Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs [Paperback]

John Lydon (Author), Keith Zimmerman (Author), Kent Zimmerman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 2008

"I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die."--John Lydon

Punk has been romanticized and embalmed in various media. It has been portrayed as an English class revolt and a reckless diversion that became a marketing dream. But there is no disputing its starting point. Every story of punk starts with its idols, the Sex Pistols, and its sneering hero was Johnny Rotten.

In Rotten, Lydon looks back at himself, the Sex Pistols, and the "no future" disaffection of the time. Much more than just a music book, Rotten is an oral history of punk: angry, witty, honest, poignant, and crackling with energy.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Much has been written about the Sex Pistols. Much of it has either been sensationalism or journalistic psychobabble. The rest has been mere spite. This book is as close to the truth as one can get ... This means contradictions and insults have not been edited, and neither have the compliments, if any. I have no time for lies or fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die."

So writes author John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten, in his introduction to the book Rotten, an oral history of punk: angry, honest, and crackling with energy. Seventies punk has been romanticized by the media and the up-and-coming punk bands of today, but the sneering, leering disaffection of that time has been lost. Now, Lydon candidly and at times, dare we say it, fondly looks back at himself, the Sex Pistols, and the "no future" attitude of the time. Rolling Stone calls Lydon a "pavement philosopher whose Dickensian roots blossom with Joycean color," and the San Francisco Chronicle calls Rotten an "invaluable [book] ... sheds welcome light on that short period of great music and spasmodic cultural change."

Bollocks you say? Read, sneer, and enjoy or die. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Britain's short-lived, notorious late-'70s punk band the Sex Pistols has become one of rock 'n' roll's greatest legends. But it's time to set the record straight, writes Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, frontman for the Pistols and author of the controversial songs--"Anarchy in the U.K.," "God Save the Queen"--which made his band an immediate sensation. In his engagingly nasty and unexpectedly witty autobiography, he seeks to demythologize the Sex Pistols by suggesting that punk rockers are just like the rest of us, people with families, friends and financial troubles. Vitriolic about the British class system and the music industry, Lydon is nevertheless unabashedly affectionate when discussing his own family. And his depiction of Sid Vicious, his ironic bandmate who has been alternately romanticized and maligned for his addictions to heroin and self-mutilation emerges as a touchingly helpless figure. Lydon's account of the Sex Pistols' demise is one-sided and his narrative rambles at times, but textual anarchy seems appropriate in the context. He augments his personal perspective with the disparate impressions of his fellow bandmates and associates to make his memoir a convincingly candid account of the Sex Pistols as working-class stiffs who mainly wanted to shake things up a bit and inadvertently stumbled across rock 'n' roll sainthood. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (October 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312428138
• ISBN-13: 978-0312428136
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #213,966 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rotten, indeed, May 4, 2000

By 

daibhidh "daibhidh" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (Paperback)

At long last, John Lydon (aka, Johnny Rotten) has opened up, nearly twenty years later. The Sex Pistols remain one of my favorite bands, and Johnny Rotten one of the more interesting media figures in the pop culture, so I devoured this book. It combines first-person accounts of all sorts of punk notables and wannabes, and the observations of Lydon himself, co-written by Keith and Kent Zimmerman. I'll admit a bias up front - so much of the history of punk has been obfuscated, I value anything that comes along. I was eight at the time the Sex Pistols did their thing, and I remember being scared when I heard the names "Johnny Rotten" and "Sid Vicious" - I didn't know who they were, but they seemed scary names (and remember, this was before MTV), and the radios weren't playing them - they were phantoms and boogeymen, and all the adults seemed scared of them. I remember when I was a teenager, finally buying their album, and thinking, "What's the big deal? This music rocks!"

I'm glad to see some light shed on this period by one of the people at the center of the media storm. Lydon fills the book with tart observations - he retains his spite and anger and seems as volatile as ever. At the same time, I feel like he's pulling one over on the rest of us. Some of his recollections seem contradictory - perhaps very real to him, but everybody knows that one's perception of things changes over time. There's a subjective quality to this account that makes me long for corroboration. Some of the first-person commentary does back up Rotten's assertions, but I get the feeling there's impression management occurring (check out Goffman's "Impression Management" and you'll know what I'm talking about). Sort of retroactive damage control on Lydon's part.

My only complaints about the book are minor - I wanted more pictures, and I'd hoped for more commentary. I was really wondering what he was thinking in some of those shots, and the cryptic comments make them all the more enigmatic. Again, probably the way he likes it. My other gripe is the book seems to raise more questions than it answers - I wanted more!

The fact that he went to bat in court for the band (which is detailed at the end of the book), and didn't cut Jones and Cook out of it, even when they repeatedly sided with McClaren, is a character-revealing moment. They'd consistently shafted him, and Rotten could have easily blown them off and pursued the case for his exclusive benefit. But he kept them in, eventually winning them over once they realized where their interest was. Contrasted with McClaren's machinations, this righteous persistence on Rotten's part is inspiring. On page 283, he says:

"'Nice' is the worst insult you could ever pay anybody. It means you are utterly without threat, without values. Nice is a cup of tea."

That's part of what I love about John Rotten - he's a nutcase, wit, cynic, revolutionary, and clown, and you're never sure whom you're dealing with; he's a chimera, and he's certainly not "nice". All you can be certain of is that he's laughing at all of us. In this age of immaculately-packaged music superstars, Rotten's aura remains refreshing and subversive - downright threatening. It is simply hard to safety pin him down, and I think that's the way he likes it.

47 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FANTASTIC !!!!, June 3, 2001

By 

Thomas A. Avallone "BluRayfan" (St Charles IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (Paperback)

You don't have to be a SEX PISTOLS fan to enjoy this book. If you remember the 'uproar' punk rock caused in 1977-1979, this is for you !

John Rotten is such a breath of fresh air, compaired to all the other rock stars of the past. He is witty, downright RUDE at times, and a 'kid at heart'.

Basically, this book talks about him growing up in the working class part of London and what started the whole punk rock scene. He takes us from Kings Row to the recording studio to Buckingham Palace to small club gigs and then to America, to wrap up the ENTIRE Sex Pistols' career. It's all here: Sid's battle with heroin, Johnny's feuding with manager Malcome McLaren, Steve Jones (guitarist) & Paul Cook (drummer) remeberences of what it was like to be a Pistol, the battles with Sid's girlfriend Nancy and the trouble she caused, Johnny's court battle with Pistols management after the breakup of the band, ect. ect....

If you EVER had an interest in the Pistols, you will LOVE this book. ALL questions are answered and put to rest. If you always HATED the Pistols, I suggest reading John's book ANYWAY because it will make you think again about the 'tallent' this band had. They changed the face of music...Without THEM, there would have been NO indie rock - NO alternative rock - and NO 'new wave' rock. They were WAY before their time.

John's book is honest and down to earth...He admits his mistakes...He admits his faults...He admits the Pistols had little or no tallent as a touring band...This is a man everyone always thought of has having an EGO problem. Read this book ! He could very well be the most CARING person in the rock industry...You might not always agree with WHAT he says, but he will make you THINK....And THAT is a sign of a true artist !

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Uncensored, Unrepentant, Unrefined, or: the Rotten Legacy, June 30, 2005

By 

Ian Vance (pagosa springs CO.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rotten No Irish No Blacks No Dogs (Hardcover)

History is written by the victorious, or so the old aphorism goes. Luckily for us, scions of the information age, history is now as mercurial and conflictive as it should be; the advantage of the mass media - and the circumnavigation tool of the internet - gives the diligent scholar as many points of view and divergent perspectives as one could possibly wish. So much has been scribed about the Punk revolution of the late 70's - a general amalgamation of myth, fantasy, drug-hazed 'facts' and grim reality - that a fairly clear and lucid standpoint on the whole glorious fiasco can be readily gleaned with a little bit of literary brow-sweat and comparative analysis. Along with the Sex Pistols documentary *The Filth and the Fury*, this particular tome, Johnny Rotten's autobiography and personal screed, is a great starting point for anyone seeking insight into what this whole Punk scene was about: how it began, briefly flourished, and inevitably went down in flames. And for the learned, *No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs* is a fantastic reflection on an era of poverty, discontent and chaos, and the artistic movement that resulted from such oppressive circumstances.

We are all now familiar with the Rotten (nee Lydon) persona: the madcap clown, the malcontent, the snarling sarcastic commentator on all that is, well, rotten in contemporary society; the punk anti-idol, the media blackguard (thanks VH1!!), the experimental artist who bafflingly slid into late-80's mediocrity. But rather focus on Lydon's 90's/00's image - the decrepit curmudgeon with the neon hair-spikes and atrociously funny bad-taste suits - this autobiography begins with the early years: Rotten as the sweet momma's boy, Rotten the spinal meningitis victim, Rotten the school outcast and all-around reprobate. Interchanging multiple perspectives and time-frames, cutting between Daddy Rotten's nostalgic musings and the Pistol's rapid disintegration in San Francisco, *No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs* proceeds to unleash a salvo of caustic commentary, humorous anecdotes and enough bald truth to encapsulate the reader in the crazed rebellion and smarmy post-modernism of the punk aesthetic.

"We were fed up," Rotten intoned on *The Filth and the Fury*, and by the shape of this autobiography, he's still pretty jaundiced-eyed about the outcome. No one is spared the dregs of bitterness: the British monarchy, the English middle-class mindset, Bill Grundy and public media in general, the record executives and the recording industry, the 'Teds' and even the 'Punks', whom Rotten feels (rather rightly) to have unwittingly betrayed the movement for fashion and ego-excess. Foppish Malcolm McLauren and the Beatles-lovin' Glen Matlock seem to get the most of the bile when the book covers the inner turmoil of the band, yet it was exactly this tension that sprung forth the sloppy, raw, uncontrollable energy of *Nevermind the Bollocks* and catapulted the Sex Pistols into superstar infamy.

For make no mistake about it: the Sex Pistols spearheaded and came to epitomize this new, loose genre; they were the voices of a disaffected generation...and the echo-howl of more generations to come, as punk 'evolved' and became the sounding board for millions of down-trodden and/or upper-middle wannebe outsiders, eventually resulting in today's top-40 gloss-dross that subsumes the original social/political outcry of the genre for joke-songs and superficial cleverness. A rotten legacy indeed! Johnny was none too happy with the tribalistic conformity that seeped into punk not long after its inception. A natural subversive stylist (confirmed by documentary footage), Rotten glowered with 'unhappy cool' and his ripped shirts and garbage-bag inventions, along with Sid's black leather jackets and mutilation fetish, soon became the de jour image-assimilation for anyone seeking fast shock n'yall. "Sheep!" the mentor snarls, and rightly so - 'Punk' (originally a term for a prison sex object) is now the most easily identifiable symbol of nonconformist consumerism, the cultivation of faux-poverty. Pretty damn vacant!

*Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs* covers the short duration of the Sex Pistols, gives interesting coverage of the period's general unrest, and captures the sneering, antagonistic persona of the young Rotten, in all his filth and fury. Unfortunately there is virtually no coverage of what went after the final dissolution of the Pistols. I personally would have liked at least some explanation (or even half-hearted justification) for the eventual alterna-pop joke that came of Lydon's follow-up band PiL, and some more information on the career/life trajectories of the main players of this sordid tapestry. But no matter. This is Rotten's life, Rotten's perspective...and the lucrative benefits of history assure that coverage of these missing factors have been or will be documented in just as exhaustive a fashion.