An album that changed the face of rock forever. Along with the Clash and the Damned, the Sex Pistols were one of the first bands to channel the anger of dole-queue '70s Britain through a fierce musical amalgam of pub rock, the Stooges and the New York Dolls. Despite their influences, Johnny Rotten and company created something utterly unlike what had come before. Their anarchist/nihilist attitude, reflected in tunes like "Anarchy in the U.K." and "No Feelings" spoke to a new generation of kids, more profoundly disaffected than any other in the 20th century.Rotten's snarling, distinctly British delivery of his agitational lyrics made Dylan sound like Mario Lanza, and the pile-driver guitars of Glen Matlock and Steve Jones move the songs along like a well-oiled but ornery machine. For all their iconoclasm, though, the Pistols were far more indebted to traditional pop song format (and dynamics) than most of the punk bands that followed in their wake. Consequently, for all their anger and urgency, such songs as "Submission" and "Pretty Vacant" enter the ear easily, only beginning to cause real internal damage once they get into your gut. One of the most essential rock albums of all time.
Review
Those who view the Sex Pistols only in eve-of-destruction terms should remember that any theory of destruction as highfalutin as Rotten's also contains the seeds of freedom and even optimism. Anyone who cares enough to hate this much is probably not a nihilist, but - irony of ironies - a moralist and a romantic as well. I believe it when Johnny Rotten screams, "We mean it, man," in conjunction with destruction, but, in a way, his land's-end, "no future" political position is the most desperately poetic of all. We want to destroy everything, he says, and then see what's left. My guess is that he believes something will be. - Rolling Stone 5/5
