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Sex Pistols + Def Leppard = WTF, Batman?!?

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Alex C:
I think it's kinda ridiculous to expect people to really feel the same connection to the band once its influence has been so dispersed that they cannot even remember a time in which their influence wasn't already in full force.  As for the music itself, I actually like the song Bodies quite a bit due to the sheer ferocity of the delivery, but it's not something I'm really in a rush to see anyone try to reproduce decades later. Further, there's a lot about punk I kinda dislike and find a bit self-destructive, and the Sex Pistols are kind of a testament to that, so in that sense, yeah, it is snobbery. I still like rock music though, just with misgivings about where people draw the line between expressing themselves and being divisive for no particular reason. Sometimes I think the Sex Pistols did a good job at that and at other times they didn't.

Ballard:
Growing up in New York and having been to all these alleged birthplaces of punk, I struggle to see how Television/The Velvets/Patti Smith were punk at all.

But the Punk 77 quote brings up the New York Dolls for a reason. They were the original Malcolm McLaren band, the original shock band, the original fuck you band. They just didn't break big enough at the time, and when McLaren taught a new horse the same old trick four years later it worked like a charm and the Pistols suddenly became the innovators of punk rock.

Ballard:
These bands as well. I was content to focus on Malcolm McLaren because that example brings to light just how ridiculous the claim that the Pistols are the creators of punk is better than any other example I could have made.

Will:
I'm not a fan of either one of the aforementioned bands, so as the saying goes, I don't have a dog in this fight. The part that made me scratch my head when I first read this article is basically the huge chasm that separates the two bands stylistically - not speaking from their perspective as musicians so much, but from a general audience perspective. Everyone associates the Sex Pistols - whether rightly or wrongly - with punk rock; punk has its own set of ideologies and aesthetics which seem to run counterpoint to the glamorized, high-profile spectacle that, if no one else, I associate with bands like Def Leppard.

Like Tommy said, when you get right down to it, there's not a great surprise here, because both forms of rock and roll still have the same roots. It's just that they're such drastically different perceptions of flavor that the mash-up seems jarring at first.

Argue all you want as to whether the Pistols deserve the label "punk rock" but that's the scene they are associated with, and that scene was the polar opposite of what Def Leppard was doing when they did it.

There, not a single argument for or against the merits of either band, just why I originally was taken aback.

onewheelwizzard:
What Will said.  Exactly.

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