The first time I heard the Sex Pistols I was at my friend Kelly's house. I was in grade 7 and she was in grade 8 which automatically made her cooler than I was. Kelly was the person I went too for all of my musical needs. She introduced me to all the music I listened too , starting with Silverchair and Green Day and ending with the Dead Kennedy's and Black Flag and somewhere in between came the Sex Pistols.

As Johnny Rotten sang the first couple of lines of Holidays in the Sun, I was hooked. The Sex Pistols make no apologies. They know they have no musical talent, and they rub it in your face because it doesn't matter.

And Greil Marcus in his book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century questions why that album and so many others cultural artifacts change lives , how are they able to still have an impact on those who are willing to listen. What is is that makes something so simple have so much meaning in our culture. Where do these ideas come from.

It's not as if they are new, but somehow the Sex Pistols made them sound new, made themselves new. Through-out history we as a people have been constantly pushing boundaries , constantly looking for people to show us the way to let us know where to look and how to act and for some it was the Sex Pistols for others it was the situationists or the dadaists and for some maybe it was a mixture of them all.

Although none of these movements and people were able to change history, they all left something behind, something that changed the cultural landscape, changed the way people think. When Johnny Rotten said "Fuck" on TV for the first time he open the door for a discussion on vulgarity and censorship . When Duchamp put a urinal on display and called it a fountain he questioned the conventions of what art was and what it could be creating a discussion with in the art world. Both used similar conventions and similar ideals to force themselves into the realm of popular culture , to make themselves be heard.