hey all. i just wanted to send out a note of apology for the lateness of the show-list. right about the time that i usually start compiling dates for the upcoming month i got word that i was going to be laid off my job. i know it’s supposed to be punx not to work and all, but the reality is that the circumstances of my life that make this potentially catastrophic.

right now i’ve got to put energy into sorting this out and so it’s going to be a bit before i can begin making the listing happen. in the meantime, you can check philly shreds, WKDU’s philly haps, and R5 for a few important pieces of the scene. i want to especially encourage folks to go to the post post show this saturday at kung fu necktie (7pm-10pm, review below). they’re a great band, seem like nice people, and they’ll be releasing a really solid new ep that night.

so yeah, the listing is by no means done and i will try to make the august dates happen asap. thanks for your patience.

i also just wanted to say that moments like this really clarify for me how much our social/political/economic situation doesn’t work right now. i’ll never pretend to have the worst shake of things, and i’m sure there are ways that the crises i experience are less crushing than they might be for other folks in different positions. but that doesn’t mean that bullshit in my life doesn’t hurt me or doesn’t hurt people close to me. it doesn’t mean that my experiences aren’t bound up in the same systemic forces that are driving people out of homes, out of health, and out of sanity across this city, country, and world… the same systematic forces that are killing people quickly and slowly with violence and depression… the same systematic forces that inject poison into our lives like oil gushing into seawater.

i’d say that all this is tragic but as i understand it, tragedy is more on the level of misfortune or bad luck. what makes things so terrible right now is that all these variations of poverty and pain we’ve got are just predictable outcomes of a setup that has no regard for what we need, and total regard for the accumulation of power and profit. it’s hurtful, it’s criminal, it’s suicidal, but within the terms of our social organization it’s also a foregone conclusion… a false-tragedy… a farce.

and my feeling today is that i love myself too much to accept this condition, and that i love other people too much to see them beaten down by these inventions. and since i know that the system is powerful and that it will take a lot of folks, a lot of whole communities, to make something equally powerful enough to challenge it, i guess i want to ask you (if you see yourself in this) to open yourself to the project of elevating life beyond mere survival and slow death. i want you to open old wounds and take a hard look at all the pain and the trauma you’ve got because of attacks you suffered or deprivations that were imposed on you. i want you to take the burden of that pain off yourself and i want you to see the connections between your pain and my pain and the pain of everybody else around you (recognizing the differences between us all).

as i want to heal, i want you to heal, and i want every suffering body out there to heal as well. the reality is that things are so bad, we’re all going to need each other. and this kind of collective healing, in the context of today, is a revolutionary project… a transformation that we’ll know in our bones and our souls, and that we’ll witness in the seizure of power from the government officials, corporate entities, and socio-economic logics that are breaking us today. there’s a lot of good writing on this (better writing than this), but there’s no complete map on how to get there. the beginning, as far as i can figure, comes from telling our stories, building connections between ourselves, and being increasingly clear in our collective commitment to pursuing the things we need and desire. there’s more to it than this… so much more… but this where is my head is right now.

with all love.

germ ross

Oh City of Caterpillar, why did you leave us so soon?

It’s hard to believe that it was only a mere two years ago that their debut LP was sucking up prime real estate on about every respectable punk/hardcore top ten list (including high honors from over half of the 2002 DFB staff). Given the band’s unexampled perfection of the screamo-hardcore-meets-post-rock epic style, their notable status as an ex-Pg 99 band, and their undeniable strength as both a live and recorded act, back in twenty-aught-two it seemed like City of Caterpillar had nowhere to go but up. Looking back, I think it’s pretty hard to deny that part of what captivated so much of the review caste about this band was this promise—this unshakable thought in our minds that no matter how amazing their self-titled debut was, that it was just a prelude to something completely and utterly ground-breaking, a seismic shift in independent rock music, or at least the birth or rebirth of something as influential and profound as Pg 99 had been.

But alas, sometime in the first half of 2003, the word came around that City of Caterpillar was no more. Our great hopes for their future were dashed and that promise of new things to come now mocked us silently from beyond the horizon, leaving behind a gaping hole that might never be filled.

Thankfully, over the past two years, a few bright lights have emerged to fill some part of this gap. From what little I’ve heard of it thus far, it seems the new ex-CoC affiliated group Malady has just released its own strong contender for the best punk album of the year. Also, the new push towards new-fangled screamo-grunge/screamo-pop hybrids has certainly kept some segments of the screamo scene true to the genre’s tradition of vibrancy and perpetual innovation.

Still for all this, I have to ask where is the CoC of 2004? Who is picking up where they left off and who will fill the hole that they left in their wake?

After listening to an MP3 of A Day In Black & White’s track “The Gaze” off My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys, I thought at last I had heard the answer to my prayers. Rising slowly out of a dreamy web of stripped down guitar riffing, “The Gaze” gradually builds in intensity, surging forth with rocketing guitar noise and ear-shattering drums before finally erupting into a furious maelstrom of vocal shouts and full-throttle hardcore brutality. Not only was this track a clear nod to CoC’s glory days, but due in large part to its differing vocal style (which was more Panthers than Pg 99), its more lush production, and its somewhat more straightforward appropriation of Mogwai/Explosions In The Sky-inflected post-rock, it stood out very much on its own.

On the basis of this lone, extremely promising MP3 I patiently waited months for My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys to make its way to my promo pile and thereby satisfy my curiosity about this new Level Plane band. Was this band going to be the second coming of CoC? Was there finally going to be another group with the inclination and ability to blaze through the unexplored musical terrain that the former band had hinted was ripe for the exploration?

As with “The Gaze,” each of this half-hour LP’s five tracks brings quite a bit to bear. Marked consistently by an interplay of rise and fall, ADIBW’s quasi-orchestral movements occilate wildly between the brutish intensity of emotive hardcore and painstakingly delicate instrumentalism. Alongside “The Gaze,” among the LP’s absolute standouts has to be “Storming The Bastille,” a collision course of gradually developed musical themes very much in the CoC mould of anti-pop song structure.

Even still, ADIBW is no CoC and to say that this album is either flawless or wholly comparable to CoC’s debut would be a drastic overstatement. I’ve long thought that one of the biggest hurtles for most screamo bands is their relative orthodoxy in terms of how they use vocals in their music; no matter how innovative these groups generally are in terms of how they use their instruments, for some reason they tend to just shout lyrics out the same shrieky monotone throughout all their songs. Though ADIBW have at least deviated from the usual throat-searing model of screamo vocals, I still get the impression that they haven’t yet put a whole lot of thought about how vocals fit into their compositions and thus use the same basic vocal part over and over again throughout the album. Tragically, this deficit leaves many of the tracks on My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys sounding somewhat repetitive against one another—a real shame considering how solid they are individually. If you ask me, if there were perhaps one real chorus or memorable vocal line on this disc, I think this album might be a hundred times stronger, perhaps even worthy of the late great CoC.

In all fairness, it’s probably not the most realistic thing to expect a new band to immediately be able to equal or even surpass the greatest band of its known genre and so my feeling somewhat mixed about My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys by no means indicates that this album isn’t up to snuff. A Day In Black & White is definitely a band worth keeping an eye on and if you simply can’t get enough of epic screamo instrumentalism, My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys is certainly worth at least checking out. But like CoC before them, to me at least, it seems that the most exciting thing about ADIBW is their clear potential to make exciting innovative hardcore.

So, with that said: Kids, please don’t break up. I’m tired of having my heart broken.

I want to start this review off in a sort of stupid direction. I don’t want to begin with some dissection of this band’s style, musical ability, message, or anything like that. I don’t want to rattle off reference points and mark off what scene they belong to and who should listen to this. I want to open this thing with something relatively superficial. I want to talk about signifiers… about names.

At first blush, Post Post just struck me as “clever,” you know? Generic indie rock wordplay, minor intellectual fronting with a liberal arts sense of humor… the usual thing. Normally, I guess I’d stop paying attention at this point. Most of the time, band names are little more than the least stupid thing the group could agree on when they started playing shows. They’re usually kind of throwaway, a put-on, without much relationship to the actual music (cough… I’m looking at you, Dismemberment Plan). Who the fuck cares about a name?

This is usually a sane way to approach things, but as I got into Post Post and grew to love the music that they make, their name kept coming back to me. It’s almost like I’d made up a story about these two words, a story that helps me understand and position this band in a context that’s bigger than the usual “sounds-like,” “looks-like” fodder that most record reviews are built on. As crazy as it may sound, in this story, the words “Post Post” take on the weight of almost perfectly summing up the moment that I hope we’re moving into right now musically, culturally, and politically. In this story, “Post Post” is what it means to grow up out of post-modern nothingness, and to become something new, meaningful, and beautiful. “Post Post” is to move past the recent fad of declaring history to be over, of declaring that the forces, struggles, and positions that defined our old historical progression have magically evaporated or become too unfashionable to take seriously… that the contradictions that once burned bright and hot in our lives and in our social reality have been finally resolved. And artistically, it means a renewal of the premise that art can serve as a means of honest expression that takes sides, provokes, reveals truths, and creates strength through an acknowledgment of vulnerability.

To give context for this idea, once upon a time folks risked their lives and their material comfort fighting for justice, freedom, control over their work, and liberation along lines of race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class. Behind the scenes, the state brutally repressed those movements, killed a few folks, bought off a few more, and put most everybody else in jail. Commentators, corporations, and all the people in power took the moment of relative quiet to announce that the slate had been wiped clean, that the benevolent few at the top had voluntarily transcended the blood and bad manners of the past. The world had supposedly blossomed into a utopia of “post-racial,” “post-feminist” social harmony. Whatever narratives survived about the past struggles were cleaned up and turned into inspirational bedtime stories. The activists and revolutionaries left standing found themselves reduced to cartoon characters in the popular imagination… curiosities at best. Whatever problems remained in this new order could only be accounted for through the failings of individuals and a few constantly redefined “bad elements.” This mirage of social peace was sold to us at a heavy cost: we had the same problems, but now we had only ourselves to blame. The songwriter David Bazan hit the full depth of this deception when he sung the lines “the class war is over / and everyone wins” in a song that was ultimately about suicide. This is roughly how they drowned history.

As a suburban punk coming up in the late 1990s, I stood in the wake of this transformation… the heyday of the post-modern condition. The same systemic forces that were erasing memories of resistance and committing genocide in urban ghettos were producing alienation and psychological dysfunction on my relatively privileged side of the class lines. On a cultural level, this translated into the full-blown retreat of the broader alternative (aka “indie”) music scene from functioning as a real site of resistance. Though the scenes I was a part of were filled with kids like me—full of pain, social anxiety, and desperately looking for connection and a different life—the spaces I found myself in weren’t centered around liberation or even bringing people together to gain strength from shared experience. What pervaded the scene at that time was estrangement on the deepest possible levels, a feeling like we not only had to keep space between each other, but publicly we had to put space between ourselves and anything we might feel or believe. We played out the script that we were given: there was nothing wrong, there was nothing that needed to be taken seriously, no causes to be joined, no fights to be waged, this crushing alienation that drew many of us into the scene could be remedied through vapid socializing and cool points.

Irony, that great chicken-shit strategy for making statements the ultimately state nothing, became an essential cultural currency during this period. To admit anything, to even put something serious on your fucking t-shirt was to be vulnerable to ridicule or sideways glances. Except for small tribes of fanatics—anarcho-punks, some straightedge kids, the few emo kids that wanted more from their scene than self-indulgent melodrama, and the riot grrl true-believers that had survived its commodification—it felt like everybody was just hiding in view. Where the punk rock nation once had the symbolic and emotional character of being at total war with society, the 1990s indie rock scene it helped spawn often felt disconnected from a coherent grasp of even personal/emotional struggles. There were places in the scene, places as vast as they were utterly lifeless, where truth had been abandoned in favor of pure artifice. Too much of the art that was coming out of our community was sustained with a core of little more than dumb jokes and fashionable posturing. The outsiders had made outsiders of themselves. Our post-modern rock scene was devouring itself, and as I got older, it only got worse.

In 12-step programs, there’s a notion that change doesn’t come until you first recognize that your life has become unmanageable: that the shit you need, you ain’t getting; the shit you do to fulfill your needs, it ain’t working. On a cultural level, I’d like to think that we’re getting to this point: that those of us that take a conscious approach to engaging this generation’s music scene are beginning to recognize that in order to have art and community that meets our needs and our desires, we have to do things differently. Philly’s Post Post may not be an outwardly conscious band (they’re certainly not as outwardly political as this batshit review I’m writing), but in my view they are doing something differently than a lot of the indie rock bands out there… namely, the songs they write, the music they play, it all feels honest to me. The tracks on Meta Meta are emotionally rich, often heartbreaking, but without self-pity. As lyrics go, lines like “I wish I wasn’t this way” and “I don’t ever want to be sober” are about as straightforward as you can get in expressing what it feels like to hurt. Michelle Zauner’s delivery—belted out in impassioned crescendos—only serves to drive the point home. As beautifully lush as Post Post’s sound is, as gifted as these musicians are, and as much as their music conjures up similarities to well-marketed bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there’s a plainness and a directness here that stands apart from other easy-on-the-ears acts who are more comfortable hiding behind wit and intellect than they are getting up on stage and just communicating who they are and what they feel.

On Meta Meta, there’s a kind of fearlessness and a willingness to stand exposed that is rarely heard from a pop-inflected indie rock group. It’s fearlessness like this that makes me hopeful. The post-modern conditions of our reality taught many us to deride truths, deride the deeper narratives that frame our individual and social lives, and took away many of the ways we had to partially understand and communicate the validity of our experiences with each other. Today, we cannot go back: we cannot rebuild old struggles, rewrite old love songs. But we can evolve. We can find new ways to express meaning, new methods to come together and get what we need. The phrase “Post Post” describes our situation—historically we stand in the aftermath of an aftermath. And it also raises the obvious questions: What do we do now? Where do we go now? To me, the band Post Post implies an answer: we write new love songs, and we go forward.

Post Post’s demo ep, Meta Meta, came out Fall 2009 and is available for download (with donation) or purchase from Awkwardcore Records (http://www.awkwardcore.com). On August 7th, they will be having the release show for their newest ep, Residents, at Kungfu Necktie.

ART FOR LIBERATION with Elizam Escobar and Joserramon Che Melendes
Friday, July 16, 2010
7:00pm
The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St

Calling all poets and playwrights, radicals, culture workers and community organizers! Join us for a conversation about art in the everyday work of social movements.

With special guest Elizam Escobar, a renowned painter and art theorist from Puerto Rico who spent twenty years in prison for his involvement in the Puerto Rican independence movement. During and since his incarceration, his art has been a vital component of Puerto Rican organizing on the island and in the U.S.

Plus performances by poet Joserramon Che Melendes (San Juan), Spiral Q Puppet Theater, and members of MMP Arts and Culture Collective.

Also featuring a special one-night exhibition of ZAPATA VIVE!, a portfolio of prints from La Escuela de Cultura Popular Martires del 68 (Mexico City).

Because Art Makes Resistance Irresistible!

Co-sponsored by Books Through Bars, Centro Pedro Claver, MMP’s Arts and Culture Collective, the National Boricua Human Rights Network and Spiral Q

$5 suggested donation to benefit Centro Pedro Claver

Yes, the rumors are true… I went to see Leatherface twice last weekend. In two different cities.

Granted, Leatherface is a legendary British punk band that can still throw down better than anyone; and granted, the two cities were Brooklyn and Philadelphia, which are a mere two-hour, ten-dollar bus ride from one another… but the whole enterprise, to a less-rocking individual, could have been termed excessive. To me, it was just right.

The rundown:

The March 5 Brooklyn show went down at the new Knitting Factory on Metropolitan Ave., on the eastern edge of Williamsburg. This was my first time at the new location. It doesn’t have the charm of the old Tribeca spot (which — crucially for us Philly transplants — had a balcony and an old-worldiness that recalled the Troc), but it has good clean acoustics, and a bar next door with a glass wall so that you can see the band even if you didn’t buy a ticket.

I had bought a ticket. I was right up at the front of the stage, and the band sounded amazing. The set pulled pretty evenly from new album tracks (God is Dead, Broken) and older classics (Springtime, Not Superstitious, How Lonely). I’ve heard people say that, in the Leatherface lineup, Frankie Stubbs’ voice almost functions as another instrument — it sits low in the mix, and adds that essential grittiness to an otherwise fairly polished sound. There’s so much complexity in his vocals — the way he sings sounds like a punk band, but there’s such thoughtfulness in his lyrics and in his delivery that I found myself moved even as I was rocking out.

And there was a lot of rocking out — a lot of energy, a lot of stage-diving, a lot of dancing. I danced until I lost everything I had — my hat, my scarf, and my wallet. But everything was miraculously returned to me by bemused onlookers.

This brings me to…

March 7, Philadelphia! I trekked down with a crew of dedicated New York Leatherface fans. After some haggling with SEPTA, we got ourselves to the Northstar bar, where I was reunited with fellow ARTNOISE staffer Germ Ross.

This show started out a bit rockier. Northstar has rules against stage-diving (as evidenced by all the sternly-worded MS Word-generated signs tacked throughout the space), and there was a fair amount of security near the front of the stage. Throw in some technical difficulties, a stone-faced, cross-armed crowd, and a bizarrely obnoxious heckler (who goes to a Leatherface show for the sole purpose of standing in the crowd and taunting the band? I’m baffled), and you had a distinctly unpromising beginning.

About twenty minutes into the set, though, things started to click: the band got their guitars in tune, people uncrossed their arms and began to dance, and a few songs later I was in the middle of one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long while. IF YOU EVER HAVE THE CHANCE TO SEE LEATHERFACE ONE OR MULTIPLE TIMES, DO NOT MISS IT.

I lost my scarf for good this time, but Germ was kind enough to give me his.

Deconstruction is to punk rock as gasoline is to internal combustion. Punk rock propels us forward. Through punk rock we are able to feel something different than we used to feel in our normal lives. When we are in the grips of punk rock, we are able to know and taste and sweat and shake with a transcendence—with a sense of power in ourselves and in each other—that is beyond words, that is deeper and more profound than words. This process, this holy fucked up experience, is fueled by an intentional breaking shit down to its rawest, most basic components.

There are many modes of art that move people. There are many modes of art that impress or entertain people. What makes punk rock different than many modes of art is that punk rock demands that we all take part in its creation—that it is only realized out of the love, the closeness, the positive frenzy we share together in common. “Talent,” “expertise,” or any other arbitrary pretense that elevates the artist above the audience or shuts any of us out of the collective act of making shit together can thus be seen as fundamentally poisonous to the project of realizing punk rock. Such elitisms hold us back, turn us against each other, and in the end they will keep us from getting what we really want. Our art must be democratic or it will not be. Our art must be articulate and explosive enough to rock people’s souls, but at the same time it must also be rough enough and honest enough and humble enough to make any of us capable of its creation. This is how you make punk rock.

I write these words more or less in response to the Layers/Quake tape that came out back in August of 2009. Layers/Quake is an instrumental-heavy, female-fronted, drum/guitar 2-piece that’s been playing around Philly a good bit over the past couple months. Their tape 2009 really hits at a lot of what I find valuable in punk rock music and is probably one of the finest masterpieces of DIY rock that I’ve heard coming out of the city in a bit.

As you might expect from a self-released cassette debut, the production values of tape 2009 are raw and dilapidated. The drums crash in blurry cacophonies, the guitars are massive and overblown, the vocals are variations of frantic howling and distorted harmony, the lyrics are almost universally undecipherable. Banging out 14 tracks in less than 24 minutes, Layers/Quake make the most of their stripped-down format, diving headlong into song after song without pause, transition, or apology. Overall, this is less a proper album than it is documentation—a simple recording of two friends throwing molten lava at each other for fun and brutal self-realization.

This isn’t music that lulls you with catchy choruses and pleasant melodies (although there’s a few points where they come remarkably close such as “just gazer,” “feel it,” and “have it all”). This isn’t music that fronts intellectual or impresses you with well thought out composition. At its core, this is ass-kicking music. This is shit that’s about crescendos, contortions, crushing weight, and regular bursts of full-throttle intensity. Halfway between Pink & Brown, riot grrl, and The Breeders; between bratty punk and pummeling guitar-driven instrumentals, Layers/Quake is yet another Philly band that is out there killing it right now—creating music that is alive, powerful, and provoking our passionate engagement.

If you would like to pick up a copy of tape 2009, get in contact with the band. The tracks are also available for free via the band’s website: http://layersquake.wordpress.com.

Germ and I were happily in attendance. Beer, song, and dance flowed freely; and the performances themselves were remarkably unabashed and heartfelt. True, much of the crowd was friends with the band and with one another, which contributed to the open atmosphere; but there was also a larger sense of campfire community that comes with any good singalong. The line between performer and audience becomes blurred; the event becomes not about watching and consuming, but about participating and creating. It is truly the best kind of show.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a cover-show junkie. The day after gorging myself on all 69 Love Songs, I went to a riot grrrl cover show in Brooklyn and danced to local incarnations of Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre. I’ve attended awesomely creepy Glenn-Danzig-based cover shows for the past two Halloweens. What’s more — and this is the kicker — I record my own acoustic covers in my spare time. My computer is full of them. I’ve got renditions of everything from Green Day to Eric Donaldson to Hank Williams, and my productivity — if you can call it that — shows no sign of slowing down.

I love covers because I believe that they gesture toward every song’s potential to achieve immortality. If a two-minute, three-chord punk song lasts as long as its creator’s music career — well, that will be pretty short. If it last as long as the vinyl and polycarbonate that it’s been recorded on — that’s a few decades, but still not a very long time. But if a song can find a new home in the guitars and voices of everyone who listens to it — and if those people go on to share their versions with others — now we’re talking about posterity. It’s a humbling, beautiful thing to think about. And it’s a continually refreshing challenge to discover and learn the songs that I love enough to try to make my own.

Lemon! Vanilla! Cherry! Mango!
Water ice! Water ice! Water iiiiiice!

-”Water ice,” Rizzo Machine

Punk rock is people art. It’s shit that anybody can make. Punk rock is stupid, raw, loud, noisy, un-tuned, broken down, and totally fucked up. Punk rock is screaming like a lunatic while rolling on the floor. Punk rock is laying bare every idiot thought and impulse, and profoundly asserting them as if they were the most meaningful sage truth. Punk rock is a beautiful practice where kids that never properly learned to make art are convulsed and overtaken by an urgency towards expression that overcomes all their understood limitations. Punk rock is a talent-less, deranged medium that summons forth its existence not from studied, learned technique but from a simple recognition that all human beings are capable of transcendence—into revelation about the essential substance of their existence, into revelation about things larger than themselves, into beauty, creation, love, truth, poetry, the electrical rush of connection, etc.

Democracy—the practice of recognizing everyone’s capacity for creation and the necessity for everyone’s collaboration in order to create—is another means through which punk rock wages war against alienation.(6) Through alienating society, people get told over and over and over again that they are powerless to engage their lives or the world in a way that changes things or allows them to actually manifest their real needs and desires. Folks wake up, go to work, and waste their creative powers doing shit they have little control over, and very little personal stake in. Creativity is regularly pulverized into routine production—a thing done by isolated experts or technicians, repeated infinitely with only minor substantial changes, and carried out in the proper place under the proper conditions. Even though all the elements of society are made possible through people’s work and activity (if one day all the workers called in sick, society would grind to a halt), people in society are simply expected to follow orders and play out their assigned position—whether that position has them making car parts, cappuccinos, babies, or simply making customers happy.

The flip-side of the dull, dehumanizing realm of production is consumption. Through consumption, people starving (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally) to fulfill their needs and desires are able to indulge themselves and temporarily make their lives a bit more bearable. If a person has been made to feel ugly, they can buy clothes or cosmetics and maybe for the rest of the day they’ll feel better about themselves. If a person has been made to feel bored or unfulfilled, they can buy DVDs or video games and maybe for a couple hours each day they can distract themselves from how they actually feel. In this way, all the wounds that society inflicts on us can be briefly anesthetized for a price.

I want to buy
I need consoling
I need something new
Something trivial would do
I want to satisfy this empty feeling…

-”Spend, Spend, Spend,” The Slits

Of course, despite the hefty price tag, all these acts of consumption typically just stall the feelings of emptiness hurt, loneliness and alienation. In these exchanges, humanity is negated and the realization of human desires becomes increasingly impossible. The consumer becomes merely a passive receptacle for prepackaged junk and chases fleeting hallucinations of satisfaction like an addict chasing their next fix. People work jobs and make things they don’t care about only to take home a check and buy up things that others made and didn’t care about. Everywhere shit is made and bought up, yet almost nothing is created. Nobody ever gets what they want; for all our frantic searching all we ever find is more debt and a deeper, more profound sense of dissatisfaction. This is called life.

Art—supposedly the purest embodiment of human beings’ capacity to express themselves, their desires, and their truths in the world—under these conditions is also subsequently negated. In a society that refuses creativity, art becomes yet another detached commodity built for passive consumption. Art is produced by “experts,” “professionals,” people with training (or—exotically—untrained people that successfully “fake it”), or individuals whose creativity has been advertised or endorsed by corporations and moneyed social elites. “Artist” becomes yet another mundane job; an artist’s name becomes yet into another exclusive band name for the marketplace.

suffer for your sins.
pay you by the hour.
follow any trend that comes their way.
they will pick your life apart
and throw away your art.
finding something new is never hard.
entertainment.

-”For Your Entertainment,” Unwound

Artwork produced by these magically important “artists” is ultimately bought, sold, or hermetically sealed inside galleries, museums, or other socially sanctified boxes in which people can try to connect with something that feels human before they go back to their dull, inhuman lives. Like most objects of consumption, this “art” is thus manufactured in many flavors: the most bland and least challenging work is marketed for those seeking escape in bland reassurance, and the “edgier,” more controversial work is marketed for those seeking escape in some thrill of imaginary social upheaval. Whatever the flavor, the brand, the market, proper art becomes a hollow affect of meaningful creativity—it is just another junk commodity distraction masquerading as something expressing deeper meaning. Art is reduced to entertainment.

This is true of all such art in society whether it rots in galleries or gets vomited out on the radio. Through the corporate record industry, the entire premise of music is continually destroyed. Manufactured bands and artists fade in and out rotation and popular consciousness based on carefully constructed marketing schemes and the whims of fashion and style. Everything blurs together. The new hit singles are written by committee and are predictably molded into the shape of the old hit singles. “Singers,” “musicians,” and “song-writers” are constructed that in reality do not actually sing, play music, or write songs. Audiences fill stadiums (and empty their wallets) just to watch a spectacle of video screens, costume-changes, lip-syncing, and theatrical choreography. This is called music.

They hate the music they play.
Kill DJs
for fuck’s sake.

-”Kill DJs,” Leatherface

The record industry works to bind all music within a straight-jacket of commerce and commodification. Music is incidental to what they do, it is just a means to an end… just another way to turn a profit. This is why the industry is constantly pushing music in the direction that it does—making music less and less messy, less and less human, more and more polished, more and more ready for the market. This is why we have all these music groups and “rock stars” that have been wholly manufactured and assembled for mass promotion and consumption—bands of recording “artists” that did not even exist before an entrepreneur made them exist, and whose formulaic music is totally fashioned to insure a successful process of capital accumulation.(7)

While these “fake” bands might be the most obnoxious and unfettered expressions of industry logic, the reduction of music to a salable good takes its toll even on the “real” artists that bought into the industry only after years of establishing themselves locally or in the underground. Even the less compromised musicians find themselves stuck in a position where they are separated from, and placed in a towering position over their audience. Even the less compromised musicians face enormous pressure to mitigate their creative expression against the needs of corporations looking to make profits through airplay and product tie-ins. Even the most honest musicians find their truth nullified by the inherent dishonesty of advertising strategies and manipulative hype. Sooner or later, the industry erodes all artists. It chips away at their intentions, their expression, the human creativity that is at the core of their art. It reduces art to manipulative exchanges in which feigned creativity and emotional resonance function as little more than bait laid out in a commercial trap.(8) More than anything though, the music industry obliterates the capacity of people to realize art through a participation in artistic expression. It seeks out great art only to put up walls around it and start charging admission. As art becomes a professionally produced commodity it becomes wholly subsumed into the larger spectacle of consumer society.(9) It becomes an empty husk of real creation. It is bullshit held up on a fucking pedestal.

I took a record of pretty music,
Now I’m putting it to you straight from hell.

-”Loose,” The Stooges

If alienating society makes art impossible outside of a shallow routine of production and consumption, then the project of realizing creation—of constructing living, breathing, human things that embody meaningful truths and expressions—demands no less than a total war against everything that we’ve been told art is supposed to be. This is the connection of democracy to punk rock. This is what makes punk rock dumb fucking music and this is what makes punk rock music so fucking powerful. When society tells us that real art only comes from real artists, that real art looks this way, that art is something you just look at, just listen to, or that only certain people get to decide what art is worthwhile, the democratic impulse of punk rock is what gives us the basis to extend our middle fingers, to reject the poison of these arbitrary limitations on human creativity, and to put forward a different concept of art without artists and rock without rockstars. Democracy means the rejection of elites, the rejection of experts, the rejection of rule by the privileged or talented few. Most importantly though, democracy also means the rejection of passivity and the active inclusion of everyone in the process of creation.

In the context of the music scene, punk rock has always had some idea that experiencing music was more than just flipping on a record or standing in a crowd with your arms crossed. Punk rock is not something that happens because X band plays song Y up on a stage.(10) It is not something handed down in a neat little package for people to mindlessly and soullessly digest. Punk rock is art that only happens through everybody’s active participation. At the punk show, there is always the promise of a kind of transcendence—the potential to reach an experience of something which is so ecstatic, frenzied, and bigger than you that it cuts you to the core and rips you out of your normal place in the world. But this moment of transcendence can only happen through the intense collaboration of all the people in the room: between the performer and the audience, between everyone with everyone.

This process can take on infinite forms. It can be seen as a collective submission to the creative moment—where both the band and audience lose themselves to a greater experience of the music over which neither has total control. It can be seen as provocations, as moments where bands taunted or tortured their audiences, goading them towards an unsettling realization of their own violence and anger.(11) It has been seen in moments where shows melt into strange interactive games with no leaders and unclear sets of adhoc, ever-changing rules. Even fighting at punk shows can be seen as a manifestation of this idea that art cannot be experienced unless the rules break down and we all actually touch other.(12) Again, punk rock happens collectively or it does not happen. The punk stage is not a pedestal, it is simply another barrier to be challenged or ignored.

This overall logic extends past the simple organization and dis-organization of punk shows. Participation—the challenge of creating things in a way that encourages others to come together in the process of creation—is one of the driving forces in the evolution punk rock. It is what makes the resounding stupidity of our art—with all its messiness, impatience, carelessness, and snot—ring out like a fucking battle cry. Through every piece of broken-down shit that we make, we affirm to ourselves and to the world that art can and should be mangled up and deformed. Our interest is not to produce the most polished, well-manicured nonsense that sets us apart from each other and locks out those who can’t or don’t want to follow the rules. Because we need collaboration, because we need people to join us, to create together with us, our art must be art that brings people in. Rather than aspire towards perfection, our art must glory in imperfection and simplicity, it must show every seam, honor every mistake. In the end, our art must show off how fucking easy it is to make art.

We see this ethic in the decades-long persistence of punk rock DIY scenes and subcultures with their emphases on collective self-reliance, personal authenticity, hand-crafted aestetics, and impassioned anti-professionalism. We also see it in generation-upon-generation of punk rock bands playing short sloppy songs, using basic chords, and rejecting showy guitar solos and theatrics.(13) We even see it in the pantheon of influential and celebrated punk rock vocalists that by any traditional standard can not and should not sing. These individuals—people like Darby Crash, Lou Reed, Penelope Houston, Kim Gordon, Kurt Cobain, Kathleen Hannah, Frankie Stubbs, Yasuko Onuki, etc—demonstrate plainly that coarse delivery or a lack of vocal range does not stop a person from expressing something beautiful or heart-wrenchingly honest and human.(14)

To say that punk rock is dumb fucking music does not mean that punk is unable to say profound things or is unable to create profound things in the world. Punk rock is profound, so profound that it does not let pretense or high-minded bullshit get in the way of the truth it seeks to communicate. Towards this end, punk rock recognizes so-called “talent” for what it really is. “Talent” is just a wall that tries to separate those who can from those who can’t. “Talent” is the arbitrary dividing line separating the elites who are allowed to express their humanity in creation from all the rest of us who can only hope to shell out cash for the fruits of their “genius.” “Talent” is the essential falsehood that keeps producers producing and consumers consuming—the lie obscuring the death of art, the lie that passes off the fucked-up organization of society as the natural, inevitable order of things. “Talent” is an embodiment of our present situation of social alienation and as such “talent” is the enemy of punk rock.

Without all these elitist mystifications, without all these social hierarchies that are thrust onto our lives, real talent can be seen as just the raw capacity to create—no more, no less. In spite of whatever we’ve been told, we are all talented in this way. In this way, it is the most ordinary thing in the world: something we all can do, something we all can develop, something we all can aspire towards. At the same time, the consequences of this idea are beyond earth-shattering. The best works of the most celebrated artists in history are nothing compared to the total creative potential of humanity itself. People working collectively, working equally with each other, dialectically with each other, working in a way that continually draws out the most inspired, most challenging truths from each other, represents a creative force capable of painting anything that can be felt, imagined, or thought of onto the living surface of reality itself. All things become possible and through the process of realizing these new possibilities, we can all be radically transformed into something greater than we once were—more human than we once were. This is the kind of cosmic power that punk rock taps into when it makes the audience an equal part of the show, when it throws off the rules that govern what art should be or shouldn’t be, when it creates spaces or methods that support others in finding and realizing their creative voice. This is what makes democracy an essential part of what keeps punk rock alive and what will keep punk rock moving forward. In the end, none of us are fundamentally better or more important than any of us. We all have potential, we all have immediate limitations, and we are all have an interest in helping each other push past those limitations. The more we are able to see this and act together in this, the more powerful we become, the more powerful our creation becomes, the more powerful punk rock becomes.

[The next section, "Revolution," will be posted as soon as it is completed. - germ]

(6) It is important to note the difference between these ideas about democracy and the misrepresentations of democracy that are applied to “democratic” governments like the United States.  Strict majoritarian electoral systems of “democracy”—like the US system of government—are at best a very narrow setup for people to come together and create and recreate society in a very limited fashion.  At worst (and it seems more typically) these systems simply serve to mask or legitimize massively anti-democratic social arrangements beneath a shallow veneer of popular participation and consent. 

(7) In describing this phenomenon of media-mogul assembled groups, I’m particularly thinking about a wide span of vaccuous pop groups like New Kids On The Block, Backstreet Boys, The Spice Girls, NSync, Hannah Montana, etc, whose entire existence is owed to corporate/private capitalist schemes to extract profits from young people.  Also, the term “capital accumulation” is an economic term for one of the most basic processes in all capitalist production and reproduction.  In this context, you could describe it as the industry’s process of making and selling crap so that they make more profits, which they can then use to finance making and selling even more crap, so that they can make even more profits, and so on…

(8) To be clear, what I’m trying to say here is not the usual knee-jerk condemnation of any punk or indie-whatever band that sells out by signing to a major label.  Whether or not a band is on a major does not determine whether their music has power and it does not determine whether you or me or anybody can find meaning in their work.  For one, I think of scores of bands on independent labels whose music I find to be as vapid, useless, and market-driven as what gets played on the radio.  Secondly, I can look at bands like Sonic Youth and Nirvana, who signed major and then subsequently gamed their positions to promote underground acts, and often criticized and promoted opposition to the industry forces that were propelling them into popular consciousness.  Without Sonic Youth or Nirvana, I don’t know that I would’ve had the reference points necessary to figure out the real power and promise of what music and art can do. 

My point here is rather to talk about how the overall logic of the industry limits everybody and how the commodification of art severely limits the realization of art.  This is not a question of greed but a question of the way that people come to understand music within the terms of the marketplace.

(9) I use the term “spectacle” here in reference to the concept popularized by Situationist writers like Guy Debord.  Their insights (many of which they actually ripped off from other smart folks) have made a huge contribution to my understanding of the dehumanizing aspects of the social realm of production and consumption and have helped me see specifically how that shit effectively destroys art as anything but a simple commodity for exchange and consumption.  Unfortunately, a lot of their writing can be confusing as fuck.

(10) “X band” should not to be confused with X, the band.

(11) The liner notes for the re-release of the first Suicide album talks about numerous instances where their antagonistic performances would descend into a chaos of threats and thrown chairs as audience members were literally moved to attack the band.  After one performance in Belgium, this may have ultimately led to a small-scale street riot outside the club.

(12) This is not to in anyway meant to glorify or promote violence at shows.  Without taking back the point I made above, I think that the actual practice of violence at shows is hardly a democratizing force in the scene.  If anything, punk violence often excludes a whole range of folks, including many women, non-jocks of all genders, smaller people, anybody not interested having their face side-kicked, etc.  Physical interaction can be a very powerful way of connecting with other people and reaching past social alienation, but balancing freedom to interact with others against other people’s needs for physical safety is a really tricky thing to try to figure out.  It doesn’t help that at shows the rules typically get set by the folks who see themselves as more physically powerful and/or care the least about what others need. 

(13) I think it’s important to note again that I’m not trying to pigeonhole any given song-structure or musical form as being “the” punk way of doing things.  In my view, unchanging aesthetic rules like this—even if they were originally grounded in a positive intent or were responding to something as potentially obnoxious as hippie/prog rock jamming—end up being poisonous to music and art if there is no room for continued change or evolution.  The Wipers’ Greg Sage (gloriously ornery fucker that he was) was on to this when in the face of punk rock trending towards shorter, faster songs, he decided to put out the ten-minute punk epic “Youth of America”—an awesome, challenging piece of music.  Moves like that go a long way to explain both why the Wipers’ music still feels so vital today, and (not coincidentally) why they remained squarely out of fashion for pretty much the entirety of their run.

(14) To be clear, by “pantheon,” I mean “bullshit list I made up of people I think are influential.”  Listed in order, these individuals are singers for the Germs, the Velvet Underground, the Avengers, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Bikini Kill/Le Tigre, Leatherface, and Melt Banana.