In order to start understanding the politics of punk music and the punk scene in general, it makes sense to start with the Sex Pistols. This band was one of the most visible and infamous components of the scene. With song titles like “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save the Queen” (not the national anthem), discussion of the band’s politics seems rather inevitable.
The Sex Pistols themselves appear to have been anarchists or nihilists. Their ideology was negative: a lot more about antis than pros. However, if we look at their mastermind, Malcolm McLaren, we will find a somewhat more articulate ideology. Before he formed the band, McLaren was affiliated with the group of left-leaning intellectuals known as Situationists International.
It can be said that the Sex Pistols as a phenomenon—or rather the sympathy between large numbers of British youth and the Sex Pistols—grew out of widespread dissatisfaction about Britain’s social and political situation. There was pervasive poverty and unemployment. Despite being a “modern” nation, Britain also seemed to also be under the spell of rampant class discrimination, social repression, and nostalgia for “better” times. England was dreaming, and the punks wanted to wake it with a good, hard kick in the unmentionables.
Still, this did not necessarily mean something as simple as overthrowing a monarch. The rot in society did not rest in a single person or group of people at the top. Rather, it also had to do with the rank fakery one found in all levels of society. Rotten’s lyrics seem to lambast the commoditization of history and nationhood. In “God Save the Queen,” he implies that one of the reasons people support the monarchy is because of the tourist dollars brought in by foreigners’ fascination with the royal family. In “Holiday in the Sun,” he gives an expounded excoriation of this same tourist mentality. The song is written from the point of view of a tourist who goes abroad on a lark to gawk at others’ suffering and the remains of Germany’s dark history. Instead, he finds a deep, dark, living abyss. He was looking for simple commodities, but, to his shock, found reality.
Many contemporary devotees of the Sex Pistols tend to be left-leaning in their politics. Some of them are socialists or leaders of unions. Also, if British punk has its roots in the plight of the working class, then many modern punks also prefer to side against the rich and privileged. However, the “umbrella” idea—and one certainly espoused by the Pistols—was one of rage against accepted authority, values, and aesthetics. Spit on the existing order, even if you have nothing to replace it with.
However, it must not be said that everyone associated with the Sex Pistols was or remained so hostile to existing order. Many punk scenesters of the “old school” tended to become more mainstream as they got older. Vivienne Westwood, a punk fashion icon who had a child with McLaren and learned a great deal of her politics from him eventually broke with him. Many years later, she was made a Dame—one of the highest honors bestowed by the United Kingdom, given officially by the Queen.