The musician John Lydon thought made the working classes look “stupid”
John Lydon is a musical revolutionary. Love him or loathe him, music would be very different from what we see now without Johnny Rotten. In the 1970s, when he and the Sex Pistols rose to fame, he and his bandmates brought music back to the working class, setting aside the elitism, pretentiousness and sold-out stadiums where you could hardly see the band you’d paid for and instead delivering something honest and raw. It ruffled feathers, but it was a pivotal moment in the trajectory of music.
Despite Sex Pistols now being a blip in music’s rear-view mirror, Lydon hasn’t been left on the roadside. He has toured with his band Public Image Ltd for decades and is never afraid to voice his opinions on various political and public issues. This comes with controversy often, but Lydon’s unwavering honesty is what people enjoy the most about him, whether they agree with his views or not.
Some people who certainly won’t agree with his views are the Osbournes following an interview in Birmingham where Lydon said Ozzy Osbourne was responsible for making the working classes look “stupid”. The Sex Pistols frontman went on his rant after saying ‘Paranoid’ was “one of the world’s greatest ever singles.”
“But since then, the rumours of biting heads really, really haven’t impressed me,” said Lydon, “Ozzy now acting like a senile delinquent is equally unimpressive. The sly innuendo of promoting drug abuse and catatonic stupidity offends me.”
Lydon made a point that his issue wasn’t with the use of drugs itself but how Ozzy uses them. “I’m not one for banning drugs,” he said, “Quite the opposite. But I understand how to use them, and they don’t use me. Ozzy is clearly a victim, and selling that loser lifestyle shit to other people equally victimises them.”
As a pioneer for the working class and one of the people credited for bringing a musical voice back to the working class, Lydon naturally holds them in high regard. “Ozzy’s a working-class man, like me, yet he allows that to happen. By acting like he does all the time, he implies that we’re all stupid, the working classes. But we’re not, you know. We’re not! We’re the proper Britain, us lot.”
Lydon received backlash at the time for his observation, not just because some disagreed with his comments but because of the convenience of when they were made. Ozzy’s daughter Kelly took to her weekly column to say, “Last week, John Lydon accused my dad of ‘acting like a senile delinquent’ and ‘promoting drug abuse’. People only say things like this when they want attention, and guess what? He has a book to promote!”
Lydon hasn’t reached where he is today without controversy; on some level, he owes most of his career to his controversy. When you are put on a platform for your unwavering opinions, it means there is less of a barrier between what you think and what you might say. For this reason, Lydon is forthcoming in giving his view on politics, music, and more, regardless of who he might offend. Of course, given he still has a career in the creative world, it isn’t impossible to think there are ulterior motives for the timing of some of his remarks.
