Punk | On the difficulty of saying no

"Public Image," the first single released in 1979 by the band Public Image Limited, fascinated me like few other songs. This was, of course, partly due to the fact that the singer of Public Image Limited had previously been the singer of the Sex Pistols, whom I admire. These punk pioneers made music of inflamed rage, the impact of which, when it was new, is almost impossible to comprehend today. The intro to "Anarchy in the UK" alone, this mixture of defiance and mockery that singer Johnny Rotten hurls at the world – followed by a series of outrageous lines like "I am an anti-Christ, I am an anarchist, don't know what I want, but I know how to get it." This lay far outside the usual framework for how 70s pop music was perceived.

Many young music enthusiasts at the time have described how they felt about the Sex Pistols' performances in retrospect. Words like "intense," "challenging," and "transformative" are often used; they say that such performances inspired them to approach music-making more courageously (even with a pronounced amateurishness in terms of craftsmanship) – and to approach their content with much more determination and criticality. This is how the punk wave began in Great Britain.

How do you continue as a musician when you say no to the conditions in the music business, when you want to change them?

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A manager named Malcolm McLaren, however, viewed all the band's provocations primarily as an effective promotional tool and sent them on incessant tours to increase profits. Both of these activities disgusted Johnny Rotten because they forced him to put his artistic integrity aside for the sake of business, even to mutilate himself. He left the Sex Pistols after just one album.

Shortly thereafter, Public Image Limited was founded. The singer, now operating under his birth name, John Lydon, declared in numerous interviews that the band wanted to help transcend the rock music business; they were making "anti-rock." Their first single, "Public Image," mentioned above, begins with the lines: "You never listened to a word that I said/ you only see me from the clothes that I wear/ or did the interest go so much deeper/ it must have been to the color of my hair."

This song is indeed a form of protest. However, it's not directed at anti-art managers or record label executives, but at those who keep the music business running: the audience. You don't care about content at all, the song says. Instead, you're obsessed with looks, a desire for nothing but kicks, and superficiality.

Punk band The Jam took a similar approach in their single "Start," released a year after "Public Image." The first verse reads: "It doesn't matter for you to know my name/ nor I do not know yours/ if we communicate for two minutes only/ it would be enough." This, too, is a direct address to the audience. Unlike Public Image Limited, however, The Jam don't confront the audience with their base motives; the band, as it were, descends from their star pedestal, puts themselves on the same level as the listeners, and wants to engage in conversation with them. Such an encounter, even if it lasts no longer than a two-minute song, can potentially change your perspective and bring about new insights.

"Public Image" and "Start" – both were, as I felt at the time, a new kind of song. Sung media criticism, sung audience criticism. Songs that encouraged you to examine your own practice of music consumption, to ask yourself what you yourself are contributing to making the world upside down.

How do you continue as a musician when you say no to the conditions in the music business, when you want to change them? Public Image Limited practiced their rejection of rock on an aesthetic and artistic level. They experimented with form, integrating dub, funk, pure noise, and dissonance into their sound, shattering the dominant song format, and releasing several meditations on the dark side of human interaction that stretched far longer than ten minutes. Later, their music became much smoother, which led to huge hits with songs like "This is Not a Love Song" and "Rise."

Paul Weller, songwriter for The Jam, founded the band The Style Council after the band's dissolution. He was politically active both in and out of his songs, for example, opposing the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher's government. He has pursued a solo career since the early 1990s. He is considered a "British phenomenon," an artist with a large local audience and a relatively small international audience.

To this day, both John Lydon and Paul Weller criticize social conditions in their songs. But rebellious reflections on the entertainment industry itself—and that always also means their own actions—have completely disappeared from their oeuvre. Perhaps because, even as a critic of the music industry, one remains closely tied to this industry. Yet the worship of success, greed for profit, stupidity, sexism, celebrity obsession, conformism, and superficiality are by no means extinct—on the contrary, all of these determine the contemporary cultural industry to a frightening extent. In other words, the questioning of this very cultural industry and its audience, once sparked by the songs "Public Image" and "Start," is not lacking in good reason. Punk was never dead; it has remained highly relevant.