Johnny Rotten was one of the few terrific antiheroes rock & roll has ever produced: a violent-voiced bantam of a boy who tried to make sense of popular culture by making it suffer the world outside–its moral horror, its self-impelled violation, its social homicide. By contrast, John Lydon–who rose from the ashes of Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols to form the experimentalist
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postpunk band Public Image Ltd.–has impressed some erstwhile followers as just a plain antagonist: a tedious, ill-affected
artiste who deserted his own dread visions for fear they might destroy him. In a way, that may be true. By dealing exclusively in abstract images and accidental sounds, Lydon no longer has to run the risk of caring–which also means he no longer needs to run the risk of meaning.
But it's true, too, that Lydon rankles critics and punk die-hards alike because he's repudiated his past. By his own admission, the music he makes with PiL aims to devastate classicist rock & roll–including punk rock–by blackening its themes and confounding its forms. It's as if, after distancing himself from the merciless primitivism of the Sex Pistols, Lydon found a fatal flaw in rock & roll itself–namely, that it imparted the illusion of order and transcendence–and decided to remake the genre. Actually, Lydon and PiL merely rerouted the Pistols' much-vaunted anarchism, applying it to song structure, and in the process, authored the first major attempt to transmogrify rock parlance since Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. (PiL also managed to give momentum and focus to the English postpunk avant-garde: a burgeoning movement of art theorists and futurist musicians, several of whom–Cabaret Voltaire, a Certain Ratio, the The, In Camera, This Heat, Dome, et al.–are trying to codify PiL's inventiveness.)
Paris au Printemps (recorded live in France in January 1980) is the album on which PiL's formlessness finally became formulated–which is to say that if they could reproduce their apparently inchoate, unpremeditated music letter-perfect live (and they could), then it wasn't really orderless or even all that experimental. Yet it is visceral. Guitarist Keith Levene, bassist Jah Wobble and drummer Martin Atkins play momentously throughout, interweaving deliberate rhythms and backhanded melodies into a taut webwork of crosscurrent designs and motions. Lydon offers a stunning, protean vocal performance: by turns gleeful, derisive, virulent and, during "Chant" and "Careering," so terrifying – invoking images of mob rule one minute, murder the next–as to be almost unendurable.
But what we hear on Paris au Printemps is more than animated, frictional music: we hear the way that music can rub up against, even threaten, people who aren't ready for it. By the LP's second side, the crowd–a horde of recherché, loudmouthed, self-conscious gothics–have had
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