‘World Destruction’: John Lydon’s strange pioneering hip-hop collaboration
The early 1980s in New York City was an extraordinary moment in cross-cultural, artistic melting pots, the prior decade’s punk, disco, and hip-hop explosions all sharing a close musical and geographical proximity in Manhatten’s East Village, new wave and post-punk collided with no wave dance acts like James Chance, ESG, and Liquid Liquid, all scoring the Lower East side’s vibrant counterculture, with heavy presence from South Bronx’s electro breakbeat.
Now under serious threat from ruthless corporate development and the death grip of gentrification, the original neighbourhood that brought the world Basquiat and CBGBs is sadly long out of reach for working-class artists.
In 1984, Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd frontman John Lydon, having already burned through the former band and now in PiL’s ‘second phase’, was seeing for himself what all the fuss was about. Exposed to the fledgling electro hip-hop pumped out of sound systems and nightclubs, Lydon came across the innovative breakbeat stylings of Afrika Bambaataa.
Hailing from the Bronx River Projects and inspired by a trip to Africa, Bambaataa formed the Zulu Nation group, a hip-hop collective dedicated to easing street tension and youth violence, and became a towering figure in the hip-hop scene with ’82’s ‘Planet Rock’, famously sampling Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans-Europe Express’.
After being introduced by producer and svengali Bill Laswell, Lydon agreed to lend his distinct, nasal whine to a new Bambaataa record, a good two years before Aerosmith’s more commercially successful rap crossover with Run-DMC. Lydon recollected in an ’18 interview with The Guardian: “The studio was full of people, all strangers,” he says. “I felt nervous and frightened: ‘I’m going to make a fool of myself here.’ Perfect!”
The end result was ’84’s ‘World Destruction’ with Bambaataa’s side-project Time Zone. A bombastic groove of chunky drums and processed guitar belligerently seizing your attention with funky angst, the track serves as a perfect cultural document of the New York scene, plus the international political turmoil of the era.
A lyrical spew of end-times paranoia and governmental brainwashing, “The human race is becoming a disgrace. Nationalities are fighting with each other. Why is this? Because the system tells you. Putting people in faceless categories. Knowledge isn’t what it used to be” the pair spit, channelling the febrile Cold War tensions and the neoliberal shifts taking place across the Western world.
Lydon’s flirtation with rap was mused with self-deprecation: “The rap thing hadn’t really existed until that point, but I related it to Jamaican toasting, which I loved. I didn’t mind singing someone else’s lyrics because the Pistols covered Who songs. The difficult bit is making them sound poignant and relevant … so I was over-enunciating, exploiting every word.”
Both artists are now seen very differently from those who formerly admired them. A string of child abuse allegations resulted in Bambaataa’s expulsion from Zulu Nation, and Lydon’s embrace of the MAGA right has eroded the respect he once demanded with his forthright opinion on a range of social topics. Despite such disappointments, ‘World Destruction’ still stands as an important document of organic, musical cross-pollination and a time when politics and pop saw merit in each other.
