... are presumably not mourning the passing of Malcolm McLaren -- unlike the way they would have been mourning, say, the death of Ian Curtis in 1980, or Curt Cobain in 1994, or Jeff Buckley in 1997. But if those High School girls had been doing their homework, instead of spending half the night Facebooking, texting, and hanging on the telephone, they might have discovered that McLaren is in no small part responsible for the pop cultural landscape they inhabit.
It is ironic, no, not ironic, funny, well, no, not funny at all, actually, just a horrible coincidence, that what took him was mesothelioma, a disease that is mostly known for attacking people who have been exposed to high levels of asbestos, a fire retardant: ironic/not ironic, funny/not funny, horribly coincidental because McLaren spent large parts of his adult life deflecting the many powerful blowtorches that were periodically fired at him.
For those of us a million miles away from The King's Road in the early 1970s, our first awareness of Malcolm was as the face -- or perhaps more accurately the mouth -- behind The Sex Pistols. But there is no evidence that his life before then -- if he was 64 when he died then he must have been around 30 the year punk broke -- was that of a shrinking violet. A person who didn't want to draw attention to himself would not, in 1975, in Mary Whitehouse's Britain, have renamed his clothes shop "Sex".
Here I rehash my take on the Sex Pistols. Musically, they were no big deal. They released two exhilarating and still remarkable singles, which captured the anger of the UK at a particular moment, but they very quickly became cartoon characters of themselves, and not in a good way, and of course the whole thing ended in farce followed by tragedy (or possibly the other way around). But for McLaren the Sex Pistols was never about the music so much as it was a kind of social experiment concocted to see how far he could push "things". He may not even have had a direction in mind, other than just to get something happening, and hang (or, in fact, overdose) the consequences.
In his adventure with the Pistols, McLaren was an early exponent of the use of the media as a tool. Was he an anarchist, a philosopher, or a shrewd businessman? You cannot ignore his tendency to use people and then spit them out. That must weigh against all that he did achieve, but surely doesn't negate it. His enthusiasm for the new, his love of music, his drive to shake things up: these are the things he should be remembered for.
But musically, for at least some part of him was in "the music business", he should be remembered for "Duck Rock". Presumably chastened by the death of Sid Vicious, and maybe a little bit frightened by what the Sex Pistols wrought (you might imagine him looking down from a high balcony at a scene of utter devastation and carnage, and then looking at his hands, and thinking, "Did these do all of that?"), but still perhaps running on adrenaline, he shortly unleashed Bow Wow Wow onto an unsuspecting but, for the most part, uninterested world, and then he seems to have gone on some kind of world tour of musical discovery, which he distilled, with the help of Trevor Horn and a long list of other accomplices, into "Duck Rock". I love this album, although I wasn't sure what to make of it at the time. In fact, it felt like it had dropped from some passing spaceship, en route from another planet entirely.
It appeared, as if out of necessity, at a time when the New Pop was in the process of congealing into a horrible parody of itself, where what you looked like in the mirror was more important than the sounds you made. There are days when I honestly believe that "Double Dutch" is the greatest single ever. There are other days when I think more deeply about the album, and about the snail trail it has left through almost every corner of the pop landscape since. Its interest in the township music of Soweto can be heard today, in the music of Vampire Weekend and jj. More immediately, it paved the way for releases like "Indestructible Beat of Soweto", on Shanachie, and more broadly the emergence and growth into maturity of that thing we reluctantly call "World Music". Its early embrace of what was then known as "break dancing" culture, graffiti, Keith Haring paintings, Velcro'd sneakers and ghetto blasters, well, it's impossible now to imagine a world without those things, but at the time you would almost have had to have been physically located in certain pockets of New York to be aware of them. The way the album is structured, with songs drifting in and out of radio chatter, and the songs themselves seemingly constructed from almost random bits and pieces, introduced the world to sampling culture, and ultimately paved the way for the mash-up. It must have had some influence on later records like "As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt 2" and the Girl Talk albums. Even the piano motif on "World's Famous" predicts acid jazz and, if you want to stretch things ever so slightly further, numerous subgenres of house music, old and new.
Those High School girls, though, I have often thought, was the one Malcolm McLaren controversy that the world wasn't yet ready for. Imagine, in this fallen, post-Gary Glitter world, a middle-aged man (at least by "industry" standards) getting away with a song like "Double Dutch" today, and its attendant visual imagery of girls in short pants jumping rope. It is the sort of stunt only a Malcolm McLaren would dare to pull. And yet at the time (or so I remember) it was seen as good clean fun, and taken entirely at face value, or maybe it was just trampled over in the rush to pillory him for his use (by theft or otherwise) of music from black South Africa in the darkest days of Apartheid.
It is an album that may not have been well understood at the time of its release, but it is surely one of very few records that can prove, in hindsight, to have been a road map for so much of the next thirty years of pop music.
"Duck, duck, duck."
