God Save Johnny Rotten

J ohnny Rotten is all alone.

He must be, in his way, mourning Queen Elizabeth II, who performed the great unintended service of giving the Sex Pistols a symbol worth sneering at — something the United Kingdom did not have a great store of in 1977. Johnny — he’s been just John Lydon for many years now — lives a quiet life in his comfortable, respectable retirement in California, caring for Nora, his wife of almost 50 years, who has Alzheimer’s. The most famous of his bandmates, Sid Vicious, has been dead for 43 years. Some of the others are still making music, but they could walk into a record store (there are still some) and stand in front of a case of Sex Pistols records without anybody’s noticing them — they are just a few of the remaining children of the 1950s in a world that has moved on.

The Sex Pistols recorded “God Save the Queen” in 1977, and Jamie Reid’s famous cover has been praised as the greatest rock-’n’-roll record cover of all times. The song, the art, and the sneer have been endlessly imitated, but never quite equaled.

And they rarely have been understood.

The received imagery of “God Save the Queen” — the angry radicals denouncing the stodgy embodiment of the establishment as the figurehead of a “fascist regime” — could not be more obvious, and it could not be more false. Punk rock, for all of its outrageous histrionics, is and always has been fundamentally (if not obviously) conservative, whereas Queen Elizabeth was the symbol of what those conservatives, unselfconscious reactionaries though they generally were, abhorred: the post-war era in British public life.

That punk has generally been musically conservative would be difficult to dispute, in that it represented a return to a prior form (the relatively straightforward rock-’n’-roll of the 1950s and early 1960s) and a rejection of the excesses of the late 1960s and 1970s (all those 20-minute guitar solos and “Stairway to Heaven” pretensions). Chuck Berry would have recognized the double-stops in the playing of Sex Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones — he had been the one to translate them to guitar from his bandmate Johnnie Johnson’s piano — while in the United States, the Ramones were basically reworking Beach Boys songs and playing 1950s rock, just louder and faster. (As everybody knows, there are only four chords in pop music.) The Sex Pistols were a lot closer musically to Buck Owens and Tennessee Ernie Ford than they were to Rush and King Crimson.

But the conservatism doesn’t stop with the music. Because American conservatives are inheritors of the English liberal tradition, we sometimes forget that there is another kind of conservatism, one that has been at times very prominent in the United Kingdom. That conservatism is agrarian, localist, anti-industrial, opposed to the power of concentrated urban wealth, and gradually hostile to capitalism as the scale of enterprise increases — a conservatism that says “Yes” to free enterprise when it means farmers’ markets and “maybe, but, possibly not” when it means SoftBank or Google or Hyundai. You can find that kind of conservatism in the anti-industrialism of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels or in the poems of T. S. Eliot, which are modernist in form and anti-modernist in sentiment.

You can find a less literate version of it in punk rock. The post-war era was exceedingly grim in the United Kingdom — deprived, dysfunctional, and depressed, with a landscape of physically ugly slums and degraded countryside. Reaction against that grimy degradation was not only nihilism: Punk rock’s perpetually offended moral sensibility and its lamentations for frustrated national and communal aspirations, so evident and urgent in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, implied, though rarely articulated, something to aspire toward as well as something to turn away from in revulsion.

The lyrics of “God Save the Queen” are not exactly coherent (the lyrics to good rock songs rarely are), but the denunciations come through: the royals as the center of a tawdry tourism scheme, the “human machine,” the advertising that sustains that machine, the industrial urban life that abandons people as “flowers in the dustbin.” “There is no future / and England’s dreaming” is a lyric from that famous song, but it could have fit into The Waste-Land with little alteration. Queen Elizabeth II, crowned in 1953 and forever associated with the war and its ghastly aftermath, wasn’t the symbol of the ancient order at all, but the symbol of a new order — in some quarters, a detested one. From that point of view, the desecration of Queen Elizabeth as a symbol was not what it seemed.

Of course, the performative outrage would not have worked if Queen Elizabeth II had been something more like her son Charles, or like the nasty creatures of Sussex who are bent on inflicting themselves on American public life, for some reason. There would have been no “God Save the Queen” if Queen Elizabeth had not been serious, patriotic, dutiful, and all those other things. To attack her as a symbol was to confess the power of the symbol and the virtue that produced that power; one sees much the same thing in so-called Satanists who can produce nothing of their own, their imagination being limited to inverting the Cross, the symbolic power of which is undisputed. The old joke about Unitarians notwithstanding, nobody actually burns a giant question mark on your lawn. I am sure that somebody will mention Meghan Markle in a few songs (or that somebody already has), but we won’t be talking about those songs in 50 years, because Meghan Markle is not worth sneering at. Queen Elizabeth was.

If you have ever seen him talk at any length, what comes through from John Lydon is not outrage or nihilism but disappointment and frustration based in a very English sense of fair play and right conduct. “God Save the Queen” was the work of people who understood the power of symbols and who cared about their value — as, of course, Queen Elizabeth herself did. That was the whole point of it.

It’s a funny old world. Ozzy Osbourne, another rock-’n’-roll rebel now foundering in decadent respectability, began his career in musical theatrics with Black Sabbath, treating Christian imagery much the way the Sex Pistols treated royal imagery and patriotic imagery. He has announced that he is leaving behind sunny California and going home to die in England. “I don’t want to be buried in f***ing Forest Lawn,” he says, referencing the Hollywood Hills resting place of the stars. “I’m English.” America, he says, is too “crazy” for his taste. And it must take something special to offend the taste of a man who made himself a star by biting the heads off bats. But, he is right: He’s English, and he is old enough for that still to mean something.

Queen Elizabeth was born before World War II, whereas the Sex Pistols, Ozzy Osbourne, and the rest of that generation were born in the years after it. (Osbourne, born in 1948, practically landed in the rubble.) But they are much more part of the same world — the same civilization — than they are part of the world of anyone who is 20 years old today. Queen Elizabeth’s death does not definitively mark the end of that world. The death of Johnny Rotten just might.