Lydon would likely disavow his own on-the-record statements, below, because he’s a pain like that.
But anyhow, here’s Seth Mandel:
In defending the lyrics to Spin magazine in 2007, Lydon said: “I don’t think there’s a clearer song about the pain of abortion. The juxtaposition of all those different psychic things in your head and all the confusion, the anger, the frustration, you have to capture in those words.”
Another song on the record, “Problems,” is about personal responsibility. “Holidays in the Sun” is a sendup of the misery tourists who live comfortably in the West but enjoy vacationing in socialist dystopias in order to feel (as we would say today) “woke.”
Political correctness, Lydon said in 2013, is a tactic used by the powerful against the powerless “to stifle our freedom of thought.”
He believes the concept of racism as it’s used by the societal elite is a middle-class invention: The “biggest racist statement is when the Hampstead elite invite a ‘person of colour’ to a dinner party; that condescending tone that goes with that. That’s racism.”
