The Alternative Number Ones: Public Image Ltd.’s “Disappointed”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for subscribers only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

It's never easy to pinpoint the exact border between punk and post-punk, if it even exists. But if the separation between those two arbitrary terms is real, then you can see the divide play out in the things that a man named John Lydon did in 1978. As that year began, Lydon was better-known as Johnny Rotten, one of the all-time great stage names. Rotten was the frontman of the Sex Pistols, the band that catalyzed the punk rock wave that swept through the UK in the late '70s. In one way or another, the Sex Pistols directly inspired almost every band that has appeared in this column thus far. They did not, however, inspire Johnny Rotten, the guy who was out front of that particular circus.

In January of 1978, Johnny Rotten essentially quit the Sex Pistols while onstage in San Francisco. He returned to London, reverted to his government name, and began planning a new venture -- one that, in his mind, would work as a deconstruction of the entire idea of the rock band. By the end of the year, Lydon was the leader of Public Image Ltd., and their scraping, deconstructionist art-rock sound represented a stylistic shift. In their early years, Lydon and Public Image Ltd. conducted business as experimental provocateurs, doing their best to yank back the curtain and expose the absurdity of the grinding gears in the music-business machine. Over the years, though, PiL went from conceptual art project to functioning band, and they did it while generally failing to function as a band.