John Lydon - Notes from Pig City

Hey ho, let’s go, DJ Albo

Australian Politics, Music / June 6, 2023 / 4 minutes of reading

On Tuesday, Australia’s freshly minted prime minister, Anthony Albanese, drew on the words of a songwriter – and committed socialist – in announcing his first ministry. “Just because you’re going forwards doesn’t mean I’m going backwards,” Albanese said. He was citing one of Billy Bragg’s early songs, To Have And To Have Not, a bitter attack on inequality and privilege. Bragg said he was thrilled for his “old mate”, whom he has known since the 1990s.

Albanese has made a habit of casually dropping song lyrics into his public appearances. At the beginning of the election campaign, he quoted the Ramones’ rallying cry “Hey ho let’s go” (from arguably that band’s best-known song, Blitzkrieg Bop). In 2013, he enjoyed the rare distinction of programming the Australian music television staple Rage, alongside former foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop and Greens leader Adam Bandt.

While not as image-obsessed as his predecessor Scott Morrison, whose background was in marketing, there’s no denying that “DJ Albo” is part of the Albanese brand. Unlike Morrison, though, Albanese is not just mugging for the cameras. Quoting a dedicated activist and polemicist like Bragg tells us that Albanese’s music fandom goes beyond image: it speaks to who he is – or at least, how he defines himself.… Read more..

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Flowers in the wheelie bin

In 1977, John Lydon – née Rotten – launched a vitriolic attack on the monarchy that brutally summed up the status of England’s youth in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee: “When there’s no future, how can there be sin? / We are the flowers in the dustbin / We’re the poison in your human machine / We’re the future, your future!”

God Save The Queen, as performed by the Sex Pistols, is one of the greatest protest songs of all time, but I’ve long pondered over these lyrics. Was Lydon inferring that Britain’s future had been literally thrown out with the garbage, as the nation celebrated? Or making a statement about how great art can be constructed from throwaway refuse – one of punk’s defining tenets?

Or was he saying that art itself is nurtured by the oppression of the state? “We’re the poison in your human machine” is a wonderfully subversive argument to this effect, and it’s a line with ongoing resonance to Queensland. It’s a common assumption, for example, that the 1970s punk explosion in Brisbane, spearheaded by the Saints (who, let’s not forget, pre-dated the Pistols by as much as two years) was a reaction to the excesses of life in Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen.… Read more..