PiL box

John Lydon's "Poptones"

by Douglas Wolk

Public Image Limited's "Poptones" is as terrifying a song as anyone's ever recorded. The narrative John Lydon sketches is unutterably creepy -- we know its details but not its generalities. The way Lydon presents its original incarnation (on Metal Box or, if you prefer, Second Edition), it comes out in vaguely arcing moans, barely audible above the music. Its teller doesn't really know what's happening: something horrible has occurred, or maybe it's about to, but he, or (let's say) she, is too young to understand it, or too confused, or too badly injured. We know she's naked in a forest where somebody's driven her in a Japanese car, "hiding in this foliage and peat/It's wet and I'm losing my body heat." She makes a grim little joke ("I can't forget the impression you made"), then another one ("Praise picnicking in the British countryside").

Lydon turns the words over in his mouth, garbling them, hiding at the back of the mix like a vengeful ghost, then lunging up front to spit out phrases that we don't know enough to understand. Again and again his narrator chants, "The cassette played poptones": the sickest thing about this memory is the pretty little sound it's tied to, the thing that makes it keep repeating in her head. But what PiL are playing isn't a pop song. It's just a bubbling loop. And it sounds all wrong. Jah Wobble's bass is hypertrophied, choking the life out of the mix; Keith Levene's guitar part never resolves into an actual chord, just repeats a crawling arpeggio over and over; the whole thing seems a little off-pitch, slowed down to a haze. On the Metal Box version, "Poptones" starts with a screech of tape and keeps cycling for eight minutes, implying that it's been going on much longer. The take on Plastic Box (Virgin), a new four-CD PiL retrospective, comes from a session recorded for John Peel's radio show; four and a half minutes into it, Lydon leans into the mike, enunciates "POP-TONE-ZAH," and screams as if the bad thing he's been anticipating were finally happening. Then it's over.

As with all great stories, there's more than one version of it told. The Chicago band Dazzling Killmen recorded "Poptones" as the B-side of their single "Medicine Me," and it reappeared on their album Recuerda (Skin Graft). As Nick Sakes sings it, the lyric comes out in fragments because he's incoherent with rage. The motion of the song is between two full-throated, shrieking chords on two guitars, which yank it back and forth like wolves fighting over still-twitching prey. It makes the idea of the pop song a hated alien, whereas PiL merely pervert the thing into a nightmare vision of itself.

But there's a third side to this story. Simon Turner was a teen idol and pop star in England in the early '70s. Fifteen years later, under the name the King of Luxembourg, he recorded an album of covers, Royal Bastard (Él), and there he revealed the darkest trick of "Poptones": it's a pop song, and it can be as pretty as any other. Turner sings it with the fluffy sensitivity of the idol he still knows how to be, enunciating "poptones!" with the cheerfulness of a children's entertainer. "The smell of rubber on country tar" sounds a little mysterious, but a little sexy, too. And the orchestration has changed: there's a French horn, pizzicato strings, a casual piano part. It's strangely abstract -- how could it not be? -- but it's an example of the same kind of glittering seduction it once repudiated, and a brilliant joke.

PiL's "Poptones" is an indictment of pop's complicity, of the way a tune can sugarcoat any horror and seduce anyone into collaboration. It comes in the middle of the grand anti-pop statement that the first half of Plastic Box chronicles: the way First Edition slowed and thickened the Sex Pistols' cheery anarchism into rich loathing devoid of tunes, Metal Box's refinement and extension of First Edition into relentless, claustrophobic grooves, the self-explanatory and murderously intense single "Death Disco," and finally The Flowers of Romance's nihilistic reduction of the pop song to a bone-crushing drum rhythm and a tiny moan.

If Lydon really feared pop in those days, he must have known it would eventually come for him. He tried to parody slick, prefabricated rock and roll with "This Is Not a Love Song" and This Is What You Want . . . This Is What You Get, but he danced close enough to it that he got sucked in. On the third disc of Plastic Box, he's a rabble-rousing voice within the system rather than a paradigm-breaking outside agitator; by the '90s work of the fourth disc, he's a reasonably distinctive singer in a sparky but perfectly ordinary rock band, and in the BBC session version of "Acid Drops" at the end of it, he's reduced to sampling his old Sex Pistols cry of "No future." This is the blessing and the curse of poptones: eventually, they'll reduce all your memories, no matter how painful, to nostalgia with a little tune attached.