O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Ex-Johnny Rotten Has Two-Edged Ire

After so many years as pop music’s inveterate heaper of scorn, John Lydon is still carrying on in a way that is both admirable and pathetic.

When he first appeared with the Sex Pistols in 1976 as Johnny Rotten, proclaiming himself an anarchist and antichrist, Lydon’s furious sound and lacerating rhetoric had an immediate focus and an attainable purpose: the wreckage of a sedate and complacent pop equilibrium. The Pistols were effective musical terrorists, immolating themselves in service of a movement--punk rock--that truly did change the face of pop. Later, in the early days of Public Image Ltd. (or, as the band’s logo has it, PiL), Lydon continued to be an influential agent for musical change, channeling punk in new directions with the introduction of abstract lyrical and musical forms and a more honed musicianship.

Pop music is a subculture that is willing--even eager--to be torn apart and remade in the image of the new, because its economy demands it. But Lydon’s ire is directed not just at the pop scene, but more broadly at society in general, with its cultural norms and power structures that are far more difficult to budge.

Unable to budge them, Lydon keeps railing in the face of his futility. As he fronted PiL on Friday night at UC Irvine’s Crawford Hall, his messages remained exclusively caustic. But the punk revolutionary days are gone, and the messenger no longer packs a threat. No longer that hellion, Johnny Rotten, Lydon came off as his own re-invention of the Shakespearean fool: a powerless figure who, by virtue of his dismissable social station, is free to mock as he pleases.

In a way, Lydon’s single-minded venting of ire is commendable: society needs its dyspeptic cranks. But there is also something pathetic about Lydon’s one-note, scornful persona. As one of his songs puts it, “anger is an energy”--but deeper artistry and understanding lie in forming a broader vision that encompasses emotions other than anger, and modes of expression other than Lydon’s bald, broadside invective. It has been said that great satire is a sharp blade that cuts its target’s throat so neatly that the head stays in place. Lydon, intelligent and idea-oriented as he is, is no satirist: he can only attack with a truncheon.

On stage, though, he was effective. Lydon plays the mocker’s role with zest, and it was fun to watch him derive his own perverse enjoyment from being perverse. Dressed in the motley of a nose-thumbing clown (Day-Glo pajamas printed with images of Jesus, Mary and the cross), with his hair shaved on the sides and bristled into a tall, “Eraserhead” flattop, Lydon hunched and pranced like a vaudevillian villain, intoning snarls in his mock-theatrical vocal style.

With his crazed, rolling-eyed looks and clawing hand gestures, Lydon seemed bent on making himself into an amusing monster, a sort of post-punk Freddy Krueger. With his comically sarcastic barbs at the audience, he could have been the guy behind the door marked “Abuse” in the Monty Python skit.

While PiL’s 90-minute show was monolithic (how could it be otherwise, given the unvaryingly irate and condemning tenor of the songs?), the four-man band behind Lydon hit hard and clean with metallic guitar rock and more textured, funk-influenced songs drawn predominantly from the three most recent Public Image Ltd. albums. Most of PiL’s songs had enough catchy pop content and good, edgy guitar from John McGeoch and Ted Chau to compensate for the sameness of tone.

Give Lydon credit for being a trouper, too. When some idiot hit him flush in the face with a thrown bottle near the end of “Fishing,” halfway through the show, he went on and finished the song. Then he told off the attacker, who had disappeared into the crowd, and pulled the band off stage for a few minutes in rightful protest of audience stupidity.

“There is no excuse for violence--ever,” Lydon said on his return. The incident underlined one of the positive attributes of Lydon’s brand of mockery and rage, and of abrasive rock in general: venting angry energy with songs and sarcasm sure beats the more brutish means at our disposal.

Flesh For Lulu, by way of contrast, is not a band given to railing at the world. The British group may not have said much of anything in its 45-minute opening set, but the point was how it was said: with catchy pop melodies, with raucously abandoned guitar riffing that kept the sound from being too confectionary, and, above all, with a strong sense of fun and enjoyment in playing.

Guitarists Rocco Barker (whose meaty lead parts and extensive schnoz were both of Townshend-esque proportion) and Derek Greening sent out hard-churning licks that at times recalled T. Rex. Nick Marsh’s singing was nasal and grainy in the familiar way of trendy British post-punk bands (could it be all that fog that makes them sing like foghorns?), but his voice was also flexible and sturdy. Marsh wore the standard uniform of spiked black hair and black leather, but he smiled often and dispensed with put-on “attitude” (although he did slip once with a forced, ineffective attempt to whip up crowd noise between songs).

Flesh For Lulu was at its best with such humorous, rambunctious rockers as “Laundromat Kat” and “Siamese Twist,” but it was able to shift moods with darker, more urgent numbers including “Avenue” and the brisk pop of “Postcards From Paradise.”