Rock Rebels Who Aged Well

Rebelliousness is a common pose in the music world. The real rebels keep rebelling throughout their lives, becoming more mature about it as they figure out what really needs to be rebelled against.

Punk rock was especially rebellious. The whole point of it was to overthrow the stodgy music establishment. The best known punk rocker was John Lydon a.k.a. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. Now he rebels against the shallow self-indulgence that characterizes our times by caring full time for his wife, who suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s. He also rebels against the liberal establishment by defending Winston Churchill, who has been slated for cancelation by cancel culture moonbats.

As for the source of the moonbattery, he tells the Times:

“It’s just horribly, horribly tempestuous spoilt children coming out of colleges and universities with s*** for brains. And I put that in the most polite way.”

Lydon became a US citizen in 2013. He rebels against the ruling party:

“You have a Democrat party that doesn’t respect anything but the latest woke fashion trend and that’s to the destruction of America. I’m watching America now collapse because of the Biden nonsense.”

Possibly the most extreme band to come out of the postpunk era was The Birthday Party, fronted by Nick Cave. These days, rather than shrieking and yowling, he rebels by talking sense to moonbattery:

Mercy is a value that should be at the heart of any functioning and tolerant society. Mercy ultimately acknowledges that we are all imperfect and in doing so allows us the oxygen to breathe — to feel protected within a society, through our mutual fallibility. Without mercy a society loses its soul, and devours itself. … Without mercy society grows inflexible, fearful, vindictive and humourless.

Inflexible, fearful, vindictive and humorless sums up political correctness, which Cave calls “the unhappiest religion in the world,” noting that it has the negative aspects of religion but not the positive ones, showcasing “self-righteousness shorn even of the capacity for redemption.”

He regards cancel culture as “mercy’s antithesis”:

Cancel culture’s refusal to engage with uncomfortable ideas has an asphyxiating effect on the creative soul of a society. Compassion is the primary experience — the heart event — out of which emerges the genius and generosity of the imagination. Creativity is an act of love that can knock up against our most foundational beliefs, and in doing so brings forth fresh ways of seeing the world. This is both the function and glory of art and ideas. A force that finds its meaning in the cancellation of these difficult ideas hampers the creative spirit of a society and strikes at the complex and diverse nature of its culture.

That may be why the liberal entertainment establishment produces nothing but soulless garbage. It needs a new generation of rebels — real ones, not the kind who only rebel the way they are told to rebel, for example, by pushing the boundaries of tastelessness.

On a tip from ABC of the ANC.

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