Malcolm McLaren, punk-rock impresario behind the Sex Pistols, dead at 64.

McClaren’s longtime partner, Young Kim, said “He was a great artist who changed the world.”

And she’s probably right – except that McLaren was an artist in the post-Romantic, 20th-century sense of the term; he believed that destroying art was art.  It was a school of art that gave us a lot of really annoying, self-indulgent twaddle, and still cripples the world of art today.

But along the way?  Well, we’ll always have the Pistols:

It was McLaren who gave the name Sex Pistols to the group of young men hanging out at his store and helped pick out front man John Lydon (soon known as “Johnny Rotten.”) McLaren signed the group with EMI, and their first single, “Anarchy in the UK” came out in 1976.

The group would aggressively court controversy, becoming a household name after an expletive-packed appearance in a British television interview which drew a ban on the group’s live performances in the U.K.

After being dropped by EMI for bad behavior, the group later signed with Virgin. Their second single, “God Save The Queen,” whose title lyrics are rhymed with “fascist regime,” was released during Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebrations — was an auditory assault on the monarchy which sparked widespread outrage and saw members of the band attacked in the street.

Which, when I was a teenager in terminally-staid North Dakota, sounded like a lot of fun.

Now that I’m not a teenager, of course, the “Art-as-destruction” school of art, and the Pistols’ contrived rebellion, wear a bit thin on me.  Fortunately, the Pistols – provided that Glen Matlock rather than Sid Vicious was playing bass – were also, counterintuitively, a really, really good band.

Which, of course, wasn’t the point to McLaren:

McLaren professed a certain indifference to the talent of the band he managed, saying it never occurred to him that the group could ever be any good.

“What occurred to me was that it didn’t matter if they were bad,” he told the Times of London last year.

Sylvain Sylvain, whose group proto-punk group the New York Dolls McLaren managed before the Sex Pistols, told the AP that McLaren knew how to anticipate a trend.

“He had that vision — maybe it came from the clothing,” Sylvain said. “In the rag business you’ve got to be five to 10 years ahead of everybody.”

McLaren, like the punks and the hippies before them, decided that transient art didn’t have to leave one starving:

He helped create advertising campaigns for British Airways, went to Hollywood to make films alongside directors such as Steven Spielberg, and worked on shows with the BBC — the broadcaster which in the 70s had refused to play his group’s songs. He even wrote for the New Yorker.

…

And while McLaren also worked with Adam and the Ants and helped create the group Bow Wow Wow, his music career wasn’t limited to management. He had a regarded solo career in which he blended genres and acted as a kind of music curator. In the early 1980s, he had key songs in hip-hop, including the hit “Buffalo Gals,” and bringing different textures to the developing genre; in his career, he worked in electronica, pop — even opera.

RIP, Malcolm McLaren, the Great Rock And Roll Swindler.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 7:15 am and is filed under Memoriam, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.