I remember once being told by a friend that he understood the phrase 99% is shit to mean that the only kind of commitment that counts is total commitment. Anything less than 100% was a sure sign of someone who couldn't be trusted and whose authenticity was in doubt.
It's a perfectly valid interpretation and reveals much about the fanatic mindset of those who took the seriously extreme call to arms issued by the Sex Pistols extremely seriously.
(This was during a time when we were both scornful of so-called plastic or part-time punks; the kind of people who play their records very loud and pogo in front of the bedroom mirror - but only when their mum's gone out.)*
As a matter of fact, however, when Sid Vicious spoke about 99% being shit, he wasn't quite thinking in such terms. Rather, he meant - more brutally - that the vast majority of people, including fans, are worthless. Thus, in the same interview, he would say: 'I’ve no interest in pleasing the general public, I don’t want to, because I think largely they're scum, they make me physically sick.'
Such violent contempt for the masses was, of course, a key feature of much modern art; the avant-garde were, by definition, a revolutionary elite who prided themselves on their own difference and superiority.**
And the Sex Pistols - at least as conceived by McLaren - belong to this tradition (contra the Clash who even at the time were sneered at for being social workers and who would doubtless echo the cry We are the 99% which became a unifying slogan of the Occupy Movement in the summer of 2011).
As do the Cash Pussies, who released their only single, 99% is Shit, in April 1979, featuring snippets of an audio interview conducted a couple of years prior with the (recently deceased) Sex Pistols bassist.***
Notes
* The lines are from the single 'Part Time Punks', by Television Personalities, (Rough Trade 1980): click here.
** According to John Carey, Modernist art was primarily concerned not only with the exclusion of the masses, but with a denial of their humanity. See The Intellectuals and the Masses (Faber and Faber, 1992). Of course, it should be remembered that Carey's book is itself 99% shit.
*** Perhaps not surprisingly, the band were conceived by an old art school friend of Malcolm's, Fred Vermorel, and his wife, Judy, and the track was produced by Dave Goodman, famous for his work with the Sex Pistols.
Play: Cash Pussies, 99% is Shit, (The Label, 1979): click here.
