"We are better than anyone, ain't we? Except for the Eagles, the Eagles are better than us"
About this Quote
Bravado with a trapdoor: Sid Vicious inflates the Sex Pistols’ myth of supremacy, then punctures it with a single, oddly sincere exception. “We are better than anyone, ain’t we?” isn’t a statement so much as a chant that needs the crowd to answer back. The tag question (“ain’t we?”) turns swagger into a dare for validation, exposing how punk’s anti-establishment posture still fed on the oldest fuel in pop culture: the hunger to be crowned.
Then comes the twist: “Except for the Eagles.” The funniest part is the target. The Eagles weren’t dangerous; they were smooth, meticulous, commercially bulletproof. Name-checking them is a calculated act of heresy inside the punk church, like admitting your guilty pleasure is the very sound you’re supposed to detest. It reads as both troll and confession, collapsing the high-minded purity test that punk audiences and critics loved to enforce. Vicious, never the band’s most musically capable member, understood image as warfare. This line weaponizes contradiction: punk identity built on negation still has to negotiate pleasure, influence, and envy.
Context matters: late-70s Britain was a pressure cooker of economic stagnation and cultural gatekeeping, and the Pistols were marketed as an acid splash on the respectable. Vicious’ joke reveals how performance and insecurity cohabited the same leather jacket. The subtext is almost tender in its cynicism: even the kids throwing bottles at “corporate rock” knew the charts had gravity, and even anarchy has a hierarchy.
Then comes the twist: “Except for the Eagles.” The funniest part is the target. The Eagles weren’t dangerous; they were smooth, meticulous, commercially bulletproof. Name-checking them is a calculated act of heresy inside the punk church, like admitting your guilty pleasure is the very sound you’re supposed to detest. It reads as both troll and confession, collapsing the high-minded purity test that punk audiences and critics loved to enforce. Vicious, never the band’s most musically capable member, understood image as warfare. This line weaponizes contradiction: punk identity built on negation still has to negotiate pleasure, influence, and envy.
Context matters: late-70s Britain was a pressure cooker of economic stagnation and cultural gatekeeping, and the Pistols were marketed as an acid splash on the respectable. Vicious’ joke reveals how performance and insecurity cohabited the same leather jacket. The subtext is almost tender in its cynicism: even the kids throwing bottles at “corporate rock” knew the charts had gravity, and even anarchy has a hierarchy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
|---|
More Quotes by Sid
Add to List





