The Work of No Future

In 1977, Johnny Rotten leaned into his microphone and screamed what became the defining slogan of punk: No future. The Sex Pistols meant it as a dispatch from the wreckage of British class society, a report on what it felt like to be young and boxed out in a time of stagflation and imperial decline. That same year, across the Atlantic, Richard Hell released “Blank Generation,” the American counterpart: “I belong to the blank generation, and I can take it or leave it each time.” In 2010, the extremely overrated huckster Banksy (see above) stenciled a gray little girl onto a wall in Southampton, holding a red balloon that formed the O in NO FUTURE, which was…pretty meta, I guess.1