Is Malcolm McLaren Really Dead?

I ask this question because, by his own admission, McLaren's entire life was dedicated to provoking responses, mostly negative. He set up a fetish shop in fashionable King's Road in London and called it Sex. He tried managing The New York Dolls at their drug-and-booze-fueled nadir. Finally, he organized a group that he felt would achieve the goal of pissing off a whole lot of people, from the royal family to the Labour Government to the music industry, and he called this little band of juvenile delinquents The Sex Pistols. Unfortunately for McLaren, the lead singer was the thoughtful, intelligent, and rage-filled John Lydon, who took the opportunity offered by McLaren to make a name for himself.

McLaren was dedicated to an obscure branch of radical thought known as situationalism. Dedicated to provocative street theater, the situationists thought that spectacle offered the opportunity to present alternatives to the current state of affairs; the opening of a sex shop, promoting a band that challenged the monarchy in the year of the Queen's jubilee, getting this unruly group of hooligans first on UK television where they spouted "rude words", then a record deal with a major label; all of this for McLaren offered two opportunities. First, to make a whole lot of money (although this backfired after the Pistols broke up and lawsuits sprouted like mushrooms on a log); second to live out situationist fantasies of radical performance. It failed here, too, as the Pistols spawned an entire music movement, the results of which continue to influence contemporary music. If you don't believe me, consider that, in 1989, in a concert in Moscow, no less a commercial behemoth than Motley Crue opened their show with "Anarchy in the UK".

McLaren's post-Pistols career was a slide in to striving to reclaim his moment in the sun. He managed, for a time, the bubblegum postpunk band Bow Wow Wow, but ran in to trouble during a photo shoot with the band's underage female lead singer. In the mid-1990's, he got the surviving members of the Sex Pistols to get together for a tour (as Billy Joe of Green Day sang, "I am an Anti Christ; buy some of my merchandise"). And now, he is gone.

Or is he?