Last week brought another of those bittersweet cultural anniversaries that seem bent on reminding us how hard it is to keep the cutting edge sharp, but also why it matters to keep trying.
Monday marked the 25th birthday of the Sex Pistols' "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols," an album that is widely considered the progenitor of British punk rock. Designed to shock, it did just that with songs like "Anarchy in the UK" and "God Save the Queen," which went so far as to wonder, in the queen's silver jubilee year, whether she actually was a human being. Concert venues closed their doors to the group, and radio stations refused to air their songs -- all of which kept the new album atop the British charts for nearly a year and helped catapult the Sex Pistols to worldwide notoriety, in Japan as everywhere else.
Today, though, probably the most shocking thing about "Never Mind the Bollocks" is how old it makes us feel. Is this what we took for revolution 25 years ago?