Dylan Jones: "Pussy Riot - more balls than the Sex Pistols"

 
While I loved just about everything about both the opening and closing Olympic ceremonies, to judge from the way the last 50 years of British pop music had been seamlessly woven together, you might have thought rebellion was purely a thing of fantasy.

Personally, I loved hearing the Sex Pistols against a backdrop of mainstream national achievement, although I imagine there were a few who sniffed a little emasculation in there somewhere.

Which makes the plight of Russian band Pussy Riot even more apposite. They have focused the eyes of the world on Vladimir Putin’s ‘benevolent’ dictatorship. Three members of Pussy Riot – Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich – were last week found guilty of inciting “hooliganism” motivated by “religious hatred”, largely due to their first single released in January – Putin Wet His Pants – and the fact that a month later they entered the Christ the Saviour cathedral, stripped and performed a protest against the Orthodox church’s support for the president.

The trial has been a worldwide obsession – even Madonna made her thoughts known. There is word that Cameron buttonholed Putin about it. Everybody has an opinion. But while it’s ludicrous that these girls should be facing prison following a Salem-style witch trial, there is another elephant in the room. Culturally, a much bigger one. Because they’re not very good. In fact, they’re terrible, sounding not unlike a particularly poor agitprop Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

This begs the questions, does this matter, and is the political message and gesture enough? Have we lost the ability to have good music drive social change? Music is littered with revolutionary statements fused with great music. Whether it’s the blues of Lead Belly, the punk snap judgements of The Clash, Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit, or The Specials’ Ghost Town, great music has always had the ability to stop us in our tracks and make the political topical – and, saliently, hummable.

Hip hop is a genre that has become one of the most politicised types of pop ever made. Public Enemy influenced a generation of rappers, musicians and pop consumers, an influence that can be heard every time you turn on the radio. The thrash-pop feminist ramblings of Pussy Riot (below) might not to be everyone’s taste – okay, they aren’t to most people’s taste – but their political and cultural activism should be applauded in the same way Public Enemy’s Fear of A Black Planet should be applauded.

The world is still full of people who abhor hip hop, yet endorse many lyrical themes and frustrations of the genre. Those who dislike Pussy Riot’s music, and draw attention to it, are victims of a media culture that would prefer the group to be saviours of contemporary white punk and who want the story to be more easily defined. But the world isn’t perfect, as Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Samutsevich are finding out.

Many of us would love Pussy Riot to have the innate talent to record an album as genre-defining as Nirvana’s Nevermind, or The Slits’ Cut. We should be pleased they have made a far more important political gesture by protesting against Putin and Medvedev’s decision to switch places, allowing Putin to return to the presidency for up to 12 additional years.

This is more important than making a record as good as Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Anyone can swear, but not everyone has the balls to storm an Orthodox church in the certain knowledge they will be locked up. Forget the Spice Girls, Pussy Riot exude real Girl Power. And they’ve got more balls than all the Sex Pistols put together.

The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music by Dylan Jones is available in paperback (Bedford Square Books, £25) or in ebook (£6.49)