Choosing a single favorite album is kind of like trying to decide about which of your parents would you eat first if stranded on an isolated island……you know exactly which one you would eat first, but it is difficult to say it out loud…..
I grew up under Soviet occupation, the joint armies of the Warsaw Agreement invaded Czechoslovakia when I was 3 years old (1968), and so my teenage years were marked by very heavy but rather dysfunctional propaganda….the black market for Western culture was omnipresent. And Czechoslovak pop music was horrible, with virtually no independent scene or venues. All music had to be approved by cultural committees with very questionable musical tastes. And so at the tender age of 12 one of my well connected school friend brought me a vinyl LP “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols”, smuggled in through Yugoslavia and Hungary, the usual route for new music, brand jeans, pop teen magazines and other relevant merchandise. Raw unadulterated punk….”in your face” even in the West…..
I and a group of my friends kept listening to the record over and over, we learned the lyrics phonetically and were doing air guitar acapela versions of “God Save The Queen” and “EMI” during recess at school to entertain (and educate) our less-fortunate and less-cultured classmates. The group consented that my accent was the best so I became Johnny Rotten….I also looked a bit like him….that gave me a lot of street cred in Middle School…
We thought that “Never Mind the Bollocks” meant something very political and radical but we did not exactly know what…..we all took English at school but the word “bollocks” was not a part of the curriculum.
I am a jazz musician, but I still consider punk a very appropriate form of raw expression, something atavistic, kind of like a drum circle of the angry. Given that this was the music of the proletariat it seems strange that the Czechoslovak totalitarian regime would not embrace it...but they did not….
And “Never Mind the Bollocks” is also a very good life philosophy.
Le Drgon is a Jazz Guitarist, player of many other instruments, and chicken & goat enthusiast around the Baltimore/DC metropolitan area.
Click here for The Brannock's Contribution
Click here for The Danny's Contribution
Click here for The Drioux's contribution
Click here for El Reyes's contribution
Click here for My contribtuion
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