Alright, well all my theorizing about punk over these threads has led me here realistically I guess, so here we go.
This is an incredibly difficult band to analyse because there are both underrated and overrated simultaneously, but then they’re also bigger than just being a band, they represent a cultural zeitgeist and movement that massively shifted pop music, fashion and youth culture, all while being manufactured and in classic Brits at it again claimed to invent something that had existed in America already for almost a decade already.
Almost every other band around that scene were “better” than them, but none of them had the same crossover cultural reach. Glen Matlock is a really good songwriter and Rotten has bags of charisma even if this influenced a whole lineage of bellends. They sang songs that were considered revolutionary at the time but has aged badly and is a bit silly now, but still briefly provided a challenge to British status quo which hadn’t really happened before or since.
Without them, Punk wouldn’t have reached and continues to reach people to this day, even if there’s so many better examples out there of the style and they also represent the very worst aspects of punk culture.
If you haven’t gathered yet, they are a puzzle wrapped in an enigma, could reasonably be a 1 or 5, meaning they are worth 3 stars out of 5.
