RAMONA

Probably the greatest song ever written about the Ramones is R.A.M.O.N.E.S. by Motorhead, originally on the album 1916, later covered by the Ramones themselves, which rolls through, with vision and thunder, a flash of images of the Ramones urban knucklehead milieu: “Black leather, knee-hole pants/Can't play no highschool dance”

Then there's Guitar Wolf, who bite the styles of Motorhead and the Ramones in equal measure, Japanese noise superheroes in black leather, everything louder than everything else, cramming words together in a sort of impressionistic punk rock fuck you, where you can tell exactly what they mean, but also are incapably of explaining exactly what they’re saying, heirs to the ultimate cool of the Ramones, black leather jackets and simplicity, crunching out the surf-garage throb of the song Kung Fu Ramone Culmination Tactic.

Ramones tributes often come at their subject from the same sort of angle, with the same sort of shimmy, careening around in a 100mph coming together of that black leather, ripped up jeans, speed and noise, jukebox romance, communal shouts of the backpatch-cool stupidity slogans "GABBA GABBA HEY!" and "HEY! HO! LET'S GO!", an emphasis on the Ramones as a combination of teen heartthrobs, dangerous herberts and cretinous goobers. And an overwhelming desire to be joined with them somehow, to imitate, to hang with that crew, like on The Migraines I Wanna be a Ramone, which packs 40-odd Ramones references into its 3 minutes, going deep beyond the pinheads and the beaten brats, managing such lyrical feats as rhyming Mama's Boy with Animal Boy. There are also at least three other songs with the same title.  

A similar desire for assimilation exists on I Wanna Be Like Dee Dee Ramone by The Parasites. “I Wanna Be a Blitzkrieg Bopper/Wanna Be a Real Punk Rocker.” It's pleasingly reckless in its fuzz and scramble, but it does have the problem of focusing wholly on the punk rebel icon at the expense of the series of life experiences that defined Dee Dee, The Parasites never mention their desire to be a rentboy in 70s New York, have a lifelong heroin addiction, play in GG Allin’s band or release an unbelievably bad rap album that demonstrates all the flow and lyricism of a cartoon moose on barbiturates.

 The Spazzys have the song I Wanna Cut My Hair Like Marky Ramone, about wanting to cut your hair like Marky Ramone, but acknowledging "It's gonna look dumb, but it's gonna be fun." For the Spazzys, they don’t care if it means they can’t get a boyfriend, looking like Marky is way more important. A shitty momcut as being part of something greater, cheap self-mutilation to join the cult. Kinship with this group of impossible freaks.

 This is in the subgenre of songs specifically about minor Ramones. Generally the songs that focus on the Ramones revolve around the main core of Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee, Tommy, Richie, CJ and Marky kinda gets kicked to the curb or just short shout outs, though there is Tommy Ramone by The Vapids, a two minute biography that follows their first drummer from his awkward teenage years, "TROUBLE ALL AROUND!" is its repeated refrain. Elvis doesn't even get one song to my knowledge, but then again he only played two shows, whereas Marky was in the band for 12 years and even gets the indignity of usually being left off the iconic logo shirt in favour of Tommy. (Also, when the Ramones covered R.A.M.O.N.E.S. they changed the lyrics from “Hear Marky kick some ass” to “Marky takes it up the ass”)

Even Kung Fu Monkeys' I Miss the Ramones has to add "Let’s not forget Marky!" almost as an afterthought. I Miss the Ramones was penned around the Ramones break-up, serving as  framing them in a larger cultural narrative, running through post-war music history from the 50s onwards heralding the Ramones as heroes arriving in the nick of time “to save the day and take back radio” from the turgid indulgence of classic and prog rock. An idea which does have some merit, though the implication that the Ramones were also somehow responsible for exposing the Watergate scandal is probably a bit farfetched.

The Mr T Experience End of the Ramones says goodbye to the Ramones with a transcendent final show, everything coming together for a last 1-2-3-4 where the pang of goodbye is temporarily obscured by the blazing exit in spite of, or maybe because of, the beating life has given the four not-brothers “Joey is a vegetable Dee Dee's going bald Johnny got kicked in the head but the kids still love them all” 

They do and they still miss them. The loss is often palpable. Punk Rock Club RIP is mournful, the passing of a venue where good times were had, the Ramones were seen, friendships were made and jaws were broken, it's as sad as a song that bubblegum can really be and you can read the grieving for a show space as grieving for the Ramones also. Their mention is often punk rock shibboleth, a touchstone, like in The Queers anti-hippie anthem Granola Head, “I’d rather be at home, listening to the Ramones.” or in Screeching Weasel’s I Need Therapy as the painful result of this obsession lamenting the fact that he’s "O.D.'d on The Ramones cause I just sit around at home"

MTX, The Queers and Screeching Weasel being the Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee of the 90s Ramonescore revival, simplistic sharp catchy punk cuts on love and isolation and loss. Buzzpop barbs of that inspired the likes of The Transgressions with Baby I Love You (But I Need Someone to Talk to About the Ramones), in this, as in (The Huntingtons Jeannie Hate the Ramones, and The Creeps My Girlfriend Hates the Ramones) adoration for the Ramones is a relationship acid test. It’s probably Ramones-worship at its most juvenile, which is pretty fucking juvenile in a field which is an endless shambling parade of four-chord arrested development. Stylistically not amazingly interesting, the The Transgressions at least get out in 40 odd seconds of screaming, the Huntingtons and the Creeps rely on a mix of terrific pace and sloppy vocal collisions between dry whoa-ohs and snotty scrapes, to sustain themselves, until the Creeps song gets kinda slower and a bit boring. What it really points too though is that sort of teenage shortsightedness, music taste over all, judgemental punx exclusivity, a ridiculous shiteheaded personal integrity over compromise and happiness. How many people are there out there suffering just cos some girl ain't into. Is it really as common a problem as these bands make out? Similarly dumb but coming from the other directions are The Come Ons with She's Ugly But She Likes the Ramones (though that does put the Spazzys fears of loneliness to rest).

It might be these sort of bands which are put on blast by the goofball iconoclasm of Boris the Sprinkler’s Kill the Ramones released on a double A-side single with the song Kill the Sex Pistols, by a band that clearly loves the Ramones as much as anyone, once recording a whole album cover of the Ramones’ End of the Century. The Ergs! offer a less drastic solution pleading over a ripped off and muddied-up Teenage Lobotomy riff Xerox Your Genitals, Not the Ramones.

Of course, Kill the Ramones was written before the main three Ramones had actually died. Since the end of the century Dee Dee, Joey and Johnny have all bought it. My favourite version of Motorhead’s R.A.M.O.N.E.S. is on the 2005 live bootleg Stagefright where Lemmy introduces the song with a growl of "I was gonna stop doing this song last year, but then another one died, so I had to start all over a fucking again.”

Since then Ramones songs have leant even more towards the mournful, dug further into the loss, it works as well as the kisses and adoration, because the Ramones weren't just about the teenage bounce and gangs, Joey's voice was always capable of an edge of sadness in stuff like Danny Says and She Talks to Rainbows

 Joey Had to Go, a mid-tempo stomper, from Nomeansno ramonescore side-project, The Hanson Brothers, draws a vivid portrait of Joey as a sort of braindead intergalactic traveller, "He couldn't count past four. But he didn't need a whole lot more. He was weird all spindly and tall. Standing in his leathers up against the wall.” an impression probably fostered by their most famous on screen appearance in the Roger Corman classic Rock and Roll High School where the entire band comes across like spaced-out weirdos struggling to grasp the fundamentals of human interaction, Dee Dee endlessly baffled by the prospect of eating a slice pizza. Here Joey’s an alien being passing through, bestowing his wisdom and then he’s gone, more worlds to tear up, more galaxies to get hoppin. 

The Sloppy Seconds, still aren’t at that stage of acceptance yet, with the tightly-rhymed slamdance denial of You Can’t Kill Joey Ramone, “NO! NO! NO! JOEY DON’T GO!” it screams, “Save your prayers for Dee Dee” it pleads.

Not all of the songs deal with love and loss, imitation and destruction, for instance,  Frenzal Rhomb explicate the art/artist division in the song Johnny Ramone was in a Fucken Good Band But He Was a Cunt (subtitled GABBA GABBA YOU SUCK) but that’s an outlier. Most of them get their kicks in romance and pinhead longing.

 The crush of Helen Love’s Joey Ramoney, which portrays a long-distance desire over a sweetly skipping keyboard riff, sampling Joey’s hey-ho’s and running away with its own silly love. “There’s a girl who loves you on the other side of the world” it reassures Joey, perfectly capturing that bedroom-poster closeness you feel towards your teenage idols. Certainly more pleasant than The Maxies’ Sandy with its promise of “For you, Sandy, I’d dig up all the dead Ramones.”

 Amy Rigby’s Dancing with Joey Ramone, is, at least at first, mellow dancefloor seduction, with a possibly spectral Joey, who keeps his distance, as she copies every move he made. On the initial listen you get caught up in the gentle shuffle, and it comes across as resembling the adoration of Joey Ramoney, but on relistens it gets weirder and more aggressive ("I tried to say something/He said "Girl, shut your mouth, they're playing Papa Was a Rolling Stone") and besides, if you're copying every move he makes, Joey Ramone’s main move was leaning forward and looking scary as he shook his head about arrhythmically so really the scene’s less romantic than it might appear. At the end the unreliable narrator finds herself alone, but still stuck with those warm gluey memories as the song suddenly speeds up into Ramones pastiche.

 Sleater-Kinney’s I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone focuses on this heartthrob idea, usurping Joey’s place as an idol, with a rebel yelp. It's equal parts that imitation and destruction. Joey's a god, but one to kill. "I wanna be your Joey Ramone/Pictures of me on your bedroom door/Invite you back after the show/I'm the queen of rock and roll."

Delay’s Everything You Hate brings together that metaphorical power together with the complex interpersonal relationships, the tension and loathing that characterised the band for most of its existence, synthesising their place as icons with their reality as humans. “You say you don’t like the Ramones/But I think we’re a lot like the Ramones/Cos we look good together but we don’t get along/We’re a lot like the Ramones.”

Modern Life Is War's D.E.A.D.R.A.M.O.N.E.S. similarly mixes the reality with the fantasy. It's got that assimilative desire, but it's also from a point in time when the Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee are in the ground so it's way darker and more tortured in its cry of "Now I just wanna go back home and turn up my stereo/Until the rhythm melts my bones 'cause I'm a Dead Ramone"

Shonen Knife, known also as the Osaka Ramones, who have also released full albums of Ramones covers and played entire Ramones cover shows. The song Ramones Forever, tells the tale of a life lived through the medium of Ramones. It’s a simple process that has played out all over the world for the last 35 years. Day 1, hear the Ramones on the radio. Day 2, buy a Ramones album. Day 3. Start a fucking punk rock band. 

 The song triumphantly climaxes with a scene of Shonen Knife supporting the Ramones, which actually happened. This is one of the ultimate attractions of punk rock, that you can start a shitty band in your shitty town and then be sharing the stage with your heroes not long after, but, more than with any other punk band, the Ramones lend themselves to hero worship as much as best-friend fantasies the Ramones are definitely on pedestals. 

The inclusive/exclusive balance, the build-it-up/tear-it-down counterplay, where you can be part of something, you can change your last name to Ramone, but you're not a RAMONE-Ramone. You can wish to obliterate every idol, but you still need heroes somehow, that impossible thing to aspire to. You can get close, but you still got that gap. You’ll never quite be one of those four sloppily uniformed thugs, leant against the wall looking cool, but almost trying too hard to look badass and disaffected and ending up like some weird broken simulacra of teenage cool, all the more desirable for its sliced and mangled take on that languid adolescent pose. The Ramones are gone, whether you think them benevolent aliens or just a bunch of fucked-up dudes from New York, they're gone, but when  Shonen Knife sing “RAMONES FOREVER! MUSIC FOREVER! RAMONES FOREVER! PUNK ROCK FOREVER!” you don't really feel like they are, you feel like they're just around the corner, something eternal and drawn in the stars and much as their etched in brick and scrawled on toilet doors and commemorated in a thousand bad tattoos, a couple hundred sloppy punk rock songs. They meant something, they did something, yo, cuz 13 human beings have walked on the moon, but only 8 have been Ramones.

Not all of these songs are available on youtube, but you can track most of them down somewhere online. For a more complete detailing of songs about the Ramones, see this excellent list which I stumbled across while editing this piece.

So Scratched Into Our Souls #11: The Queers - Fuck the World (I'm Hanging Out With You)

"Anyway, while record collector scum fail to understand that the point of accumulating info is to marshal it into an argument, they have their uses as trivia merchants who can be consulted by those who know that facts alone are useless things. There is a huge difference between playing DUMB and being genuinely STOOPID. This explains why I rate the Queers and loathe lumpen-intellectual Britpop wannabes like Blur and Oasis." - Stewart Home, Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock


The Queers are a dumb band. Deliberately so. Because pull it all down, and pop music, punk music, pretty much any music that relies more on verve, heart and snappiness over technical virtuosity relies on, is the raw fuckwitted immediacy of adolescent emotion. And that is some fully dumb shit.

And that's why they wrote the greatest love song of all time in Fuck the World (I'm Hanging Out With You Tonight). Because love is dumb, a beautiful relentless assault on the intellect, a rabbit-punch to Rodin's thinker. It is a well well worn approach to describe it as something which stuns, stupefies, befuddles, discombobulates and turns over the place like a bored puppy. Though this doesn't really say much, because love, in all its snowflake simplicity, is kind of a well-mined subject, a Diavik-hole, dead-earth chasm of artistic and emotional pursuit, twatted-out by every single person who's ever penned any words in anger or desire, or angry desire. Bitter love, unrequited love, joyous love, hopeless love, barbed-wire love, vicious love, viscous love, self-destructive love, anyway you want to play it and every combination. There are no new angles, but fuck it, what else are you gonna write about? The Queers write Love Songs for the Retarded.

Sandwiched on that record between the more direct paean to love-as-idiocy Teenage Bonehead and the fairly self-explanatory ode I Can't Stop Farting, sits Fuck the World (I'm Hanging Out With You) and it is, for me, the greatest ever love song ever primarily for two reasons: 1) my emotional capacity is a fundamentally limited beast best expressed in two minute pop-punk songs 2) this particular two minute pop-punk song perfectly captures the way that a relationship with someone you love is both an internal perpetual motion machine that often doesn't require interaction outside itself and an outward kicking force that does not give a fucking shit whose shit it fucks up.

I called in sick to work today and stayed in bed 'til noon

And now I just don't care what's going on outside this room

Things aren't getting better

My future's not too bright

Fuck the world I'm hanging out with you tonight

Me and you will walk around so pointlessly

Smashing things, jacked up on way too much caffeine

I'm really going no nowhere

I hate this shitty life

Fuck the world I'm hanging out with you tonight

In this song, love isn't a glorious thing, not in the exultant majestic sense of the word, anyhow. It's not a blanket to envelop everything in a warm homogeneous glow (fuck hippies yo), it's a twisted tight little thing that you cultivate in private spaces, in shared glances that crack the both of you up, all those silly little moments held as cradled weapons, when everything else in the world might be full of shit, to fire spitballs at life and all its annoyances from this perfect bundle of companionship, twitching in rhythm with in each other. It acknowledges the futility and smallness of these actions, their place as a because that's always been the fundamental optimist/pessimist question for me, beyond half-glasses of water, whether the light we find in our likes and loves, in people and records and moments with these things, makes the darkness seem all the darker or whether the presence of that pressing black around us makes the light brighter. Fuck the World raises that question but never answers it, it tumbles down with each line, another depressing gripe, another acknowledgement of futility but then that last shout brings you right back up. Fucking's better when the two of you are fucking the world at the same time. Does it bring you back up all the way? Is it enough? Who really knows. Some have made it enough. Probably more haven't. But it leaves you on that upwards shot, it's got the hope in the right place. Battle lines drawn, two vs billions, a war cry, a charge and a smile. Berserker confidence. Crazy dumb but unstoppable for now and all nows screamed high in the mix above thens or whens and what-ifs so it's all you can hear.

And I mention fucking there, because I've always read this song primarily in terms of romantic love, but this song is about more than just that narrow definition, it's about companionship, in any form, the second person perspective is never clarified, it could be sung from a Jude to a Phineas Poe, from an Old Jock to a Greyfriar's Bobby, from a Beavis to a Butthead. Any pairing of thrown together compatible biting souls, snapping at the loneliness that inhabits us, the rules, written and not, that bind our hands and stymie our steps. Any pairing that can bring itself together on the singalong whoa-oh-ohs when you're close past words, and then even past vocalising as the song rolls into simple guitar line that seems to capture that needling unity and companionship and the very essence of the song in a couple of notes, the way the best Screeching Weasel songs do too.

But a couple months ago, I got to see The Queers with the person I love, the person that I think about when I hear these sort of songs, and I had always sort of thought about that moment. We all project the vision of our worked over slick sung loves that we learnt from these songs and such onto the way we think the future will pan out and maybe all on some level think that there can't help but be a perfect melding of song, story and place. That as the song you love plays and the person you love stands next to you then it'll build into a moment greater than itself, a moment of battle-lines, two vs billions etc. The song will burst itself out onto reality and things will make absolute unholy sense for two minutes or so.

But what actually happened was, we were all physically shattered from three days of drinking and dancing and a night of fitful sleep on a 9-hour bus-ride punctuated by a couple of people in front of us swapping bible trivia as we rolled through little Florida towns in the early hours. Was it everything, was it all that I had imagined when I listened to that song alone and aching years ago and had romance painted for me in those two minutes. No, we were all so dead on our feet that I could barely stand-up and my girlfriend passed out on a bar-stool wearing sugar skull make-up and we left after about four songs, well before they got round to Fuck the World. Ah, well. That's how it works out. Art and music aren't everything, they're a bunch of touchstones and hot water bottles, they're vastly important, but they're not comprehensive documentary nor valid plans. The narratives we construct from them get knocked down, the perfect moments we imagine when the collision of life and art coalesces into a transcendent series of well-soundtracked kisses, that shit just doesn't work out like in the dumb movies, and the dumb songs, and the dumb books. The perfect song isn't always playing on the radio, the perfect movie isn't always on in the background of the bar to teach you some trite life-lesson on your third or fourth drink, to furnish you with a quick manageable epiphany. Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-ooooaa.

I don't need the Queers for that, the way I used to, I don't need to hang on to Fuck the World as a promise, a dream, but I still love the song, I'm still gonna listen to them, when I want some simple melody and refreshing snot, when I want a perfect picture of the whirling dervish of punk rock love, but I don't see it as an all-encompassing thing in the way I once got caught up in it, ideal for the sort of people kicked most of their ideals to pieces in exactly the sort of caffeine-jack rushes the song builds itself around. Maybe it's fuck Fuck the World I'm Hanging Out With You, I'm hanging out with you.

 Flyer by Mitch Clem.

I love, and I know that those freewheeling itchy moments this love song so perfectly bottles and kisses exist, but I know that there's so much more to things than that, and that when those perfectly punk rock times present themselves then it's pretty fun to throw yourself into them and roll up in the collision of the various loves of your life, abstract and personal, when the music and life do accidentally fall in step for a few paces then I'm going to appreciate that and sing my fucking lungs red and dry but I don't need it the way I used to need it, I can say Fuck the World I'm Hanging Out With You without the song, but I'll still spin Love Songs for the Retarded when I want something simple and dumb and great, but I don't need to endlessly romanticise something that I've already got, to moon over a pantheon of bursts of verse and chorus from Cometbus' Punk Rock Love to a dozen cheapskate Thunder Roads and that Act 2, Scene 2, I know life to be better than romanticisation, but The Queers will still have that place in the wispy dreams that have touched me and shaped my stupid head, a spot in the fun of things. And besides, it's not like I'm gonna stop relating to I Can't Stop Farting anytime soon. Pfffffffffrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp.

A Weaselmania Of My Own: Part One

"Ben Weasel, he's an asshole/Ben Weasel, he's a jerk/Ben Weasel, you just hate him cos he don't have to work" - Ben Weasel, The Queers

So on March 18th of this year, as everyone who would possibly be interested in the topic knows, Ben Weasel punched two women in the face at a show at SXSW in Austin, Texas. The event and the resulting fallout were just depressing. Larry Livermore's reaction was probably the most balanced that I encountered, and he's someone who has known Ben Weasel for a long time, but for the most part people quickly divided themselves into two opposing sides. In one corner, long rants about the prevalence of domestic abuse and the social and moral implications of male violence towards women that basically came to the conclusion that Ben Weasel is a misogynist scumbag and patriarchy personified, and then on the other side, a series of outraged shouting about personal responsibility and how anyone acting in the way the first woman who got punched did should probably not be surprised when they find a fist in their jaw, you know those arguments which are generally summed up by a slogan made up of a brief rhyming couplet: EQUAL RIGHTS! EQUAL FIGHTS! or TALK SHIT! GET HIT! (this is something that seems to be especially prevalent in the discourse of the hardcore community, it's like Scott Vogel possessed by Etrigan, I'm wondering if you could start a twitter feed that consists solely of analysing the genre in this manner: NO FINER BET! THAN MINOR THREAT! BETTER NOT RISK IT! GORILLA BISCUITS! FRIENDS AND STRANGERS! WE ALL LOVE DANGERS!  I HATE THIS FAKE TOWN! I'LL EXPLAIN IN THE BREAKDOWN! EVERY EARTH CRISIS LYRIC OF NOTE! SOUNDS LIKE A PUNISHER QUOTE! I think it could be a success, although you'd probably quickly run out things that rhyme with 'x'.)

First things first, I don't think the women who got punched should've been punched. One of the them was clearly just instinctually intervening on behalf of a friend, and the other one, well, as obnoxious as she was acting, I think anyone in their 40s, man or woman, should probably have progressed to the stage that they don't respond with a haymaker to the almighty attack of a thrown ice cube, especially if the person who's suffered the infintesimally small indignity of being aggressively cubed spent 40-odd minutes beforehand deliberately provoking the group of people from which the fateful chip of frozen water was flung. But while I don't think those women should've been hit under pretty much any circumstance, I also don't believe that Ben Weasel is a misogynist.

I don't think Ben Weasel is a misogynist. I do think he's a massive fucking twat. The only thing that shocked me about the whole incident was that anyone could actually be surprised when Ben went all Rocky Marciano in Austin, everyone I know responded with something amounting to a resigned sigh and maybe a rueful "Jesus Christ, Ben." Because we don't hate Ben Weasel because he doesn't have to work. We do hate him because he is an arsehole, whatever Joe Queer might think. He's spent 25 years acting like a contrarian dickhead, and so it's not that much of a leap when that apparently pathological snotty desire to piss people off mutates in an angry uncontrolled moment of physical expression. Come And See The Violence Inherent In The System. Every single one of his MRR columns that I've read basically consists of him picking something people like and explaining why anyone who likes it is a fucking moron for liking it and should probably die. Okay, I'll admit that does sound like a fairly amusing act, but when it's all you ever do, then it stops feeling like an act. It's like that the Kurt Vonnegut novel Mother Night where he illustrates the way the lead character is tainted by their time working as an American spy for the Nazis and although he did his moral duty in a fine important way and helped the war effort, the pain he caused and the hate he inspired in his cover identity take their toll. Vonnegut sums up his theme in typically Vonnegutian insightful brevity with the phrase "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." He's not saying there that if you're an Elvis impersonator you're going to end up dying on the toilet, what he's saying is that pretending to be an arsehole is in itself inescapably kind of an arsehole thing to do (just as pretending to be nice to people can actually result in you being nice to people.) If you want it in hardcore terms: fake it til you accidentally make it.

So he's an arsehole, but what are we going to do about that? Screeching Weasel's music means a fuck of a lot to me. It has pulled me through some really tough times. A lot of people who make really great art are shitty people, Bukowski was a complete dick, but his novels and poetry are beautiful evocations of the drunken washed-out struggle of so many people. Bukowski's hero was Celine, who was an even better writer than Bukowski, even more acute in his laceration of hypocracy and his wry amazement at the special little human moments, he was also an even bigger fucking cunt, a raving anti-semite and a complete misogynist, a misanthropic fascist who ended up despising pretty much everyone.  In punk rock, Bad Brains have a reputation for homophobia, but their best music still sounds vital 30 years after it was made, far more so than MDC's stringently left-wing responses to it. It really becomes trickier if a great work is in itself ideologically shitty, like DW Griffiths' Birth of a Nation which is massively important in the development of American cinema, but is also virulently racist in an incredibly vile way (though it should be mentioned Griffiths was so mortified by this accusation he immediately bankrupted himself with a massive budget film about the evils of intolerance and later directed the first attempt at an cinematic interracial romance), but that doesn't really apply here, there is nothing genuinely hateful in the music of Screeching Weasel, pissy, yes, but that's key to their appeal.

So he's an arsehole, but so what? My friend Tommy's response to the Weasel debacle was "Good thing we're punks so we don't have to have heroes." which made me smile as Tommy usually does, but it doesn't take it all the way, because while I don't want to get into a whole real Death of the Author debate here and while I think art can live beyond its creator, Ben Weasel wrote those songs, Ben Weasel sings those songs. And he's a gaping arsehole. And I think an important part of punk is recognising the fact that we identify with art made by arseholes, and that's probably because we're sort of arseholes too.

The fact that Ben Weasel is an arsehole is part of what makes him a good songwriter in his way, just as the misanthropy of Celine is what allowed his satire to be razor sharp let's stop pretending that we're into this music because we're all lovely unique glorious people, to a certain extent the noise of the music is mirroring those ragged shitty parts of ourselves that we can never really expunge, even if we wanted to, which we don't because we've built those shitty parts into castle walls and radio towers, fending off the besieging armies of conformity to an imaginary mainstream ideal, broadcasting our loathing and limp-wrist-in-the-air defiance to similar fuck-ups. If we were nice people then maybe we'd all just be listening to ethereal waft of flowery pop-folk, not twisted angry facsimiles of pop songs and unruly streams of noise and bloody-throated screams. If we were really nice people, we'd never actually know there was a distinct genre called crust, or powerviolence, or goregrind. And what greater example of that internal division of than a man who punched two women in the face on stage also being the man who sang (although didn't write) Going Home, the finest punk song about how the destructive power of gender stereotypes is harmful to everyone, male or female, about how it's not about a war of the sexes, the shittiness of these patterns of violence and mistrust is such that it's an indelible psychic stain on everyone obscuring our abilities to connect to each other as just fellow human beings.

Let's also stop pretending that people fit in to simple categories of good and bad, let's stop imagining that every artist, friend, hero, politician, relative, cop, person isn't a complex human being built from an assortment of contradictory beliefs and experiences that may not sit logically with each other according to some grand scheme. Solidarity is fucking great, but it's slippery. It's a constantly shifting bind of allegiances and shared aims, vicious disagreements and mutual antagonism. It's fucking the human condition is what the fuck it is. We're not all beautiful delicate flowers, we're not all pricks either. We're roses. (OH GOD! That was such. A. Fucking. CHEESEBALL. Line. Though it fitted so well that once it popped into my head that I knew immediately that I was both going to use it because deep down [or on the surface maybe] I'm a high school poetry sort of motherfucker, even if I kind of hated myself for thinking of it and knew I'd probably have to parenthetically acknowledge its shitty corniness to prevent large swathes [4 people] of the readership bailing immediately as soon as they comprehended the full scale of its cheeseball nature. I apologise)

We're not perfect beautiful models of perfection, no one is, but especially not us, because in the embrace of punk rock to me there is an implicit rejection of that search for a smooth unblemished notion of beauty. You can still dress up nice, make yourself up, do your hair, reject every crust-punk convention, but the love for something so raw and angry betrays an essential coarseness to you or to me. We don't just accept those broken bits, we mold them into a shield, into a fluttering proud standard. We're the sort of ugly people that find ugliness beautiful. That live and love in the dry cracks in skin, the flabby folds in flesh, in the dirty smears on grinning faces, singing loud songs, telling each other sick jokes and desperate stories and all of our scars are norse fucking sagas.

(This sort of point cropped up in a discussion I was having with my friend Drew about cultural redemption narratives and their relationship to punk rock. "I get almost resentful, like it takes trauma to be broken enough to walk down that road. Most of my real trauma happened because of, not as an impetus for, punk rock." which led me to liken punk rock to a Simpsons joke, and because he is in the same age demographic as me and the joke was from seasons 1-8, even though I did not specify the joke, he immediately knew which one I was talking about, as you probably do reading this. THIS IS A TEST.

From this I can only extrapolate that punk rock's IF IT AIN'T BROKE, LET'S BREAK IT! spirit is equally applied to people as it is to nation-states, police cars and guitar strings and my friend's friends were all secretly dancing with glee behind his back chanting "ONE OF US! ONE OF US!" as they led him into a series of a confusing and messy social situations and relationships. It's a serious drug, you just want the high, but you don't realise that there's no way of getting there without embracing all the strung-out inhuman mess that comes with it.)

It's a scene made up of the kind of guys that put Code Blue on a mixtape for a girl they really like, the kind of girls that give their boyfriend about whom they're just starting to believe there's more there than a fun fling a copy of the SCUM Manifesto on their one-month anniversary, lovingly inscribed (i's with hearts for dots and all) with the dedication "This is why you are beneath me", as well as a whole fuckload of people who don't really care for the whole boy/girl deal but instead of trying to fit in or not make a big deal about it walk round with a mouth full of "Fuck you. This is who I am. Take your prehistoric binary notions of gender and sexuality and choke on them, you fucking relic."

So shocked that we find ourselves in a place where people often seem really interesting and smart or at least dumb and fucking cool, we test it. We push it to see how far it will accept us. We compete to show off our disaffection and distraction from the notions of conformity, and in doing so of course just create a different type of conformity that then must be reacted against as well in this endless fucking stupid pisshearted chain of chimerical explosions, regrettable tattoos and basement shows.

It's a scene made up of those kinds of people, who do those kinds of things, and then still get the uncomfortable inner tug that maybe they stepped too far outside the lines this time. Because we don't live our lives as Johnny Rotten or Poly Styrene or Guitar Wolf or Jello Biafra or Pig Champion, though we ache and shoot for that, though we use them as crutches and patches, bright crusty stitching on Gein-chic skin suit chainsmoke mailroom disguises. We spent most of our time stumbling on through as John, Marianne and Seiji, Eric and Tom, and that duality, that snotty-mouthed swagger/snotty-nosed terror, run-your-mouth/heart-in-your-mouth dichotomy that we bounce and swing between is exactly the teenage freakshow that Screeching Weasel at their best have always been able to perfectly articulate.

And you kind of feel sorry for Ben Weasel a bit, because I think as you get older you generally kind of get a bit better for the most part at reconciling the furious certainty that makes up some of your teenage years, and the chaotic insecurity and self-loathing that makes up the rest of it, the circles merge until it's no longer a dichotomy but more like a happy chubby Venn diagram we've found a warm spot in the middle of, but Ben Weasel does not seem to have done that. Just as Celine's hatefulness was what provided him with the perfect outsider perspective to lance societal hypocrisy, it was also what warped him into a fascist prick, Ben Weasel's continual oscillation between stark self-awareness and self-justificatory blather has led to so many perfect anthems of alienation, fun TV party ditties and ra-ra-ra-Ramones riot story songs, it's also led to him being a fucking dickhead burning bridges like they're dandelion seedheads. He's been an adolescent for three decades. And I am so fucking grateful to have struggled out of my teenage angst somewhat (mid-20s angst is a fucking piece-of-piss in comparison), I couldn't imagine dragging that amount of weight for another 20 fucking years.

But he's finally left that dance behind it seems for the most part, and just decided to stick with the self-righteous angry part. The final song on Screeching Weasel's 2011 offering, First World Manifesto (which is catchy as anything) is about the stupid notion of punk celebrity with apparent specific aim at Brendan Kelly of the Lawrence Arms, but every single line feels like it could be about the person singing it. Maybe he knows this, maybe it's all a bigger subtler joke than I'm giving him credit for but it doesn't seem to be. He's finally broken out of the pattern of catch-an-epiphany and release-hell, but rolled out, not into the quietitude that many aging artists find, the confidence of self-knowledge, but into the almost sole fury of the Unimpeachable Weasel. Maybe he's losing it, or maybe it's just that he can't seem to modulate himself with other people as well as he used, but stuck in this anger rut, it's been a turbulent snipey few years for Mr Weasel, even by his standards, and the few moments where he does seem to get that he's not all that (I mean, he's ALL THAT sometimes, but he's all that because he didn't always think he was all that, or always say he was) then he's switching back quicker and more sharply between something recognisably identifiable as the work of a person who knows they're a person (the initial humility of his apology after SXSW) and the self-righteousness with which he crafts his public missives (the long, rambling [I'm kettlepotting tremendously with those two words used in a pejorative fashion] half-smart half-stupid all-pretty-fucking pathetic comeback blog post where he explained exactly how perfectly right he was about everything after all). He increasingly seems like he believes his own bullshit, or to put it another way, he's stuck as Ben Weasel and can't remember who Ben Foster was, whereas his creative spark was always the introspection and humanity of Foster delivered with the salty smirk of Weasel. And man, that's gotta be shitty, there's not gotta be a lot of peace in that.


You kind of just want to give Ben Weasel a hug and say "Look, you don't have to push against us so much. We like you. Some of the time. If you could tone down that whole "I'm Ben Weasel. Fuck you!" just a little bit, it'd be really great. This is a cool place. And while we're not going to agree with everything, you're going to say, we really are as good as you're gonna get."

Of course though, that sort of genuine honesty is probably not going to get past this hard outer shell of disaffection and anger, so he'll continue doing the dumb shit we hate, but his music, at its best (and it is currently really really not at its best) can save a fucking life. And I know that, because when I repeat those magic words of "punk rock saved my life" that many have uttered sheepishly, declaimed loudly, carved into desks and brick knowing them to be true as a sunrise, Screeching Weasel are one of the bands at the forefront of my mind.

"I am here not by choice but by my birth. For so many years I doubted my own worth it's no coincidence I ended up where I'm at now I'm here to tell you that you can't kick me out 'cause I'm a permanent part of this society the blackest sheep amongst a crowd of them I'm not the glue that holds this scene together but I have arrived here by way of dirty looks and rejection and head scratching shrink and frustrated parents and teachers just like so many did before me and will after me go ahead and laugh at me you can afford to laugh I can't 'cause this is all I have I'm not proud I'm not ashamed but this is all I have and it's good enough for me and I am through following your truth I'm making my own rules. My own world, my own rules."

- Screeching Weasel, The Scene



Yeah, we've all felt like that sometimes, right? But Ben can no longer claim that position, because every new piece of news on the band still meets dozen of detractors ripping the piss out of the whole Weasel canon or praising the gloriously funny Max Levine Ensemble diss EP it will also have at least a few obsequious fanboys repeating by rote the screeching wheeze that PUNK IS ABOUT PISSING PEOPLE OFF AND HE DOES THAT! Or that PUNK IS ABOUT REJECTING TRADITION AND HE DOES THAT! which is exactly the same colossal pile of magic bullshit that Michael Graves trotted out for the ridiculous  ConservativePunk website that sprung up in response to PunkVoter around 2004. (For the record, and I cannot reiterate this enough, punk rock is not really about breaking from tradition, it is about the right to choose which tradition you fit into, building and inhabiting a system of your own not necessarily smash all systems, because the world is so old and so big that everything has a tradition and everything is systematic, and rejecting all tradition is in the Futurist traditon, and smashing all systems is done systematically.) The very existence of those Weaselites disproves their entire point, because Ben Weasel is not a lone voice in the darkness speaking up against the oppressiveness monolith that he imagines to be whatever he considers 'the punk scene' today, if he really was then he wouldn't have that captive audience ready to lap up all of his tortured logic bullshit and spring up at any time in defence of him. On a broad conceptual level his criticisms have a place as a significant aspect of punk rock is recognising the failings of your own scene and puncturing dogma and preciousness with giggling bile (and there are plenty of great songs about it like Electro Hippies' Am I Punk Yet? or Propagandhi's Back to the Motor League, Turkish Techno's Meth Not Meat, Screeching Weasel's very own Slogans etc.), but Ben Weasel has stopped doing it in that sort of scattershot 'I don't know who's right but you're fucking wrong' entertainingly sarcastic way, he does it in a patronising 'I am right! WHY CAN'T EVERYONE BE MORE LIKE ME?' way. He may be an outsider in certain circles but it smacks of someone who's on top (boasting about his five figure show guarantees) applying downwards pressure rather than lone misfit doing it with upwards pressure which aways soils that sort of thing.

Would I go and see Ben Weasel live? Yes, but I'd put on a full-face helmet first! Boom. But, yeah, I would, but, despite the fact that I just wrote a billion fucking words about him, or who he appears to me to be, it's not about him. Yes, the fact of who he is, what he's like, has led him to not only this unenjoyable impasse with reality but to document feelings and sensations that I fucking hated having but were entirely grateful for having elucidated by someone to prove I wasn't insane and alone, but the songs birthed from his creative loins still do exist without him, and will continue to exist without him, outside of him, whatever Republican politician he brags of voting for, and I love love love a lot of those songs, as much as I love any work of art in the world, and, as I think I have gone on about before, the communal experience of a song is what finally completes it. Yeah, I identify with art made by arseholes, but so do others, and they're gonna be arseholes of the same sort as me, and I want to scream those words with them, whoever the fuck's on stage. If I could go see a Screeching Weasel cover band which I knew would have as many people in the crowd as the real Screeching Weasel and that the crowd would be as completely into it were ol' Weasel there himself, then I would be just as happy with that. It's what I want to sing along to, not who I want to sing along to, just as I'm massively excited to see Ted Leo's Misfits cover band close out Friday night at Fest, almost as much as I would be if it were a Danzig fronted 'Fits (but less so than I would be were it The Misfats).

So basically, this article has been knocking around in draft form for about 4 or 5 months and soon Screeching Weasel are releasing a new EP, The Carnival of Schadenfreude, with a regular band, this would be a celebratory post of their power to inspire and my love for them, their dogged determination to exist in some form, rather than what this is, which is a sort of a complicated mealy-mouthed shrug. Now, maybe he'll snap back again, maybe he'll drag himself down from his perch and make great music again someday, but not today (or it doesn't sound like it from what I've heard of the new EP) but shit, I'm not gonna renounce my love for Screeching Weasel. Yeah, there have been times throughout this year where I've felt like I was moving past them, leaving them behind, few weeks ago I put on my personal Weaselmaniacal Greatest Hits playlist for the first time in a while and every single song hit me just like it used to, from the goofiness of Joanie Loves Johnny to the profundity of What We Hate. So I come not to bury Screeching Weasel, but to praise them. As the spiderhead psychopomp Tim Timebomb might say, "Dis isn a stowaree bout how Ben went doowaarn, is abowt how he wen uuerp." I just first wanted to indulge in some bullshit armchair psychoanalysis on the hard-to-love cunt behind the music to help maybe illuminate all the stuff I'm gonna say in what I'm about to do, which is a series of posts detailing my 50 favourite Screeching Weasel songs. Yep, 50. There are not many bands where I even have that many songs (there are plenty of my favourite bands that don't even have that many songs.) I probably won't get it all finished for a while, they'll be posts on other subjects in between and I'm off to Fest on Wednesday for a couple weeks of American dreams but 50 songs, 50 scratches on my souls, is what I'm gonna do, because in all the shit about Ben Weasel's personal conduct, there have been people laughing and sneering about how they were always a terrible band and they don't know how anyone could ever really care about who Ben Weasel is anyway.

And fuck that with an asteroid, because they were fantastic. Stay tuned for exactly why.