One of the problems with hero-worship is discovering that your golden idol has feet of clay. Whether it’s Bob Dylan going electric, or Red Letter Media host and Star Trek fan Mike Stoklasa finding that William Shatner is a massive arsehole. Sooner or later, your heroes are going to disappoint you.
Luckily, then, the hero of my youth has yet to disappoint me.
John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon has been my GenX idol, ever since I first heard the Sex Pistols on the radio as a pre-teen and realised that the papers had been lying to me. Far from foul-mouthed yobs who couldn’t play, the Pistols were awesome (although they got the “foul-mouthed yobs” bit right, and who’s complaining?).
The Pistols, of course, released one, world-changing album and then imploded. But Lydon almost immediately came back with a stunning riposte, Public Image Ltd. Over the years, PIL delivered the goods, and Lydon continued to call out bullshit (he publicly pinged Jimmy Savile decades before the BBC came clean on the monster it had long protected and enabled).
Lydon tours rarely, these days, due to being a full-time carer for his wife, Nora, afflicted with dementia.
But he’s still offending the high and mighty establishment creeps.
Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten (aka John Lydon) has weighed in on the woke culture permeating today’s society, telling the U.K.’s Sunday Times that it’s a “load of bollocks” perpetrated by universities graduating a new generation of students with “shit for brains.”
Growing up in London’s Irish milieu of Shepherd’s Bush in the 60s, Lydon knew more than a bit about “disenfranchisement”. He has no time for bougeois pretenders.
“These people aren’t really genuinely disenfranchised at all,” added the singer, stating, “They just view themselves as special. It’s selfishness and in that respect it’s divisive and can only lead to trouble. I can’t believe that TV stations give some of these lunatics the space.”
The man who penned God Save the Queen isn’t buying into Meghan Markle’s pity party, either. “Dreadful person. Very bad actress[…]Stop being self-righteous and smug, that’s what she needs to do.”
And he detests the modern left: “We can’t take much more of you, you talk twaddle. Everything you do, you just miss the point of who the general population are”.
Lydon outraged the leftist establishment by backing Donald Trump and Brexit (although he initially supported Remain; as he said, the people had spoken). Of Trump, he said, “You can call him a narcissist, you can call him nasty, he can do many different things, this fella’. But he’s the only hope because the system as usual is an S-H system.”
Lydon is right behind the “conservatism is the new punk rock” idea.
“Where is this ‘moral majority’ nonsense coming from when they’re basically the ones doing all the wrong for being so bloody judgmental and vicious against anybody who doesn’t go along with the current popular opinion,” posited the musician. “It’s just horribly, horribly tempestuous spoilt children coming out of colleges and universities with shit for brains.”
The interview also touched on a number of other topics with Rotten ridiculing the upcoming Sex Pistols miniseries and calling out protestors who defaced a Winston Churchill statue last with the word “racist.” The vandalizing events occurred during a Black Lives Matter protest and the statue defacing was one of many that took place worldwide during the protests in June of 2020.
Of the statue defacing, he decried, “This man saved Britain [and] whatever he got up to in South Africa or India beforehand is utterly irrelevant to the major issue at hand.”
“We are not walking up and down the high street with jackboots and helmets because of that man. The Nazis were the biggest race haters of all, ever, in the history of the planet so thank you again, Winston,” he added.
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And thank you, Johnny, for not letting me down, so far.
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