"...if there is a god, he's only concerned with artists. Specifically those of us who possess both skill and energy. And he only troubles himself long enough to swat us down like horseflies just before we become his rivals." - Sam Edwine in Tom Bradley's Killing Bryce
When I was 17 I thought I was an artist. I thought I was pretty fucking great. And I found this album that was called Destroy, Oh Boy! and the first track was called Born Toulouse Lautrec (still a fantastic pun 20 years after it was released) and over a breakneck snotpunk swell it kicked to pieces my puny artistic exceptionalism. NO HEROES, NO LEADERS, NO ARTISTS, NO GODS. It screamed. I'm a worker, you're a worker, would you like to be a worker too? Eviscerating the high minded rhetoric of the ultracrepidarian artist with a sarcastic superspeed sneer and years after I've heard it, when I must've heard it dozens of times, when I've sang along to it on a warm Texas November night with Eric Davidson strutting, twitching and mincing across a low stage, it still makes me smile, still holds me true, because I know a lot of writers and artists, I am a writer, and let's face it, we're wankers. But that's okay, I'm a wanker, you're a wanker, wouldn't you like to be a wanker too? Because if there were just artists and no plumbers we'd have endless beautiful villanelles and murals about what it was like to be covered in shit all the time, a thousand loves in a time of cholera, rather than what we have which is endless beautiful novels and plays about what it's like to be drowning in metaphorical shit all the time, but go the other way and we'd all have immaculate crappers but no way of properly articulating our appreciation for it (there's a big chunk of Don Delillo's Underworld all about bowel movements as a metaphor for traveling into communist countries).
It's all a job and as such it fills your days and changes the way you perceive the world, whether your mindless furniture shop job leaves you absent-mindedly assessing the kitchen units in every new house, you visit, line names and serial numbers and styles reeling unbidden in your head, or the restless desire to make art about the world turns you into a constant vulture for your own emotional damage. Kicking about in the dirt, we scrabble about for commission, a speck of cash for the way you've said something, in paint or words or notes, about the way the world works, the way people spin. And then you take that measley cheque and spend it on a beer, or to fix the washing machine, or something mundane while the steady trudging monthly pay from a day job is getting thrown away on art supplies, or too many books, or saved up for that guitar hanging like a teardrop in the music shop window with which you plan to pour everything you've got into a furious garage thrum, panicky riffs to staple to jackhammer drumbeats and switchblade lyrics to pummel, gut and pull apart the stupid fucking certainties of another 17 year old and rearrange their head so they gasp and mouth to themselves in shit and wonder, "Destroy... oh boy..."
"ART: A Friend of mine in Tulsa, Okla., when I
was about eleven years old. I'd be interested to hear from him. There are so
many pseudos around taking his name in vain." - The Hipcrime Vocab, Chad Mulligan (from John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar)
Before the supergroup swagger of The Dead Weather, the stripped down hit of the Kills, there was a cheap little teenage punk band from Florida called Discount. A short song: Portrait of a Cigarette. Where as the guitar seems to fall away in the background like discarded ash, Alison Mosshart draws a simple pictogram about the basic shape of things, a cigarette as a line and a circle, ashstray as a square in a circle. And from these geometric beginnings, she sketches out the shape of a relationship, any relationship, breathing in the burning, between the people who are square pegs in round holes, the temporary community of a promethean cadging, an offering of flame. The kaleidoscope of life paired down to each individual shape, through a fantasm moment, maybe just a single sung minute, of clarity and calmness offered by a friend smoked down to the filter, and it reminds me of when I was about eleven I remember coming across a riddle that went
Make three-fourths of a cross, And a circle complete; And let two semicircles On a perpendicular meet; Next add a triangle That stands on two feet; Next two semicircles, And a circle complete.
And I was baffled until I scratched out the shapes and found that it spelt TOBACCO, and when the scratchy song finishes I flick back and press the triangle in the circle on the square and marvel at its shape again and when you screw down the cigarette sometimes you find the spell broken.
take a circle. and a straight line. put a match against the open end.
feel it burning. see the burning. breathe the burning. until it's
extinguished again. all those distinctions. clearly ashes in a circle on
a square. i stare across it all at you. you stare through it at me. are
you still there? are you bent up? being burned out. are you foggy. am i
trying now? am i straightening? am i dumping out the circle but hanging
on to you? are you lonely in this square? i'm lonely in this cube.
"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.
I actually made this mix a while ago and couldn’t think of some decent cover art for it. Fortunately, the other day I saw the surprisingly good Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which fairly closely mirrors the plot of Groovie Ghoulies’ Outbreak. I also probably could’ve filled this with far more songs about how businessmen wear monkey suits but I cut NOFX’s Pimps and Hookers and The King Blues’ Chimp in a 3-Piece Suit and just stuck to the one. So this is one for all our simian friends.
Tracklisting:
01. The Dickies - You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla)
02. Didjits - Monkey Suit
03. Screeching Weasel - Joanie Loves Johnny [Live]
04. Dead Milkmen - Gorilla Girl
05. Groovie Ghoulies - Outbreak!
06. White Shit - Shitted Out
07. Spizzenergi - Jungle Fever
08. Osaka Popstar and the American Legends of Punk - Shaolin Monkeys
09. Tijuana Bibles - Gorilla Stomp
10. Arson Anthem - Primate Envy
11. Disgusteens - Monkey’s Uncle
12. The Mummies - (You Must Fight to Live) on the Planet of the Apes
13. Zombina and the Skeletones - Ape Man
14. Raooul - Rotten Dead Monkey
15. Rocket from the Crypt - Raped by Ape
16. Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments - Baboon’s Liver
17. Riverdales - Time of the Apes
18. The Mopes - You Look Like a Gorilla
19. Melt Banana - Monkey Man
Time: 49:34
For maximum enjoyment, turn the sound down on this video and let it sync itself to the music as you listen:
I've been on a massive garage punk trip for the past month or so. The Rip Offs, The Gaza Strippers, The Didjits, The Mummies, New Bomb Turks and Guitar Wolf have dominated my computer speakers, but I think the song that I have listened to the most, certainly the one that has been scratched deepest into my soul is this Oblivians song.
It's a break-up song, and all break-up songs are country songs, ol' time country, when it was just the blues with a spark more twang. Whether you dress it up in the frenetic whine of pop-punk as so many do (The Ergs' Stinking of Whiskey Blues and The Zatopeks' Mary Lou are two songs by pop-punk bands that explicitly make this thematic debt clear) or shave the bedraggled edge off it in a plaintive folk-pop abomination. All break-up songs are country songs and all country songs, the ones I love anyway, are rough things, where the emotion is stunted and the pain comes through even more from the fact that it's being expressed by someone who doesn't know how to express their pain that much, is uncomfortable with coping mechanisms beyond bottles and barfights, that's what this song is. There's clearly a lot of emotion in it, but it's not always clear which emotion is being expressed and how the singer even feels about it or whether they've even made up their mind yet. You can't really say it wears its heart on it sleeve because its heart is a tricky misshapen muscle beating arrythmically and growling unintelligibly, ventricles at war with one another. This song fuzzes and spits with its own internal conflict, just like any human cunt does.
This song is, for want of a better word, a ballsy song. It's not some heartbroken cry designed to get girls to see how sensitive you are and offer you comfort, but it's not really a righteous fuck you of bitter indignation either with all the transparent pathetic bravado that those sort of songs contain (though there is a bit of that, it kicks it to pieces itself before you can snort at it). I think thematically the song it bares most resemblance to is the refreshing anti-sentimentality of Against Me!'s Cavalier Eternal, a fantastic break-up song that transcends many of the artistic clichés around this particular form.
Girl, I'm sorry but I'm leaving.
We're both at fault, we're both to blame.
And it wasn't the other men 'cause there were other women.
This just isn't love, it's just the remorse of a loss of a feeling.
Even if I stayed, it just wouldn't be the same.
But Cavalier Eternal is a wry smile for the most part, its emotion is couched in a self-awareness, it sets itself up and knocks itself down and takes the next step down the highway with its inner cheeks caught between its teeth, a cocked head, a wink at the road ahead and maybe a wistful blown kiss at the road behind that falls away into laughter. There's no such detachment in Bad Man, it does acknowledge the singer's own culpability in the situation being described just as Cavalier Eternal does but it has none of the acceptance of the situation that Gabel sings of, maybe it's a proto-Cavalier Eternal, cavalier foetal, the roiling mass of emotion that comes before the acceptance.
Over the scratchy stomp he howls in an overly-enunciated backyard Elvis style. I mentioned earlier that there is some bitter indignation, but for the most part it's a mixture of self-loathing and self-justification. I'm leaving. It's not you, it's me. I'm a prick. But by the way, it's you. "And it's on, and I'm gone. That's that." as Biggie would have it, but this guy has too much guilt to let himself out with a carefree farewell like that.
I love the way the song reveals itself like that, changing the direct of the emotion with each line but always emoting fucking hard, yelping and shouting. Just when you think you've got a handle on what's going on with the strained chorus of "I'm a baaaaaad man. I'm a baaaaaad man." it switches up on you again with "But I'm/too good for you."
Like Cavalier Eternal it's a song that ends on the road, but where Cavalier Eternal scuffs its heels knowingly Bad Man is an arsehole Orpheus, pulling out of the driveway in a beat-up car, punching the rearview mirror off lest it be tempted by the trap of a girl who's only fault was to love him and letting out a howl as it roars out of town. FUCK I HATE MYSELF. I'M A FUCKING SHIT. BUT. BUT. BUT. BUT I'M FUCKING FREE. WOOHOO!
It's basically Bruce Springsteen's The River if he never knocked the girl up and managed to force himself into Born to Run but without the girl by his side because she just represented too much of that town full of losers he was busting out of.
Time was in a vacuum, when I wanted to be free.
But now my adolescence has all but left me.
I could have stayed another day, but it would be wrong.
And you would just grow tired of me, before too long.
I say no. I must go.
I'm not the one you want, though I know you think so.
I'm a bad man.
I'm a bad man.
I'm a bad man.
But I'm
Too good for you
My Suzie, true.
Time was an obsession, but that was just for me.
You can tell by the sound of my shoes that I am gonna leave.
Even if you plead with me, and say you were so true.
It's too late for long goodbyes, honey, we are through.
