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Return of The Sex Pistols

Sylvie Simmons, Rolling Stone, Summer 1996

The jury’s out. It’s either the ultimate joke, the perfect punch-line — plump, forty, pimple-free Johnny Rotten with a tan only sensible living and serious money can buy, shoves some designer togs in a suitcase, kisses his Malibu housewife, then flies back to Europe to sing (to a ringing cash registers accompaniment) a subversively sarcastic ‘God Save The Queen’ to people smart enough to understand the irony or stupid enough to cough up the cash. Or it’s major-scale whoring, the ultimate sell-out — as most of the headlines have predictably put it: The Great Rock & Roll Swindle Part II.

Total word count of piece: 1176

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