This band has been getting some play beyond the low punk circles most of the shit I'm into dances about in so naturally there's been some 'SELLOUT' backlash, some of it apparently that members of the band are kids of one of the dudes in TSOL, but that seems weird to me, because if association with TSOL was a recipe for popularity then putting Code Blue on numerous Valentine's Day mixtapes would be a surefire route to social success, rather than what it was and is, a dumb shitty joke that serves as just another small signifier (and intensifier) of your anti-social needy push/pull self-hatred. Anyway, it was the echoes of Police Truck in Cheap Beer that made me realise what FIDLAR really are: the band that DK would be if Too Drunk to Fuck wasn't satirical. "I. DRINK. CHEAP. BEER. SO. WHAT. FUCK. YOU." in a take on Anti-Nowhere League We Are... The League nihilism so patently silly it feels like a version of that UK82 flashback scene in True Blood where Stephen Mayer hams it up complaining about Thatcher in a dodgy British accent. Fuzzy surfpunk obnoxiousness where the lyrics seem like they were all cribbed from hungover-still-drunk conversations with dudes who know what sacking yourself on a school rail feels like. Sass Dragons-clipped Wassup Rockers ride and roll. Shittydude music that generally avoids being shitty dudemusic (well apart from on the song Whore, which I guess shows that if you're gonna get into the adolescent joy of teenpack storming it's hard not to get into the rampant fuckheaded unreconstructed childish entitlement too) and laced through with those two distinct subgenres shittitude music and shittytube music.
I love though the Thee Cormans spooksound garage-warble underpinning Blackout Stout, the perfect skaterat junkrock anthem on Wake! Bake! Skate! and its chronicle of wasted nothingness existence, poppier dreamier odes to drop-out parasites that hang around that sounds like a singalong where you can't tell if the shake comes from a Rolling Stones swagger or methshot jonesin' shiver. Not every song's a winner but when they're on they can hit that sloppy Nobunny style with an irresistible Cardiel energy and Jackass giggle and the shit is golden like a california lens-flare as you film your dumbfuck buddy nail a tre down a four then stack on a gravel chunk caught in the wheels, call it a day then all go shoot up, nod out and die young like a twat.
"I THINK CONFORMITY TO NON-CONFORMITY IS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF CONFORMITY." - boring dickheads everywhere.
Yeah! Punk rock! Non-conformity! A relentless drive away from anything that other people might enjoy until you end up in such a weird abandoned hole of emotions that you find yourself getting emotional listening to Lotus Fucker songs that sound like someone conducting experimental unanaesthesised bollock surgery in a chainsaw testing lab.
"THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK IT IS PUNK TO DRESS UP LIKE SOMEBODY'S DAD. OR LIKE A SEXY LUMBERJACK WITH A RATTAIL. THESE PEOPLE ARE WRONG. THEY MUST BE STOPPED AND THEIR IDEAS DESTROYED." - Who Killed Spikey Jacket? from Who Killed Spikey Jacket? by Who Killed Spikey Jacket?, important worthy saviours of unimportant worthlessness (PUNK!)
This is a strip for my friend Mitch's punk comic strip Nothing Nice to Say that I helped out with writing dumb jokes for a while and people fucking HATED IT or outright didn’t get it and chimed in with “YEAH! CONFORMITY TO NON-CONFORMITY IS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF CONFORMITY!” as if the point of the strip wasn’t that that sentiment is the most unoriginal entry-level shit ever. As the creator of something you’ve got to take a lot of the blame when people miss the point of something so widely, so it probably should’ve been sharper, or maybe just the strip’s readership is made up of those people who blindly hate punkcore stud-and-spikes gutterpunx while all wearing flannel and drinking the same beer, considering we made fun of crusties like a week later and people went “I LOVE IT! A STAGGERING RETURN TO FORM!”
I mean, yes the Casualties are obviously in the 99th percentile of stupidity, on a plateau with Ayn Rand acolytes, trailers for the movie 21 and Over, people who think Bob Dylan got better when he went Christian, and almost everything I did before, well, before starting to write this article, but tedious motherfuckers who spout that trite-as-shit line about conformity to nonconformity over and over again like it's a startling fucking insight are obviously way way worse than everything ever, because I love trite silly dumb things, but I fucking hate trite silly dumb things that are masquerading as intelligent cutting insight.
I think I must've lost it in a harddrive changeover at some point within the last few years but I totally had a picture of these guys (they were called Citizens Punx) flipping off a wall they'd spray-painted the words GEORGE BUSH on and it was the fucking best. Goddamn I wish you could see its glory.
"I THINK THE PUNK UNIFORM IS JUST ANOTHER UNIFORM! I THINK CONFORMITY TO NON-CONFORMITY IS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF CONFORMITY! I THINK THE PUNK UNIFORM IS JUST ANOTHER UNIFORM! I THINK CONFORMITY TO NON-CONFORMITY IS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF CONFORMITY! I THINK THE PUNK UNIFORM IS JUST ANOTHER UNIFORM! I THINK CONFORMITY TO NON-CONFORMITY IS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF CONFORMITY! I THINK THE PUNK UNIFORM IS JUST ANOTHER UNIFORM! I THINK CONFORMITY TO NON-CONFORMITY IS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF CONFORMITY! I THINK THE PUNK UNIFORM IS JUST ANOTHER UNIFORM! I THINK CONFORMITY TO NON-CONFORMITY IS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF CONFORMITY! I THINK THE PUNK UNIFORM IS JUST ANOTHER UNIFORM! I THINK CONFORMITY TO NON-CONFORMITY IS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF CONFORMITY!" they trundle on talking endless reams of unthought while all generally resembling what Jeremy Clarkson would look like after a month in a downed plane.
Everyone conforms. There's no way you are entirely different from everyone, because if you were that'd be awful and you'd be as actually desperately alone as you sometimes feel, the fact that while you are yes unique in your particulars there is a whole lot of squealing babies painted and crushed the same way you are is something that should keep you the fuck alive, rather than something to be ashamed of. The grouping of shitty peoples, illustrated in singalongs and those played-out sentence constructions like "Is it just me..." or "That awkward moment when..." that ring with the terror of imagining yourself doing something no-one else has done. Conformity is chill, be cool with it, it won't make you a nothingness to be part of something, it won't break you or erase you, it'll just twist you a little, annoy you a lot, save your life once or twice if you're lucky like that. Conformity comes up in all of this, you're you, you just get to choose your scene, whether you wanna roll goth or punx or hippie or steampunk or whatever style, you might not find a particular aesthetic appealing, but to deny that you have an aesthetic at all is a boldfaced fucking lie, and when it comes down to it I'm picking the shimmy of idiots who look like deranged extras from a Jack Womack novel, over the idiots who look like Ron Swanson without the inner peace, because that's just the way my idiot head leans.
And yeah I was obviously some burning dickhole who got huffy about and earnestly sneered about 'fashioncore' or something, and I can't even fucking remember what bands I slapped with that label, and even more embarrassingly I clung onto that "Fashion is dumb and worthless" shameful stupidity for way longer than I should've until I was called on that bullshit and on the inherent misogyny that lies behind it (CLOTHES ARE FOR GIRLS! BOYS LIKE SERIOUS THINGS LIKE BOOKS AND MUSIC AND VIDEOGAMES) but I was entirely entirely in the wrong because fashion is awesome, and though this seems like the most inane fucking observation point, it bears repeating for just how long it took for me to get it knocked into my driedshit skull, the clothes you wear make a difference to the way you feel, whether you're painstakingly studding jackets and sewing patches, or just picking out your favourite band shirt, you feel better, silly and stupid as it is, I feel punker when I'm wearing the crappy jacket I've scrawled Hickey and New Bomb Turks lyrics on and sewn Rudimentary Peni patches to, feel better, feel attached to something bigger than myself, not better but at least less shakily fragile. I find myself walking tougher, find myself giving more money to homeless people, find myself sitting tighter and more secure just cos I've got a Wankys patch on my pocket.
Because as punk prophets, stud buddhas (studdhas?), WHO KILLED SPIKEY JACKET! sing on their 12" that Total Fucker put out at the end of last year and Noise Punk Records are distributing in the UK and Europe, "They say we all look the same, that's cause we're a fucked-up gang." Because they are fucking ridiculously silly and unafraid of being that way, pogo-punk is the goddamn best as it's just the idiocy of streetpunk deliberately shot up its own arse, flowering goofy fuck-you sentiments out of these speed-strung icons. Two-dimensional two-chord monsters. Streetpunx are cartoon characters, pogo punk is streetpunk with a sense of its own ridiculousness, cartoon characters who know they're cartoon characters, attacking without reason and without rhyme that isn't DRUNK and PUNK or BRAIN and INSANE or POGO DANCE and BONDAGE PANTS. Here every sneer might burst into a smile and every chorus is delivered like an Itchy and Scratchy hammer attack and if that self-aware cartoon nature wasn't explicit enough from the album or the fact that the band's name is a nod to a film about how cartoons intersect with reality, WKSJ's album cover is three cartoon punks stomping all over the world and vomiting out every aspect of society and their logo imposed above in a bitten Disney font.
"There's only one true love in this world, and that is chaos" the spoken word interlude on the romantic crooner Leather Loves Studs tells you. "PUNKS ARE ROWDY! PUNKS ARE BAD! YOU ARE JUST A MOM AND DAD!" snaps No More Pigs. The liner notes are a glorious collage of punk jackets, dudes with pink hair sticking knives in car tires, bad graffiti and of course jackets sporting endless shining studs adorned with frankly incomprehensible slogans like Distjej's INTERCOURSE IS VIVISECTION and the names of bands that were stupider and better than you could ever hope to be (Special Duties, who wrote completely perfect punk songs like You're Doing Yourself No Good and could never decide what they were angry at and why so just decided to be angry at everything for every reason like in Bullshit Crass where they diss Crass for being rich appropriative capitalists in the first verse and then for being dirty worthless skint hippies in the second). It also includes step by step instructions on how to look cool in punk photos and how to CHAOS WALK, which is like the WKSJ punk rock equivalent of that scene in Tank Girl where all the mutant kangaroos pray by dancing around to jazz, but with The Damned's Smash It Up as the orison. And it's hilarious and gleeful and daft and just so much punx.
The original punk clothing is actually way weirder and more art school than the which was kinda codified by the time UK82 rolled around. Somewhere in there a diktat was issued in the form of a shittyass punx flyer or incompetent zine or something. STUD YOUR HISTORY! STUD YOUR LIFE!
That sort of no-compromise scratching of lines in the concrete over sad little bullshit that teeters right on the edge of meaningless most of the time is great, it's why most of the time I'd much rather listen to a straight-edge band like Kurb Stomp who shout songs about beating down people who drink beer (BAR SMASH! STRAIGHT EDGE STREET FIGHT!) than someone who sings a serious song about the societal problems of alcohol addiction, why Play Fast or Die is a better album title than Play It How You Like, why I listen to Prince and Kool Keith and Ke$ha and Hank Williams but still singalong to Vision's eternal declaration of 100% punkness Close Minded (EVERYBODY TELLS ME I'M CLOSE MINDED! IF IT'S NOT PUNK ROCK THEN I'M NEVER GONNA LIKE IT!). A mish-mash of superlatives and exaggerations, hyperbole cut sharp and shining, is the way this party runs. Songs about Oi! being awesome (OI! IS A WAY OF LIFE FOR PUNKS), cops sucking (POLICE TRUCK WHAT THE FUCK), substance abuse (ADHESIVE LUNG), punks looking punk (PUNKS DRESS PUNK) or some combination of those things (SPIKE YOUR HAIR WITH BEER!), it's the energy of The Disclapties or Tom and Boot Boys or The Showcase Showdown or Quincy Punx perfectly articulated in all its stupid gory messiness. Hard Skin for people who preferred The Discocks to Cock Sparrer. Songs so concerned with their own obnoxiousness that the lyrics devolve past silliness into utterly asinine fury screaming stuff like "GLAM IS FUCKING FUCK!" and "FUCKING FUCKING CHICKENS!" which are in and of themselves without any point but contribute to the swerve of the album, the sense of outrage and destructive force directed anywhere that makes the fight of it all so fun. This is a band built for WKSJ knuckle tats and writing their name on toilet doors, built for stupid punx, a band built for shows like this one:
What this album and band is is a distillation of all that punx idiocy into simple two-minute songs that bring you back in their coolness and sharpness and ludic forthrightness to that moment, that time when you ran into punk rock and it changed you, that spark in the skull that accompanied the Stiff Little Fingers or Oblivians or NOFX or Clash or Ratos de Porao or Chaos UK or some nameless highschool shitpunk band song that burrowed itself deep in your squirt soul like a pig tapeworm in the brain of a Australian pop-punk singer.
And from there it was a process of discovery, excitement, when you don't even really know what you're doing, at first you're listening to music because it's cool, and then you're listneing to it because you like it, and then you're digging deeper into the obscure bands, reading biographies online, and the music is digger deeping into you. You're finding new bands and pretending you've always known who The Descendents are because you love this shit so much and you hope someone doesn't find out how lame you were to have existed without it. You're breaking your speakers as there's no way this song was meant to be played at anything but the highest volume every time. You're scouring lyrics booklets. You're building a record collection that will one day contain at least 15 songs called SKATE OR DIE and 32 which include some variation on the words NAZI SCUM. You're lying on your bed staring at the ceiling while Pat the Bunny screams DIY Orgasms, skipping round your room and throwing wild hooks at the air while Henry Rollins rises above, you're sure that Joey Vindictive isn't the only one who's sick of being a human being, Off With Their Heads aren't the only ones who want to tie a rope around their neck kick the chair out with their legs, Jack Terricloth isn't the only one addicted to bad ideas, you're a bouncing soul, a true believer, a cleveland bound death sentence, and silence is a language that you're fluent in as practice makes perfect and you spend a lot of time by yourself, some days you get the thunder, some days the thunder gets you. You're making sure there aren't any squares at your funeral, roaring like a lion and not missing a drop, sure that dis is the best and you and your friends are theeeee battiest bunch of gnostic idiosyncrasy sonic militants this side of Henry Fiat's Open Sore, finding it gets loneliest at night down at the liquor store, you laugh at danger and break all the rules, journeying to the end of the east bay, all you know is that you don't know nothing, you can get away with anything when you're young and when you're not feeling strong you grab the mic and sing along. You're doing plenty of stupid shit.
Plenty.
Or something like that. That's the summary of the quest undertook. That many undertook, that me or you or him or her or them struggled through. That was the easy bit. That's the soundtrack of moments and changes, a mural of messy lyrics. There's a lot of real tough shite you've got to roll through, a lot of standing in the corner somewhere dark or at the bar or out on the street as close to the road as possible and not fitting in, working up strength just to nod at the guy you sort of know but aren't yet friends with but that dude is just so fucking in, whatever in is, there's a lot of wailing in the pit pretending like that elbow some skin just caught your chin with didn't hurt and in fact was a beautiful fucking angel kiss and bring on more violence, a lot of drinking til blackout, hating til whiteout, drugs, edges, kisses and handshakes, a colossal load of interminable discussions on WHAT PUNK IS to ruminate on and get silly about, there's a whole bunch of dumb little human interactions, to plod through like a bad album track first listen through your favourite band's new stinker and it all turns in on itself like a worm in your gut.
Punks watching punks be punks. Learning how. Steal your name from a bad movie, your hair from a worse one. Name your band after a Husker Du song, name your guitar after a crush who didn't know you existed, name your pet after a disease. Shape the sound that seared you somehow into an approximation of your physical perception of those notes and beat and shouts and call that your swagger. Impersonate til you personify. Because dicks didn't talk like Marlowe, gangsters weren't all quick wit switchblades and tyrant kings in silk suits, punks aren't just leather jackets and metal shot through flesh like cyborg adornments, but they often slip into these shapes. Art and culture, journalism and rumour, they take an easy snapshot, blow that grainy polaroid up and flesh it out with fear and rewrites, throw it up into space and nail it into a wall and the kids come past, the wannabe detectives and hoodlums and joeyramones and see it, see what is advertised as WHAT NOT TO BE and they think it looks cool so they steal it and wear it like the skin of some dead and poorly skinned animal. Hanging loose and looking silly, they shred themselves into the myth of the beast. They hide from the light and subsume themselves into a greater part to feel strong and to feel realer than they are by being faker than they are. Because reality fucking sucks, feelings are shit and inarticulate, too blunt to be of worth. Poetry is beautiful but false. But false is real because real is just fuck lust shit hate love pain pain music fuck god alone pain dance shit shit sky awwwwshite and who wants that internal reel of theirs splayed out anywhere for all the world to tut and cluck at? Poetry and art and story is all that reality strained through into a falsehood that says yourself better, streamlines it into stanzas and digestible bursts of life stroking you at your core. Characters in a movie are adrenaline shadows of people who you kind of know but don't really talk to and people are much too complicated to idolise and throw yourself into. Lines in a song are stenciled banners.
"The spikey jacket is the armour of the punk warrior of today."
So you become character, you sidestep into the shape of a monstrous hero and it's weird symbiosis between armour and knight. The projection and projector flickering back and forth. You did it, you know you did, you pretended and worried about being exposed and set yourself apart and posed like you were born with a silver splatter limited edition vinyl in your mouth. You immersed yourself. Spent intimate hours with lyrics booklets and fretted over which shirt to wear to the show. Acted like a fucking arsehole to everyone to prevent them from ever finding out that there was a point when you'd never heard of Gorilla Biscuits or Tragedy.
It shapes you and maybe if you're lucky and strong you shape it a little. You alter the shade, you rejig the photofit and that too becomes part of the timeline, the succession of images hung on this mobile for the next fucked-up kid who wants to belong to snatch at and dive into like a ghost. Because even reacting against the scene or the people or the image doesn't preclude the fact that you love this music. And not many people love this music in the wider scheme of things, so even if it's full of pricks and undesirables and you just want to build anew, you're forced into weird friendships and acquaintances with an array of interesting shitheads and awkward oddballs and you sort of get used to it. And because the shekel of truth rattling around your weak raspy chest is that you're one of them, you sort of fucking love it.
And then maybe you come up for air and you're a little less crazy, a little more you, a little filtered down, usually. But now you've got a crew, a place, an image, shitloads of band t-shirts and you know every single world to Film at Forever and Skulls and you will scream them when the drink is flowing and the stereo is loud and you're part of the process, the scene, the tableau, the heroic monster observed by the kid at their first houseshow scuffing their heels and clutching their beer who has never heard of half the names you spew in an febrile conversing mass of excitement and 80s hardcore and is desperately trying to remember them, to file them away in a hidden pocket of safety-pinned jacket. You've made it. You poser fake human beautiful dumb cunt shade light flesh and sick sick blood motherfucker. You shitty little punk.
That's WHO KILLED SPIKEY JACKET? All the struggle of that particular murky path wrapped up in the joy of eejit violence. All the stupidest convictions, flashes of certainty that light this route. I would say they're the most important punk band in the world if importance in art wasn't such a stupid and fucking worthless concept that should be left to sad weekend supplement broadsheet culture writers who constantly harp on about Bikini Kill or Crass as if they were respectable. This album is just great, as ephemeral as extra zips, as considered as a Contrast Attitude patch, as dumb as a tattoo, and yep, this is a ridiculous tract to lay at the door of what is pretty much a joke album, but fuck if I'm nailing myself behind something that takes itself seriously. Get silly. Act like a dickhead. Dress punk. Have fun (FUCK fun.). Spike your hair with beer. Oi! Oi! Oi! Fuck you! Get Pumped!
“Anyone who wants to end the annoying and embarrassing problem of losing studs from their leather jackets can find a solution by looking at the mighty shark. Sharks are possibly the punks of the ocean because they are unpredictable, frenzied and agressive and they drink a lot. (Other ocean punks include spikey sea urchins and spiny fish with mohawk-like fins.) Whenever a shark loses a tooth there is a smaller tooth right behind it to take it’s place. “Shark-Tooth Studding” applies the same principal to studs on a leather jacket. The process involves studding your entire jacket with small 1/4 inch cones, then covering each stud with a regular 1/2 inch cone right on top of it. This has several advantages. First of all, and possibly most importantly, you can effectively double your stud count, and could even achieve maximum stud density by having a stud surface area larger than the surface area of the jacket itself! Also you are unlikely to lose any studs because the smaller stud acts as a sort of anchor for the larger surface stud. And of course if you lose a stud; there is a small baby stud to take it’s place. The best part of this is if someone sees a stud fall off and sees the little stud beneath it, they might think that your jacket is actually somehow alive and growing metal studs, *or they might even think that the jacket is your hide and that you are a bionic terrorist from the future who has come to earth to wreck everything and destroy their life. One final note: If you use this technique on a denim jacket or vest, the weight of the studs will be so intense the jacket will quickly fall to pieces, which of course looks awesome.” - Who Killed Spikey Jacket?, punks, just like you, speaking in Maximum Rocknroll 346
"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..."
"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.
"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!
The first line of this album is "WELL I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR BAND!" which sets the tone fairly comprehensively.
This is a punk rock album for people who are into punk rock for the hate, not the sort of painful damaging morally void hate of post-All Skrewed Up Skrewdriver, but the petty but very real sense of outrage and irrationally intense loathing that springs from what really should be a minor annoyance that, instead of just dismissing and forgetting as stupid, you allow to fester and grow into an unfathomably important all-consuming despair at how anyone in the world can live their life like that. The Reaganomics just write fun arsehole songs about how everyone and everything sucks, eviscerating trend-followers, the faux-Irish, Ed Hardy wearers, critics, yuppies, other punk bands with equal relish. There are a few positive numbers that are conducted with the same sense of glee as the sophomoric diss tracks, but while you get brief happy moments when The Reaganomics really want to party with Robocop or visit the Renaissance Fair, you're soon back to learning that they don't want to end up at a bar with someone they don't like, they don't want to go work, they don't want to go to school, they don't want to read your blog (so I really could say what the fuck I want here with absolutely no chance of retribution).
The great thing about this album is that they're so scattershot in their targets that it's inevitable they're going to hit upon some niggle of modern society, some little tribe or attitude that just gets under your skin and though you know it's stupid to care so much about it you just can't help it. There's probably going to be a song on this album that you don't just like because it's fun and stupid and easy to sing along to, they'll be something where you'll genuinely feel the sense of ridiculously inflated malice towards its intended target.
There's a sort of self-defeating sense to it because it's a profoundly negative album for the most part, but it's the sounds of a bunch of nerds in their basement putting the world to rights and while that doesn't really sound appealing, they're talented enough musically to get you on their side, so you get to vicariously enjoy their pet hates streamed into 90 second pop-punk songs full of brief angry solos and really big choruses. It's the maelstrom of minor frustrations that can slow you down or impede your journey through life cathartically channeled into creating something incredibly dumb and incredibly catchy.
