Malcolm McLaren RIP

Tom Ewing, hero:

RIP Malcolm McLaren. Best troll ever.

"of course he WAS, i mean."
From what little I know about the guy, he reveled in being a scoundrel, so it seems weirdly appropriate to point out his greatest hits of scoundrelry as tribute, if nothing else. To this day I have no idea what his angle was with chiptunes. Truly a master player.

RIP Talcy Malcy. Playing Bow Wow Wow and Adam and the Ants just cos.

Tributes coming in from
Vivienne Westwood: http://www.nme.com/news/malcolm-mclaren/50581
Wobble: http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/2010/04/09/sex-pistols-manager-malcolm-mclaren-dies-115875-22172162/

This is getting really sad now actually. I mean in the old fashioned sense :(

This is amazing, although I am biased: http://imomus.com/mclarencomplete.html

Rip and...

"Fronted by John Lydon — whose repugnant appearance and Irish background earned him the stage name Johnny Rotten"

...wooooah!

Fucking hell.

Obviously this is sad for all the reasons mentioned above, but whenever someone like Malc or Tony Wilson dies it does sort of highlight how people like that ("mavericks," for want of a better word) seem to give the music industry an extremely wide berth at the present time. Perhaps it's because there barely is any industry to speak of anymore. Unless I'm missing something/someone?

Gotta say that was a pretty classy quote from Mr. Lydon considering the battles he had with Malcolm.

Wasn't he to blame for the Pistols breaking up?

Pistols broke themselves up, but McLaren took all the money (through publishing rights, etc).

And the New York Dolls as well?

His wiki entry is pretty thorough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_mclaren

The whole um.. 'Chicken' magazine episode is the real clincher for anyone looking for reasons to diss him but i mean.. let's not go into THAT.
― piscesx, Thursday, April 8, 2010 7:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

link?

farewell, you culturally significant piece of shit.

At about midnight last night I was skimming the obits and news online and thought 'That's really nice that they've got a Tim Westwood tribute on DiS. Good on them for thinking of the McLaren/hip hop connection.'

It was literally two hours before I realised that the quote was from Vivienne Westwood not Tim.

"Dis is well dark news innit bruv? Brah Malcy will be well missed, brap brap."

Evidence of the 'Chicken' episode seems to be thin on the ground because it never actually existed. But I seem to remember reading about the proposal in Smash Hits at the time. It was going to be a p0rn mag for kids basically.

RIP

RIP Malc :(

Good riddance and fuck off. </punk spirit>

At his funeral, I reckon the pallbearers should be dressed in bondage trousers

the guardian's piece didn't go much beyond 'sex pistols manager'. bigger obit to follow, no doubt.

looking at youtube i'd forgotten the forays into world music and square dancing. his championing of chip tunes didn't come to much.

full obit now up:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/09/malcolm-mclaren-obituary

who cares if he was a dick. did way more good than harm. totally interesting dude rip.

From Rip It Up and Start Again:

Vermorel believes McLaren's master scheme was "to create a child porn scandal implicating as many people as he could." Not just EMI, who was financing Chicken, but the BBC, too.A documentary crew headed by Alan Yentob had been following McLaren around for a program on the marketing of Bow Wow Wow. Partly impelled by his usual lust for maximum media mayhem, McLaren also wanted to make a serious polemical point, exposing pop music as porn for children...and pop as porn using children to titillate adults.

With typical ruthlessness, McLaren, in his eagerness to embarrass the music and media establishment, showed no concern whatsoever about the youngsters (Annabella and the other teenage models) or old friends (Vermorel) who would have been embroiled in the scandal. When he went to remonstrate with McLaren, says Vermorel, "alcolm just laughed and said, 'You should be telling all this to the judge! When the shit hits the fan, I'll be in South America.' So I told EMI what was going on. And they tld Yentob, and he freaked out, and those tapes have been in the BBC vault ever since."

...Chickennever hatched. According to Vermorel, the only physical evidence of Chicken's existence was the rate card for advertising in the magazine." But Bow Wow Wow's second release, Your Cassette Pet, continued to expolit the underage-sex angle.

honestly that passage is incredibly vague. lots of lacunae. weird.

the double dutch song seems like an obvious mbaqanga (sp?) rip/homage, no? probably some easy ideological objections could be made to mclaren using _that_ particular source for a song about afro-american folkways, but whatever.

r u confusing "Double Dutch" with "Buffalo Gals"?

Nope. "Double Dutch" was the UK hitlist hit from the "Duck Rock" album.

the biggest UK hitlist hit, I mean.

are there good books about/by mclaren? the 2002 momus interview linked above mentions malcolm writing a book, was this an autobiography and did it ever come out?

http://www.malcolmmclaren.com/

Lol.

The Word have done a tribute playlist on Spotify: http://bacn.me/1a6s

xxxpost I think Momus was alluding to the potential autobiography Malcolm might write.

The Wicked Ways of Malcolm McLaren was an authorized biography, rather than an autobiography but it certainly tells his side of the story. It's a good read. I can't see that a subsequent autobiography would have been worthwhile, although there are a couple of things that are skimmed over like the post-Duck Rock recording of the Swamp Thing tracks. I'd like to know more about that.

It's been a long time since I read Wicked Ways, I don't have a copy, and I've read more Pistols books than is healthy, but I think the account of the whole ugly Chicken episode from Rip It Up and Start Again is lifted pretty much directly from there. If I'm right, he authorised it, warts and all.

It's been a few years since I read it too - I got it from the library. I do remember that Chicken thing but the impression I got that it was a wind-up that never went anywhere. At no point was it suggested that he thought a p0rn mag for kids was a good idea.

It's a good idea for comedy prank! c.f. Brass Eye

geir "double dutch" is not a square dance song, it's borrowing quite obviously from african music, esp. mbaqanga, no?

actually what i am doing, geir doesn't know the difference between those things. and he'll probably assert that there is no difference. i might as well be trying to get my alarm clock to distinguish between brahms and bruckner.

Double Dutch is based on a Boyoyo Boys song:

This group would perhaps be unknown outside of South Africa had they not come to the attention of the great rock & roll swindler, Malcolm McLaren, who took their hit single "Puleng" and adapted it for his own production, "Double Dutch." McLaren came to blows with the Boys after refusing to share the royalities from his single. Only after a lengthy legal struggle did the group receive their due. Out of court and on stage, the Boyoyo Boys offer an ebullient music, consisting of chanted, bouncing rhythms. The group suffered a tragic blow in 1984 with the slaying of their drummer, but with their next album, proved to the world that they were Back in Town.

to be fair to geir, he's not necessarily talking about DD when he mentions square dancing:

"Well, "Double Dutch" was being played on constant rotation"
...
"so for me it's more about his own work. Which was interesting in its own way with its combination of modern beats and electronics together with American square dance."

the subject has widened by the end there.

watched buffalo gals video again this morning. it's an odd mix of seven brides for seven brothers and breakdance 2 (electric boogaloo). the next one was weirder, squaredancing done be people wearing american sportswear chic (pre-dating tank girl by some years). i'd completely forgotten Soweto and the Zulu thing (which were great, but relatively untouched by him)

but later in the thread he says, no, i wasn't talking about buffalo gals, but double dutch.

possible "xpost", but this needs to be shared:

Anarchy in Gardenstown - how Sex Pistols guru was thrown out of a Highland village - The Scotsman
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Anarchy-in-Gardenstown--how.3283235.jp

lol

McLaren forced his way back and declared: "Jesus is a sausage," before being bundled from the podium.

My mate at Southern Records says that all film sequels should have the same upgrade as Breakdance. And when you consider Schindler's List 2 (Electric Boogaloo) or The Unbearable Lightness Of Being 2 (Electric Boogaloo) or Threads 2 (Electric Boogaloo), I can only make him right.

Ebert remembers Who Killed Bambi?

WFMU just ran Irwin Chusid's 1983 interview with MMcL...really interesting, worth listening to the archived show when it's updated later this evening.

I found that Ebert piece to be really interesting. The idea of Meyer, Ebert, McLaren and Rotten all working together is quite a thing to contemplate. Not really surprising it didn't work out but it has to be one of the great "what ifs" of 20th century popular culture. Thanks for linking. It's weird how there's a couple of bits that almost foreshadow what would happen in real life, like the final line of the movie would have been Rotten saying "Did yer ever had the feeling yer being watched" and Sid's quote after reading the script "I don't think my mum will like the bit about the heroin".

my bit...

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JySddEdGkVY/S8ZMZPlvydI/AAAAAAAAAcA/TXY2i252Qco/s1600/God-Save-Malcolm--WHT-T.jpg

http://pollywannacracka.blogspot.com/2010/04/duck-rock-4-life.html

that momus/mclaren interview linked above makes both of them seem like pretentious nitwits. which sounds about right.

i thought it was a great interview. 8yrs on it makes me wonder where and in who the spirit of punk is hiding now ?

The spirit of punk was reincarnated in a baby girl born in Asia born on 1/1/2000. She will restore punk to world dominance in 2018.