No More Heroes (Malcolm McLaren)
I.
One of the things said by Johnny Rotten that has stuck with me for fifty years is his response to Janet Street-Porter's question about who he admires: "I don't have any heroes - they're all useless." [1]
Ironically, his anti-hero stance instantly made him a hero to me. However, my affections and loyalty later shifted to Malcolm McLaren once it became clear that he was the conceptual genius behind the Sex Pistols [2].
And I have continued to name McLaren - along with Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, and Larry David - as a primary influence on my thinking. However, I'm not sure I would call them heroes. And, if I'm honest, each has disappointed in some manner.
Here, and in the posts that follow, I will attempt to explain why. Let's begin by raising concerns around what might be called the ideological stuckism of my punk mentor, Malcolm McLaren.
II.
To be clear: when I say Malcolm was a stuckist, I am not suggesting he had any involvement with the international movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting as opposed to conceptual art [3]. I am simply referring to the fact that McLaren was trapped in his past like a spider in its own web [4].
His entire career was an endless (if brilliant) recycling of the memories, radical ideas, and obsessive fixations drawn from his 1950s childhood and his 1960s art school days. Forever associated with the Sex Pistols and defined by the role he played in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980), McLaren was stuck in a self-made loop of his own youthful mythology and his desire to live yesterday tomorrow [5].
III.
Apart from the childhood tales told to him by his grandmother to do with Peter Pan and pirates and Dickensian street urchins, the first thing to really make a terrific impression on McLaren were the great balls of fires projected into popular culture by Jerry Lee Lewis and his fellow rock 'n' rollers.
He loved the records and he loved the clothes and spent his entire life trying to perfectly recreate the look of music and the sound of fashion (a conceptual phrase coined by McLaren that he repeated in interviews and public lectures until his dying day).
He may have experimented with many kinds of music in his career, but at heart he remained a rocker and it was the raw authenticity (and sheer fun) of the records he heard in the '50s that he wished to inject into his own projects and the various incarnations of the little shop at 430 King's Road, from Let It Rock to Worlds End.
Ultimately, punk wasn't really an attempt to look forward - it was, rather, an attempt to strip rock 'n' roll of its bloated, progressive bullshit and recapture the excitement, danger and innocence of his childhood.
IV.
If, on the one hand 1957 was a crucial year for eleven-year-old Malcolm McLaren [6], then so too was 1968 for the then twenty-two-year-old art student. For although not directly involved in the événements de mai [7], McLaren - the would-be revolutionary and Francophile - now fell under the influence of Guy Debord and the Situationists.
Radical ideas to do with the société du spectacle and the staging of events in order to shatter such, thereby rescuing people from the boredom and inauthenticity of everyday life, remained important to McLaren throughout his life. A volatile character and natural born troublemaker, he was always attempting to mix the perfect Molotov cocktail: two parts art theory; one part political ideology; and one part cultural terrorism.
It's certainly difficult to understand the Sex Pistols project without reference to McLaren and Jamie Reid's belief in the ruins, demand for the impossible, and wish to steal back happiness.
The problem, however, is that avant-garde political theories relying on Marxism and surrealism don't adequately address the problems that emerge in a post-68 world. The revolution that happened was technoliberal in character and seems to allow not only no alternative but no outside space from which one might form a critical perspective or offer resistance.
If McLaren had bothered to keep up with his reading - some Baudrillard perhaps - he might have understood that although the beach does indeed lie beneath the paving stones, it too is a constructed (artificial) reality that merely provides the illusion of depth and the false promise of authentic freedom [8].
As the conceptual artist Michal Martychowiec has shown, what were once believed to be natural grains of sand are actually cold and lifeless glass crystals ... [9]
V.
If, then, McLaren retained a fixed model of style based on the look of music and the sound of fashion and a fixed politics that relied for the most part on subversive pranks and the technique of détournement [10], so too did he hold on to the same concept of sex throughout his life - one closely tied to his radical politics.
Influenced by thinkers such as Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, McLaren was of the view that liberating libidinal energies would outrage bourgeois society and threaten a culture founded upon sexual repression.
Thus, like so many other sex radicals and countercultural theorists, McLaren sought to weaponise desire, using pornographic images printed on T-shirts and a range of fetishwear sold in SEX and Seditionaries, for example, to provoke public outrage and incite his young clientele to insurrection.
McLaren was (naively and mistakenly) convinced that by dragging the forbidden into the open, he was striking a blow against the state. However, this politics of desire relied entirely on what Michel Foucault famously termed the repressive hypothesis - i.e., the flawed belief that power functions primarily through prohibition, censorship, and denial.
What McLaren failed to realise - and what Foucault brilliantly demonstrated [11] - is that modern power does not repress sex; it incites it, categorises it, and manages it. By remaining stuck in a sixties model of liberation, McLaren's radicalism was easily co-opted. He believed he was unleashing a dangerous, and authentic energy, when in reality, he was merely pioneering a highly profitable new market and the pornification of society.
Decades later, he was still talking about bondage trousers with their zipper crotch with the exact same pseudo-academic earnestness and revolutionary zeal of a soixante-huitard [12].
VI.
If there is one word that comes to define Malcolm McLaren's thinking, it's not sex, nor style, nor even subversion - it is rather authenticity. That's the thing that most intrigued him and which he set out to discover - authenticity in an age of artificiality and what he termed karaoke culture [13].
In an interview in 1999, McLaren describes authenticity as something dirty, horrible, and disgusting; something which "is to be found in the ruins" and involves "reclaiming the past"; something which is complex and "has built into it this uncomfortable idea of chaos"; something which contrasts with everything valued today as success [14].
He certainly makes it sound attractive and almost has me sold on the idea. But then he goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid (or at the very least politically naive); "the authentic is something that isn't as easily assimilated by capital" [15] - something that can't conveniently be packaged and sold.
At that point, one realises that ultimately McLaren is still a romantic idealist at heart who has failed to fully learn the crucial (Situationist) message at the centre of The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980). Namely, that even something like punk is very quickly recuperated - no matter how authentic it may be [16]; that even the most radical ideas and images can be stripped of their danger and turned into products or harmless forms of entertainment.
VII.
So, to conclude ...
McLaren disappoints because of his inability (or refusal) to recognise that his ideals of sex, style, and subversion, had been rendered null and void by a radical neoliberal shift in the 1980s.
His political and aesthetic strategy relied on a set of mid-century conditions that no longer existed, including a rigid, easily shocked, top-down Establishment that could be genuinely threatened by countercultural activity involving the look of music and the sound of fashion.
What Mark Fisher terms capitalist realism thrives on the revolutionary rhetoric and authenticity McLaren championed - the pursuit of individual expression, personal branding, constant reinvention, etc.
During his Duck Rock and Nostalgia of Mud phase, McLaren operated under the optimistic delusion that paganism and primitivism were wild forces external to the market. He would insist that a man on a mountain side tapping two sticks together makes a much bigger sound than all the musicians playing electric instruments or programming their synthesisers. But the sound of two sticks can be just as easily commodified as techno-pop (file it under world music and allow it to be sampled by others).
The fact is, in the twenty-first century, there is no Outside from which to launch an attack and desire is no longer (if it ever was) a wild revolutionary force; it is an entirely synthetic product engineered by the market. Capitalism does not repress our libido - it structures it through algorithms, infinite digital feeds, and consumer
niches, pre-formatting what we want long before we even know it.
Ironically, when McLaren made his critique of karaoke culture, arguing that young people had become timid consumers of an endlessly recyled past, he failed to realise that this digital landscape was the monstrous offspring of his own '60s ideology and that youth today are not lazy or complacent - many are acutely aware that things are fucked up - but they feel powerless to act (what Fisher terms reflexive impotence) in a way that McLaren's post-War generation of baby boomers were not.
Notes
[1] The interview took place in late 1976 at the Denmark Street studio where the band used to rehearse and essentially squat. It was broadcast on the London Weekend Show, hosted by Janet Street-Porter, on 28 November 1976. It was one of the very first television features dedicated to the underground punk scene. To watch a clip on YouTube, click here.
[2] Years later, during McLaren's Charisma Records period (1982-85), that love and loyalty paid off when he placed me inside the label's press office (acting as a kind of spy). I have written several posts about my time at Charisma: click here.
[3] The name Stuckism was coined in January 1999 by Charles Thomson in response to a poem by Billy Childish in which the latter relays that his former girlfriend, Tracey Emin, had repeatedly said he was stuck with his art, writing and music.
After exhibiting in small galleries in Shoreditch, London, the Stuckists' first show in a major public museum was held in 2004 at the Walker Art Gallery, as part of the Liverpool Biennial. It was titled 'The Stuckists Punk Victorian'.
By 2017, the initial group of thirteen British artists had expanded to 236 groups in 52 countries and although painting is the dominant artistic form of Stuckism, artists
using other media such as photography, sculpture, film and collage have also joined, and share the Stuckist opposition to conceptualism.
I would like to say more, but this is probably not the right time or place - I will endeavour to publish a post on Stuckism in the near future.
[4] Interestingly, however, the first Stuckist manifesto issued by Childish and Thomson in 1999, opens with the line: "Stuckism is a quest for authenticity" [3] and that is something that McLaren fundamentally endorsed, frequently contrasting it with what he called karaoke culture, as we shall discuss.
However, the manifesto also emphasises the value of painting as a medium and opposes what is seen as the superficial novelty and nihilism of conceptual art and postmodernism and McLaren, who often styled himself an artist without portfolio and whose final works were audio-visual in nature, would laugh at the statement: "Artists who don't paint aren't artists." I also like to think that, unlike the Stuckists, McLaren would always choose irony over sincerity, viewing art as a material practice
rather than a form of spirituality.
The first Stuckist manifesto (1999) can be found on their website: click here.
[5] To be fair, this idea of living yesterday tomorrow is not simply an exercise in bogus nostalgia and can be tied to Mark Fisher's thinking on retrofuturism and hauntology and the reclaiming of what he calls lost futures. In notes written in 2000, McLaren discussed how history might be reclaimed (and not merely pissed on):
"The question I find most interesting is how you reclaim history. This is a very different thing from repackaging it. It's not about nostalgia, which is basically dead tissue. Living yesterday tomorrow should be about reclaiming history then reversing it into the future. If you can discover how to do that, you are probably doing everything an artist genuinely wishes to be involved in. One must aim to use certain disruptive practices to challenge the dominant cultural forms and relax the grip of authority."
Quoted by Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), pp. 718-719.
[6] An end-of-term Christmas concert in 1957 "provided the eleven-year-old with what he would later describe as 'an epiphanic moment'. Among those selected to provide entertainment was a young male teacher who performed an enthusiastic rendition of Jerry Lee Lewis's rollicking 'Great Balls of Fire'." McLaren, who had never seen or heard anything like it, was understandably blown away.
Not long afterwards, his older brother took him to see Buddy Holly & the Crickets and Malcolm was fascinated with rock 'n' roll subculture for the rest of his life. See Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 30.
[7] McLaren failed to get to Paris in May '68 due to ongoing French rail and air strikes. He did, however, visit the French capital at the end of June and his political imagination was excited by the literature and graphics of the Situationist International (even if he couldn't read much French).
Back in London, and friends by this point with Jamie Reid and Fred Vermorel, McLaren got involved with the SI's (unofficial) British offshoot known as King Mob. See my post titled 'It Was Meant to Be Great But It's Horrible: Christmas with Uncle Malcolm and the King Mob' (21 Dec 2025): click here.
[8] See the essay by Nataliya Atanasova, 'We Dreamt a Beach and Found a Desert: What It Means to Live in Post-Situationist Reality', Sofia Philosophical Review (1): 70-85 (2026). This essay can be downloaded as a free pdf via Academia.edu.
[9] Sous les pavés, la plage! was a solo exhibition by Polish artist Michal Martychowiec, held at the De Sarthe Gallery in Beijing (16 July to 13 August, 2017). Creating a deceptively inviting beach setting, Martychowiec replaced natural sand with industrially produced glass crystals, in order to critique capitalist realism. For more details visit his website, michalmartychowiec.com
[10] Détournement is a Situationist technique by which familiar images and texts are recontextualised or amusingly altered in some fashion, forcing people to question the original ideological meanings embedded within them.
It was outlined by Guy Debord and Gil Wolman in their Mode d’emploi du détournement, which originally appeared in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #8 (May 1956). An English translation by Ken Knabb can be found in the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, PM Press, 2024).
[11] See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1998).
Foucault persuasively argues in part two of this work that what most perversely characterises modern societies, "is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" (p. 35).
[12] See the episode of Being Malcolm (Canal Jimmy, 2000) titled 'How To Make Subversive Trousers' in which McLaren discusses the design for bondage trousers, created in 1976 and sold in
Sex and Seditionaries, the shops he operated at 430 King's Road with Vivienne Westwood. It was uploaded to YouTube by the Malcolm McLaren Estate in 2015.
[13] McLaren first unveiled his Karaoke Culture thesis in an essay titled '8-Bit Punk' published in Wired (November 2003) He spent the final decade of his life expanding this concept, giving a 2010 TED Talk titled 'Authentic creativity vs. karaoke culture' shortly before his death. The manifesto is founded upon the idea that contemporary culture is a kind of desert of the real and that young people today are incapable of generating authentic and original art, prefering to 'mouth the words to other people's songs' - i.e., surrendering agency and living by proxy, whilst chasing instant celebrity and success (afraid of struggle and failure). Karoake culture, argued, McLaren, built a risk-free environment (or safe space) - the antithesis of 430 King's Road. To combat this, McLaren championed a romantic return to creative authenticity and real sex with real bodies in order to discover real pleasures, which had to be better, he said, than 'fucking an inflatable doll'.
[14] Jefferson Hack, 'A Malcolm McLaren Moment', Another Magazine (7 May 2013) - revisiting an interview originally conducted in 1999.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Récupération is the situationist term for the co-option and commercialization of radical
ideas. Formulated by Guy Debord and the Situationist International in 1960, it describes the process by which subversive concepts are twisted and absorbed into mainstream consumer culture as harmless, innocuous commodities.
Part two in this series - 'Nietzsche - The Man Who Failed to Die at the Right Time' (15 July 2026) can be read here.
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