Tell us why you don't like the Sex Pistols.
I fear the question is of rhethorical nature, but I'll spoil the party by giving reasons because they are easy for me to put in words:
- I heard the debut of the Ramones first. I loved the way that was produced, it sounded like no album had done before in my ears. When I heard the Sex Pistols debut (and I remember distinctly when that was: I was in Munich with a friend and we were staying in his sister's apartment, we had just bought the album and were expecting great things) I was aghast how dated the production sounded - like Chinn Chapmann backing tracks from a Sweet, Mud or Quatro album four years earlier. I had loved glam rock, but thatr sort of production had nothing to do how the Sex Pistols were to sound
in my mind.- I didn't see the Sex Pistols as a band, but as a vehicle for Rotten and McLaren. All the other members were workmanlike, Sid Vicious later on excepted, but they were already on their way down then. Rotten's vocals were overtly loud in the mix, I don't like that to this day, it devaluates the music. The Ramones, in contrast, had no star, but a great - beautiful in its simplicity - band image. That album cover of the debut is iconic, the Pistols one just garish.
- I was an avid NME reader back then, took my bicycle once a week for a 20 mile round trip to buy it in the next larger town. The NME feasted the Pistols (and all of fledgling punk) in 1976/77 excessively creating a frenzy of expectation for more than a year. When - after a myriad of signings with and exodusses from other record companies - Never Mind the Bollocks appeared on Virgin, the king had no clothes on.
- I loved the Ramones' power pop sensibility, their charged up bubblegum sound. In comparison, the song writing on the first Pistpls LP had very little finesse, it was neither tuneful nor radical or off the wall (like, say, Doctors of Madness were). Rotten didn't have Joey's sense of a good tune.
- People like the Pistols for their lyrics and how groundbreaking they were. I found them labored in their attempt to break as many taboos as possible ("Belsen was a gas", wow, what a hugely political statement that is, akin to scribbling a swastika against a toilet wall). In 1977, I was a politically aware (or misguided, George!) young man, I read a communist daily in Germany and my first vote went to the - miniscule - German communist party in 1979. Johnny Rotten describing the Queen as "a fascist regime" made me laugh, it was so naive and off the mark,, the man had no idea what fascism was, yet he was older than me. He sang about "Anarchy in the UK" based on a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with the English class system, but in reality had no idea what anarchy was. He probably thought it had something to do with throwing bombs.
- In essence, the Pistols were a hype. McLaren launched them as a hype and they delivered the goods that way. They weren't any more political than Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson. The Ramones were apolitical in an unabashed way - no pretension. The Pistols were full of themselves and of pretension. The Ramones grew from scratch in an organic way, the Pistols were casted by Mclaren, with Rotten being dragged to a rehearsal of the then three-piece after being sighted in Malcolm's/Vivienne Westwood's fetish wear shop.
And they never wrote a catchy riff either. Nor do I hear much of an influence of theirs in the music of today. The Green Days of this world have more of a Ramones influence.
Does that explain somewhat why they do nothing for me?
