The first premise of this chapter is that the Sex Pistols’ music was, in many regards, not particularly shocking nor transgressive of various musical norms of its era. Harmonically, for example, the band were clearly happy enough to present chord structures that descend the V-I sequence and/or that adopt the I-IV-V structure which had been at the heart of most Western music for centuries, from church hymns to so-called popular music (Middleton, 1993: 185). The basic ‘rock band’ format, meanwhile, was very familiar in the mid-to-late 1970s, as were the arrangements within the group’s material: four-on-the-floor drum patterns, full-blooded bar-chords on the guitar, decorative counter-melodic patterns on the bass including ‘walking’ patterns at times and so forth. However, there is one element within the Sex Pistols’ oeuvre that is more discernibly transgressive of the musical norms in pop and rock circa 1976: the vocal performances delivered by John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten). Lydon’s vocal lines are not entirely untuneful: ‘God Save the Queen’, for example, clearly makes a IV-iii-ii-I descent to the tonic note as Lydon sings ‘no future for you/me/you’ at the end of the recording, thus offering a fundamental line that very much conformed to centuries of musical tradition. Nonetheless, Lydon’s performances across the 1977 Never Mind the Bollocks album demonstrate that he was capable of significant vocal dexterity and, at times, vocal innovation: the rolled ‘r’, selective alternations from head voice to chest voice as well as, at interesting moments, a form of ‘twang’, and so forth. Lydon’s vocal performances tend toward the theatrical but they include elements that are ostentatiously ‘in poor taste’: off-pitch intonation, rasped timbres and suchlike. The chapter therefore explores the music of Never Mind the Bollocks with a special interest in Barthes’ concept of ‘the grain of the voice’.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)