No future

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No-future graffiti on a house wall.

No Future ( English "no future ") is a slogan of the English punk movement. It goes back to the punk piece God Save the Queen by the group Sex Pistols , in whose text the formulation No Future plays a leading role. The single with the piece was released in May 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth II's silver jubilee, and is dedicated to her. Shortly thereafter, God Save the Queen reached number 2 on the English charts .

Lyrics

Excerpt from the lyrics:

When there's no future how can there be sin
We're the flowers in the dustbin
We're the poison in the human machine
We're the future, your future!
(If there is no future, how can there be sin / We are the flowers in the trash can /
We are the poison in the human machine / We are the future - your future!)

The lyrics continue to contain the line

There is no future in England's dreaming! (There is no future in England's daydream!)

At the time of the Queen's jubilee celebrations, the Sex Pistols and their manager Malcolm McLaren had hired a boat to approach the festivities on the Thames while the band played their version of God Save the Queen . The boat - although legally rented through Virgin Records - was arrested and forcibly evacuated by the police, and there were arrests and fights with the officers.

slogan

Society and some punks themselves used the slogan as an expression of pessimism and despair, and in the consumption of alcohol and other drugs one saw it embodied as a self-damaging lifestyle (“Live fast, die young”). In reality, however, the slogan was intended as a rejection of the contemporary elite , embodied in Great Britain by the Queen as an aristocratic relic of a bygone era, which was nevertheless shown great respect, especially by the conservative side. Here's a line in the chorus of God Save the Queen:

There's no future for you! (German: " There is no future for you !")

John Lydon , co-author of God Save the Queen and known under the pseudonym Johnny Rotten as the singer of the Sex Pistols, explained in an interview how he wanted the statement No Future to be understood: “This line of text 'no future' is prophetic : If you don't take your future into your own hands, then you won't have one - it's that simple. ” In his 1994 autobiography No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs , Lydon also emphasizes: “ Except Sid [ Vicious ] was none of the Pistols self-destructive on it - quite the opposite. We intended to destroy the system, but certainly not ourselves. "

The music journalist Greil Marcus commented on the slogan in his book Lipstick Traces , an analysis of the cultural avant-garde of the twentieth century, with the words: “Of course Johnny Rotten couldn't predict the future; he could only insist that it was in the past. That meant »no-future«. "

Others saw the Sex Pistols slogan as an exclusively ironic formula. Moritz Reichelt , painter and as “Moritz R®” member of the Neue Deutsche Welle band Der Plan , commented on this in an interview: “Punk was at first the finest irony. »No Future« - for me those were ironic statements. I never believed in that. I was very positive about the future. And when I said "No Fun" or "I'm so bored," it was only meant to express how I felt. And not with a serious statement, but with ironic over-affirmation. That was the trick of the time. "

The slogan No Future was also understood as a declaration of war against an official belief in technical progress and the political optimism of the 1980s, which many young people did not want to share because of, among other things, the threat of the nuclear holocaust during the Cold War .

literature

  • Jon Savage : England's Dreaming - Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock . Abridged, German-language edition, Edition Tiamat published by Klaus Bittermann, Berlin 2001. ISBN 3-89320-045-2
  • Greil Marcus : Lipstick Traces. From Dada to Punk - cultural avant-garde and their ways from the 20th century . Rogner & Bernhard at Zweiausendeins, Hamburg 1992. ISBN 3-8077-0254-7

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Allan Jones: Punk - The Revolution Betrayed . Article in Rock Session 2 - Magazine of popular music , p. 7 ff. Rororo non-fiction book 7156, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek 1978. ISBN 3-499-17156-2
  2. ↑ Quoted from Robert Palmer : Rock & Roll - Die Chronik einer Kulturrevolution , p. 282. Hannibal Verlag 1997. ISBN 3-85445-140-7
  3. ↑ Quoted from Martin Büsser : If the Kids are United - from punk to hardcore and back . Ventil Verlag, Mainz 2006. ISBN 3-930559-48-X
  4. ^ Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces , p. 127. German by Hans M. Herzog and Friedrich Schneider
  5. ↑ Moritz Reichelt, quoted from Jürgen Teipel: Waste your youth . A documentary novel about German punk and new wave, p. 85.Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-39771-0