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By Root 443 0

of any better or even as good to take their place—that's simultaneously why we may be facing a new dark ages, why now might be the most exciting time to be alive in human history, and for sure why Jim Jones was able to get all those suckers to off themselves and their babies down Guyana way. But when you get right down to it was the Guyana incident (for despite all the media flap, that was really all it was, I mean Gilles de Rais would laugh) all that different except in sheer quantity of deaths from the Sex Pistols phenomenon and all it represented? Both were about human manipulation under the guise of social change. “No future for you” was powerful not only because it was great music but because there was something awfully true about it, but did any of these people ever take the time to even try to posit some alternative? Richard Hell used to go onstage in a T-shirt that said “Please kill me,” and that finally sums up 90 percent of the punk phenomenon for me.

I’ve defended this scene a million times, saying stuff like “Well at least they went halfway, at least they said ‘Everything sucks!’ instead of pretending everything was just a whoopie party like those disco creeps.” But even then I was not so sure I was right. Because for one thing those disco creeps who are no more a united front than the punks, who still haven’t resolved the fact that most American punks think the British are too self-righteously political and most British think the Americans spoiled dunderheaded dilettantes—those disco creeps, whom American punks have all written off with the homophobic slogan “Disco Sucks,” have come up at times with material far more affirmative on the basic humanistic level than most anything punk has to show for itself. When I got up this morning the first thing I played was “I Love the Nightlife,” by Alicia Bridges, which is not as I first thought just another cheerlead to empty solipsistic club-hopping hedonism, but in fact a feminist self-determination anthem. Let's line up Gloria Gaynor's “I Will Survive” and Richard Hell's “Who Says? (It's Good to Be Alive)” and see which one makes more sense in twenty years.

Richard's come in for an undue share of bad press, especially from such professional wanknoses as Tony Parsons, and I believe the first Voidoids album will someday be looked back upon as a rock masterpiece akin to White Light/White Heat and Raw Power that got lost in the shuffle of 1977 punk-overload, but Jesus Christ, man: I believed in Richard Hell and still do, as musician, poet, and I guess I’ll have to be corny enough to say Philosopher (theoretician), but yesterday I had a friend over who is 19 years old and brilliant, a writer/photographer who came to New York from Michigan, lives on food stamps, sits in his room every day staring into space, thought he was a sadist for a while because the first girl he ever laid asked him to slap her around a little, has played around with Satanism and been committed by his parents at the age of 16 to a mental ward where the fave song of all the kids there interred was Lou Reed's “Kill Your Sons,” committed almost solely because he happened to say one day that he didn’t think the American high school system had much left to teach him so he didn’t think he was going to go anymore, which was grounds for electroshock treatments according to everyone around him with any power at the time—I played this kid Richard's “Who Says? (It's Good to Be Alive)” and he just laughed. “That guy's stupid,” he said. “No,” I said, “don’t you see, that he's at least going halfway toward some resolution with reality, that that's an important question to ask at a certain point in your life?” “Gimme a break,” he said. “That's a question that should not even arise.”

Which might well, when all is said and done, be the summation of the Sex Pistols. When it looked like Sid was gonna have his day in court I wouldn’t have dared write something I’d felt in my guts and nervous system for months: that I am not at all convinced that there wasn’t something in the Sex Pistols’ music that did or would inspire