John Gulick:
> For the longest time Lydon's leading charm has been his willful hypocrisy
What hypocrisy? Lydon has never pretended to be any kind of leftist. In fact he has proclaimed his hostility to socialism on numerous occasions.
The Situationist posturing of the Sex Pistols was 100% McLaren's influence; whatever one's feelings about McLaren's relationship to the band, I think Jon Savage's book England's Dreaming makes a rather convincing case that the most interesting aspects of the Sex Pistols were entirely due to McLaren: the image he created for them, the discursive context he placed them in, the influences he claimed for them, etc.
The Sex Pistols were rather dire guitar-driven sludge rock. John Lydon's only interesting *musical* output are the first two PiL albums (and that's not a slight; Metal Box would make my top ten list of rock/pop albums ever).