Photo from Sid Vicious: Rock ‘n’ roll star The Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotton/Lydon, Sid Vicious and Steve Jones gave no solutions, but looked to chaos.

The Filth and the Fury, a documentary on seminal 1970s punk rockers the Sex Pistols, comes to the UICA downtown this Friday and Saturday at 7 and 9 p.m. both nights, and at 4 p.m. on Saturday. Admission is $5 for UICA members and students.

In 1955, Jacques Ellul—pastor, writer, professor, once active in the French Resistance, and Reformed prophet-theologian par excellance—predicted in The Technological Society that modern media and technological development would create “psychological collectivism … [brought] to the ideal, absolute limit,” a global fascism of Brave New World proportions whose control would be all the more secure because its victims would enjoy it. He wrote:

Human activity in the technical milieu must correspond to this milieu and also must be collective. It must belong to the order of the conditioned reflex. Complete human discipline must respond to technical necessity. And as the technical milieu concerns all men, no mere handful of them but the totality of society is to be conditioned in this way.

Roughly twenty years later, Johnny Rotten—née John Lydon, 20 years old, unemployed, undereducated, a singer with no-hope London rockers the Sex Pistols—penned “God Save the Queen” in twenty minutes sitting at his kitchen table. Rotten, like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, speaks as one trapped in the Technological Society (he calls it “the human machine”) and imagines what it means to be there, and then to resist:

Where there’s no future there cannot be sin

We’re the flowers in the dustbin

We’re the poison in the human machine

We’re the future—Your future

Around the same time came a similar manifesto, “Anarchy in the U.K.”:

Anarchy in the U.K.

It’s coming sometime, and maybe

I’ll give a wrong time, stop a traffic line

Your future dream is a shopping scheme

In other words, if Ellul’s “technique” makes the future into a “shopping scheme”—that is, “no future”—the only resistance left is violent inefficiency and disruption. “I /Wanna be /Anarchy,” Rotten declares, choosing disorder over an order that negates humanness. Johnny Rotten’s lyrics for “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen” were and are a lot more than calculated attempts to piss people off, though they certainly were that too. Behind the poster nihilism was a radical, almost prophetic stance, as if Rotten saw the same destructive tendencies in the modern state that Ellul had seen and coldly, level-headedly, like Ellul, described them. There is no future, he says, in the shopping scheme, the technological society, where entertainment, efficiency and capital are the only shared values. And where there’s no future—nothing to hope for, no telos for life beyond stuffing oneself with junk food, cell phones and cheap sex—there cannot be sin. Why not shoot your classmates?

The Sex Pistols saw—a few years before everyone else did—that the material and technological wealth of the West wouldn’t produce a poverty-free efficient utopia, but an air-conditioned prison in which the only apparent means of resistance are barbaric anarchy on the one hand, and bestial extremism on the other, whether in the wild growth of militancy or in Eric Harris’s and Dylan Kleibold’s mercilessly overexposed classroom massacre. The band responded with loud, dissonant rock, chaotic and unearthly but obviously fascinated with ideas of order (as in “Holidays in the Sun,” a terrifying meditation on the Berlin Wall). They used rock and roll to predict the chaos at the end of modernism.

For these reasons the Sex Pistols rank with the great rock performers—Aretha, the Velvet Underground, Marvin Gaye—the ones who took an idiom and made something really new out of it, something that smacked you upside the head with truth or beauty. They’ve been awaiting a Christian appraisal and response for far too long. There are good reasons for this.

They were jerks, first off. As rightly as they describe the world we live in, they seem in their songs (and more so in their interviews) to almost enjoy the destruction. In this way, they mirror our own accident-gawking, news-watching, celebrity-obsessed ways, but it isn’t pleasant to watch.

They’re not Christians. Unlike Ellul, they don’t offer any solutions. But an accurate diagnosis is pretty good wherever you can get it, and an accurate and artful diagnosis can give the inspiration, along with the encouragemOctober 3 at 7 p.m. in the FAC and only $3.ent in fighting, that we look for in art.

Everyone likes to say that they were incompetent musicians, which isn’t true. No one who listens to “Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols,” their first full album and best, can say they couldn’t play. Steve Jones’s guitar is meaty and thick, and Rotten’s sandpaper vocals rank with the best in pop sprechstissime (sung-speech), fluidly adapting to the persona of an East German or an aborted baby (abortion-on-demand is part of the technological society too, and the Pistols have an interesting ambivalence toward it). If you can put up with Bob Dylan, you can surely put up with this.

The Sex Pistols saw that our obsession with mediated reality was damning many of us to a life without the genuine article, and worse, utterly blurring the boundaries between the two. Finally the anger and ugliness of their music sounds most like a frantic cry for help, for clarification, for something unambiguously real. It’s good stuff. Julien Temple’s documentary The Filth and the Fury, showing tonight and Saturday at UICA downtown, promises to be a quick but thorough introduction to these brilliant and prophetic noisemakers. Go.

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