Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine - White People and the Damage Done

Jello Biafra is responsible for some of the greatest punk songs ever. He's also responsible for a seven and a half minute song that closes this album entitled Shock-U-Py!

SHOCK-U-PY! So that's a mixture of the Occupy movement and Shock. But the way it's written is also in the way of cheesily named companies like U-Haul or Spud-u-like, so then it's SHOCK/OCCUPY but also SHOCK YOU, PIE? What the fuck are you even doing here Jello!? At least it's not as bad as Barackstar O'Bummer from the EP they put out last year. Yes! That's an actual song! No! I have no fucking clue what it means! Was it ripped from a topvoted comment on a Foxnews website story? I can only hope. Or as Jello would put it: Icon Own Le Hype! SATIRE!

Dude fucking loves puns. Which is cool. I love puns! Spider Robinson is a fucking beautiful man, but there is a law of diminishing returns. There is a certain point where paronomasia goes past its initial sly smile jolt of recognition and then past the idea of using the concomitance of words as metaphor for the interconnected nature of ideas and humanity and then just becomes like an opaque blurry mess (the Finnegans Wake coefficient) Like those kinda editorial cartoons The Onion's Kelly satirises where everything is labelled as something else until the analogies collapse in a inane blancmange of pundit buzzwords.

First line of this album: WE ARE THE ILLUMINAZIS! (Followed up with a pissjoke) Yeah, I get the kinda shot it's taking but I'm fucking if I know exactly what it's attacking? Nazis/ The illuminati? People who think the illuminati is real? Jay-Z? Sometimes it seems like Jello has perfected writing punk lines that are like the anti-capitalist Crass/MDC/Bad Religion version of "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". Sub-NOFX wordplay is a harsh fucking sequence of words to type but it does lean in that direction at times. I'm not even talking about groaners, these aren't Andy Zaltzman pun runs where they stretch and ineptitude is part of the comedy of failure, these are supposed be fiery burns on (or at least witty placards shoved in the face of) the man and the machine, and they are not that at all. This ends up like the scene in The Tin Men by Michael Frayn where a character creates a computer program called UHL (Unit Headline Language) that automatically generates headlines where people superficially recognise the intent, but cannot explain the exact meaning of when pressed, like STRIKE THREAT PLEA, HATE BAN BID PROBE, TEST ROW LEAK or LEAK ROW LOOMS.

These colours clearly run. I'm contacting my washing powder supplier.

There are some things I really like though:
WEIRD VOICES! I was just talking about the current dearth of punk bands using dumb fucking voices in their songs like Splodgenessabounds or The Nipple Erectors sometimes did but Jello always delivers on that front (sometimes he over delivers, as anyone's who's listened to his half-arsed George W. Bush impression on The Yuppie Pricks Geto Boys parody Damn It Feels Good to Be a Yuppie (god even typing that sentence makes me feel like I have a life ill-lived) will tell you). Jello's voice is kind of an odd warbly thing in the first place and when he twists it into goofy redneck snipes and throws it up and down, slides a kiss of terror in it and lets it pip and scream then I'm always having fun. Yeah cunt! Weird voices! Minajcore!

PUNK SONGS! Yeah! Fucking punk songs! As mentioned at the top of this review, Jello Biafra has cranked out some of the best goddamn punk songs ever sneered, so the fact that one of his primarily modes of expression for the past twenty fucking years has been nine minute rants loosely bolted to music rather than the whipquick brainmelt blasters that threw him onto the stage in the first place has been rather fucking galling for those of us who've always found ourself in thrall to worlds set right and lives done wrong in doubletime (Remember when you loved short songs, Jello, oh what have we become as the seasons pass and our bodies age and crumble, ramble ramble ramble). John Dillinger is real screamer and a classic punk metaphor as well, bank robbers and banks and all that capitalist jazz (NO JAZZ).

Road Rage is a snot-packed simple hardcore punk blast, with breaks for an unsettling carnival punk lick and a chug-section in the middle that builds back up into a mini-Chemical Warfare kinda freakout and then back into that punk run. Ugly throughout with nasal violence and some of the aforementioned weird voice shit where he just sort of barks and yips like an annoying fucking dog fighting a mop.

Mid-East Peace Process is another punk song that follows Road Rage's THRASHFUCK-M I N A T O R Y S L O W B I T- OHSHITHEREITCOMES-THRASHFUCK structure, dropping into a first-person narrative of paranoia and terror with real bite.

Hollywood Goof Disease is pretty cool too, and it's got a real sense of theatre to it with the title line echoed by female vocals like how Bob Dylan did it once his voice was shot to shit on Street Legal, a section of drone-voiced repetition of the word 'CONSUME. CONSUME. CONSUME.' like a cheap garish sci-fi parable. This is one song though that suffers from the fact that the Jelloed One is a fifty year old man. I mean, I got a few problems with what he's attacking here, probably a bunch of the same problems that a lot people have with that whole celebrity carousel, but when you've got a middle-aged dude sarcastically going "What the hell is a Kardashian?" you're not an agitpunk provocateur, you're a fuddy-duddy cruiseship hack, throwing out one-sane-man platitudes to similarly self-satisfied sticks of grey. It's some olds gonna old crap. The sort of sitcom dad motherfucker that would describe themselves as a straighttalker when the word they're looking for is 'cunt'. Don't do that shit. MTV Get Off The Air is a great song cos its someone fucked off and thrown out by people they could, if they were built a different way, possibly consider their peers, if it had been a rambling missive thrown down on high by an old it would not have been good, if it had been sung by, say, Eric Clapton it would've been shit. And not just because Eric Clapton is shit.

But punk songs! PUNK SONGS! Like five in a row! Goddamn solid fucking punk songs. That's nice to have back properly. Do more of that Jello. Don't do something like rerecord Burgers of Wrath from your album with Mojo Nixon and manage to add an extra two minutes onto it somehow.

Oh wait you did that too. Twice on the extended edition. Oh well. It's still a solid cowpunk stomp and the skitter and click of the Slight Rural Extension version is probably more fun than the one on the actual album but it's throwaway and not in the cool way like a pogo-punx song's squirting nothingness.

BAAAAD DAAAAAADS

The album has more than a touch of that cowpunk crack to it, which seems to be used implicitly to link, or just uncover the existing connection of, the country-cowboy-go-get-em idealism to the bastardly genocide that it sits with in the old west and onwards all around the world which is very well done. WHITE PEOPLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE! Now that's a fucking song title, Jello. None of this Crapture crap. Seen at least one dicksplit arseclunk get angry about 'reverse racism' over it. That's how you do it.

Comparing this shit to Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is fucking pointless: so let's do that. Look, that's got a good shout at the greatest punk album ever made and DK were possibly the great punk band ever and anything anyone involved in it has done since or will ever do in the future is not going to match it. On it's own terms this is a good album, which uses some of the most effective tricks in Jello's political arsenal, and also succumbs to some of his most obnoxious (and not obnoxious in a cool way like a pogo-punx song's nothing squirt) excesses. Sometimes it gets too blues rock, a little too plodding and he there's no individual part of the song Shock-U-Py which stands out as shit, there is just no world in which it needs to be seven and a half minutes long. Songs like that are political verbosity as Dream Theater riffs, boring and long and they just need to be pruned with extreme prejudice (though clearly Dream Theater are beyond redemption, they need to be cut off at the stump) and the failure to do curb that self-indulgence is exactly the attitude that has been festering and dragging Jello's artistic output tediumwards since Frankenchrist's Stars and Stripes of Corruption. Shoot it dead. Punk it up.

Night Birds - Fresh Kills Vol. 1

"I met a wave head-on as it broke and took the cold shock running. My feet kicked out behind me and I swam straight out for a quarter mile. There the kelp-beds stopped me, a tangled barrier of brown and yellow tubes and bulbs floating low in the water. I hated the touch of underwater life. I turned on my back and floated, looking up at the sky, nothing around me but cool clear Pacific, nothing in my eyes but long blue space. It was as close as I ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I got from all the people. They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted. There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean couldn’t cure. Except there were too many Ararats, and I was no Noah. The sky was flat and empty and the water was chilling me. I swam to the kelp-bed and plunged down through it. It was cold and clammy like the bowels of fear. I came up gasping and sprinted to the shore with barracuda terror nipping at my heels." - Ross MacDonald, The Drowning Pool

I once read an article about Monty Python which posited as its main point the idea that while everyone cites Monty Python as an inspiration, it wasn't actually that directly influential for the things that are cited as revolutionary about it. Its formal innovations and deconstruction of the sketch show genre were so complete that no-one else could risk doing things like letting sketches bleed into one another without being accused of simply aping the Pythons and so if it did have influence on the many who cited it, then it was more in its general tone, its anarchy of spirit.

The same, for me, can be said of the Dead Kennedys. I think Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is quite possibly the greatest punk album of all time, and everyone I know loves it, but you won't find much that sounds like it. You'll find dozens of bands trying to be The Clash or The Sex Pistols, hundreds trying to be The Ramones, thousands trying to be Hot Water Music or NOFX, but not many people seem to be reaching for a sound resembling DK. That's partly because they did not have one definitive sound, they were constantly shifting and experimenting with genres and sounds, but FFFRV is what you might call the 'classic' sound and there's just not that much that resembles it.

(Of course, they're not unique in bringing in surf influences to punk. The Ramones covered Surfin' Bird and later spawned their own gimmicky but fun hanging ten tribute band The Ramonetures and The Livingbrooks later took this early Beach Boys feel of some Ramones stuff a lot further. There are the eponymous Surf Punks who are actually kind of a precursor to the goofy careless genre-hopping sarcasm of The Dead Milkmen. A bunch of early skatepunk has the odd surfy song or cover (like JFA, despite their Yodaesque cry of 'Surf punks we're not!'), then you have the other side of surf bands drawing in punk influences, like rock and roll fighters The Tijuana Bibles, garage-surf trash women The Trashwomen or intergalactic travellers Man or Astroman? but none of these bands sound much like Fresh Fruit (though The Ramones are obviously a formative influence on it.) )

And then here come Night Birds with Fresh Kills Vol. 1 which is a collection of their previously released seven inches, and everyone who hears them goes "Wow, it's just like DK!" They're not solely drawing from DK though, they clearly have a bit of Adolescents in the way they underpin their choruses with lots of aaaaaaahs on the backing vocals. The mid-tempo darkness of Living in the Middle calls to mind something like the Drunk Injuns' Mental Holocaust and its naked desire to aurally paint the trudging threat of a mind slipping into itself. They seem to be dedicated to recreating the beachviolence noises of this particular branch of the early 80s punk sound I initially assumed that must've been a California band, but they're actually from New Jersey.

The combination of surf sounds into punk subverts it. In general, in surf-rock the sun, sand and sea all roll together into a friendly fun day out with wholesome smiling faces, white teeth, tanned skin. The whole odd little subgenre of beach party movies like Beach Party, Gidget, Bikini Beach and Muscle Beach Party. "Help save the youth of America/Help save them from themselves/Help save the sun-tanned surfer boys/And the California girls" as Billy Bragg sang. The addition of punk rock is a horror movie take on the genre, like The Horror of Party Beach, but extending that horror past just a guy in a dodgy suit preying on women in bikinis into a pervading sense of danger and loathing and psychosis that threatens to consume the world. This surf/punk melding paints the sun as a burning ball of oppressive heat burning your face, not a happy smiling greeting to the day, the sand as dirt, grit thrown in your eyes, the sea as malevolent energy personified, a place of drownings and shark attacks, breakers crashing down on your head. It drags the surfers out of the sea and into the city and then gets them fucked-up on pills, mugs them and leaves them wandering about the supermodernist nightmare of Los Angeles descending into madness, the joy of a Ventures or Volcanos song rippling round the edges of their mind until they're subsumed into the underclass of the city, spanging for changes and humming the Hawaii 5-0 tune into the cracks on the sidewalk like they're worm-charming for that wave to come wash it all away.

Night Birds are doing nothing new. They have songs about being in thrall to b-movies that echo the grindhouse cinephilia of the Misfits and The Lillingtons. They're writing first person serial killer songs. Surf-punk instrumentals. Paranoia and social detachment. Apocalyptic fantasies of mega-tsunamis. It's all been done before, but they're so tight and well-constructed that you really want to listen to it, and like I said, the fact that the sound they're mostly going for isn't actually one that was done that much, as familiar as it sounds.

Punk rock has this odd mixture of being associated with this mad lunge towards a dystopian brutalist future in a lot of its early iconography and the way it was drawn into the whole cyberpunk literary movement and its high-tech/low-life obsessions, but also in its classic sound and simple song structures it's defiantly retrograde a lot of the time. It's stripping down the virtuosity of classic rock, laughing at the archness of metal, kicking the shit out of the self-involved pomposity of prog screaming "THE ONLY THING THAT SHOULD BE PROGRESSIVE IN ROCK MUSIC IS POLITICS!" Night Birds are this sort of snotty manic musical necromancy, a perfect example of the desire for safety and security within a sound that is built of unsafeness and insecurity in its thrash and violence. The aping of a past sound which engages with it perfect sincerity and never lapses into gimmicky parody. This is just pure concise 80s hardcore style punk rock, and at a time where we're building Reagan statues in London, watching Thatcher in the cinema, rioting in the streets against the Tory cunts, what could be more perfect? I can't wait for the full-length.

So Scratched Into Our Souls #5: Turkish Techno - Meth Not Meat

"Here is the great, explosive novel I promised you. Like our souls it is polyphonic; it is, at the same time, a lyric poem, an epic, an adventure novel, and a drama. I am the only man who has dared write such a masterpiece, and it will be my own hand that will destroy it, when the growing splendor of the world has equaled it with its own and rendered it superfluous. In spite of what the inhabitants of Goutville and Paralysis may say about it, this work of mine unfurls an immortal banner in the winds of glory, on the topmost peak of human thought; and my creator’s pride is well pleased. Don’t think of justifying it; watch it, rather, bounding and exploding like a well primed grenade over the shattered heads of our contemporaries, then dance, whirling in a warlike reel, splashing about in the quagmire of their imbecility, taking no heed of their monotonous driveling." - F.T. Marinetti in the preface to Mafarka the Futurist, swinging like an eleven foot penis not just for the fences but the nebulous bonds of human creation itself. An utter fascist shit, it should be mentioned, but you've got to kind of admire that level of bravado.

For the most part with this blog, I want to focus on shit that I love. There are many punk bands that I am mostly or wholly indifferent to, a few that I genuinely dislike and want either scorched from the earth or just given a really good talking to that tells them to buck their ideas up, sunshine, but I don't really see the point of focusing on them too much, because unless you're actually getting paid to review something, or someone requests it, or they are part of a larger review (Bad Ideas) then purposely seeking out something you're not into rather than attempting to highlight a few small parts of the endless reams of beautiful brilliant stuff just seems kind of fucking stupid.

All I really want to do with my life is write about punk rock in as eloquent and inspiring a fashion as someone like John Berger writes about art and resistance, in as chaotic and beautiful fashion as Dambudzo Marechera writes about love and rebellion. I want to be as angry and funny as Bill Hicks, to be as fearless as Kathy Acker as she tears down and reconstitutes culture and literature for her own playful angry ends, as noisy as JMG Le Clezio, as fun as William Burroughs, as conscious as Ursula Le Guin, as moving as Bao Ninh, as readable as Ross Macdonald, as thrilling as William Gibson, as human as Flannery O'Connor, as punk as Aaron Cometbus, as conscious as Juan Goytisolo, as self-aware as Stewart Lee, and really to just rip off Lester Bangs for the most part, and I expect to spend my life in a constant struggle to get even a quarter of the way towards those ideals, or the strengths of dozens of other writers that I idolise, but that's what I'm aching and reaching for. (Also, I want to egregiously mention lots of writers so people know how smart I am, and then acknowledge what I'm doing as if that in anyway alleviates the shuddering arrogance of it all, like a cunt.) I want to do all this shit not just in general, not in the abstract, but with specific regards to punk bloody rock, and these writers represent many many different approaches and styles and genres, but if there's a way I lean with my writing, a direction in which I make an active effort to synthesise them, it's as an attempt to scrabble away from my own natural cynicism.

While it is important to question and attack the negative aspects of punk rock and one of the many aspects I love about punk rock is the way it accepts and encourages self-criticism (I do not think all these recent articles about sexism would be as prevalent in metal) and I do want to fight to make the scene as accepting as it can be without compromising what I see as the essential parts of it, now what I see as an essential part may seem peripheral and alienating to others, but such is the nature of the music and culture. While I want to sing along to Back to the Motor League or Chickenshit Conformist and enact their angry slashing denunciations of the scene, but generally more than that I want to sing along to Ghost Mice singing Up the Punx or Against Me! remaking the world in a better image with Reinventing Axl Rose. I want to talk about the redemptive power of the music and culture more than I want to talk about the shittiness of the scene. I want to write narratives akin to Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and A.R. Flowers' De Mojo Blues and their common themes of dealing with traumatic events and experiences with a return to the values and traditions of a marginalised native culture. I don't have a native culture, for the most part, or maybe I just don't have one which I feel in any way connected to, as Nick Hornby wrote, there are few people as rootless as a middle-class white Englishman, all I have is what I have chosen to believe in, what I have not been able to help but love since it first got scratched into my soul, and so I will continue to emphasise all that I see as punk rock's contradictory strengths, its beautiful human powers a little bit more than I focus on its contradictory weaknesses, its painful human ugliness and if I do turn my gaze towards the flaws and nastiness of it, I want to fold them into its strengths as a sympathetic mirror of the stunning fascinating complexity of all that human effluvium and steam generally more than I want to engage in scathing condemnation. That may be a fucking cop out, but it's just how I see the world and seek to leave a skidmark on it.

But still, you know, I get fucking pissed off.

I think the whole idea of punk cred is kind of bullshit. The wonderful thing about punk rock is that it has no definitive texts, yes, there are many punk albums which I personally would consider essential, I recently attempted to compile a list of 'important' punk albums, not my favourites, or even ones I really like, but just a list of albums I consider influential in the sonic and social development of punk and its subgenres, I gave up on this when I realised that my brief primer had reached 125 albums and I had another 30 on the tip of my tongue. But even if I'd completed and posted the list I know people would've had a go at me for missing out some albums, including others, probably they would've mentioned some albums which they feel are undisputable punk rock classics that I would have never even heard of. There may be some sort of loose canon running from Fun House to Scrambles but still, there is not one album you can point at and say "This is all that punk rock can be.", you can only say "This is something, or some of the things that punk rock can be." because even an album that battles and struggles with itself, that contradicts itself in sound and message in an attempt to mirror the wider schisms within the genre and culture would miss out on the fact that many of the best punk albums are cohesive unified works.

There are no definitive texts, it may be a faith in some ways but it is not in any way a religion, this means that in many ways that all definitions of punk rock are equally valid, the idea of what punk rock is offered by a 15 year old just getting into it is as valid as mine, when I've spent about a decade now thinking about it and loving it, and yeah that gets frustrating for me sometimes, I do get annoyed. When my friend posts a picture online of him in a Dead Kennedys NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF! shirt where you can only see the top half of the logo and has someone tell him off for being hateful or says "I hope you're being ironic with that shirt" I cannot help but howl to myself "IF YOU CANNOT IMMEDIATELY RECOGNISE SOMETHING AS OBVIOUSLY FUCKING ICONIC AS THE FUCKING NAZI FUCKING PUNKS FUCKING FUCK OFF LOGO THEN WHAT IN THE NAME OF JESUS CUNT FUCKING FUCKARSE ARE YOU EVEN DOING CLAIMING TO BE PUNK FUCKING ROCK IN ANY FUCKING WAY AT ALL YOU FUCKING FUCKING FUCK!?"





But still, those poor pathetic fools who have never let the cheshire-cat surfy menace of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables or the brief goofy thrash of In God We Trust Inc or the apocalyptic driving thunderscapes of Frankenchrist run through them and work its witty wailing way into their heads still have a place in this culture, this scene. I wouldn't have it any other way because there's always the underlying suspicion possibly the definition of a snotty 15 year old is more valid than mine being as it is a culture born in the teenage maelstrom of frustration and isolation and what I seek to do is to preserve the rawness of passion and feeling that all art inspires at that age while trying to work towards a more measured clearer evocation of punk rock's varying appeals, but in the ever-shifting bounds of such an amorphous self-contradictory culture I find myself constantly revising and arguing with myself, struggling and dancing with conflicting ideas that seem to each represent some vaguely tangible notions of punkness (not Punk Ness, which is either an extensively-pierced Family Ness member with a Black Flag tattoo, or anything up to and including White Light, White Heat, White Trash, zing!). I believe things are far too complicated to say that because something is contradictory it is weak or invalid, to paraphrase Walt Whitman fairly tritely: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, punk rock is large, it contains multitudes."

But still, like I said, I get fucking pissed off.

And when I get pissed off, I listen to Turkish Techno's Meth Not Meat from their split with the always great Brokedowns on Traffic Street Records, a brilliant label of the sort where if I were rich I would just send them a big wad of cash and the note "SEND ME EVERYTHING YOU DO. I WANT IT ALL!" (this video cuts off the song by a couple seconds).


Meth Not Meat a brief scratchy pop-punk tune for all those times where you couldn't take the expansive view of things. It is a zero-compromise-fuck-all-yall-had-it-up-to-shittin-here shout. Even the aforementioned anti-scene rants offer some hope. Nazi Punks Fuck Off comes from a position of siding with one particular group of punks, the good ones, though a song called Non-Nazi Punks Have Some Delicious Biscuits would probably not have attained the same level of ubiquitous reproduction in its logo and lyrics on armbands and shirts and skin (BUT APPARENTLY NOT UBIQUITOUS ENOUGH FOR SOME FUCKERS). The protagonist of Back to the Motor League begins by listing what he does like before he descends into a laundry list of his punk pet peeves, he offers some awareness and direction towards the hard-rocking reconciliatory movement betwixt his "mouthed feet, eaten hats, teated bulls, amish phone-books, drunken brawls" and the wispy unattainability of perfection that too many fools passive-aggressively posture at lamely, broadly speaking, he has somewhere to go back to. Chickenshit Conformist has little nudges towards the light like "Change and caring are what's real" buried in amongst its laundry list declaiming all the dogshit hardcore formulas and other related ills of the punk scene.

Meth Not Meat has none of those nudges, none of those good points and people to take sides with. Fuck that positive noise. Redemption is a myth. Salvation is a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I am pissed-off with being pissed-on by shitty little fucking pretentious fuck motherfuckers who seek to turn radical politics or noisy music into a fucking compe-fucking-tition, who like to exist in a inbred echo-chamber of punk rock rules and regulations and humourless policing of others through self-important self-satisfied grandstanding. WHO THINK THEY'RE FUCKING BETTER THAN ME. I am alone and everyone else is a ridiculous slimy shitehawk with an acoustic (FUCKING ACOUSTIC! IT'S LIKE BOB DYLAN NEVER FUCKING DIED!) guitar. Alienation as a point of order. Being a solitary prick in the face of massed pricks. There is not a single line in this song which is not filled with all the spit and itching fury of the moments when you feel yourself falling into the silly sucking black wound of the idea that, as Frank Turner sang on Love, Ire and Song, 'punk rock didn't live up to what I hoped it would be'. This song captures that moment so perfectly, a quick mid-tempo guitar intro, an odd little pop and then it tears into action and you're sneering and shouting along "TAKE ME FUCKING HOME! I REALLY WANNA GO! THIS BAND IS REALLY WEAK ANOTHER SHITHEAD FASHION SHOW!" You're in the restless fitful rhythm, the screaming pace of this all-encompassing feeling of loathing and bile, it quietens down in places, repeating the central refrain of "I don't want it. I don't need it" like a churning mumbling to yourself as you smolder in the corner of the terrible show. It also slows down a little for the solo, restrains itself slightly, draws back into itself briefly before projecting that bubbling rant out at the world again. "I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR WHITE BOY BLUES, YOUR SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT OR BAD TATTOOS! AND I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOUR VEGAN SHOES!"

Now obviously this mentality is a temporary one, an unsustainable one, a pretty fucking stupid one (chances are a good proportion of those singing along have some fairly bad fucking tattoos), but it is a bright flash of an undeniable instinct, a cutting spark that cannot be overlooked in the way it flips through you and marks you with its pyrographic reminders of times when you just snapped (a couple songs which perfectly illustrates the unsustainabilty of it and the complex process of simmering down to a greater calmness and then taking your ability to create that energy and channeling it into love and dancing rather than spite would be Operation Ivy's Jaded and Dillinger Four's Doublewhiskeycokenoice, two bands whose albums were definitely on my list of essential ones). It's a renegade Marinettian blast of personal affirmation that is kind of fucking pointless in the long term and exists in some ways as a warning for people to maybe steer clear of being quite that utterly batshit and uncompromising in their self-assurance next time, whether its in the act of proclaiming yourself a genius or just the only sane person left standing.

Turkish Techno are at that exact same point that Dear Landlord were at a few years ago, a few seven inches out and a long-gestated album in the works (coming soon for the last fuck knows how long, but apparently genuinely coming soon from Dirtcult) which all those arseholes sad and deluded enough to believe that they know their shit (I totally know my shit) about punk rock are predicting will be perched atop many end-of-year lists. This confidence in a band with so little actual material out there similarly springs from one momentous song which makes pretty much everyone who hears it get totally and forever caught up in its 2 minute rush, the marriage of bouncy shouty noise into a breathless breakneck rant that squats resplendent within the anserine beating heart of punk rock. With Dear Landlord it was Three to the Beach, with Turkish Techno it's Meth Not Meat.

A funny thing though, about a song like this, is that it, like the songs that approach punk rock with the most happy-clappy inspiring loveliness, like the ones that travel from one to the other, is that it is contingent on the listener already being a punk. It will convert no-one. It's by the punx, for the punx, with the punx. The references will not make sense to those not already invested in the scene. Who else knows enough people who brag about their vegan shoes to get pissed off by it? Who else appreciates the determination of deciding not to burn your bridges despite fifteen fights and your six bucks up some promoter's nose? Who else can honestly say "Punk rock saved my life" and know that it's not a pose in any way, shape or form. The glorifying and the denigrating are twin sides of the same battered pick. One of the things out of the many many things in seemingly endless ever-expanding list of things that I love about punk rock, one of the contradictory things, is that it is a place which both shamelessly self-mythologises and ruthlessly self-excoriates and I think it needs both parts to survive, it needs to struggle between them, the clatter when they come together and snap apart, to move from one to the other and back again, to sit temporarily in either one until boredom sets in. For the most part with this blog, I want to focus on shit that I love, but sometimes I love being a shit.

So go fuck yourself, world. Go fuck yourself, Joe. And above all other things, before you get out of bed in the afternoon or pass out in the early ours, fuck the fucking punx.
"I don't want it, I sure as fuck don't need it..."