MALLINation

Malcolm McLaren was a bastard. There, I’ve said it. Yet he was one of the greatest impresarios of the 20th Century. The Sex Pistols as a concept were very much his creation, a “swindle” in his words that combined the nascent punk rock of his former charges The New York Dolls and bands like The Ramones with situationist sloganeering, social shock and awe, the bondage and fetish gear purveyed in the boutique operated by he and his then wife Vivienne Westwood, and a grand dose of P.T. Barnum-style showmanship.

This in turn launched the UK punk revolution, which confined to the media market of The British isles and coinciding with the Queen’s jubilee, had a cultural impact that seemed far greater than the New York scene that had inspired it.

The Pistols tumultous 18-months in the spotlight begat bands like The Clash, The Jam, Buzzcocks, Joy Division, The Slits, Siouxie and The Banshees and trailed a legion of followers who would form a subsequent generation of bands like Shane McGowan and The Pogues and Stephen Morrissey who formed The Smiths.

McLaren engineered the sacking of the Pistols talented bass player Glen Matlock, replacing him with the barely talented but colorfully doomed Sid Vicious, alongside the man he re-named Johnny Rotten upon anointing him lead singer. When Rotten started to have ideas beyond being a McLaren puppet he too quit at the end of a grueling American tour, and the band recorded tracks with Great Train robber Ronnie Biggs.

In the subsequent psuedo-documentary/propaganda film The Great Rock and Roll Swindle McLaren played up all this activity as part of an elaborate scam that included signing to three seperate record labels in arow and pocketing the advance.

Post Pistols McLaren put together Adam and The Ants, this time fusing African tribal drumming to primal rock to less ground shaking effect, though it did pefigure the fascination with African music that would take hold in the 1980s. He then swapped lead singer Adam Ant (who went on to a fairly successful career sans McLaren) for 14 year-old Annabella Lwin to form Bow Wow Wow which added a not so subtle under-aged sex element to songs like “Louis Quatorze” and hitched their wagon to the home-taping boom at the time with songs like “C30-C60-C90 Go.” The teenybopper sex symbol thing prefigured later starts like Britney Spears and home taping at the dawn of the 80s was a controversial bugaboo to the record industry – the illegal downloading of it’s time.

Bow Wow Wow would break free as well, leaving non-musician McLaren to start up projects under his own name. This included the fantastic singles “Buffalo Gals” and “Double Dutch” which were explorations of the burgeoning hip hop scene, especially DJ scratching. As tempting as it might be to cry cultural imperialism the quality of the tracks which prefigure the sound mash-ups of producer/DJs like Prince Paul and Fatboy Slim is undeniable. However unlike punk, his influence on the overall development of hip-hop was slight.

His next move was even more audacious – mixing hip-hop with opera on the Fans album and “Madame Butterfly” single. Surprisingly it worked, though again the impact was minimal compared to past successes.

As McLaren transitioned into a talking head and cultural commentator, so to did his originally ideas reverberate into the mainstream. Anytime you see the “typical” punk mode of dressing or variations thereupon (safety pins, rubber, fishnets, boots, torn clothes) McLaren and Westwood’s original vision survives.

McLaren died yesterday of Leukemia.

Trailer for The Great Rock and Roll Swindle: