Punk Spreads
Punk and Popular Imagination
Although punk rockers mocked and rejected the entertainment industry and the consumer culture it fed, that industry found the striking visual style, the sneering insolent performers, and the sensationalistic threat of youth violence irresistible.
At first a contained regional curiosity in New York and London, punk in the popular imagination would be forever marked on December 1, 1976 by the appearance of the Sex Pistols on the London Today show, when Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones, surrounded by an entourage of fans (including Siouxsie Sioux), decked out in spiky hair, Vivienne Westwood t-shirts and Malcolm McLaren’s fetish wear, were provoked by the host Bill Grundy into a cascade of swearing insults. The moment immediately turned punk rock into a caricature of itself.
U.S. comics, from the satirical Mad magazine June 1978 issue, to the serial detective strip of Dick Tracy in August 1979 through January 1980, seized on the cartoonish nature of punk style and attitude, portraying punks as boorish and ridiculous. European glossy magazines, however, turned lead singers into standard rock star pin-ups and objects of tabloid gossip columns.
Absolut Vodka Campaign. Sex Pistols, 2000.
In 2000, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols became part of an ad campaign series by Absolut Vodka that reproduced or slightly modified the jacket art of eight classic albums, including Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, Judas Priest’s British Steel, and David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane.