John Lydon, the artist formerly known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, revives pop music’s excitement with the wake-up challenge in his new album End of World. The sense of embattlement implied by that title is basic; dropping “the” to convey personally felt privation. Homeland invaded, from the U.S. to Europe, we’re all bereft of security — only media shills or the criminally naïve feel that things are going okay.
But Lydon has always made art out of his dissatisfaction. End of World not only rocks, it articulates discontent; the musical pulse, uncanny insight, and purifying release prove that the legendary 1977 album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was not a one-off. Lydon’s post-punk band, Public Image Ltd, expanded his musical style, and his voice is always a clarion, warning about the deep hypocrisies of social institutions and individual egos. He speaks the common language of the millennium, especially after the disenfranchisement of the Covid-era lockdowns and the unethical social realignments that followed.
On “Car Chase,” he sings, “I am the man for all season / I don’t get bothered / I don’t get bored / I get ignored.” It’s the perfect forgotten-man lyric from the punk who, 46 years ago, declared, “I’m nobody’s fool!” Still gifted with anger, stinging humor, and energy, he is pop culture’s great scold. Lydon’s aware of the fray but helps us through it. Sex Pistols songs are still blazingly cathartic. The songs on End of World outrun social monitors — those “stakeholders” who control pop discourse for their own tyrannical benefit. Lydon’s truth-telling is rousing because he has already anticipated the dull media responses — especially today’s dead rock-music journalism that has exchanged rebellion for establishment elitism and cancel culture.
One pundit who complained about Lydon’s “preoccupations, which tend toward the old-white-man variety” revealed typical corporate-media resentment as currently lodged against Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond.” So Lydon answers such class snobbery with the remarkable opening track, “Penge,” citing ideological gentrification in a London suburb that can never escape its history of warfare and struggle. Oliver Anthony aims for this, but Lydon’s beer-pub-music hall-punk rowdiness (his inner Ian Dury) never risks sanctimony — even when his song confesses “the depth of misery.”
Some joked that Johnny Rotten sang as if someone was standing on his foot, but, actually, Lydon originated a singular protest voice that was shrill, temperamental yet inspiring. (Legend has it that either Miles Davis or Ornette Coleman said Lydon “sang like I play trumpet.”) At age 67, Lydon’s vocals retain punk rawness but can also veer into quieter, purposeful modes to suit his lyrical brilliance. On the title track, “End of World,” his lines “Down over the edge / Where the clifftop is bleak” describe our existential predicament. Perched between mockery and doom, he urges contemplation — not just political reaction, but moral response.
Public Image Ltd’s core musicians (Lu Edmonds’s soaring, searing, siren guitar; Scott Firth and Bruce Smith) swing between head-banging and brain-stirring vividness. It’s a breathtaking approach to combat rhetorical snark and dishonesty, as on “Being Stupid Again,” a marvelous riposte to the tradition of indoctrinated lemmings: “You’re being stupid again / Well done / It’s the students again / So sloganed again.” It’s ingeniously paced to the subtle reverb of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s imperishable “Sunset People.”
When Lydon ventures into the purely rhetorical, his English pith is matchless. “Walls” reverses the utterly banal topicality of Barbra Streisand’s anti-Trump tune “Walls” and corrects it: “Defund your grief / Defend your police/ Acknowledge these walls” (emphasis mine).
Surveying the current rule of fools, Lydon addresses the spiritual crisis (“Strange,”) trans wars (“Pretty Awful” features the Morrisseyean line “And your pants, well, they’re pants”) and the bottomless pit of wokeness (“Down on the Clowns”). Finally fed up, he unleashes “LFCF” to corral our acronymized institutions and their lackeys. The snappy “Liars / Fakes / Cheats / and Frauds” recalls the terrific percussive chorus on PiL’s “Seattle.” “Hawaii,” the closing track, is a love song that serves as both private eulogy (for Lydon’s wife) and an elegy for the old-world civilization that’s been lost.
End of World adds to the rare, brave declarations by pop artists such as Van Morrison and Morrissey who fearlessly challenge pop-culture conformity. As ever, Lydon knows what’s at stake. He chants, “I love it when you slate me / But you cannot fake me.” Even on “North West Passage,” a hilarious tale of Jack London intrepidness (“Mush, mush”), Lydon is always on point, the master of invective and magnification that we need.