Nowadays, musical nihilism has obviously reached its zenith in real-life mayhem à la the many dead boys of rap. Puffy & Co. destroy their competition and their detractors, not themselves. And everyone is inured to shock rock to the point of dismal ennui and Marilyn Manson coffee mugs.

A joyous, vitally lame self-loathing and real subversion were at the center of punk, which gave everyone young and grotesque and disturbed a reason to go outside, to be a part of the revolution. And Rotten was so, so great. Absolutely perfect, a fusion of delirious, elfin prankstership, rowdy politics, great hair, nasal screaming, wonderfully creative, artfully moth-eaten sweaters. Truly an icon -- we never realized that Rotten was so sexy, nor Vicious, nor that the band ruled as much as the best Led Zeppelin album or the best Stones. Oh, those boys were truly delicious, especially in retrospect.

At the time, we were too dumb to know.

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I went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to see the exhibit "Body Art: Marks of Identity," because after I saw the "Fame After Photography" exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art last year, I said that if there wasn't a tattoo show in a New York museum in the next two years I would get one on my ass that said "malcontent." Well, there is a tattoo show, but it's at the natural history museum, so I guess that's a stalemate.

In front of the museum was a pack of highly androgynous skateboard kids. They all looked like boys -- spiky hair, baggy pants, baggy sweat shirts, spikes in nose, eyebrows -- but two of them were girls. At first I thought they were gay, and then they started making out lurid and crazy with two boys -- legs spread, backs against a statue, boys dry-humping them, tongues churning wildly behind cheeks.

Tourists from Ohio were terrified and covering the eyes of their small children. I was fascinated. They were rebellious teens from the MTV generation, in which no look is too outlandish to be co-opted, loitering outside the museum shocking people with their blatant, in-your-face sexuality. That's a newish twist, I thought, with echoes of 1968. But these kids weren't hippie loving so much as celebrating pornography: taking the shameful stuff out of Dad's dresser and exploding it on 81st and Central Park West.

Apparently, they weren't there for the "Body Art" show; nobody was, really. In fact, the show is a flop, which is too bad, because it is a really nice, elegant show. But it isn't lowbrow enough to curry the kind of interest that the motorcycle show at the Guggenheim had last year. This show, a nicely assembled batch of displays, from the head-flattening practices of the Chinook Indians to Zulu ear disks to sideshow tattooed ladies, doesn't have much oomph.

It speaks of a certain amount of Wanting to Have a Sensational Youth-Oriented Lowbrow Show but then chickening out of delivering the goods -- like a XXX peep show where you pay your money and look through the little box and the lady only takes off her tube socks. Craven cowardice has no place in museum curating, even under the reign of swinish art oppressor Herr Giuliani.

Rotten said of the early demise of the Sex Pistols, "The real stuff never survives. Only the fake stuff survives [in the music industry]." We live in a time when the real stuff hardly ever gets to the starting line anymore. Everyone is too afraid of punishment, of alienating people, of lawyers and lawsuits and controversy and losing money, to ever do anything truly original and daring.

Well, fuck 'em, I say. Fuck 'em all right in the ear. You have to get a little bit of somebody else's blood on your teeth if you're ever going to say anything but "Yes, sir," and if all you ever say is "Yes, sir," you've wasted your whole goddamned life.

Johnny Rotten is an inspiration to us all.

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