Direct Hit! - Brainless God

tense fucking shit when a band whose logo you have decided to etch indelibly into your skin decides to release new music. I don't have to worry about the Hickey H on my leg as that band are dear departed, but having already dodged the Screeching Weasel bullet, no-one wants to join the group of people who got Gaslight Anthem tats after Sink or Swim, or got Anti-Nowhere League jobs before The Perfect Crime came out (though to be honest, an Anti-Nowhere League tattoo was always gonna be somewhere in the top ranks of bad decisions from moment needle hit skin). So I was kinda on edge for one of my favourite bands' new album.

Selfie of the Artist as a Young Dog

And it got worse when I heard a couple of the preview tracks and they sounded pretty slick. Slick, as in well-produced. I generally try not to harp on about production, because focusing on production in punk reviews it always just the most boring shit ever and generally seems like a transparent attempt on behalf of the writer to go "Oh look how mature I'm being knowing that music is something made by people in rooms." Fuck that, music is numinous adolescent shit for dancing to and crying over, I will treat it as sillily and ridiculously and pretentiously as I possibly can.

But yeah it sounded kinda slick, and slick is a word I only like to use when I am giving a nickname to a greaser that I have beef with in the musical that is my everyday life, and combined with the fact that I was not too into Domesplitter (I love all those songs, I'm just generally not down with rerecordings if they don't alter the song significantly in someway like Proxy's Police Car's development from demo to 7", OG KEASBEY 4 LYFE) I was definitely worried. Maybe it was just use of the words 'first date' in the song Buried Alive, the song I heard first, that brought up memories of First Date, one of Blink-182's most Blink-182 songs, and I'm just not really into that anymore.

What I did not see coming was that the song Buried Alive was not just a throwaway goofy love song, but a serial killer section of a greater narrative, a concept album about the end of the world, and not in like the way that d-beat albums are about the end of the world ("YEAH WE'RE DISPEPSIA AND WE SING ABOUT ALL THE TOPICS: NUCLEAR WAR, NUCLEAR WINTER, WAR NUKES, NUCLEAR BOMBS, NUCLEAR ARSENALS, NUCLEAR SUMMERS, FISSION-POWERED NUCLEAR ROBOT DOGS") but a collection of songs telling, from a bunch of criss-crossing perspectives, the tale of the eschaton immanentized. In this sense the full wider sound of it all apt, a big sound for a big story, works, an angelic sheen for songs of angels descending, like the way Shitlickers layered guitars like a motherfucker to get that end-of-the-world blast on their raw punk d-beat classics, but put to shinier, brighter purpose in big lifting pop-punk swells.

One thing it doesn't focus on too much though is the mechanics of that destruction, there are a bunch of references to bombs falling, but the album's focus is on consequences not causes, humans (not just humanity) faced with the nothingness rushing towards them, not the blundering brinkmanship or nationalist posturing that brought the curtain down. It's a story that works on a few levels. There seems to be something of a throughline, that you can kind of work out but it's shady and hinted at and uncertain. The main thing is a bunch of people confronting an end, maybe the end, a personal as well as a wider one. On & On and The World Is Ending (No-One Cares) open with a couple of overviews of the situation, one screamingly defiantly against the black ("LET'S GET PLASTERED ONE MORE TIME!"), the other a snotty righteous putdown of sinners. That's the first hint of this albums multi-pronged approach to armageddon, coming in from different angles, stuff like Buried Alive and Getting What He Asked For are third person. Bank of Elevators, White Robes, Back to the Tower and more are first-person, but from different characters.

A lot of the songs fit together in pairs like that. Buried Alive are both macabre stories of violent lives facing armageddon, one a serial killer, one an avenging victim of domestic violence. Buried Alive is a weird one, somewhere close to parodic and blackly comic, but with enough specificity and real emotion to give it consequence, and of course set up against that rushing doom that shoots up the tension in all. It's that uncertainty and switching up of viewpoints and tones, ghostly forgiveness, dark irony, drawn-out relief, that prevents it falling into that sort of cloying cutesy serial-killer stuff of bad 'adult' dramas and Hannibal Lecter twitter accounts.

Getting What He Asked For might be sharper in its cut off, more sudden, the righteousness gets shit on but the selfish evil of Buried Alive doesn't. What really gets closure here? The song's asking something brutal. Can even the cunt in Buried Alive taste redemption? Can even the victory of GWHAF's protagonist get stolen out of from under them. The last line screams "It's not so fucking depressing" but I'm not sure if that's true. It certainly thrills fore it snaps apart whereas Buried Alive just makes you feel weird, but it's a testament to the sequencing of this album that the pairing of these songs makes each other stronger, more complex, playing off each other in the different applications of murder, the different feel of the end hitting, with some uncomfortable stuff to say about the possible pointlessness of it all.

The idea of a brainless or absent deity has echoes of Garth Ennis's Preacher or Chronicles Wormwood, of maybe the heavenly detour of Angels in America. It's a rage at absences, at irresponsibility from those entrusted with it the most. It works on an anti-god trip, but even on the level of someone who's never bought into that line when they weren't high as hell and depressed watching What Dreams May Come at 4am it seems like a great rage to be a part of, that scream against the idea that things are ultimately fucked, meaningless, out-of-control, that we were lied to, cos we were, by someone. It's something somewhat like a soaring chorus for those days when you get so fucked off with the world that you end up daydreaming that that shit was real just so shitty people would go to hell when they die.


It is also wordy as hell. This might be the first album I've reviewed where the word count of the lyrics has a shot at outreaching the word count of this review (we'll see about that, ya cunts). Cos it jumps around with the perspectives you end up with a lot of different character songs sung in the voices of angels or suicides or desperate lovers. The characters are well drawn through dialogue, lines packed with nice natural bleed and softness to the language, words imbued with caginess and euphemism, the edges fraying with litotes and couching language. "It's kind of awkward to admit that I've been less than forthright when I implied that I was ready to die" on I Told You a Lie scuffs with shamefaced admittal. The sort of non-commital bureaucratic coaxing on Bank of Elevators, about a a dead soul facing damnation, or purgatory or pressganging into heaven's service. "When you’re done, see me here and we’ll discuss compensation – If there’s something I can say, it’s we’re especially patient." It leads to a lot of cleverly structured Sloppy Seconds double rhymes, cluttered torrential slaps of words, enjambement running over.

It's cool but it's weird for a band that tends so clearly to the anthemic to construct songs of such lyrical density, it means that when I saw them I spent like 3 days listening to the songs intently trying to learn the words and then just got too drunk/excited to remember all but the choruses, and even a bunch of the choruses do that thing where they change up with each one.

There's an Auld Lang Syne style refrain that comes up a couple of times through the album, drawing that choral flourish of ending and loss and rebirth into this punkpopalypse dance. Cos there's a lot of denial in this album, as much as there is acceptance, a lot of bargaining and and ugly discomfort and threads-left-hanging as much as there is conclusion. The messiness and contradictory nature of this album is what makes it. Sometimes joyous, sometimes hateful, sometimes despairing, sometimes all these things and more smashing into each other. Sometimes the end seems meaningless and arbitrary, sometimes it throws everything that matters into stark relief and then on I Told You A Lie it even acknowledges the idea of setting lives against the situation in that fashion and the way that that's probably not a very smart way or helpful to frame things "In fact the truth is I've only used this to understand why we're all here." It escapes and dodges away from easy answers. It's a conflicted album, sonically, thematically, silky whoa-ohs fly into angry barks. Heaven is a Black Hole, a song that reverberates with sweet harmonies and heavenly echoes still has a stumbling moment of indecision where it all shudders to a stop in the middle. It can switch between silly-sweet classic Steinwaysesque buzzpop lines like "Cause in a minute we'll be isotopes all jumbled up/Doesn't that give you some hope that we can end up together?" on White Robes to searing pain on We're Fucked.

We're Fucked, a straight up hardcore rippper, like their split with Hold Tight!, burning with the fury of betrayed suicides. If more pop-punk bands are gonna start throwing hardcore bangers into their stuff (like how RVIVR did earlier this year of The Hunger Suite Part II: Dark Territory) then I'm down with it, more pop-punk bands should forget they're not Die Kreuzen for a minute and a half and punch holes in the glistening wings of the anthems with a bunch of screaming anger in the middle of the album, bursting with pain and voidborn rage, "We'll pluck out your eyes so they won't see the end/We'll box out your ears so they can't hear the end". This fury is brought-up again at the end of I Told You A Lie which shifts gears from a mid-tempo crooner into a panicked rush that leads into the confident punch of Home To You which slams straight into a dramatic bomb blast.

And then the end. The end of all these endings. How can you do that? Such an intricate chaotic thing, swirling with brawling boxed-out emotions, what seem like possibly dozens of stories, all hinting at dozens, hundreds, thousands more. Packed as much with bleakness and anger as it is with romance. Like I said, there's a narrative here, buried and cut up like its characters, obscured and tricky to unpick but that's unimportant ultimately, being secondary to the flux of human feeling that pours from every song in every different way. How can you sum all that up with one big closer? Well, it ends with a song about fucking up angels. Yeah, maybe it's kinda easy to bring everything all into one fantastic upwards tear, a shining coming together of all the twisted broken souls streaming, smiling and violence in their hearts, towards the gates of heaven, but the wide warm singalong of lines "WE WANT OUT WHISKEY BOTTLES BACK NOW/OUR GUITARS AND AMPLIFIERS/COS THIS NIGHT AIN'T OVER TIL WE SAY IT'S DONE!" grab everytime as it rolls back seamlessly into a reprise of the similarly joyous and unrepentant On and On. It an album built of endings, painful ones, triumphant ones, sudden ones, that goes up against the finality and futility of it all but can't help but loop back in on itself in an endless humane and life-filled continuation of the fuck-yous and the get-pumpeds that runs like a river on, communal and victorious, vicious and companionless, making you lose the idea that it's some tense, really

Culturcide - Tacky Souvenirs from a Pre-Revolutionary America

"Oh, say can you see in the blinkless electron-gun eye of the mainstream media mirage that what we hail are the hallucinations of authority and progress and righteousness whose sweet and stern voices have captivated and conditioned millions of human creatures, stimulating in them a passive acceptance of technological disruption and destruction of environment, of history, of possibility of alternative ways of being? Whose seven stripes are broken swastikas, whose fifty stars are black holes sucking 200 million atomized existences into the daily routine of the human herd, of hamsters rolling the great wheels of death machine, squeaking at the shocks and nibbling the cheese and reciting and discussing and delighting in their shared programming history, in their stupid lives, in their cancers, their deaths, their TV shows, their jobs, their ignorance, their endless, pointless, forward creeping, their glorious, blithe nose-dive into their pay-check's pleasures, into an ecstatic emptiness: a glowing incinerator: a parking-lot full of business-men conspiring and colluding on the big lie, the big dream, the big nauseating screaming sweating nightmare of Business America/Consumer America/Corporate America/Media America/FASCIST AMERICA...." - Culturcide, Star-Spangled Banner

No-one likes feeling like their essential culture that they love and respect and have invested themselves in is being co-opted by forces who are just seeking to capitalise on the saleabilty of some trite simplication of germinal notions of otherness and rebellion contained within that culture and do so without any of the effort and alienation and history really required to understand those concepts and their pained births. I have read some incredibly awesome angry diatribes on the idea of the 'hipster headdress'. I once stumbled across a discussion on the racist implications of the failure to explain the concepts of east-Asian wisdom in Hong Kong Phooey. Just yesterday (though it doesn't exist on the same societal level in any way, obviously) I walked past an immaculately coiffured bro wearing a yellow and pink Never Mind the Bollocks t-shirt and though I was never particularly into the Pistols, it still sort of pissed me off a bit, but it's pretty much always been this way. How else could the proto-anarchist teachings of compassion espoused by Jesus Christ exist as a central tenet of the unashamedly capitalist authoritarian-right packed to the gills with hate preachers greasing the shadowy machinations of big-business motherfuckers.

They co-opt. We reclaim. They defang and sanitise. We remix, sample, recontextualise and subvert. With spraypaint and stencils, literary theory, rogue codes and a soldering gun. We take this fucker apart from the inside out and rebuild it in a distorted cubist rendition that fits our fragmented view of ourselves and our fucked-out, romantically fuzzed and slickly-shitted aesthetic. We find our icons in odd places. We change the meaning of words and symbols. Scrape them down to the etymological base or pull them out of their hateful past. Altering and dragging up the rough edges hidden by airbrushed perfection, ridiculing the robotic distortion of the flawed human form that is everpresent in the shiny mass media realm. Humanising the inhuman, both in bringing to light the sparks of beauty in the disgraced and in highlighting the ridiculous folly of pitch-perfect PR-managed pop stars and movie stars and politicians who march in meticulous rhythm under the shaming destructive banner of THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD BE.

It's great to exist on a planet where Luther Blissett, a 1980s Watford striker who by any stretch of the imagination should be remembered solely in wistful pub discussions in centre sections of Hertfordshire, is known by most people as an anonymous anarchist icon. When you walk past a telephone box in Farringdon and notice someone has replaced the text reading TELEPHONE at the top of it with WRAP UP WARM and CALL YOUR MUM it gives you the sense we're living in a slightly nicer world. It's fun to laugh whenever we hear the name 'Santorum'. This happens, not just through collective and individual effort, but almost by happy accident nowadays. We live in a world where you can wake up one morning and find that the playful hands of history have turned a silly Bangles karaoke classic into a revolutionary call-to-arms. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world (in Joey Vindictive's voice).

This is the internet era. Memetic mutations are the norm. Culture jamming is the culture. Reappropriation is an appropriate response. How many jokes have you read in the last few days that have equated the sad death of a now mostly-past it 80s professional wrestling legend with the ridiculously overhyped moronic end-of-the-world ravings of some sad little cultists locked in their homes and even further locked in their denial and turned this coincidence into something that's both an honest celebration of a childhood icon and a bygone era and further gleeful gloating over the idiocy of blind moralistic ranting and taking apocalyptica seriously. This is how we do things. Situationism is the situation.

Culturcide are one the many many precursors to this rearrange-the-world-in-your-bedroom ethic which fills up the culture today, where we determinedly curate and defend what we love and the same time as we repurpose, mock and mutate what we hate. Except Culturcide don't really love a lot. Or anything here. Including the concept of love. Apart from the opener, their 1986 album Tacky Souvenirs of a Pre-Revolutionary America consists of pop songs with sloppily overdubbed scathing lyrics, radio reports and adverts cut in and bursts of industrial noise dotted about to spice up the proceedings.

Here is a selections of the messages I got from Tacky Souvenirs of a Pre-Revolutionary America: Love sucks. Heroes suck. The media sucks. Punk rockers suck. The music industry sucks. Corporations suck. Pathetic fanboys suck. Critics suck. New York sucks. LA sucks. Cops suck. Trite humanitarian platitudes from multi-millionaire rock stars really really fucking suck. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. This is a screaming joke. A culture war where weapons are sharp. Pikes, maces and nerve gas and everyone is already wounded. This is a pitched battle on a fast-food forecourt. This is a riot. A fucking giggle.

The first song is an deadpan intonation of the speech at the top of the page over a wall of noise and the faint strains of the Star Spangled Banner in the background. It really reminds me of the opening and closing monologues of the Dead Kennedys' Plastic Surgery Disasters. The whole tone of this album is pretty similar to Jello's searing scattershot satirical tone, with less of the silly horror songs that DK used in I Kill Children and Funland at the Beach. Maybe Culturcide feel there is enough inherent disturbing horror in the song We Are the World without having to further establish their credentials as unflinching romeos to the void.

There are some shit artists parodied on here (Grand Funk's American Band is blown apart as Industrial Band). There are some great artists (Bowie and Springsteen). There are some things I just could not give a fuck about (Was there ever a band as bland as Huey Lewis and the News? And Ebony and Ivory, anyone? The song which I have an odd personal relationship with as having it sung at me and my girlfriend by a couple of pricks outside a bar but for most people is notable only for somehow being an even more vapid plea for racial equality than Blue Mink's Melting Pot and its hilariously misguided non-PC lyrics of "Curly latin kinkies, mix with yellow chinkies). But whatever the state of the song being parodied, everything is approached with the same juvenile sense of outrage and nihilistic philosophical certainty, the same kick of dizzy anger.

I like Bruce Springsteen a lot. I think at his best he's something approaching genius in the way he can synthesise all the human ache of the shortcomings of the American endeavour and the slippery moments when life coalesces into a flashing second of hope and warmth, where you sit behind the wheel of the car and can feel the whole world's blacktop under the tires, where you walk down the road with such a bounce in your step you're afraid to jump for the fear you'll take off for outer space, waving at airplanes and patting weather balloons on their flank as you pass them by. I think the lyric "We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school" on No Surrender is one of the quintessential rock and roll lines. I do like the way a bunch of current punk bands have taking the best parts of Springsteen's unashamedly romantic posturing and combined it with the drive of punk rock, I think the first three Gaslight Anthem releases are really great music, Senor and the Queen especially. Despite all this, I still fucking love it when Culturcide fill Dancing in the Dark with a load of extraneous feedback noise and sneer over the top of Bruce's earnest singing and big synth-lines: "We sit around gettin' older, listening to Bruce's new LP. Dig the glorification of our own passivitity. Cos on the streets of this town, everybody's given up the fight. You're hungry for entertainment, Let's play the new Springsteen album tonight!"

Wichita Lineman is a classic, but it's still thrilling to hear it as Houston Lawman, with a long news report about the use of 'throwdown guns' by the Houston PD and their tendency to plant weapons on unarmed suspects they got trigger-happy with. It does have a couple of bonus tracks from a Christmas single, which exist in the long tradition of bonus tracks that are kind of interesting but do fuck with the rhythm of the album which finished fucking strong on a cover of Chicago's Colour My World entitled Colour My World With Pigs which is the only song on the album that they just straight-up parody without any grinding clamor or silly voices thrown into the mix.

It's a heroically single-minded shrieking vision of a inexorable slide into beige despair and oppressive social order that paints the group as the sole inheritors of the tradition of intellectual and social validity. Or maybe as the fresh new lords of an ironclad renegade morality, without any precedence whatsoever. It's pretty fucking stupid. You know that there's no way they're not tainted too, that they're not as sucked in my the whole neon human quagmire as the lazy punks they excoriate on They Wish They All Could Be California Punks. You know they can't really consistently believe that love is just another form of control because that sort of nihilistic totality cannot sustain itself. But that's kind of the point, this album is not really supposed to offer solutions or effect a positive change, it's a SHIT OFF! like a clarion call. A teenage fuck-the-world without refuge. No 'Fuck the World, I'm Hanging Out With You', more like 'Fuck the world! I'm fucking the fucking world!', 'Fuck the world til it fucks you back! It's a shout of NO GODS BUT TRICKSTER GODS! NO MASTERS BUT YOU BETTER FUCKING MASTER YOUR DESTINY, MOTHERFUCKER! NO COMPROMISE!

This gives the album more of a fun feel than anything, which could be taken as undermining their own message, but really just gives a vision of that disgusting lonely arrogant second where you feel like you're the only person who gets it, who sees past the curtain. You know really that there are dozens of valid ways of looking at the world, but right now you want to call bullshit through a hundred megaphones strapped together. And there is a little bit of hope dug deep down in there, evident in the forward looking title and bits of They Aren't the World. It's a great artifact but not just that, much of its anger and sophomoric cynicism needs to be appreciated for how relevant it remains. It's not the smartest approach, but its a tentpole of blunt truth for us to circle, lean against and futz around with. It challenges us to build on the slogans. To develop our mockery into methods of resistance. And it's fucking illegal as anything. Fuck tha police!
Somehow we get by without ever learning, somehow no matter what the world keeps detourning.

Direct Hit!

"We must write the story of our own life, and play the soundtrack to it too! Our culture will die, nay, it is already on its deathbed because we do not invest our own life in it! We do not include ourselves in the history! We do not take the responsibility to make it into something we can truly call our own! Stand up and make your heroes proud! I need a rallying cry! A flag to unite us in our desperate struggle to stay true and stay together! Give me a slogan!!" - Aaron Cometbus, Double Duce
"FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!" - Direct Hit! (passim)
Direct Hit! was a band that I was planning on getting around to writing about sooner or later, because I absolutely fucking adore them, but the initial impetus for this post comes from reading a piece about Direct Hit! on some obscure punk rock blog (not quite as obscure as this one) which claimed that Direct Hit! had a motto and that motto was 'Get pumped!'. Which it is not. At first I made a short comment pointing out the problem, which was responded to with an attempt to burn me which is never a good idea as I'm kind of a sad fuck who has spent a lot of time on internet forums exclusively populated by witty arseholes, so I then I comprehensively took apart their response, pointed out that it raised further questions about his commitment to writing well about punk rock and tried to offer some helpful suggestions, all comments were then deleted and replaced with a comment about how they'd had to delete comments while setting up a strawman distortion of my argument to justify themselves, which I then responded to again clarifying my position and pointing out the problems with obliviously ignoring constructive criticism, after which they then deleted all comments and left the post commentless. Checking back, the author also deleted a comment I made on a completely unrelated post about bands altering their musical style which contained no criticism of anything and was just an honest attempt to engage with the points raised in the piece which explicitly asked for responses, but apparently was so tainted by my unappreciation of the fact that they are always right and not to be questioned that it had to go. Ah, the internet. We're really changing the world on here. Of course, I was more eloquent than that dry account of the exchange implies, and also much more of a sarcastic dick. Needless to say, I take the fact that I had my argument deleted as evidence that it was a truth too searing to be seen, like the Ark of the Covenant melting Nazi faces off, not that I'm just an overly sensitive idiot who got inordinately worked up on the internet in an unduly aggressive manner.
I would like to set the record straight here, Direct Hit! have a motto. Or a slogan. Or a maxim. Or an apothegm. Or whatever you want to call it. And it is not 'Get pumped!'. It is 'FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!' To which anyone reading this is going, "You got that fucking angry about someone missing out two measly words when describing a band. What the fuck is wrong with you?" There are a lot of things wrong with me, it was probably a mistake to immediately assume that someone was demonstrating a moralistic urge to sanitise that which I do not believe should sanitised rather than just an example of accidental bad writing ill-defended (Hanlon's razor and all that). Perhaps one of the things wrong with me is that I put far too much store in loud stupid fast songs generally so caught up in their own force that they don't have the stamina to reach 180 seconds, but I'm sticking with that flaw, because that's the one that always feels alright and makes all the other things wrong with me not matter if even for a moment.
EDITED TO ADD: I showed this whole piece the guy who wrote the original blog post that had annoyed me and while he did make a mistake, it was a completely accidental one, and it turns out I really wasn't clear enough in my first complaint so the whole thing was a genuine misunderstanding. So we are both now totally cool, united by the power of Direct Hit! and punk rock. I understand that these sorts of edits should probably go right at the end of an article, but I don't want to fuck with the rhythm of the piece too much (which is just getting into gear at this point, honestly) and I think it has a pretty nice build to a really good climax that would suffer from a corrective epilogue. And I bet you can't guess what that finale is.
See I like writing about punk rock, I like taking the thrill that it gives me and trying to examine it and recreate it apart from itself, but the problem is, I’m always elaborating on something that it sometimes seems you either feel instinctively or you don’t. I’m always trying to take apart something that is perfect in its own retrograde little way and then rebuild the essential tempest of the sweet combination of passion and intelligence expressed in rough music, strained voices and fuck-up pure lyrics using a few dry overused words and phrases scratched into a notebook or shimmering on a computer screen. I’m always trying to use 500 or 1000 or 10000 words to sum up a sentiment that is never expressed in a better way, in a truer fashion than the group vox choruses, than the simple riffs and pounding drumbeats, than four words screamed at the start of a punk rock song. A Direct Hit! punk rock song. Stupid as fuck and fun as dumb hell. I could witter on for ages about the juxtaposition of hate and love, the scrambling bedfellows of angry inspiration and scattershot expletives, the parallel emotional sparks of adolescent rebellion and brief teenage camaraderie, about how joy and a shining sliver of a greater meaning is demonstrated to the few ready to embrace it in songs about prison escapes, drunken escapades and being a werewolf, all I would ever really be saying would be:
FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
There are a lot of punk rock slogans, mottos, maxims, aphorisms, axioms and apothegms. GABBA GABBA HEY! MORE CLIT IN THE PIT! REVENGE OF THE VILLAGE IDIOTS! TRUTH, ADVENTURE, LOVE AND RAGE! NEVER TRUST A HIPPY! KILL FROM THE HEART! PUNX IS HIPPIES! GET PISSED, DESTROY! PUNK IS DEAD, LONG LIVE PUNK! A.C.A.C! WE GOT THAT PMA! DIG THAT GROOVE BABY! SLIM JIM! PLEASE KILL ME! ONLY ANARCHISTS ARE PRETTY! FAGS HATE GOD! FUCK THE BORDER! 45 STORY HOUSE, 34 BRICKS! etc. and we shout all these phrases at each other as shibboleths and in-jokes, fall back on them when we're too wasted on cheap whiskey or by cheap jobs to construct an argument, to properly spend the time we need to fully elucidate our artistic and political positions, our angers and ideals and desires. We sew them into our clothes, into our fucking hearts. We also love these little lines so much because the complex parts of ourselves, the ideals and struggles and stands we're not sure we want to take, are in a constant state of flux, circling around inside ourselves, altering subtly, dulling or sharpening with our responses to day-to-day events. And often the only constant in these internal ruminations is a slogan sturdy like an island in the void, clear beeping signal in the noise. Something we can grasp on to and know that despite all the swirling confusion of our lives and our place in the universe, there is this one little thing that makes some sense. And in this case that little morsel of unerodable sanity is:
FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
That Cometbus quote at the top of the page comes from Double Duce, the best punk rock novel ever written (I am planning a future post laying out the conventions of the punk rock novel as a distinct genre akin to the Latin American dictator novel). The quote comes from a section when the lead character gets pissed off with his friends just reciting old punk slogans and quotes and exhorts them to create their own. "Who knows what the hell 'Sten guns in Knightbridge' means?" he asks. We all want to make our own mark, take our own injokes forged in online discussions of Against Me! or The Thorns of Life, coined accidentally in drunken conversations in between the openers at shows in the backrooms of pubs, we want to take those quips and build them into the mythos of kids the world over shouting the words to Cock Sparrer songs in sweaty basements. I know I have a few lines that if I ever get my band properly together, are fit for singing along and sticking on t-shirts, pithy enough to go in a one-line message board signature or daub on a skateboard grip to distinguish the nose and tail, but until I get that sorted out, and even after that, it's fucking great to hear someone else come up with a new perfect slogan and to see it permeate the consciousness of punk rock. A chant for our age, our punk rock generation, to echo back alongside FIGHT WAR! NOT WARS! or PLAY FAST OR DIE! that will endure in patches and tattoos, a particular basic template for the music we love maybe more than we should. A particular stripped-down template along the lines of:
FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
Warren Ellis wrote about writers "Deep down, there's a little James Joyce homunculus in our hearts, presumably chatting up a saucy-looking ventricle and asking it if it shags, and also spreading the beautifully toxic notion that his book Ulysses actually contains all of Dublin in it and, should it ever be destroyed, a new Dublin could be generated from it like a backup copy, if needs be. And so we peer around at everything, to see if we can image it on a hard drive of a book, ghosting the real world." I know I do that, I try and work out the little aspects of things so common they're usually left unseen and I try and structure them in my head so that they make a kind of pattern. When applied to punk rock, this deluded romantic idea that I can never really shake leads to me leaping at certain screwily dazzling lines which I feel manage to encapsulate something perfect and essential about the genre and culture I love and have invested myself so wholly in, where I feel like as if somehow if almost all evidence of the music and the movement surrounding it was destroyed you could extrapolate its whole, all its contradictions and shittiness and drama and fleeting perfection, from one great line, one statement of punk rock purpose, like the universe contained in a piece of fairy cake in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You could find the whole of punk rock in World/Inferno's chant of "Because I can, 'cause no one can stop me, 'cos it makes up for things I lost. Because I'm addicted to bad ideas and all the beauty in this world". Or The Ramones intoning "Everyone’s a secret nerd. Everyone’s a closet lame." on Mama's Boy. Or Mojo Nixon exclaiming "Let me tell you, real rock and roll’s about cheap electrical guitars and nasty secret places that serve underage kids in bars!" Or the very title of The Grit's I Came Out the Womb an Angry Cunt. D4's "In this frustration we find our salvation" (a lot of fucking D4 songs actually). Black Flag's Rise Above. Bomb the Music Industry!'s band name. The Buzzcocks repeating "Pretty girls, pretty boys, have you ever heard your mummy scream noise annoys?" Rivethead's eleven second blast of Sleepless in St. Paul roaring "I’m a fuck-up who fucks up, gets too drunk, won’t shut up. I’m hopeless, I know this. I shoplift. I’m homeless. I love you, it’s stupid, sounds sappy, it’s true but it could pass, might be that cheap speed makes me think fast." I could provide endless examples of this, because I'm a huge fucking nerd and I invest a lot of time in seeking out these little wonderful fragments of a larger broken, but amazingly broken, whole. I would argue semi-seriously that you can pretty much sum up the essential nature of punk rock and my love for it in FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED! The combination of excitement and snottiness, youthful enthusiasm and sneering petulance, profane noise and profound bliss. Romantic cynicism. That's why I felt aggrieved to the extent that I was willing to forcefully argue my corner when someone cut the slogan in half thinking it still meant the same thing. I think pretty much every great punk band has some part of that four word shout in its genetic make-up, and the punk bands that I dislike or just can't get into are generally ones that I feel have neither enough FUCK YOU! or GET PUMPED! to their being. Let's look at some examples:

• The Velvet Underground: FUCK YOU!
• The Stooges: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• MC5: GET PUMPED!
• The New York Dolls: GET PUMPED!
• The Dictators: FUCK YOU!
• The Ramones: GET PUMPED!
• The Sex Pistols: FUCK YOU!
• The Clash: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• The Damned: FUCK YOU!
• Stiff Little Fingers: FUCK YOU!
• Cock Sparrer: GET PUMPED!
• The Jam: GET PUMPED!
• Sham 69: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• Crass: FUCK YOU!
• Conflict: FUCK YOU!
• Dead Kennedys: FUCK YOU!
• The Germs: FUCK YOU!
• Black Flag: FUCK YOU!
• Minor Threat: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• The Toy Dolls: GET PUMPED!
• The Anti-Nowhere League: FUCK YOU!
• Discharge: FUCK YOU!
• Disclose: FUCK YOU!
• Death Side: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• Almost every KBD band: FUCK YOU!
• Bérurier Noir: FUCK YOU!
• Bad Brains: GET PUMPED!
• The Misfits: FUCK YOU!
• Angry Samoans: FUCK YOU!
• The Dicks: FUCK YOU!
• The Big Boys: GET PUMPED!
• Culturcide: FUCK YOU!
• Hüsker Du: FUCK YOU!
• The Minutemen: FUCK YOU!
• The Replacements: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• Dayglo Abortions: FUCK YOU!
• The Dead Milkmen: FUCK YOU!
• Gorilla Biscuits: GET PUMPED!
• The Queers: FUCK YOU!
• The Mr T Experience: GET PUMPED!
• Screeching Weasel: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• Jawbreaker: FUCK YOU!
• Bikini Kill: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• NOFX: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• Rancid: GET PUMPED!
• Good Clean Fun: GET PUMPED!
• Off With Their Heads: FUCK YOU!
• Bomb the Music Industry!: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• Hickey: FUCK YOU!
• Bent Outta Shape: FUCK YOU!
• The Copyrights: GET PUMPED!
• The Vindictives: FUCK YOU!
• The World/Inferno Friendship Society: GET PUMPED!
• The Gateway District: GET PUMPED!
• Dear Landlord: GET PUMPED!
• The Bouncing Souls: GET PUMPED!
• F.Y.P.: FUCK YOU!
• Dillinger Four: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• Apocalypse Hoboken: FUCK YOU!
• The Measure (SA): GET PUMPED!
• Boris the Sprinkler: FUCK YOU!
• The Dwarves: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• Used Kids: GET PUMPED!
• Guitar Wolf: GET PUMPED!
• Leftover Crack: FUCK YOU!
• Operation Ivy: GET PUMPED!
• Evan Greer: GET PUMPED!
• Ghost Mice: GET PUMPED!
• Against Me!: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• Johnny Hobo and the Freight-Trains: FUCK YOU!
• Propagandhi: FUCK YOU!
• Soophie Nun Squad: GET PUMPED!
• Paintbox: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
• Integrity: FUCK YOU!
• Inmates: FUCK YOU!
• Agnostic Front: FUCK YOU!
• Fleshies: FUCK YOU!
• Fancy Pants and the Cellphones: GET PUMPED!
• Future Virgins: GET PUMPED!
• Direct Hit!: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!

I could go on. Needless to say, these labels are not an exact science. Black Flag have a bunch of GET PUMPED! songs despite being a complete FUCK YOU! band most of the time. Bikini Kill are a FUCK YOU! band if you're an unthinking misogynist prick, a GET PUMPED! band if you're a rad progressive punk rocker smashing the patriarchy. The Dwarves started off as a pure FUCK YOU! band, but have incorporated a whole range of GET PUMPED! influences while retaining the essential FUCK YOU!itude. I could go on, and in fact I am sort of tempted to qualify every single one of my judgements above (maybe I should draw a graph!), but I will not, because I am not quite that crazy.
I realise now that I've spent the entire article thus-far talking about the first three seconds of Direct Hit!'s oeuvre. All the epigrammatic reckless mottos in the world don't mean shit if they aren't backed up with music that makes you want to yell and dance around your room in weird contortions like you're wrestling with an angry ghost. Direct Hit!'s songs are fucking amazing. Pop-punk classics, every one.



There's not a single one I'd skip. I bought the triple cassette anthology of their first 5 EPs which gave you a chance to vote for which ten songs I wanted to hear rerecorded for their first proper album, and it was an unreasonably stressful hour or two spent narrowing it down.
I love Arson Hero, a burn shit down punk song as sung by Sesame Street's Count von Count. I love Werewolf Shame, a song about simply being a werewolf, but of course anything dealing with lycanthropy is inevitably going to deal with the central metaphor of struggling to contain an inner beast, just as the zombie theme of They Came for Me works both as a fun lock-and-load singalong about the living dead, and also about attacking the overwhelming power of mainstream society in the way that Dawn of the Dead does. There's a Reaganomicsesque fuck you to self-pity on Mom and Dad. In Orbit is basically a sappy "I want to spend the rest of my life with you" nation-of-two style love song, with that emotion both subverted and intensified by placing this desire in the context of it happening on an isolated space station (where presumably they'd watch bad b-movies over and over again and make snarky comments about them). Mutant Drunk has the stumbling intoxicated rhythm and fury of a screaming bender. My favourite song is Snickers Or Reese's (Pick Up The Pieces), which reminds me thematically of a song I wrote when I was 15 called They Still Want Me Dead about having ex-girlfriends want to kill you, long before I'd even ever worked up the nerve to talk to a girl. Snickers or Reese's has an amazing moment (a bit like AM!'s We Laugh at Danger and Break All the Rules) where it feels like the noise and enthusiasm of the song is so intense that it flames itself the fuck out, a momentary pause, a restless 'fuck' delivered somewhere between frustration and exhaustion and straight back into the chorus, like the second when you're accidentally thrown tumbling out of the pit and need a brief second to check yourself for broken bones or lost shoes before hurling yourself back into the dancing morass.
Whatever level you take the songs on, the collection of monsters, drunkenness, silly decisions, and wry reminiscing about monstrously silly drunken decisions, they all work first and foremost as an amazing uplifting poppy noisy FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED! punk-fucking-pumping-rock anthem. The only bands I've even come close to listening to as much in the past year as Direct Hit! are Hickey (Hickey are the best band ever) and Paintbox and all their demented intensity. I love this band, I love the defiantly juvenile purity of purpose, I love that every song seems to be constructed solely out of fantastic choruses bolted on to one another, as if there's no reason that the great moment in a song where the verse revs up into the singalong section shouldn't be every single moment of the song, I love the homemade merch and the sheer enthusiasm they seem to radiate. And when I am approaching something like an acceptable level of solvency, I am going to put my money where my mouth is, and have those four words that represent the most succinct possible summation of my entire philosophy with regards to punk rock, art and life seared indelibly into my skin for the rest of my stupid, inevitably snotty and hopefully exciting life. Chances are it will be a monstrously silly drunken decision, but shit, this is what we are. Punk rock, man. In all its tender fuckheaded glory. One more time from the top:
FUUUUCK YOOOOU! GEEEET PUMMMMPED!