Speed Of History

This is the April column, sneaking in at the end of the month again. Even though my show is on hiatus I enjoyed doing my Top 1-5 last month and thought it would be fun to round out the top 10. Just to clarify, this is not my “best” list, that would be much harder and would probably include such time worn classics as the first CLASH and RAMONES albums, Marquee Moon, Pink Flag and Entertainment and one of the two greatest punk EPs ever released, the STIFF LITTLE FINGERS releases “Suspect Device”/”Wasted Life” and “Alternative Ulster”/”78 RPM”. You see the problem there I haven’t even left the 70’s, not to mention I am not including collections which rules out stuff like, Singles Going Steady, EPs of RP or EP LP.

Instead this is just a list of favorites. On a recent road trip I listened to just about all of these. That is my criteria I guess, things I choose to listen to the most frequently.

So with no further ado (again) here are numbers 6-10.

6.  THE PROFESSIONALS - s/t LP (1980)

THE PROFESSIONALS are somewhat forgotten and ignored, which is a damn shame.  For those of you that don’t know, THE PROFESSIONALS were Steve Jones and Paul Cook’s band post-PISTOLS.  In my opinion Jones was the SEX PISTOLS.  Yes Rotten was a great front man and brought the element that let people write entire tomes about them (Lipstick Traces), but Jones wrote the songs.  Hell he even played bass as well as guitar on most of Never Mind The Bollocks.  He started off aping Johnny Thunders but quickly developed what I consider one of the best guitar tones in rock.  It’s instantly recognizable, much of it sounding like SEX PISTOL songs with Jones’s loutish and just passable vocals.  This is their first album, which is a weird one to start off with, because even though it was recorded in 1980 it didn’t actually get an official release until 1990.  This would have been THE PROFESSIONALS debut LP but instead that honor belongs to I Didn’t See It Coming from the following year, which features re-recorded version of some of the songs.  The original s/t album is by far the stronger, featuring some of their best songs, like “Mods, Skins, Punks”, “1-2-3″ as well as some of the better tracks off of I Didn’t See It Coming, such as “Little Boys In Blue”.  Rotten and PIL got all the attention but THE PROFESSIONALS charted what, to me, is a more interesting take on post-punk, one less experimental, dissonant and eclectic and instead more workmanlike rock ‘n’ roll, borrowing equally from power pop and pub rock but keeping punks sneer and swagger.  Similar in ways to THE BOYS or THE KIDS and followed by bands like THE GUITAR GANGSTERS, it is a populist and unpretentious punk.

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7.  GUILTY RAZORS - I Don’t Wanna Be Rich EP (1978)

This is where I cheat, much like how I did with THE UNDERDOGS in last month’s column.  This is essentially on the list for just one song, “Provocate” though the other two are decent numbers as well and like THE UNDERDOGS, this was their only true release with a very recent release compiling other unreleased tracks.  THE GUILTY RAZORS are hands down in my opinion the best French punk band.  It’s throbbing, dark toned stuff  with charmingly bad English lyrics (“fuck off for your mother”, “I don’t forget for you”) and it perfectly walks the line between the more rock influenced French punk like THE DOGS and the coming Cold Wave style France became known for.  Listen to CHARLES DE GOAL – “Exposition” if you don’t believe me.  What I find even more interesting is how the cold distance of the vocals give it a JOY DIVISION style post punk feel, one that the modern band FRUSTRATION perfectly captured, at least on their early releases as Relax was, unfortunately, a bit of a letdown.

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8. CHUMBAWAMBA - Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records LP (1986)

The course of CHUMBAWAMBA’s career is really interesting.  From the early bedroom tape loop and sample heavy early singles and Bullshit Detector tracks, which were barely songs, to their later dance music infatuation (and infamously the sellout pop of Tubthumper) they traced what is an almost backward trajectory from earlier anarcho bands such as CRASS and FLUX OF PINK INDIANS who became more abrasive as they aged.  Seriously, the hectoring of “Sheep Farming In The Falklands” and even more so on The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks is deadly serious and the music so fractured and uninviting that they become completely unlistenable despite what you may wish.  CHUMBAWAMBA instead went in a completely unique direction.  They easily could have been CRASS’s successor but instead on Pictures Of Starving Children Sell Records and Never Mind The Ballots they create a theatric and generally accessible platform for their unforgiving politics.  While not as Brechtian as their song(s) on the Pox Upon The Poll Tax compilation (full title: “Song Of The Mother In Debt , Song Of The Hardworking Community Registration Officer, Song Of The Government Minister Who Enjoys His Work, Song Of The (Now Determined) Mother”) still recall Weimar cabaret.  Both albums are great, but Pictures Of Starving Children wins out for me, primarily because of the reoccurring whitewash theme that ties the entire thing together.  The easy argument, about making the message more accessible by appealing to a mass audience (one that I happen to disagree with), can be readily applied to their later career, but the mid 80’s period of fusing theatrical style structure, incredibly varied world influences, dance beats and anarcho punk to call out Bowie, Keith, Mick and Sir Paul is so just, still, so refreshingly novel that I can’t get enough of it.

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9.  THE FLYS - Waikiki Beach Refugees LP (1978)

This was actually the hardest one for me to do, 9 instead of 10 because I already knew what was going to be number 10.  I had debated listing ZOUNDS or THE MOB.  Both are very similar and related bands, Curse Of The Zounds has better songs, “Can’t Cheat Karma” and “Demystification” for example but Let The Tribe Increase was edging it out due to its unforgiving monolithic and monomaniacal internal aesthetic.  It’s such a beautiful downer of a record.  I wasn’t feeling completely happy with either choice and after thinking back on what I would have listed when I started this show, I realized I forgot one of my all time favorite records.  Sure the amount I listen to it has faded over the years, but THE FLYS – Waikiki Beach Refugees is still worth of a top 10 spot, no doubt.  It is probably one of the best of the immediately post-punk power pop movement shared with the likes of THE BOYS and quite a number of other Brit and Irish acts.  It contains the absolutely classic “Love And A Molotov Cocktail” as well as other standouts such as the anthemic “Looking For New Hearts” and the sugar (bitter)sweet “Beverly”.  I can’t believe I almost left it out.

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10.  CRIMINAL DAMAGE - s/t LP (2006)

CRIMINAL DAMAGE is the best punk band of the past decade.  A bold statement true, but given the paucity of actual punk rock in the last ten years, it is an opinion I think I can stand by.  This album, their first, was amazingly recorded as demo (and famously for $67) and thank fucking god someone realized how good it was and gave it a proper release.  It’s short, 8 songs in under 24 minutes and when I first heard it I listened to it about 5 times in row.  It hit me like a revelation.  Let me try to explain.  From their name alone they immediately garner BLITZ comparison and it is deserved, though there is a lot of French Oi influence as well.  The thing is, the band has about as much in common with the skinhead seen as someone like I do, meaning nothing but an appreciation.   They are, emphatically, not a street punk or Oi band and their break from the 4-4 plod and absolute cartoonish nature of that scene is immediately evident.  It’s journeyman style bar punk to be sure, with stylistically simple anthemic songs, complete with chanted choruses, but the level of craft is almost perfect.  I’ve argued this before, but experimentation and progress in the arts is insanely overrated, perfecting something already existing is something else entirely.  Again though, they aren’t a genre act, the tone is much darker for one, similar to another modern great NO HOPE FOR THE KIDS and nowhere is this more evident than on the closer, “Anesthesia” which would have been a drinking anthem for a lesser band but instead comes across as a condemnation of that entire lyrical cliché.  Hell even the fight songs (“On Goes The Fight”) are about fighting depression.  I just recently read that they have a third album in the works and am as impatient as can be to hear it.  Their second album, No Solution suffered a bit from the sophomore jinx but it has grown on me.  It has much more “rock” influence, which initially turned me off and is structurally more advanced, losing some of the purity of the first album, but it also has its killers and one of the best songs “Empty Eyes” is refreshingly completely outside of the current punk rock sub-genre game.  I’m hoping for the best album of 2009.  No pressure guys.

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Yes, the March column is sneaking in at the beginning of April.  It should probably just be the April column but who knows, I may actually write something in the next month.  Oh well, at least this has some downloads for you all.

Inspired by the stupid Facebook “Top Five” thing, I’m going to post my five favorite punk releases, at least as they are currently.  I couldn’t really find most of what I wanted to list in whatever database it was that Facebook was using (no real surprise there) so I decided I should just do it here instead.

So with no further ado….

1.  WARSAW - s/t LP (1978)

You all know this one, the first real JOY DIVISION album, when they were still known as WARSAW.  It was only available as a bootleg until sometime in the mid 90’s, unbelievable enough.  I have always been a JOY DIVISION fan.  I think the first song I had ever heard of theirs was “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (I actually think I heard the SWANS cover first) and bought the Substance tape when it came out that same year.  Yet it was the first two songs on that tape that really floored me, “Warsaw” and “Leaders Of Men”.  One or both were staples of my mixtapes for years to come, and I remember ranting endlessly about “why weren’t there more songs like those two”, because, little did I know back in the pre-internet dark ages that there was an entire album waiting for me.  The later version of “Transmission” and “She’s Lost Control” are great, and I love how so perfectly aesthetically coherent Unknown Pleasures is, but I can honestly say that I hardly ever choose to listen to Closer.  The WARSAW songs (and yes I now know that those songs on the Substance tape were from the JOY DIVISION release An Ideal For Living) just spoke to me more, having the absolute perfect amount of “post” while still keeping a huge part of the “punk”.  I probably never heard the entirety of the WARSAW album until sometime in the late 90’s and while it is not perfect (much of it being demo quality and all) it is probably my longest running favorite.

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2.  THE VIOLATORS - Die With Dignity 12″ (1983)

I was tempted to list THE VIOLATORS collection The No Future Years but decided that collections should not be allowed, so this is the obvious choice, even though it itself is a bit of a collection, compiling tracks from two previous EPs and their songs off the A Country Fit For Heroes comp.  They are an interesting band and definitely one of my most listened to.  This 12″ show their early range, from the absolute raging UK82 style punk of “Government Stinks” to the much slower, moodier and absolutely singular “Gangland” and “Fugitive” songs (essentially the same song differentiated mostly by male or female vocals) that prompted a UK music critic at the time to term them “a street level JOY DIVISION”.  The world needs more post-street-punk.  They didn’t record nearly enough but of that small output I don’t think they ever recorded a bad song, maybe one or two mediocre ones, but even the later material, in which they shared a weird parallel evolution with BLITZ (though avoiding the NEW ORDER keyboard cheese) and went New Romantic, they produced the absolutely amazing “Crossing Of Sangsara”.  If WARSAW didn’t exist, this would be my number one choice.

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3. THE UNDERDOGS - East Of Dachau EP (1983)

Some of you may be accusing me of being purposefully obscurist with the one, listing the sole EP by a largely forgotten band in my top five, but those of you that have followed my show and blog will know this to be an all time favorite.  In fact it is in the top five on the strength of the title song alone, which I think really says something.  “Johnny Go Home” and “Dead Soldiers” (the latter being so generic that it may as well be a punk standard, along with songs named “War Hero”) are perfectly serviceable 80’s britpunk but “East Of Dachau” is transcendent.  Transcendent being a weird word to use for what is essentially a plodding downer of the song, when it is normally used describe things like the cathedrals of guitars built on “Marquee Moon” for example, but to me this is the perfect example of a certain strain of 80’s punk.  It’s a slower and somber number (are you sensing a theme here?) but one that probably has more in common with CHRON GEN songs such as “Puppets Of War” than with THE VIOLATORS.  I have said this many times before, but I swear one of my favorite modern bands, NO HOPE FOR THE KIDS, lifted their sound almost straight from “East Of Dachau”, down to the WWII/cold war themes.  Well maybe not all of their material.  Going back and listening to the NO HOPE FOR THE KIDS album I found a lot of it pretty awkward and wanting, but the singles!  Ah the singles!  Anyway I digress.  I blogged about THE UNDERDOGS before, but I didn’t discover this band until I heard a CROPKNOX cover a few years back.  All of THE UNDERDOGS recorded (and until then unreleased) material was collected on something called Riot In Rothwell, which may or may not be a boot.  It contains a number of great songs, the other stand out being “Private Wars”, but, as I said before, I am not listing collections.

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4.  THE FUN THINGS - When The Birdmen Fly EP (1980)

Yet another sole EP by a band that should have done much more, and, unlike THE UNDERDOGS, this, to the best of my knowledge, is the only material THE FUN THINGS ever recorded.  Australia really took the Detroit-style STOOGES garage proto-punk and ran with it, releasing quite a number of classics, THE SAINTS first album being the most well known.  Here though, in this EP, the style is perfected, all four songs are absolute killers and recorded when the band was still in their teens supposedly.  I first heard two of the songs “Time Enough For Love” and “When The Birdmen Fly”was on the Year Of The Rat comp (that also contains such other greats as SATAN’S RATS, CRIME and THE URINALS) that was taped for me back somewhere around 1997.

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5.  CRESS - Monuments LP (1997)

This is probably my oddest choice, being much more recent and not subject to the scrutiny of history (and largely ignored in my opinion) but CRESS is definitely one of my favorite bands.  No one seems to listen to CRESS and I honestly can’t remember when I first heard them.  They had been on my radar since the 90’s but I don’t think I began actively listening to them until this decade.  Monuments is full of samples, long intros, outros and bridges (though not as much as some of their other releases) and is what was at the time an extremely unfashionable style of anarcho-crust which has since made somewhat of a comeback.  CRESS were carrying on the tradition of some of my other favorite bands, such as ANTISECT (In Darkness There Is No Choice not Out From The Void) or ANTHRAX (the punk one you Philistines) for example, with less of the AMEBIX style metal normally associated with the scene.  There are also hints of the proto-industrial leanings of bands like KILLING JOKE.  Some songs, such as “Progress” are lyrically and dogmatically clumsy in that endearing anarcho way but songs like “Earth” and “TV Screen”, the two standouts, more than make up for that.

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So here is my Feb. column, late in the month and dealing with the best of 2008, something I should have written about one or two months ago. Such is life. At least I have had plenty of time to digest and ruminate on these releases. It’s pretty eclectic. I mean it all falls under the rather loosely defined umbrella of “punk rock” but spans from dark, heavy crust to bubblegum powerpop. I think that means it has been a good year. So, with no further ado here is my top 10 in roughly descending order.

1.  MORNE demo

This is hands down my favorite release of the year, which is surprising because this is well outside the spectrum of what I normally enjoy.  As I have said to many people while raving about this, that either means that my tastes are really off, or it is really fucking good.  Of course I am going with the latter.  Originally a CD-R demo that was then released on vinyl (echoing the CRIMINAL DAMAGE LP of a few years back), MORNE is the current project of Milosz from FILTH OF MANKIND and is, in my opinion, the absolute pinnacle of modern crust, epic and emotional, while not becoming stadium or emo-crust.  It’s amazing that it took someone this long to realize that what we wanted to hear was AMEBIX or ANTISECT updated for the modern age and not 15 minute long cello driven metal (sorry FALL OF EFRAFA I still like you, I swear).  And just look at that cover.  That is fucking perfect.
http://morneband.com/ 

2.  EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING - “Demon’s Demands”/”I’m Guilty” 7″

This is the first of three bands that are all linked together in my mind that came out with great releases this year.  EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING have been around for a few years now but for those of you that haven’t heard them, they play somewhat slower and kind of downer garage punk that brings to mind many of the early Detroit influenced Australian bands as well as the more modern sounds of a band like say, THE SOVIET VALVES (who released a killer EP a few years back before disappearing and who may have some connection with ECSR).  I could have easily picked their LP from this year, Primary Colours, but chose this EP instead, primarily because of the A side.  It’s a 6 some minute long dark and dirty almost dirge, driven by one of the best and laziest (in the effortless sense) riffs I’ve heard in a long time, broken on occasions by the swelling chorus.  It was written for a film called Constructing Fear, a documentary about Australian government sponsored union busting.
http://www.ecsr.com.au/

3.  THOMAS FUNCTION - Celebration LP

More proto-punk garage sounding goodness, this time from Alabama.  The singer has a twang that is at times annoying and at times really reminds me of how Mick was trying to sound on the most countrified of the Sticky Fingers-era STONES songs, even on the punkier sounding tracks. And while I think the STONES comparison is warranted for a lot of the album there is much that remind me of EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING, such as the standout “Snake In The Grass” with its chorus that is almost permanently stuck in my head now.
http://www.myspace.com/thomasfunction

4. PIERCED ARROWS - Straight To The Heart LP

The final of my trilogy of garage punk bands, I initially wasn’t that warm on this album.  Not that it was bad, it just took a few repeated listens before I was sold.  It’s impossible to talk about this band without going in to their history.  Fred Cole has been making garage rock since 1964.  Fleeing the draft, he ran out of gas in Portland and met Toody Conner, whom he married in 1967.  The two of them have been making music together ever since.  I was familiar with one or two of his older bands from various Nuggets-like comps and with much punkier DEAD MOON who was active during the grunge and garage rock years of early 90’s.  PIERCED ARROWS is simply the newest incarnation.  I was expecting more of the same and was initial drawn to the rawer of the tracks, like say “Dead Rainbows” for example but after repeated listens have decided that my favorite is the much sweeter “Caroline”.
http://www.piercedarrows.com/

5.  THE ESTRANGED - Static Thoughts LP

Another Portland band, THE ESTRANGED put out several releases this year, all of which I could have chosen but I decided I liked Static Thoughts the most.  While the EPs had a darker post-punk feel the LP stays dark but draws less from the UK influences (JOY DIVISION, WIRE, etc…) and much more from another band from Portland’s history, THE WIPERS.  While the whole album isn’t directly updating THE WIPERS the tracks that are, such as “Don’t They Know” are some of the best.
http://www.myspace.com/theestrangedpdx

6. SPECTRES - Visions Of A New World EP

More dark post-punk from the Pacific Northwest, from guys that used to be in hardcore bands, this time from across the border in Vancouver.  Colder and sparser than THE ESTRANGED, THE SPECTRES sound like much of the darker UK peace punk, minus the accents that is.  I am very excited about the current move in this direction as this sound is some of my favorite stuff.
http://www.myspace.com/inlowlight

7. MARVELOUS DARLINGS - “I Don’t Wanna Go To The Party” / “Careerist” 7″

An absolute gem of sugar sweet power pop, continuing on in the tradition revived by THE EXPLODING HEARTS but easily equally anything they wrote as well as most everything from the classic period.  The A-side is great but the flip, “Careerist”, is probably the best song of the year.  Amazing stuff, I can’t wait for the upcoming LP.
http://marvelousdarlings.blogspot.com/

8. THE DALTONZ - Sortie du 1er 45t (First 7″)

This will be the one that most of you haven’t heard of.  Modern bouncy Oi from France that doesn’t reference the gigantic French Oi scene of the 80’s so much as it does the more contemporary American style.  It brings to mind a less annoying and slightly more upbeat TEMPLARS, with the rough scratchy vocals and sing along choruses with two songs in English and one in their native French.  Good quality stuff without much of the cheese that generally goes hand in hand with this sub-genre.
http://www.myspace.com/thedaltonz

9. CIVIL VICTIM - Mehr Krieg EP

One of the only hardcore releases I dug from this year, Germany’s CIVIL VICTIM blast out 7 songs of retro hardcore on this 7″.  Ranging from sub 1 minute blast of thrash to more nuanced songs with harder, slower and heavier bits reminiscent of POISON IDEA.  I didn’t want to say “mosh-parts” because they really aren’t that kind of band, which is why I like them.
http://www.myspace.com/civilvictim

10. THE DEFEKTORS - Torn To Pieces EP

THE DEFEKTORS released two EPs this year and I enjoyed both but this one wins because of the title track, a nice moody number that stays with me well after each listen.  I am unsure how to characterize this band.  Part of me wants to lump them in with the new bedroom punk trend because there is a certain looseness to the songs, as if they were sketches recorded live, but that really isn’t fair.  They are walking a line between the colder post-punk and the warmer, earthier garage punk, while playing what are essentially power pop songs.
http://www.myspace.com/defektors

Honorable Mentions:

FRUSTRATION - Relax LP:  I really wish I could have put this album in my top 10, but it just wasted exactly what I wanted.  There are one or two dark, standout bangers, like “No Trouble” but most of the album avoids the darker WARSAW-like sounds of that song and instead treads more into synth darkwave territory, that can’t help but remind me of the worst of the 80’s new wave synth driven drivel.  FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD comes to mind because of the title of the album, which is unfair but there it is.

TRISTESS/MASSHYSTERI/INSTANGD/HJERTESTOP/PJ BONNEMAN/COLA FREAKS/et alll:  So Sweden and Denmark (in particular) keep cranking out hit after hit of retro punk and all of the bands listed above are great.  It has just been going on for so long now that it has all blended together for me, differentiated only by whether one sounds more like X or more like AGENT ORANGE.

THE HEX DISPENSERS - Lose My Cool EP:  A great EP who’s impact was probably lessened to me because it sounds just like the songs on their previous album.  If I had never heard that this would have made the list hands down.

THE YOUNG OFFENDERS - Big Man, Small House EP:  I love this EP and this band.  It’s just not 10 year material.  Not that probably even half of my top ten is, but whatever.

I’ve really slacked off on this monthly column thing.  The holidays, work, depression and general laziness are all to blame.  I have no real excuses.  I always start planning out the columns, but when I actually get around to the writing part I quickly get frustrated and decide it is just better to not write anything than to publicly post something that I consider either boring and uninteresting or just trite.  Yet one of my New Year’s resolutions is to continue an effort to be productive and this blog and show is a major part of that productivity.  That and the bike riding and art making.  The art making is the one I am really struggling with unfortunately.

So, that said, here is a quick recap of what I would have written for the past few months, presented in handy, bullet point format.

November:

• Obama victory
• Dancing in the streets in Brooklyn
• Cautiously optimistic
• Didn’t vote
• Hell, I’m not even registered to vote
• My politics are a disaster
• Don’t particularly believe in representative democracy
• Have slid into individualist anarchism
• Unrestrained capitalism = bad
• Wish I was more on the socio/communo side but it just doesn’t suit me
• Interested in ideas, not people
• Stuck on the stupid rugged individualist myth
• Biological political predeterminism?
• Fully aware that the choice to espouse philosophical anarchism is an attempt to place myself outside of or beyond “politics”
• Fully aware that I have this luxury because of privilege

December:

• Musings about punk music in the 2000’s after putting together the 90’s show
• Concept of “10 year” records and songs
• Lots of great singles, few great albums
• My top three tops from the decade
• THE A-FRAMES
• NO HOPE FOR THE KIDS
• CRIMINAL DAMAGE
• Album reviews and personal anecdotes related to the above three

January:

• Musings on my “Best” of 2008 show
• Stuff I didn’t play
• Major trend of 2008 was bedroom and weird punk
• Crust still going strong
• Actually liked some of the crust/metal type stuff for once
• MORNE demo (winning very unofficial Profane Existence board poll) prime example
• Have noticed my tastes sliding towards darker stuff, though skewed more to the CRESS and RUDIMENTARY PENI side of the spectrum
• Discussion of the three standout albums of 2008
• THE ESTRANGED - Static Thoughts
• EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING - Primary Colours
• THOMAS FUNCTION - Celebration
• The last two, finally good indie rock, meaning independent rock ‘n’ roll, not “indie rock” the genre
• Still very little good punk punk unfortunately

That should hold you over until next month, when I may actually write something and not just outline it.

When I was in middle and high school there was an older guy who hung out and skated with us occasionally named Jeff S.  He was a gangly, tall guy, easily like 6’ 4” and a pretty accomplished skater.  From what I knew of him he was a great guy, he was always nice and tolerant of us kids and had the kind of effortless cool that came just from him being in his 20’s that was amazing to my awkward teenage self.  Much of my early exposure to punk and hardcore indirectly came from him as well.  I am almost positive that my prized tape with the first MDC album and Salad Days EP on the A side with most of Flex Your Head on the B side originally came from a tape he made for another friend.  Also, in my mind, he was the same guy that taught me how to skate the ditch we always went to and stressed the (aesthetic) importance of riding Independence trucks, but I think I may be confusing him with someone else there.  Regardless, for some reason there were more stories about him than any of the other guys.  The two that follow are the ones I remember most vividly.

There was supposedly a young teenage girl that Jeff was involved with that had a party while her parents were away.  That in itself is probably kind of scandalous but it was also the norm as far as we were concerned.  There was this girl Reba who lived down the street from me that was famously dating a pro or pro-am skater from Pennsylvania when she was 13 or 14.  Anyway, as the story goes, Jeff was fucking this girl up in her bedroom while everyone else sat downstairs drinking and listening to music when her parents unexpectedly came home.  The father barged up stairs and opened his daughter’s door to catch her, in flagrante delicto, with a fully grown man.  Jeff then supposedly stood up, shoved her father down, grabbed up his clothes and ran downstairs, stopping to get his tape from the stereo, and took off down the street on his skateboard, naked.  Then, in what is clearly a later embellishment designed to raise the story to a Beowulf style epic hero tale, he was said to have ollied the train tracks in bare feet.  God knows if this was based on anything or not or merely the creation of our over active teenage minds.

The second story about him has probably a bit more bearing in fact, as it occurred several years later when I was near the end of high school and we knew the other party involved.  Something happened, but I am sure it is not the story that got told.  There was this punk girl Julie who was, ironically, the daughter of my school’s feared Vice Principal and disciplinarian.  She did phone sex for a living so of course was the subject of endless rumors.  My friends would occasionally hang out at her house during her work hours, she had to be home to answer a special line, and try to stifle their giggles as she talked dirty.  Jeff had been in or was in some kind of relationship with her and she allegedly owed him a good deal of money.  Soon after Jeff split town the story came out that he had gone over to Julie’s place, tied her up under the guise of kinky sex and then stolen all sorts of stuff from her and left her there.  Again this is almost surely fabricated but it was the fitting end to a man who figured heavily in our childhood mythos.

The last time I saw Jeff, he had shown up to help us build a vert ramp.  I remember him hack sawing through the steel coping that we were struggling with.  He had two plastic toy rats with him for some reason.  I always collected stupid plastic animals and dinosaurs and seeing that I was really excited about his rats, he gave me one of them.  I still have it.  Right now it is on my kitchen table, perched atop a fake plastic pizza that came from Japan, artfully arranged so that it looks like it is eating an olive.  Years later he showed up in a picture in some skateboard magazine, skating some ramp out in the southwest I believe it was.  That is the last I ever saw or heard of him.

The next story has much more grounding in reality than the previous two about Jeff, as I was an actual witness to some of it, but the details never clear and all sorts of shit was obviously made up to fill in the blanks.

There was this guy in my high school, Steve (or at least I think that was his name, my memory is failing me), that opened a short lived punk club named Pie Weasels.  Steve was what back then we called an ‘art fag’, meaning trench coats and EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN.  He had worked at a local pizza place and had somehow gotten the keys to it.  He began holding shows and punk/metal/industrial DJ nights there.  My memory is especially fuzzy, I think that at some point it was actually in an empty shop next door, one that got completely covered with graffiti, but the final show was definitely in the back of the pizza place.  You had to walk through the kitchen to get to the show area.  At that show I remember the 4 FIENDS played or at least were supposed to play.  To digress for a minute the 4 FIENDS are a much better band than I gave them credit for back then, female fronted, they played a kind of slow, gloomy punk rock that owed as much to Goth and early peace punk as it did to things like horrorpunk and the slight rockabilly of bands like X.  Listening to them now they remind me somewhat of some of the slower SIGNAL LOST songs.  Anyway, the last show at Pie Weasels was busted.  We never knew whether someone had called in a complaint or if the cops had just seen a bunch of punk teenagers hanging out outside a closed pizza shop on an industrial access road and decided to investigate but it was amazing it lasted a long as it had.  Steve disappeared in to the crowd and no one, to my knowledge could answer the cop’s questions about who was in charge.  The keg that was out back by the train tracks was supposedly spirited away into one of the bands vans, thus avoiding the even more serious serving minors charge.

I have no idea if Steve was ever caught or charged with anything, much less if he had permission to be there in the first place.  I am pretty sure he was no longer an employee at this point, so it was exceptionally illegal.  I never found out because he was suspended from school soon after and, as the story goes, phoned in a series of bomb threats.  He was then allegedly expelled and there was even, supposedly, a bomb robot employed and attempts to charge him with making terroristic threats and for the cost of the robot itself, which we all took as fact at the time, but thinking back on it I don’t have any memory of any of that actually happening.  It was all just hearsay.  None the less, we never saw him again.

I think I will probably revisit this theme in future columns if I can remember some other good stories, but for now this will do.

ENDNOTES:

1.    I mentioned in last month’s column that I was going to try to help MRR build their review database.  I started on it, and actually transcribed issues 1 and 2 into text before slacking off.  I don’t know if anyone from the ‘zine reads this but I apologize for flaking.  I had and still have every intention of doing this but between work, post season baseball and my increased bike riding, my normal excess of spare time has been close to zero.  Sorry guys.  Hopefully I will get back on track with it.

2.    I am sliding hard in to the full lyrca roadie category and am loving it.  The dirty punk kids on their stupid fixies with bandanas tied on them are starting to look really ridiculous to me.  I probably look like total yuppie scum to them, but fuck it, I built my new bike up for easily a 1/3 of what it would cost new and it is just a real joy to ride.

3.    I’m still scared to death about putting together my “Best” of 2008 show.  As I slide farther and farther out of touch, I have been hearing less and less new music that I actually like.  Most of it only has the most tenuous connection to punk rock as well, being bedroom DIY and the like.  Which is totally cool, but as I always complain about, I just wish that some guys that aren’t Punk Core style clown punks would bash out a bunch of killers and reinvigorate me.

This month’s column is going to be very short.  I had started to write up three different columns, the first about my personal politics, the second about punk rock music in the 90’s and the third a mish-mash of my hatred of work segueing into some things like the Long Emergency and Green Anarchy.  Obviously none were finished and this has gone on too long so I am just putting something up here.

1.    My controversial column from last month has attracted quite a few aspiring young fascists.  I don’t know what interest my new found following of racist noise musicians and street artists will find in all the far left punk I play or my monthly ramblings though.  I, most likely, will write something sometime in the future that will garner the same kind of attention, but I am not promising anything.

2.    When I downloaded that NF comp No Surrender so I could play the ABOVE THE RUINS song in the show following the Neo-folk column it was in 64kbps.  Almost all of the racist or fascist music I have ever downloaded, things like Boots And Brace / Voice Of Britain or that Japanese RAC comp Werewolfen, have been in similar shitty bitrates.  Skinheads don’t know how to rip mp3s.

3.    I am now officially an internet tastemaker.  I have been getting quasi-spam emails of “play my band on your podcast” from a number of different bands of varying quality.  It’s not going to happen.  Sorry folks.

4.    MRR is working on creating an online database of all of their reviews.  I have volunteered my services.  Mindlessly importing review data into the appropriate database fields is, oddly enough, right up my alley.  Hopefully this will all pan out and I will have a played an important part in putting up what is going to be an absolutely indispensable resource.  Fingers crossed.

5.    I normally hate living in the future, as I call it, but /b/ hacking Palin’s email is just the type of thing that makes me love it.  This is shit right out of all the near future cyber punk style sci-fi I have read and I can’t get enough of it.

6.    I am already dreading trying to put together a “Best” of 2008 show.  So little of what has come out this year has done much of anything for me.  The ESTRANGED and THE YOUNG OFFENDERS are the only two bands that come to mind immediately.  I know I have a few months left, but I would hate to have to fill the show up with, well, filler.

7.    I skipped last weeks show because I was riding bicycles in Philly.  I plan to start riding a lot more.  Hopefully we will have a long temperate fall so I can and hopefully this won’t cause me to skip more shows.

“The rise of a racist folk music scene shows how the far-Right has extended the breadth of its cultural embrace to include a range of musical forms that one would not traditionally associate with fascism and which many “traditional” fascists would doubtless find a challenging listen. These include Neo-Folk, Darkwave and National Socialist Black Metal [NSBM].

- “Searchlight Extra” on Neo-Folk February 2007

A note on this column:

This is an edited version of the original column.  I knew from the start that it would be somewhat controversial and had stated in the first paragraph that I would willing redact, edit and publish any rejoinders to anything that was disputed and am now doing so.

In the original column I used a small label release of two neofolk records as a stepping off point to criticize the fascist undercurrent present in the scene.  Despite what the individuals or bands involved with that label may think, it was not done out of any personal vendetta or mean-spiritedness on my part, but merely used as what amounted to a rhetorical device with which to structure the column.  I couched my language in a way that, while not accusing the label or any of the bands on the label of being fascist, unjustly linked them to that element of the neofolk scene.

For that I apologize.

After speaking with one of the owners of the label and being assured that neither they nor any of the bands on the label support far right politics by any means I agreed that the column had unfairly singled them out and it has been rewritten to reflect that.

Lesson learned.  I will be more careful in the future.

The essence of my argument has not changed though.  I have noticed an increased interest in neofolk and I find that troubling.  Let me start by first giving a bit of history.

Neofolk, as it exists now is largely due to the musical careers of two individuals, Douglas Pearce and Tony Wakeford.    Pearce and Wakeford’s first band was the punk band CRISIS.  The early singles had a sound reminiscent of the post-punk of WARSAW era JOY DIVISION as well as the early peace-punk of bands such as THE MOB and ZOUNDS.   The singles were political, being explicitly anti-racist and anti-fascist, and the band was politically active, being associated with both Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League.

By the time of the release of their album, Hymns Of Faith, in 1980, CRISIS’s sound and thematic content had started to become more experimental.  The band soon split, with member going on to several post-punk bands with Pearce and Wakeford creating the most famous of the lot, DEATH IN JUNE.

The name DEATH IN JUNE itself is a reference to the Night of the Long Knives, an early Nazi purge, and the band itself was, explicitly, an exploration of the fascist aesthetic.  In Douglas Pearce’s own words:

“When we first formed we were investigating fascism, no bones about that. It’s interesting to see what this tainted ideology which has been so powerful had to say in the beginning.”

Pearce, the only continuous member of DEATH IN JUNE, has been dogged by accusations of Nazism the entire length of the bands career, largely because of the continued romanticization of fascist ideology and the Nazi aesthetic, ongoing collaborations with known fascist artists (e.g. Boyd Rice and Michael Moynihan) and support of white power acts, such as DER BLUTHARSCH, to name a few.

Tony Wakeford left DEATH IN JUNE in 1984, supposedly because of a disagreement over his ongoing involvement with the National Front, an involvement that allegedly often included street level violence.   His next band ABOVE THE RUINS, contributed a song to a National Front benefit album, No Surrender, along with RAC (Rock Against Communism) bands such as SKREWDRIVER and BRUTAL ATTACK.  Though supposedly a break with his far right past, his following band, SOL INVICTUS included other known fascist activists, such as the bassist from the RAC band NO REMORSE.

Wakeford made this public statement on Myspace (yeah I know, fucking Myspace) last year:

“….Many years ago I was a (sic) once a member of the National Front. It was probably the worse decision of my life and one I very much regret. … this is the last public statement I plan to make on the subject…. In the end people will either have to believe me or not.”

Whether or not Wakeford is still a fascist or Pearce ever was or if they have been merely acting as provocateurs is not up for me to decide here.  Entire books have been written on that subject. What is of concern is that the sound and aesthetic developed by these bands, along with other frequent collaborators such as David Tibet and Current 93, established the template that modern neofolk follows.  It can be simplified as a post-punk, post-industrial, folk-inspired experimental music.  Thematically, besides the obsession with the fascist aesthetic, neo-folk generally is concerned with things such as paganism, romanticism, the occult (Evola has been particularly popular), European heritage and folklore.  Many of these trappings are directly related to the elements of volkisch theory that were used by Nazis propagandists and the Nazi occultists, such as the Thule Society.

Modern bands carrying on the legacy of DEATH IN JUNE, like LUFTWAFFE for example, have continued this flirtation with fascism, prompting numerous, ‘are they or aren’t they’ articles and interview questions.  The point of this brief history is that, unlike the Oi scene for example, neofolk, from its inception, has been dangerously and ambiguously enmeshed in far right politics.  It attracted not only those interested in commenting on fascism (much like the closely related band LAIBACH does) but also genuine fascists.  Stormfront, the premier online forum for white supremacists, has had a number of discussions on neofolk, militarist, neoclassical, darkwave and experimental post-industrial music and its appeal to racialists.  The level of ambiguity that exists about what these bands actually stand for has helped draw a significantly large number of actual fascists and racists to the scene and develop an entire openly-fascist subset of the genre.

As I said earlier on, I have noticed what seems to be an increase of interest in this scene by the slowly spreading post-punk diaspora.  My point, which may have gotten lost in the more inflammatory original version of this column, is that small boutique labels act as ‘tastemakers’ far more than they may realize and that by releasing neofolk they may be playing with fire.  I am not saying that all, or even a majority of, neofolk bands are fascist or even crypto-fascist.  I am sure a great number of these bands are legitimately and non-politically interested in things such as fascist history, runes, paganism, European heritage and the Nazi occult (which is fascinating, I own several books on it myself).  Yet, when these same things act as the coded symbols used by Odinists, neo-Nazis and white supremacists world wide and are staples of other racialist music such as RAC and NSBM, the knowing use of them, while claiming to be apolitical, is troubling, to say the least.  It displays a willful blindness to what is actually being communicated.

The following is a quote by the openly fascist Michael Moynihan:

“I’m sick of people saying they’re “not political,” as I think this is a cup-out…If you’re going to espouse “fascist” ideas, then I believe you have to accept some of the responsibility for their application in the real world; otherwise what is the point of espousing them in the first place?”

I am reminded of two things that tangentially relate to my argument so allow me to digress for a moment.  The first being an interview with Gary Bushell where he remarks that in hindsight it may not have been the best idea in the world to name his compilation, Strength Thru Oi (a play on name of the Nazi organization Strength through Joy) nor to include a known racist skinhead (Nicky Crane) on the cover, especially at a time when he, a socialist, was attempting to help distance the Oi scene from the surging National Front and races riots at gigs.

The second anecdote is less directly related.  There was a brief period several years ago, when at least two and maybe three hardcore bands, displaying a jaw dropping level of ignorance, named themselves things like REDEMPTION 88 (I’m just making that up, I can’t remember what they were actually called).  They used the 88 not in the Heil Hitler manner that RAC and Nazi punk bands had, but in reference to youth crew.  I wish I was making that part up.

That didn’t hold for long, of course.  The punk scene has been exceptionally good at self-policing. For the large part the far right elements of the scene were excised by the late 80’s and went on to form their own, parallel, music scenes.  There have of course also been unfortunate witch hunts, one of the most recent was the calling out of FUCKED UP (which I touched on in an earlier column) over their references to Evola and other Nazi occultists.  These witch hunts can be said to at least have had the positive effect of clarifying where bands stand, which, while not the intent of the original column,  I inadvertently ended up doing as well.

What I fear, is that an increased interest in neofolk will not include this aspect, and instead the far right elements will be treated with the same level of political apathy that was given to black metal.  When the hardcore punk scene began to explore black metal, the racist and fascist aspects of that scene were for the large part ignored, excused and apologized for and therefore allowed to fester, even as the music gained much wider audiences.  This fence walking process of appeasement only allows the infestation of these scenes to grow and any notions of staying non-political or neutral in a fascist infested scene I feel is hopelessly idealistic.

I will end with a final quote.

“Neo-folk acts as a social and ideological glue holding its Nazi adherents together, as well as drawing in a smattering of younger followers who start out as music fans and end up full blown mystical fascists, and without this, the ease with which these rats are able to collaborate politically would be massively reduced. Removed from the access, distribution and networking points provided by neo-folk, the individual and collective influence of this subculture’s fascist inspired ideology would be massively reduced.”

- Stewart Home

So those of you that listen to the show, and I figure that if you are reading this do (but you never know), know that I am in the middle of a two part early American punk and hardcore theme show. I am listening to the rough edit of next weeks hardcore show as I type this and it is going to be fucking epic. I was/am trying to avoid playing the big names without resorting to playing all obscurities but with most hardcore songs lasting only a minute or so, this is much harder than I initially thought. Still, I think I have put together (or will put together) quite a survey of early U.S. hardcore. I’ve really think I’ve hit a good balance between some of the obvious choices and some of the lesser known lights. In some ways this is going to probably be better than the Pushead mixtape (which is hands down the most popular download on here) if I do say so myself. But then no one is going to care as much about this as that mixtape, because I am no Pushead.

Listening to this is reminding me of just how strange the 80’s and the hardcore explosion were. Without getting in to the argument of how and when hardcore began (Answer: BAD BRAINS because Nervous Breakdown was a punk record [though MIDDLE CLASS probably wins the release game putting out recognizable hardcore in 1978]) it was pretty much officially up and running by 1980 and it quickly took over the world. I have said this before but in the early 80’s, American punk rock was hardcore. Of course, as I said in last months column, the grand narrative fails, as there were quite a few bands hanging on with a traditional punk sound and a lot of more experimental fringe bands that went on to form the basis of the college radio/progressive/alternative rock movement of the early 90’s. Still for all intents and purposes, hardcore was the American underground. One of the best elements of the much maligned AMERICAN HARDCORE movie is the map animation showing bands spreading out across the nation like a viral outbreak. Plus they all had their individual, and in some cases downright iconic (the bars), graphic logos. How cool was that.

In many ways the hardcore explosion mirrored what was happening in Britain, but in the U.K. the true second generation of punk was split between anarcho punk, the hardcore UK82 style punk and the loutish street punk/Oi movement. In America it was all centralized in a much more visceral form which may be one of the reasons for its incredibly rapid adoption.

This is one of the major things that strikes me as so odd about the whole movement, how insanely fast moving it was. These things just don’t seem to happen anymore. Fittingly (or perhaps not) for a website entitled Speed Of History, this speed now almost seems to be a thing of the past. Hardcore lasted about 5 years. Of course Boston and New York kept putting out thugcore for years to come (and the Bridge 9/FSU style crap is still going strong for reasons I just can’t fathom) but for all intents and purposes, hardcore as it existed was dead somewhere around 1985. DC went melodic, HUSKER DU released Zen Arcade, Boston went rock, bizarre things like Hardline developed, untold numbers of bands “crossed over” and a few bands even went post-punk/goth (TSOL and MIDDLE CLASS spring to mind).

It was done.

Compared to what has happened in the modern age (which for arguments sake I say roughly started with the advent of the mp3) and the mp3 driven revivalist age which I talked about in last weeks show (and which doesn’t only apply to punk rock), not much has actually happened in the last 10 years. While not an expert I say this applies to many of the genres out there. Indie rock for sure and I bet the argument could be made by someone more knowledgeable than me about hip hop, which was evolving at an absolute incredible speed in the late 80’s and early 90’s. The two exceptions that I can think of is metal and the post-techno diaspora, both of which seem to have splintered into an almost uncountable number of subgenres and undergone rapid growth in the last few years, but I know so little about this I can’t really speak intelligently about it.

Another aspect of early 80s hardcore that I find so strange is that a disproportionately huge majority of these bands were skinheads, and not the traditional skinheads that were undergoing their own revival movement at the time in the U.K., but instead a very specific American interpretation of it. They didn’t listen to Oi, they listened to hardcore.

While I understand that in the late 70’s it was somehow radical to have a shaved head and wear a Hawaiian shirt and this helped define the early hardcore punks, by the early 80’s this had all morphed in to skinheads. I played THE STIMULATORS last week and mentioned that Harley Flanagan makes the claim that he single handedly introduced the cult to America after being shaved in Belfast by the local skinheads while on tour in Ireland in 1980. While I somewhat doubt the veracity of this (it seems like Sab Grey of IRON CROSS and others in DC must have be contemporaneous) what do I know, I wasn’t there. Regardless, there is no doubt that Harley helped create the very specific thing that was the 80’s American skinhead, the NYHC/DMS variety, and what a strange beast it was.

In my suburban high school, I saw the last gasp of this. When I entered in 1988 there were at least 6 skinheads and by the time I graduated there were none. Like hardcore itself the trend flared and then burned out improbably fast.

In the revivalist age we live in, early American HC has definitely come back in to fashion in the last few years. In a sense it never really went out of fashion. No one ever stopped listening to the NECROS, for example, but the bands themselves had been leaning much more towards the mosh-metal territory until just a few years ago when, as I think Mike Thorn said, a sizeable number of the hardcore kids “remembered that they were punks”.

So that’s it for this month, my take on HC history. Listen to the show. It will go by in a blur for how motherfucking hard it was to put together.

I skipped out on a FUCKED UP / HARD SKIN show that I had already paid for a few weeks ago. It was a rainy Friday evening and I would have had to kill an hour or two after work and then gotten all wet riding down to the show. I was tired and it just wasn’t worth it to me. I saw FUCKED UP play a year or two back and they really didn’t impress me. HARD SKIN would have been fun, even though they may also be past their prime.

This is nothing new. I have bailed on most of the shows I had planned to go to the last few years. There are quite a number of reasons for this but my age and increasing apathy is probably the major one. The fire of my youth has faded, unfortunately. Secondly, I am not a part of any scene anymore, by which I mean I have no friends that really listen to the same music I do. It’s been this way for quite some time now. My move from Philadelphia to New York a few years back completed the cut-off. I now rely almost solely on the internet as a place to find out about and talk about current music.

But finally (and probably most interestingly) I miss “real” shows. In New York, as far as I can tell, bands just play in bars though I am sure there are house shows out in Bushwick that I know nothing about. Hell, there even may be LES squat shows still (besides all the bad metal ABC No Rio books that is). To me, real punk rock shows will always be pure DIY affairs.

DIGRESSION:

I grew up outside of Baltimore and some of my fondest memories of punk rock are from two illegal show spots, Jules’ Loft and the Hour Haus. Both were incredible, in that shabby romantic sense, and both put on regular shows for many, many years.

The Loft was a Baltimore scene fixture since the early 80’s. From what I understand, and this is all hearsay, Jules had had an original Loft on the east side of the city, which was shutdown for some reason or another (I always heard skinhead violence with whispers of homicide). By the time in the late 80’s when I first started going to shows he had relocated to a pretty rough neighborhood on the west side. It was a three story, formerly industrial building. Jules lived on the top floor and the held shows on the second floor for a while before safety concerns (rotting floorboards) forced them to move to the ground floor. For all I know Jules could still be having shows, but I suspect he finally stopped or was shutdown sometime in the mid 90’s. If anyone out there knows for sure, fill me in.

The Hour Haus, was my personal favorite spot. Located on Northern Ave. across the bridge from MICA it always had some kind of connection with the school. It was above a gay bar called Icebreakers and was what would have been, under normal circumstances, a large loft apartment, instead it was a disaster. Graffiti everywhere, trash filled rooms (literally, the kitchen was waist high), holes cut through walls to extend the show space. The rear was always curtained off and I never saw what was back there. I have a feeling the place may have been a studio and practice space and not an apartment, but someone may have been living in that beautiful squalor.

I never had the same connection to any of the west Philly punk house, probably because I was in college and by then and places like that just didn’t cause the same level of excitement by being ‘dangerous’, they were just places to do see bands. For those of you not familiar with the city, there was a stretch of Lancaster Ave. in West Philly that was basically punk rock row. A block of converted warehouse, it held a number of different punk houses and show venues over the years such as the Killtime, the Fakehouse and Stalag 13. All were in better condition than what I remember from Baltimore, but were also much seedier due to an influx of heroin and generally scumfuck nihilism in to the scene, something that was either missing or that I was blind to when I was in Baltimore.

The late 90s was when I started going to shows by myself. I still knew where to go and would still recognize enough people there to not feel like a sub-cultural tourist, but I was already becoming an outsider. Since I moving to NYC it seems that if I want to see bands play I have to go stand in a bar and get horribly bored drinking overpriced beers for 3 hours, while waiting for the one band I want to see to finally play to an unenthusiastic audience. Maybe I am still a romantic and want an autonomous zone where anything goes and expect a genuine cathartic experience, one that involves the audience as much as the band.

It’s a shame I hardly see live music anymore, because modern punk rock has had something of a renaissance in the last few years. I know many of you may not agree, as most people my age or a bit younger are nostalgic for the music of their youth, but the 90’s were horrible for punk rock. Instead of a long winded explanation as to why, just consider the following three bands: HATEBREED, THE LOCUST and the band that Dance of Days inexplicably ends with, GOOD CHARLOTTE (seriously, what the fuck is up with that).

These styles and unholy combinations of them are the music of choice for today’s emos and scenes and it has only the flimsiest of connections left to the punk rock family tree. MRR championed THE NEW BOMB TURKS in response to the sorry state of punk rock music and then we were treated to nearly half a decade of uninspired garage punk yowling.

Things didn’t get interesting again until the late 90s, when a surge or revivalism swept the scene.

Of course any attempt to create a grand narrative here fails because real life tends to be messy and doesn’t like to conform to individual pet theories, e.g. THE CASUALTIES put out their first record in 1992, years ahead of the coming spiky street punk revival. Another good example, even though I am not a big fan, is how the Scandis, the Japanese and Profane Existence made punk a threat again by keeping crust and d-beat alive.

What really set the punk-revivalist movement afire was most obviously the advent of the mp3. This was fed by the amount of old, rare material now easily available due to the boom in the number of rare punk collections (Bloodstains, KBD, etc…) and the massive reissuing of classic punk rock (Captain Oi for example).

DIGRESSION:

There was also an unprecedented string of reunion tours in the late 90s and early 2000s. It seemed that every band that had ever recorded anything between the years 1975 and 1985 dusted off a few corpses and went on tour. I saw a good deal of them and almost all were not worth it. I was spared the indignity of seeing the reformed fake MENACE play thanks to 9/11 as they got stuck in NYC and couldn’t make it to Philadelphia because of the attacks. These bands have now thankfully gone into semi-retirement again, emerging only to play Holidays In The Sun and fest of that nature.

The exception to the above was THE KIDS, who I saw play 4 or so years ago at one of the Dot Dash fests. Maybe it was because it was their one and only US appearance, ever, but they killed it and the crowd (punks, skins and the normal Dot Dash garage weirdos) went nuts. This was probably the best show I ever saw at a bar.

I saw WIRE play just the other night, a free outdoors show at the South Street Seaport, to kick off the summer concert series. It was what was to expected of a large outdoor concert with $6 beer. The sound was horrible and the entire atmosphere a bit sad but they at least played quite a wide range of their material.

This was the second time I had seen them play since they reformed. I saw them back when the first Read & Burn eps came out and had some seriously mixed feelings. Not only did I not like much off those eps (much of which sounded like NIN to me) but I had read an interview that made me uneasy. In it they had essentially said that they noticed that there was a demand for smart, arty yet hard music that was not being filled, so they decided to fill that gap. It was so cold and calculated and it left a bad taste in my mouth, which wasn’t helped by seeing them play live. They played to less people than the opener THE OXES (now that was a gimmick band that got old fast) and just stood and mechanically played a set with almost no breaks between songs. I don’t think they ever addressed or acknowledged the audience. They were always cold but now they seemed cynical and contemptuous. They were still cynical bastards the other night, but now just came across as resigned.

The mp3 age and the increased exposure to older punk rock helped spark a huge number of sub-genre trends. While there may be some grumbling about re-hashing the past (and I am as sick as anyone of all the cut-rate d-beat and now retro HC that have flooded the scene), I still think this is, in general, a good thing. I am not one that thinks constant progression and experimentation is always a good thing. My common response to the oft heard complaint of “everything has already been done” is to point out that there is almost an infinitesimal amount of small differences between existing things. These interstitial spaces are worth exploring and I am glad that it is happening. Without this we would still have millions of bands taking their sole inspiration from RANCID and SCREECHING WEASEL instead of the huge breadth of punk rock history.

Years ago, I once got in an argument in a bar with a girl who told me I was never a punk because I never squatted. It was strange, she got actually, seriously angry, but thinking back on it I can’t recall what I could have said that set her off. She disdainfully called me a ‘house punk’. Tipped off by that phrase, I knew I was arguing with an ex-gutterpunk and it went from being an inane argument over “what is punk rock” to an inane argument over “what is punk rock” with what is basically the worst possible sub-sub-genre of the whole stinking mess. I smartly just walked away from that one.

A few months later I remember recounting the story to an old girlfriend and her friend, who also happened to have been affiliated with ANTI-FLAG in some way (fill in guitarist/tour manager I think it was?). We all had a good laugh, but I couldn’t help feeling a bit like a poseur, especially because I was hanging out with some ANTI-FLAG guy. Nice guy though, I made sure to only make a few jokes, to just make sure he got where I stood, before going back to being a normal person and just hanging out. Come to think of it, I think he may have been edge and probably just sat there while I got wasted and screamed about something stupid. In hindsight he probably thought I was an ass. Oh well.

So anyway, back to gutterpunks. Have you ever talked to the spanger crusties or gutterpunk about music? They don’t listen to punk rock. They listen to metal. They may be in to GG ALLIN, some of the classic American bands like the DEAD KENNEDYS and new bands like LEFTOVER CRACK, but that is about it. They generally know very little about punk rock music. I met this guy who introduced himself as Filthy Rich in Philly last weekend. Full studded vest, patches etc…. All he wanted to talk about was metal. Plus he was so wasted he wouldn’t shut up and kept repeating himself. He was kind of like that guy that corners you in a bar because he hears you like punk rock and then wants to spend all night talking about MURPHYS LAW, RANCID and E-TOWN CONCRETE. Seriously, he was trying to talk to me about E-TOWN CONCRETE. Fuck that guy.

I bring all this up because I read two different things decrying hobbyism in punk rock in the last month or so. One was an MRR interview and who knows what the second was, probably something from a webzine or an online forum. So as the guy that has frequently compared being in to punk rock music as the same as being in to model trains, I felt I should champion hobbyism and that it was my duty to stand up and speak for it here, but then I remembered that argument with that girl. So, I’ll just stick to being a house punk and continue to promote my bedroom culture take on it all.

I do think it is safe to say that anyone in 2008 that think that punk rock is anything more than a lifestyle choice is fooling themselves. It sure as hell is too dated to be any type of political or artistic vanguard.

That may be a little unfair, and out there in the hinterlands of the good ol’ U.S. of A. there may be more of an “us vs. them” feeling, but here in the big city it is just one aesthetic choice among many. Maybe I am just spoiled, but living in NYC I am convinced that when I go out, almost anyone I meet is going to be an atheist, a leftist and have at least a passing knowledge of punk rock. It is the shared culture touchstone for the artsy/boho side of my generation. It is our cultural heritage as bizarre as that may sound and what is left of it is a musical legacy and an incredible DIY network. Even that DIY network is under attack from within as more and more bands, labels and promoters are becoming more business oriented. I have even come to feel that sites like Terminal Boredom (disclosure: I really like Terminal Boredom) exist now almost solely as hype engines to make sure that all the extremely limited EP releases sell. It’s just a kinder, gentler capitalism emulating on a small scale what is done at the major level.

I’ve argued for years for a new purity, an abandonment of the big indies, tour managers, punk publicists, etc… and a return to micro-labels and self produced and released music. No one wants to hear you tell them that they should be losing money in order to be ideologically sound, but fuck it, it’s all vanity. The future of punk rock is hobbyists, it’s drunken basements shows for your friends and songs you recorded in your bedroom up for download on your website and that is not so bad.

I can live with that.

An example of this is the existence of BURNT CROSS. I played a song of theirs in last weeks show. Two brothers from the U.K. with a drum machine cranking out a full album of classic sounding anarcho/peace punk that ranges from CONFLICT sounding scorchers to moody ZOUNDS/MOB style dirges all available for sliding scale (read: free if you are cheap) download. We need more of this, badly.