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“Anarchy in the U.K.” truly did distill an old, forgotten social critique, that is interesting; if, in a new “potlatch,” in a conversation of a few thousand songs, “Anarchy in the U.K.” brought that critique to life—that is something far more than interesting.
    This story, if it is a story, doesn’t tell itself; once I’d glimpsed its outlines, I wanted to shape the story so that every fragment, every voice, would speak in judgment of every other, even if the people behind each voice had never heard of the others. Especially if they hadn’t; especially if, in “Anarchy in the U.K.,” a twenty-year-old called Johnny Rotten had rephrased a social critique generated by people who, as far as he knew, had never been born. Who knew what else was part of the tale? If one can stop looking at the past and start listening to it, one might hear echoes of a new conversation; then the task of the critic would be to lead speakers and listeners unaware of each other’s existence to talk to one another. The job of the critic would be to maintain the ability to be surprised at how the conversation goes, and to communicate that sense of surprise to other people, because a life infused with surprise is better than a life that is not.
    My wish to make sense of the outline I began with became a wish to make sense of the confusion the outline immediately produced: to make sense of such cryptic pronouncements, mysteries blithely claiming all the weight of history, as that made by Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre in 1975—
     
    to the degree that modernity has a meaning, it is this: it carries within itself, from the beginning, a radical negation—Dada, this event which took place in a Zurich cafe.
    Or that of the situationists in 1963: “The moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.” Was that line, I wondered, a clue to the promise of the Berlin dadaists in 1919?
     
    dada is the only savings bank that pays interest in eternity.
    Or to the appeal of the Sex Pistols’ most famous slogan, “NO FUTURE”? To the no-future chill in the face of lettrist Serge Berna as he posed for thecamera in 1952? To the manifesto of one Guy-Ernest Debord, running a few pages on in the same obscure volume that carried Berna’s portrait: “The art of the future will be the overthrow of situations, or nothing”? Or to the boast the situationists left behind in 1964:
     
    While present-day impotence rambles on about the belated project of “getting into the twentieth century,” we think it is high time to put an end to the
dead time
that has dominated this century, and to finish the Christian era with the same stroke. Here as elsewhere, it’s a matter of breaking the bounds of measurement. Ours is the best effort so far to
get out
of the twentieth century.
    We are already a long way from a pop song—but a pop song was supposed to be a long way from “I am an antichrist.” We are already at a point where an appeal to rock ’n’ roll will tell us almost nothing worth knowing, though this is, finally, a rock ’n’ roll story. Real mysteries cannot be solved, but they can be turned into better mysteries.

VERSION ONE
THE LAST SEX PISTOLS CONCERT

     
THE LAST SEX PISTOLS CONCERT
    His teeth were ground down to points. So one heard, when Johnny Rotten rolled his r’s; when in 1918 draft dodger Richard Huelsenbeck told a polite Berlin audience gathered to hear a lecture on a new tendency in the arts that “We were for the war and Dadaism today is still for war. Life must hurt—there aren’t enough cruelties”; when in 1649 the Ranter Abiezer Coppe unfurled his
Fiery Flying Roll
(“Thus saith the Lord,
I inform you, that I overturn, overturn, overturn”);
when in 1961 the Situationist International issued a prophecy, a “warning to those who build ruins: after the town planners will come the last troglodytes of the slums and the ghettos. They will know how to build. The privileged ones from