…turning rebellion into money.” So the line goes from The Clash’s ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’.
Virgin Money, the bank owned by Sir Richard Branson, recently announced that punk is officially dead and the Sex Pistols will now be featured on their credit cards. The credit cards will display the album art from 1977’s “Never Mind The Bollocks”. Another design is inspired by the song “Anarchy in the U.K”.
As The Guardian points out, that very song also ironically includes the lyric “your future dream is a shopping scheme”. Branson, who signed the Sex Pistols to Virgin Records nearly 40 years ago, said in a video statement that the band’s “power to provoke is undimmed.”
“In launching these cards, we wanted to celebrate Virgin’s heritage and difference,” Virgin Money CEO Jayne-Anne Gadhia said on her blog. “The Sex Pistols challenged convention and the established ways of thinking – just as we are doing today in our quest to shake up UK banking”.
What we are seeing here are two worlds colliding and, personally, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why? It’s big business re-appropriating youth culture once again and attempting to have some kind of cool ‘look at me’ cache. Whilst there is nothing new about this (the Che Guevara iconic photograph adorns many products), we have to ask ourselves is it right? To me this comes across as lazy thinking to regurgitate something that was slightly subversive from back in the day to adorn a credit card to gain cheap publicity. Also, who would want to own this?
At the end of the day, the the banking crisis created more anarchy in this country than the Sex Pistols and their punk cohorts ever did.
Yes… it’s cash from chaos.
