So Malcolm McLaren is dead.
The self-proclaimed maestro provocateur of punk, and everything else important that followed, died of cancer in a Swiss hospital Thursday at the age of 64.
McLaren's dead, but I'll bet there are some who will stand guard over his eventual burial spot in London's Highgate Cemetery to make sure the former Sex Pistols manager doesn't claw his way out and walk among us again. We all try to speak well of the dead, and most tributes are proclaiming his genius and gifts, but the truth is that everybody hated Malcolm McLaren at one point or another.
If the lawsuits and biographies are any indication, everyone who dealt with McLaren -- from the New York Dolls, whom he dressed up in Communist red leather in their last days, to Johnny Rotten, whom McLaren managed and manipulated in the Sex Pistols, to his former business partner and lover Vivienne Westwood -- felt cheated, scammed, stolen from, patronized or just plain aggravated with a man who claimed credit for everything and never ever seemed to be wrong.
More fatally, McLaren, alive or dead, can never avoid having some of the blood on his negligent hands for both the heroin overdose of the Pistols' Sid Vicious and the killing of the bassist’s girlfriend Nancy Spungen.
The thing is -- important to remember in an age where sex scandals make bland Tiger Woods and Sandra Bullock infinitely more interesting and “American Idol’s” Simon Cowell is perceived as pugilistic -- Malcolm McLaren never hid his horrible side.
Perhaps that is why, in a sense, the best things about him were fake.
Maybe the art school-educated McLaren was utilizing the poignancy of the French Situationists, as Greil Marcus claims in "Lipstick Traces," and the student uprisings of 1968 with the naughty T-shirts and bondage gear at his King's Road SEX boutique and the Pistols. Maybe, with designer Westwood, McLaren was melding fashion and music into something sexier, more violent and more accessible than ever before -- you certainly see traces of that in Agent Provocateur, the lingerie brand founded by McLaren's son Joseph Corre.
Maybe, and perhaps most fittingly, it was all sheer spectacle with surgical stabs to the culture.
In a way, the conjecture doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because in this life, as Robert Oppenheimer, Col. Tom Parker and, to a far lesser extent, Sam Worthington learned, you only have to be in the right place at the right time with the right moves once to make your mark.
Like now, the Western economy was in the toilet in the mid-1970s when the rabid Sex Pistols dropped their bombs. Unlike today’s biggest acts, the band, who have reunited several times since their 1978 break-up, wasn't about selling you a beverage and a banner ad. The Pistols with McLaren barely in the background were shilling art and anarchy.
Why? Because, as McLaren repeatedly said, "Being bad is more exciting."
