50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley, #13. The Sex Pistols, Never Mind The Bollocks

My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. He did series on books he loved, and albums he loved. I thought it would be fun to put up some of the stuff here. So we’ll start with his list of 50 Best Albums. I’ll put up one every Monday.

Brendan’s list of 50 Best Albums is part music-critique and part memoir and part cultural snapshot.

I have always loved these essays, because I love to hear my brother talk. I am happy to share them with you!

50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley

13. The Sex Pistols – Never Mind The Bollocks

I don’t know of any other album that more perfectly captures the sense of what a fit of anger feels like.

The Sex Pistols Never Mind The Bollocks album is a work of art so perfectly realized that you can almost be fooled into thinking that it is artless, that it is the pure form of what it expresses. In other words, it so perfectly embodies rage that one could mistakenly label it as merely an after-effect of rage, instead of a masterful evocation of it.

The music industry was so threatened by these guys that they thought they had no choice but to deride this as mere juvenile ranting, the bark and howl of an underclass that is not worth a nickel. They didn’t mind making money off of it but they sure as shit weren’t going to hold it up and say, “This is a flawless work.” Which it is.

In the 32 years since it was released (!?$#?), music has exploded. Rage has become an economic juggernaut. Volume has increased, censorship both implied and explicit has ebbed, and no one is shocked when they encounter uncomfortable topics presented with all the unpleasant details right out front.

But when The Sex Pistols hit the scene, this was far from the case. They were unseemly. They were unruly. They had unabashed scorn for anything that smacked of the establishment. They hated hippies as much as businessmen. The baby boomers who thought their softly strummed odes to fucking while stoned were going to change the world were the biggest resisters to the noise and clamor of these hooligans.

Lost in all of that is a gem of a record. Sid Vicious killed more than a couple of junkies that night in the Chelsea Hotel. He also killed any real chance that The Sex Pistols had to be viewed as anything other than an aberration, instead of a meteor.

Getting back to the changes in the record industry, what strikes me is that, as comfortable as everyone has gotten with rote expressions of anger and disappointment (nü-metal, grunge, rap/rock, gangsta rap, emo-core, etc.), Bollocks puts it all to shame. Even me with my affinity for anger, for loud uncompromising music, even I find myself wanting to tell Johnny Rotten to shut the hell up, to behave, to act like a gentleman. He is relentless in his vocal attack, seeming to rip convention to shreds with every line.

And this clarity extends right into the production of the album itself. This was no mere angry spurt. The sound of that album is like a chainsaw with a grudge. It is as clear as a bell which gives the emotional content even more weight because they aren’t willing to let you escape one second of it via a muddy mix, a muffled drum beat, a garbled lyric. Each musical moment is like a shining dagger headed right for your chest.

Thrilling challenging exasperating alienating incriminating and exterminating. The Sex Pistols killed the 1960’s and it was about the fuck time.

I am almost always angry on a cellular level. Somehow if you were able to test my DNA for rage you’d get an off the charts reading. If you could trace anger itself as an evolutionary force you would slide into the DNA and travel back in time through each scream, each punch, each threat, each explosion. And lo and behold, at the beginning of it all, at the moment that God created anger, you would hear his booming voice in the halls of heaven. He would warn you about the evils of this emotion, how it will warp you and rob you of human connection.

And The Sex Pistols would burst in and say, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

— Brendan O’Malley

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1 Response to 50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley, #13. The Sex Pistols, Never Mind The Bollocks

  1. I was an undergrad when this came out, and its release was delayed in the States, so I had to score it as an import. I brought it back to my dorm room, and a group of us gathered to hear what this thing was. We put it on the turntable and I dropped the needle, prepared to snatch it off the record if it was some sort of terrible, unimaginable cacophony, and then: “Hey, this is good.” “Hey, this is *really* good” and then we all relaxed and listened to our new favorite album

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