This is nothing new to pop--think of Elvis. But the fact that pop music can continue periodically to make so many so nervous says more about us than than it does about the music.