Rotten Johnny

Lydon goes techno on Psycho

by Richard C. Walls

Psycho's Path (Virgin) is John Lydon's first solo album ever, which may come as a surprise given his punk-pantheon status -- especially since the last few albums by his group Public Image Ltd. have felt and sounded like solo albums, dominated as they were by his songs, voice, and general concerns. Actually, Psycho's Path sounds like a PiL album too, which is to say thickly electronic with Lydon's piercing vocals alternately hectoring, androidal, and twee. The guy has one of the most annoying voices in all of rock, yet it's never been without its appeal. There's something admirable about the way Lydon manages to maintain, 20 years after the Sex Pistols flamed out, his not entirely theatrical sense of outrage, and it's encouraging to hear him get the old dander up for the umpteenth time.

There's also a mitigating factor that has saved him from becoming just another whining old geezer: the almost sweetly naive quality that underpins his jeremiads, an intractable idealism threading through his disillusionment. Although Lydon began his career as the ultimate anti-hippie, he was always a protest singer, and though he's shed the grimy garb of punk for shinier duds (musically speaking), he still is. He continues to go on about hypocrisy and unthinking conformity, and he hasn't given up on lines like "The Bible is as corrupt a book as any out there." It's taken a certain guilelessness at the core to hang on to that kind of counter-absolutism, and this peeps through his otherwise spiky faade.

The quote about the Bible comes from the CD's promo sheet, on which Lydon provides song-by-song annotations. Although too full of his own purity by half -- I'm just so bloody not the things I dislike in others, he constantly assures the reader -- they offer a few interesting bits, as when he says, "Of course I want to be loved," and, on the song in question, "Take Me," actually asks, "Is that so wrong?" His annotations also claim, "If I ever wasted my time trying to make records other people would like, then I'd be in a very sorry state indeed," which has kind of an Oliver Hardy ring to it, don't you think? Taken together, the comments suggest an ambiguity that he generally manages to keep out of his work.

Sometimes you wish he didn't. On "Dog," a delightfully creepy sing-song number, his proclamations come across as both heavy-handed and old hat. On "Stump" he really gets on the listener's case: "You can never ever make a difference. . . . You couldn't put sense in a sentence. . . . Could you see a thing right through?" Sounds like me ol' mum. I mean, enough already with the superior perspectives . . .

And enough kvetching. Here's what's good about the album: "Sun," which features an accordion and so adds a distinct ray of oddball humanity amid all the electronic drizzle; the lyrics to "Grave Ride," an anti-war song about a man headed toward "a bleak and private, arbitrary death"; the probably unintentional evocation of Pere Ubu's David Thomas on the vocal to "Another Way"; and the ghostly aura of, I kid you not, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which passes over "Dis Ho." Finally, it's hard not to appreciate the genuinely eccentric contours of Mr. Lydon's insouciance.

The disc ends with a clutch of remixes by the likes of Moby, Leftfield, and the Chemical Brothers -- ha! you trendy bastard. Think of these as more-public versions -- grandly rhythmic with lots of protracted mood setting and sustaining -- of Lydon's songs, less intimate, less hermetic. Two are actually improvements: "Sun," because Leftfield's mix brings up the accordion, and "Psychopath," yet another John Wayne Gacy remembrance, which manages to sound almost scary festering under gobs of Leftfield-generated metal machine goop. Of this song Lydon tells us: "We all have the potential to be a serial killer." I guess it's just a matter of applying yourself, of stick-to-it-ivity. John Lydon stands as a fine model for both.