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Malcolm McLaren, RIP

Malcolm McLaren, the subversive Svengali and self-aggrandizing impresario who was a major player in the creation of punk-rock as both music and fashion as manager of the Sex Pistols (and before that, the New York Dolls), died of cancer in Switzerland yesterday at 64.

McLaren's outsized personality and inherent untrustworthiness as an interviewee always made it diffucult to figure out what exactly he deserved credit for. Johnny Rotten (nee Lydon) and McLaren spent most of their lives at odds with one another, but it was under McLaren's influence at SEX, the boutique on the Kings Road in London owned by the Situationist-schooled circus master and his then girlfriend Vivan Westwood, where the Pistols first began their assault on civility.

The Pistols' self-destruction in 1978 was chronicled in two Julian Temple directed films, The Great Rock And Roll Swindle (1980), which celebrates McLaren as the brains behind the group, and The Filth and The Fury (2000), which retells the story from the Pistols' point of view. "For me Malc was always entertaining," Rotten said in a statement yesterday, "And  hope you remember that. Above all else he was an entertainer and I will miss him, and so should you."

After that, McLaren went on to have a checkered but often intriguing career, forming the band Bow Wow Wow after discovering 13 year old singer Anabella Lwin, and scoring a hit in 1982 with the Bo Diddley beat driven cover of The Strangeloves "I Want Candy."

He worked with Boy George and Adam Ant, and fused hip-hop and punk rock on the 1983 hit "Buffalo Gals," dabbled in opera and electronic music in 1984 with "Madame Butterfly." Later he worked with fellow provocateur Quentin Tarantino on the Kill Bill, Part 2 soundtrack, considered running for mayor of London, and worked in fashion, film production and, inevitably, reality TV.

Last year, his video piece Shallow 1-21 made its full length U.S. debut at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on North Broad Street. It consisted of 21 "musical paintings," made from cut-up old sex films. "They are not films or videos but another form entirely," he said of his art works, calling them "a map of feelings that navigates the look of music and the sound of fashion."

Below, check out the look and sound of four McLaren-associated clips, from the Pistols and the Dolls to Bow Wow Wow and "Buffalo Gals."

Previously: Dr. Dog's Shame