If you asked me back when I was in junior high school and I discovered the Sex Pistols if I’d think in a million years that Johnny Rotten would be doing a commercial, I’d have told you that you were crazy. You see back then the band was considered “dangerous” and if you liked them you were pretty much an outcast open for ridicule and beatings by the “in crowd”. Hell, if you asked me 5 years ago I might still have thought you crazy. You see, when I think about Johnny Rotten/Lydon I think about punk rock, the Sex Pistols, and Public Image, Ltd. The last thing in the world I’d likely be thinking about would be butter.
Yet somehow, some butter company overseas thought Johnny Lydon would be the perfect spokesman to shill their product in a TV commercial. I never thought I’d see the day that Mr. Rotten would be doing a commercial that you’d likely see during a soap opera but the evidence is below. Of course, I never thought I’d live long enough to see gas cost $4 a gallon either. Times are a changing.
People gotta make a living some how. Guess that whole punk rock thing isn’t paying the bills like it used to.
Oh, I’m not against someone making a living but the whole thing is just kind of surreal I guess. I never thought in a million years that Mr. Rotten would be in a commercial on TV. It’s just proof that punk rock has really been accepted by the world as just another style of music and the days of it being some outcast sort of counterculture are as far past it as my youth is past me.
My brother found this quote from Lydon which makes it even more surprising he would do a commercial.
This from a guy whose response to being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was as follows:
“Next to the Sex Pistols, rock and roll and that, hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum. Urine in wine. We’re not coming. We’re not your monkeys. If you voted for us, hope you noted your reasons. You’re anonymous as judges but you’re still music industry people. We’re not coming. You’re not paying attention. Outside the shit-stream is a real Sex Pistol.”