Five times John Lydon proved his hypocrisy
For as long as he continues to remain in the public eye as a culturally relevant figure, you can always count on John Lydon to make a quotable remark, whether for better or worse. His ability to spew asinine remarks and retorts against the things he despises is as dependable as the earth rotating on its axis and its grass remaining green, and if he were to ever cease letting his inner monologue spill out into the press, my job would likely suffer from a severe lack of inflammatory headlines.
While he may have been a wind-up merchant from his early years fronting the Sex Pistols under his Johnny Rotten moniker, he would often appear to be in the right with his observations despite the obvious intention of being incendiary. His remarks may have lacked the intellectual nuance of some of his other punk peers, but he was often happy stating things that others were terrified to be so blunt about.
However, this Rotten persona that he created for himself would eventually prove to be exactly this: a carefully crafted character who thrived on aggravating everyone around him by rallying against popular opinion. It would turn out that his suspicions of the ruling classes would disintegrate the minute it began to be ‘cool’ to hate politicians and monarchs, and everything he once stood for has now become a thing of the past as he has reinvented himself as a contradiction of the anti-establishment figure he once was.
It would be easy to simply pick out a string of examples of where Lydon has proven himself to be a hypocrite, but he’s flip-flopped between points of view so much in recent years that it’s possible to line some of them up consecutively and witness them contend with one another as though he is continually at war with his own ideological beliefs.
Here are five of the best (or worst) examples of Lydon being a duplicitous fraud.
Five times John Lydon proved his hypocrisy:
He called Joe Strummer a “champagne socialist”
While the Clash frontman Joe Strummer idolised Lydon as the godfather of the punk movement that he would find himself in, Lydon certainly didn’t harbour much appreciation for one of his most ardent devotees, asserting that he believed their identity was built on a complete farce.
He’d go on record rallying against Strummer for how he lapped up the luxuries of being a successful rock and roll star, talking about how his opposite lived in a mansion and “pretended to hop off buses”.
“You can’t be a champagne socialist,” Lydon asserted. “You’ve got to be more honest than that.”
This is, of course, incredibly rich from a Donald Trump-supporting expat who lives in Los Angeles, essentially devoid of all his roots as a working-class Londoner.
He referred to Donald Trump as “anarchistic”
Being from a working-class background with Irish immigrant parents and now being an immigrant himself, you’d think that Lydon would despise everything that the xenophobic tycoon president stands for. Having always conveyed a mistrust in politicians, it would make sense for Lydon to detest a man whose time in power has been a catalogue of hate-filled rhetoric and deceitful behaviour.
“I’m anti politicians, and I always have been,” Lydon said in an exclusive interview with Far Out in 2023. While this fits in with his older points of view, he would go on to praise Trump for his unpolitical approach. “He was not a politician at all in any way. And he threw an anarchistic spanner in the works and shook them all up.”
Considering Trump is staunchly right-wing in his policies and ideologies, and anarchy relies on the dismantling of plutocratic power structures in favour of the leftist community, it’s quite safe to assume that Lydon has grossly misinterpreted what the Trump administration is offering him.
He thinks anarchy is “a terrible idea”
From calling Donald Trump “anarchistic” and exclaiming “I am an anarchist” in his own material, Lydon seems to enjoy using the word and all of its derivations but has little understanding of what it truly means to be a supporter of anarchy. Also, it turns out the second statement that he made in the lyrics of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ is a complete lie.
In a column for The Times, Lydon wrote: “Anarchy is a terrible idea. Let’s get that clear. I’m not an anarchist. And I’m amazed that there are websites out there – .org anarchist sites – funded fully by the corporate hand and yet ranting on about being outside the shitstorm. It’s preposterous.”
He isn’t wrong about it being hypocritical for corporations and anarchist groups to be co-operating, but he’s misguided in his belief that this is the case, and his insinuation that he doesn’t believe in it is radically different to his former stance.
He never actually hated the monarchy
For a man who wrote the most viciously anti-monarchy anthem of all time, you’d think that his hatred for the Royal Family would be one of his least flexible points of view. ‘God Save the Queen’ (the Sex Pistols song, not the former national anthem) called Queen Elizabeth II a “fascist”, suggesting that he might be in favour of the Windsors’ abolition.
On the contrary, it seems. In the same column for The Times where he denounced anarchism, he was also quoted as saying: “God bless the Queen. She’s put up with a lot. I’ve got no animosity against any one of the royal family. Never did.”
I suppose denying her humanity and qualifying your statements with “we mean it, man” counts for fuck all nowadays.
He thinks the new Sex Pistols are “woke”
Speaking of ‘nowadays’, everything’s gone ‘woke’ in the eyes of your local village idiot. From off-colour flags on football kits to renaming geographical locations to their native tongue, everyone’s getting their knickers in a twist about the ‘wokification’ of today’s society. What exactly does that mean? It means you’re either too privileged or prejudiced to have anything of genuine concern to complain about. Lydon ironically fits into both of these categories these days.
Lydon’s old band, the Sex Pistols, have recently reformed without him and instead replaced him with former Gallows and The Rattlesnakes’ frontman, Frank Carter. Lydon called this move “Walt Disney woke expectations,” and said he’d never return to the lineup because of how they’ve “turned the whole thing into a rubbish, childishness, and that’s unacceptable.”
In one of the most ‘pot and kettle’ statements ever made, this is the peak of Lydon’s idiotic revisionism – and revising old beliefs is supposedly ‘woke’.
