Friday, April 09, 2010
RIP Malcolm Mclaren
McLaren was a grand charlatan, a pop culture thief, and a mis-manager (as branded by the Sex Pistols, after they successfully sued him in 1986 for royalties, and won).
Former Pistol Steve Jones said that McLaren was "a big key in what happened in punk and with the revolution of it all" but that he undermined his own credibility by constantly clamouring for recognition through the years. "The whole thing probably wouldn't have taken off the way it did without him, there's no doubt about that," Jones said, "but his downfall is that he spent the rest of his life trying to take credit for all of it." (source: LA Times)
My favourite take so far on McLaren and his sense of self-importance to the punk scene is from the Guardian's Alexi Petridis, here. He talks about McLaren's inabiltity to deal with the fallout from the antipathy he helped generate against the Sex Pistols, leaving them to flounder.
Petridis writes "It wasn't until after the band split up that McLaren attempted to reassert his authority over the Sex Pistols: rewriting their story in the film The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle as a masterplan he had controlled all along, the band merely his stooges. It wasn't a terribly convincing argument, nor was it a terribly good film.
"Understandably outraged, Johnny Rotten has spent the subsequent years airbrushing McLaren from the Sex Pistols story, pointing out that the music had nothing to do with him, reinventing the band as autodidacts who would have been even more successful without his interference.
But that seems reductive too: without McLaren's ideas, his art-school grounding in Situationism, without the clothes he and Vivienne Westwood designed for them, the Sex Pistols wouldn't have been the same band, nor would they have had the same impact. Neither party would ever admit it, but they needed each other."
John Lydon farewelled McLaren, saying “For me Malc was always entertaining, and I hope you remember that. Above all else he was an entertainer and I will miss him, and so should you.”
Wallace Chapman has some entertaining quotes from when he interviewed McLaren back when Wallace was hosting BFM Breakfast on his blog on TVNZ7's site.
Watch: Malcolm McLaren - a career in clips
Image credit: Peanut Butter Wolf via Twitpic.
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