MIKEROSCOPIC | Bodies
Bodies
by Michael Lindgren
“She was a girl from Birmingham,” snarls Johnny Rotten, biting off the syllables like he’s tearing meat off a bone — “an’ she just had an abortion…” So kicks off the Sex Pistols song “Bodies,” a high-velocity blast of sonic splatter on the landmark Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols. Even on an album of ferocious songs, “Bodies” stands out for its unusually graphic lyrics: the girl from Birmingham is “dragged on a table in a factory… in a packet in a lavatory,” and the aborted fetus is described as “a throbbing squirm, gurgling bloody mess,” before Rotten spits out the penultimate lines: “Fuck this and fuck that / fuck it all and fuck a fucking brat / SHE DON’T WANT A BABY THAT LOOKS LIKE THAT / I DON’T WANT A BABY THAT LOOKS LIKE THAT.”
It’s a beautiful, horrifying performance, a brutal shoving of the listeners’ face into the messy chaos of bodies, pregnancy, and abortion, an angry cry of fear and revulsion. Ripping the lid off illicit abortion with such uncompromising language was part of the Pistols’ meaning, their courage, and their integrity: in England in 1977 such things weren’t part of the public discourse, let along a topic for pop songs, and the effect was visually underscored by the violence they effected on their own bodies, stapled and scarred and mutilated in reaction to the narcissistic high-glam sheen of superstar rock.
As usual, though, the Mikeroscope tells a slightly different story, the more interesting for being the more complicated. Despite, or perhaps because of, their immense notoriety, the Pistols remain one of the most misunderstood bands in rock’n'roll history. The Sex Pistols were provocateurs above all, and their political and cultural content starts and stops there. Their predecessors the New York Dolls got a subversive kick out of dressing in drag; their peers the Ramones were capable of singing affectionately about rebellious punkettes, while the Clash’s songs were informed by a thoughtfully constructed leftist agenda.
In contrast, the Pistols were interested in shock value only; they were authentically nihilist, with no regard for value-statements, theirs or others. They wore T-shirts with swastikas and they wore T-shirts with homoerotic drawings of policemen kissing, and saw no difference. They were well-coached in the art of exploiting public outrage by their svengali Malcolm McLaren, and they weren’t stupid.
Which brings us back to “Bodies,” which is a difficult artifact from which to extract an exegesis, to put it mildly. The plangent wail of “Mummy!” at the end of the song and the lines “I’m not a discharge / I’m not a loss in protein” come uncomfortably, suspiciously close to implying agency. Underneath the leather and spit and blood and track marks we find… anti-abortion fundamentalists? On the other hand, the “dragged on a table in a factory” description of the illicit abortion has the deliberate explicitness of cinema verite-style muckraking, and the keening chorus — “Body! I’m not an animal” could just as easily be the cry of the “girl from Birmingham,” protesting a society that enforces her status as a mindless, breeding animal: livestock, in short.
So what are we left with, then, after these contradictions, contained within an evocative but hardly precise cultural document, penned by a group of subliterate working-class teenagers over thirty years ago, in a land across the sea? Well, the music, for one; mythology aside, Bollocks is the work of a band playing with a precision and power that belied their reputation as amateur hacks, just as Rotten’s free-associative lyrics convey, with great economy, real power and horror.
The song’s true force is located in Steve Jones’s roaring guitar line, in the heavily syncopated intro (practically prog-rock by the Pistols’ austere standards), in Paul Cook’s crushing backbeat (especially the stuttering kick/snare figure at the jump at 1:51). Most of all, the feral directness of Rotten’s singing still jumps out of the speakers, raging against limits, for all of us, male or female, who feel trapped within our bodies, shouting, I’m not an animal.
Filed under: mikeroscopic | 7 Comments
Tags: art, birmingham, bodies, bollocks, clash, column, girl, johnny rotten, journal, literature, malcolm mclaren, mike lindgren, mikeroscopic, never mind the bollocks here's the sex pistol, New York, paul cook, rock, sex pistols, steve jones, um, Urban Molecule
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Awesome article, Mike! I’ve never gotten too much into the Pistols, but I think I might have to give them another listen soon. I was always more partial to The Ramones myself. After all, it was The Ramones who sang at Mr. Burns’ birthday gala. Okay, sorry, silly Simpsons reference. “Have the Rolling Stones killed.” But SIR, those aren’t…” “DO AS I SAY!”
I want to be a rebellious punkette. I assume Rotten would disapprove?
mike, you helped answer a few questions I’ve always had about the Sex Pistols. thank you for a dose of rock skool. what a fascinating band..
I’ve always liked the Sex Pistols, and “Bodies” (not in a very committed way–I haven’t listened to them a whole lot, a statement which should serve as a caveat for all that follows), but I think that you’re right about their primary concern being shock value, and that this, if not negates, hampers the value of their songs as “statements,” or “positions”–yes, there are moments when it seems that they’re attributing agency to the fetus, but at the same time it’s hard to imagine the Sex Pistols as making a plea for the sanctity of human life, unborn or otherwise. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it thins the enjoyment I’m able to get out of the songs–not because I want them to be teaching me a lesson, but because I feel that those guys are on some level committed to keeping themselves withdrawn, emotionally and intellectually. That’s not to say that there isn’t, like you say, real power in their music, but it feels to me like pure defiance, like a gesture that’s not necessarily referring to anything, like an attitude that doesn’t necessarily have any content. If that makes any sense. I always preferred the Ramones and the New York Dolls, whose subversive defiance seemed like a subordinate part of a general program of fun and gusto. On the other hand, the Clash’s politics always rubbed me the wrong way; it seemed like they would have felt guilty about rocking out if they hadn’t furnished themselves with some ideological excuse first. But, like I said above, I haven’t listened to or researched any of these bands enough to really know what I’m talking about. Anyway, Lester Bangs loved the Clash, didn’t he? So that proves they were great. (Someone once told me that Lester Bangs loved Abba, with a love that was free of irony. Is this true?)
“Bodies” has weird personal associations for me, because I first heard it a bunch, not from the album, but from my friend Simon, with whom I used to go to karaoke a lot, and who used to sing it all the time. He’d sing the opening lines in the office where we worked, ad nauseum. Other songs he’d sing incessantly were a plethora of numbers from Magnetic Fields’s “69 Love Songs,” like “Busby Berkley Dreams,” and, especially, Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” (”Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Cathy, I’ve come home,” etc.), which is why, for me, the Sex Pistols’s “Bodies” will always be closely linked to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.”
Very well written piece, Mike.
Your speculations that “Bodies” could have an anti-abortion subtext or a subtext protesting a society that enforces “the girl from Birmingham” made me think about the song in a new way.
Mostly, though, your observation, in the last paragraph, on the power of the instrumentation and Rotten’s voice struck me as insightful and striking.
Alicia
Mike,
Your thoughtful exposition of the Sex Pistols’ artistry belies all my long-standing usual notions about their achievement, and also the idea of them as “subliterate.” Well done!
Jon