anyway, my main take on sex pistols: boy band or no? is that you have to come up with a consistent set of criteria that a group meets to be considered a boy band, and the pistols were so inconsistent that it’s impossible to see how you could apply it to the without applying it to basically everyone
the long and short of this is that “boy band” is inaccurate unless you’re classifying most bands before the mid-80s as boy bands or girls groups, and that malcolm mclaren, vivienne westwood and each individual member of the pistols all had entirely different motivations for being involved
fwiw, my criteria is:
1. plays music written by producers/managers/label
2. public/personal life largely controlled by label (this one is subjective, i know, but important)
3. are part of a marketing strategy to sell items other than music
the pistols only meet 1/3 here
Can you expand on 3?
And I think you need to draw some distinguishing factor for, say, Miley Cyrus when she was mostly owned and controlled by Disney but obviously not a girl group even if there's a similar thing happening.
I've always felt kind of bad for Tork out of the four of them.
He seemed to have been a perfectly competent but not astounding folk musician. Someone who might have otherwise had a career as a session or backing musician but never a real solo one, and that didn't quite fit with their success.
I think I read that there’s an only-slightly different universe where he still ended up just as “longtime Stephen Stills collaborator Peter Tork” which is still pretty good as Wiki pages go
Yes—they asserted independence after a couple of albums because, as it turns out, Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork were actually quite talented songwriters and collectively they were pretty strong willed
The quality difference between cutting Neil Diamond-penned tunes with studio musicians and at least partially their own stuff with a lot of Nesmith and Tork instrumental tracks was surprisingly small, though definitely noticeable. Which is actually really impressive.
