Genre: Rock/Pop, Sub-Genre: Punk Rock

The Sex Pistols: Johnny Rotten (vocals); Steve Jones (guitar); Sid Vicious, Glen Matlock (bass); Paul Cook (drums).

Put this alongside BLONDE ON BLONDE and REVOLVER as an album that changed the face of rock forever. Along with the Clash and the Damned, the Sex Pistols Were one of the first bands to channel the anger of dole-queue '70s Britain through a fierce musical amalgam of pub rock, the Stooges and the New York Dolls. Despite their influences, Johnny Rotten and company created something utterly unlike what had come before. Their anarchist/nihilist attitude, reflected in tunes like "Anarchy in the U.K." and "No Feelings" spoke to a new generation of kids, more profoundly disaffected than any other in the 20th century.

Rotten's snarling, distinctly British delivery of his agitational lyrics made Dylan sound like Mario Lanza, and the pile-driver guitars of Glen Matlock and Steve Jones move the songs along like a Well-oiled but ornery machine. For all their iconoclasm, though, the Pistols Were far more indebted to traditional pop song format (and dynamics) than most of the punk bands that folloWed in their wake. Consequently, for all their anger and urgency, such songs as "Submission" and "Pretty Vacant" enter the ear easily, only beginning to cause real internal damage once they get into your gut. One of the most essential rock albums of all time.

 

Rolling Stone (12/11/03, p.108) - Ranked #41 in Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums Of All Time" - "...The Sermon on the Mount of English punk - and the echoes are everywhere..."

Spin (5/01, p.109) - Ranked #10 in Spin's "50 Most Essential Punk Records" - "...'Gabba Gabba Hey' meets 'Hey, hey We're the Monkees'..."

Q (5/02 SE, p.141) - Included in Q's "100 Best Punk Albums".

Q (6/00, p.85) - Ranked #10 in Q's "100 Greatest British Albums" - "...Few [can] deny the LP's unrelenting punch nor its litany of spine-tingling moments....imbued with a quintessentially London ambience..."

Mojo (3/03, p.76) - Ranked #1 in Mojo's "Top 50 Punk Albums" - "Has any other band so changed the world with just one album?..."

NME (10/2/93, p.29) - Ranked #3 in NME's list of the `Greatest Albums Of All Time.'

NME (9/11/93, p.18) - Ranked #2 among the Greatest Albums Of The '70s - "...The ultimate `first album as greatest hits' exercise....Pub jukeboxes remain terrified of it to this day..."

Melody Maker (7/27/96, p.48) - "...NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS, as a human transmission, as a piece of plastic, as an idea, even through the putrid rose-tints of retrospect, even with the distance of time and accumulation of official sanction, is still a bomb beyond appraisal, impossible, UNDENIABLE..."