More on Hardcore and Political Consciousness
In 1983 I was an angry, lonely, and misunderstood 13-year-old. Most of this was rooted in what was going on at home: my mother had surrendered to her alcoholism and spent half of her time in a staggering, unpredictable drunken rage, and the other half in her room with the door locked, recuperating from her hangover. My father, who had no idea how to deal with this, spent as much time at work as possible. I had spent the previous year as brother and parent to my younger sister and my 4 year old brother. I wasn’t doing well at school academically or socially. I’d taken up smoking cigarettes, an addiction that lasted a good ten years.
I was already into loud rock music that pissed off my parents, addicted to bands like AC/DC, Ozzy, and Black Sabbath when Tony Virgillio, one of the miscreants I spent my time with told me about a band called the Dead Kennedys (DK), who played a song called “I Kill Children.” I desperately wanted this record, but had no idea where to get it. One year and an expulsion later, I finally found what I was looking for, sort of, thumbing through the “Hardcore” bin at the Music Box, a local record store. It was a different album by DK, “In God We Trust Incorporated.” It didn’t have the song I wanted, but included “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”, a song that was just as likely to piss off my parents. I brought the album home and turned it on.
It was like a cattle prod up the ass. The opening cut, “Religious Vomit”, was like listening to a cement mixer. The guitars didn’t so much strum as they grinded dissonantly as the singer, a high-pitched guy named Jello Biafra, delivered the angriest spew of words I’d ever heard with the velocity of a machine gun.
All religions make me wanna throw up
All religions make me sick
All religions make me wanna throw up
All religions suck
They all claim that they have the truth
They’ll set you free
Just give ‘em money and they’ll set you free
Free for a fee
They claim that they have “the Answerâ€
When they don’t even know the Question
They’re just a bunch of liars
They just want your money
They just want your consciousness
Chorus: All religions suck
All religions make me wanna throw up
All religions suck
All religions make me wanna BLEAH
They really make me sick
They really make me sick
They really make me sick
They really make me sick
They really make me sick
They really make me ILL
This song is followed by a rant against the Moral Majority, a protest against drugging kids for hyperactivity, a song about the Minimata mercury disaster, the infamous “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”, and closing with a reworking of “California Uber Alles”, retitled “We’ve Got A Bigger Problem Now”, that targeted Ronald Reagan.
The interesting thing about this album, and all of the Dead Kennedys’ early albums before they became free speech icons and made an example by the Meese Justice Department, was not so much that there was no pretense of intellectualism, but that these were albums for, and often by, teenagers. Biafra was only 23 when “In God We Trust” was released. There were other bands: as mentioned in a previous post yesterday, MDC (Millions of Dead Cops, Multi Death Corporation, Millions of Dead Children) included lengthy liner notes, complete with photographs, of what the United States was doing in Central America in its battle against Communism. It was shocking, it was galvanizing, and it was inspirational: imagine 14 year old kids with mohawks and skateboards talking about the threat that Ronald Reagan and the Republicans posed to individual liberty and you have a pretty accurate picture of the early 1980s hardcore scene, at least in Rhode Island.
We’ll blame the guerillas for what has been done
Burnt church of Jesus, the death of a nunThe church has preached resistance
For what the poor hold dear
Stronger than the army
We sent to instill fearA US torturer, designed just for you
Agony guaranteed, they know what to do
CIA assassins are coming with guns
The people will mourn for dead priests and nuns
Kill with no mercy, men and women of the cloth
Ineffective martyrs for the God they brought forthIs their retribution only time will tell
Agents don’t believe and the people live in hell
We’ll destroy their faith
In their God and his son
A plain wooden casket destined for a nunWe will not compete
With religious belief
Burn the church, kill the priest
Leaven them in grief
Unlike their saviour they’ll die with no cross
Shown their mortality they’ll know who is bossDestroy their faith in their God and his son
Show what we will do
For our power and money
A blood spattered habit Amen
The Death of a NunMDC, “Death of a Nun”
And frighteningly relevant today:
Cast a villain: Saddam Hussein
Paint him evil and insane
With our help and his notorious fame
The world’s problems on him we can blame
Problems like our decaying schools
Crooked bankers treating us like fools
Tankers leaking oil slick pools
Cities where fear and violence rulesProblems like AIDS
Global warming: a fucking mess
What we need for re-election for sure
U.S War #54When Johnny goes marching home again
Hurrah hurrah
In a body bag, ha ha ha ha
Never to come to family or friends
He died so fast and that is his end
See the pain in their face
So sad such a fucking waste
Watching buddies’ flesh burn
No more lessons to be learned…Military brass now are stars
On the talk shows and in the bars
How George got the world protected
Just to get his ass re-electedTo stack the court and slyly confused
“Bye civil rights women’s” right to choose
The plan was perfect couldn’t ask for more
U.S #54
MDC, US War number 54The hardcore music of the early to mid-1980s was much more direct, blunt, and clear than any of the other so-called "protest" songs from that era. Oh sure, Sting had that "Do the Russians Love Their Children Too" song on his magnum flatulent "Dream of the Blue Turtles", but who the fuck wanted to listen to the musical equivalent of a quaalude? The Sun City and We Are the World and Live Aid events were nothing more than PR events for big corporations with guilty consciences. What we kids were listening to was the real thing: angry, honest, DIY, and balls-to-the-wall. Hardcore bands like the DKs, MDC, Minor Threat, the Bad Brains actually gave enough of a shit to talk directly to us, in our own language, because they WERE us.
As Chris Jones writes on the verbal Assault website, When my friends and I were first getting into punk, it was much more difficult to actually find it. You heard about it through small fanzines, cassette tape trades and word-of-mouth. This in itself was important. It meant there was already a certain amount of commitment involved; you couldn’t just turn on the radio or visit the local chain record store to hear the music we loved.
The bands that we looked up to put no stock in technical virtuosity (though many were quite good). More than anything else, this was an invitation to grab a guitar and give it a go yourself, to be a participant, not a spectator. Using friends’ equipment, we would bang out primitive covers of our favorite songs. It’s hard to describe the jolt you felt when you realized that you could do this too. And thus the racket coming from our parent’s basement was both angry and joyous at the same time. Even when the playing was less than perfect, we realized that this was more than music…
But even at this point I know it was more than music, for I think I still carry with me the best of the ideals of the scene that we were a part of: a healthy distrust of all large political, cultural and economic authority; an indifference to the uglier aspects of consumer culture.
Emphases mine. Chris describes the “jolt” when you realized you could do it yourself: punk and hardcore is what inspired me to pick up a bass guitar in the first place, and also what set me on a lifetime of political writing. It was thrilling to know that there were other people out there, the same age as you, who cared about the same things, who were trying to make sense out of the world we live in and the systems and patterns we all participate in, consciously or unconsciously, and trying to figure out how we could make our world a better place. “Walk together, Rock together,” as 7-Seconds sang, way back in 1985.
So why am I writing all of this, and why does it matter 21 years after the fact?
When I read the lyrics to “In God We Trust, Inc.”, they could have been written yesterday, they are that spot-on and still relevant.
When I read blogs by Glenn Greenwald, by Atrios, John Aravosis, Mike Rogers, and countless others, I get that same rush I used to get when I heard the Circle Jerks for the first time. [Speaking of Glenn, here's a good one on the Canadian torture case.] I get that same feeling that just reading the words, considering the ideas and concepts articulated therein, is a revolutionary act, something dangerous, something the State and Power would certainly not approve of.And because in a world of Hot Topic corporate fashion for punks, a world in which bands that look the part get confused with bands that live the life, I wonder: Are the youth still restless? If not, why not? Who’s telling the kids the truth today? Where are the Jello Biafras, Ian MacKayes, Dave Dictors, Henry Rollinses, Vandals, Government Issues, Dag Nastys, Adolescents, Drunk Idiots, Bad Brains, and Circle Jerks of the 21st Century?
I’m a grown-up now. Who’s passing the torch to the kids and pointing toward the structures that need, more than ever now, to be burned to the ground?
3 Responses to “More on Hardcore and Political Consciousness”
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September 19th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
you are so eloquent. don’t stop writing.
what a trip seeing those old verbal assault vidis on youtube!
by the way, henry rollins is still around and still yakking to the kids…or maybe he is still yakkin’ but to the adults now….
i saw jello at trader joe’s a couple of years ago.
there has to be kids who are looking for somethig to find it or make what they can’t find. my theorie is that no one is looking…..
September 21st, 2006 at 6:19 pm
There are a lot of substantive, political-minded bands out there today. Against Me!, Propaghandi, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists (get Shake the Sheets), Dillinger Four… that’s a short list of politically adept bands who I know are reaching the kids (the D4 rarely play shows that aren’t all ages, for instance). But as far as who they are, most of these guys are from our generation and were doing the same thing we were doing when we were kids (except in Jersey or elsewhere in the US)… so where are the kids? Pick up a copy of Punk Planet magazine. They are out there. Or look up Al Quint or his Suburban Voice zine on myspace — he’s still got a good sense of what’s happening on the all-ages hardcore circuit than I do.
September 21st, 2006 at 6:23 pm
Great writing, btw, and those clips… pre-Dave Smalley Dag Nasty!?!? That’s Shawn Brown from Swiz on the vocals. And it’s been so damn long since I’ve seen Verbal Assault that I’d almost forgotten what a fucking FORCE they could be on stage.