Public Image Ltd.* – This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get

The fan base wanted a subversion of Pop music, the record company wanted a pure Pop album. Lydon satisfied both desires and disappointed them too. Accept the art for what it is not what you want to be. Or as the title says: This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get.

This was Johnny Rotten's first attempt at pop music with Public Image Ltd.. It yielded an alternative dance hit, but it was not a commercial success. Artistically, however, it absolutely was. I love this record. It still sounds cutting edge. And the new remaster sounds amazing.

This album has aged very well, unlike this review from '84:

Dear John, the big kiss off:

This is what you want? Carry On Picking The Carrion Part Umpteen? Starring Johnny Rotten as Little Miss Understood, the world’s most self-righteous schoolmarm, whose once shrivelling, presently shrivelled, wit has tightened to a contstipated bowel that slowly and painfully emits squeaky sarcasms only capable of raising tears in 11 year olds? Or the frightening faithful class creep Martin Applecheeks back in line?

This is what you’re left with when you make a career of going against nature (only to be defeated by your own): a fixed scowl, a very limited public image indeed, intuition dried up, refinement beyond grasp, reduced by sloth to hiring studio morticians to cosmetise the corpse of a long dead idea, because you no longer care or have energy enough to be invigoratingly careless.

Now bored with testing the world against your whims you blame it, anyone else but yourself-it can never be your fault, can it? - for your loss of interest, loss of words, loss of vision; for your very deafness… But surely even you can feel the cheapness of the horrortronics permeating this record with the stink of the stale and the secondhand. Sudden sax squalls and thunderous drum breaks are hardly the things to blow it away.

For one whose chief pride has always been remaining true to yourself, I’m surprised your conscience so readily accepts your feeble reasoning. Just because you write a love song, there must be something wrong with the form? Obviously. And because your dwindling legion still stand by to watch the waning moon of your rotten talent, believing it will rise again, they must be thoroughly abused, thereby disabused of that sentimental notion? Naturally.

With you on the last point, Johnboy, and will reluctantly it you a piddling victory. Your idiot finger wagging rhythm ’n’ entropy, exemplified by the bicker banter of the title ‘This Is What You Want This Is What You Get’, is crass and mediocre enough to complete your self-willed, pointless martyrdom. Congratulations. You’ve earned our contempt. Here it comes:

Wot a bloody stupid cackleshit asshole coyote lied-to done-in-good ’n’ rotten put-upon no-hope lumpenlard jackal knucklehead trickletalent pile of jokepuke you turned out to be. There ain’t enough copographers in the world to swallow your PiL in quantity enough to justify the cost any longer.

Piss off.

Biba Kopf, NME, 4th August 1984

This album was way ahead of it's time. It still holds up in 2020 and we did not want COVID

I want to thank the guy on the Jah Wobble yahoogroup who challenged my lazy assumption that Commercial Zone was better than "This is what you want". (sorry man forgot your name, but your words stayed with me)
leaving aside the superior vocal performances on "This is what you want", this album is much more forward looking than the retro-isms of "Commercial zone"
this mega hard, almost industrial funk sound was much more of the moment in 1984 close to what cutting edge bands like coil & fini-tribe were doing but more accesible

as the years have gone by this stuff has grown in my estimation and "Commercial zone" has waned